MintBlogger - 8 Tips To Use Twitter More Effectively

8 Tips To Use Twitter More Effectively Posted: 10 Mar 2009 01:00 AM PDT Twitter has gained massive popularity giving many established social media services a run for their money. This excellent micro-blogging service is becoming a favorite marketing and business development tool for thousands of organizations and individuals. Are you leveraging the power of twitter to help grow your blog? Get smart and use this excellent social media marketing platform to give a much needed kick-start to your blog. It's simple, it's fun and it's intuitive. Let's see how to get more out this powerful micro-blogging service to get more eyeballs for your weblog. Profile Says It All A twitter profile giving a clear, crisp and unambiguous message gets the most attention of potential followers. Custom twitter background, your real name, a link to your blog and an appealing mini-bio turns any twitter profile into an effective fishnet to get new connections. Services like twitbacks, freetwitterdesigner and PrettyTweet lets you create free custom twitter backgrounds. While uploading your twitter profile picture, give first preference to your own thumbnail image. The second best choice is your Gravator image. The whole idea is to keep your identity uniform across all the social media networks. Follow Right People Your success on twitter largely depends on whom you follow. It's not the quantity but the quality of your twitter network that matters the most. Follow most active, popular big names in your domain and leverage their strong network by interacting with them and by attracting their attention. Swim with a big fish and benefit from their reach. Use services like MrTweet to get recommendations about whom you should follow to get the maximum benefit from this micro-blogging service. Track Hot Trends And Join The Bandwagon One of the keys to get connected with more people on twitter is participating in constructive debates. Use services like Twitscoop, Tweetmeme and Twitterfall to keep yourself updated with the latest happenings and the hot trends on twitter. Pick ongoing conversations and heated debates related to your niche, and take that debate to the next level by sending your constructive tweets. This will create large number of new connections in quick time. Tweet What You Are Known For Large number of your followers expects to get specific kind of tweets from you, whether it's your personal tweet or a tweet related to your business/domain. Intelligent tweeting involves cleverly crafted personal and business tweets intermixed with each other to keep your followers asking for more. Direct Your Twitter Stream To Other Social Media Profiles This is one of the best methods to leverage your already grown social media profiles. With the advent of various social media mash up technologies, you can easily feed your different social media profiles with your never-ending twitter stream. This will not only keep your other social media accounts active, but will also spread your tweets across different channels giving more eye balls for your twitter conversations. Don't Be An Owl, Tweet During Peak Time If you know your audience, then you are also aware about the demographic data associated with them. That means you very well know when they are most active on twitter. Tweeto'clock is an excellent service that calculates the best time to tweet someone. You can handpick the most popular, active and interesting users in your twitter network and can calculate the best time they are most active on twitter. This will help you to engage with them more easily during their convenient hours. Understand The Power of Retweets Initially, Internet marketing experts never saw twitter as a viral marketing platform. As it grew, tweeple realized how a snowball effect is created when people start retweeting some interesting stuff. Once people start picking any tweet, it creates a rippling effect in connected networks spreading the content to massive number of people in very short time. Here are some tips to get your tweets retweeted more often. 1. Keep tweets short. 2. Keep them interesting. Ideally a condensed teaser excerpt with a link. 3. Use best URL shortening services to track performance of your tweets. 4. Embed retweet buttons in your posts available from Tweetmeme. Don't Be a Bot, Ask And Discuss In recent months, twam (twitter spam) has increased significantly and most twitter users are aware of it. Try to give your tweets a more human touch by answering questions and discussing heated topics. Use TwtPoll to conduct short surveys on twitter. This will not only spawn more conversation threads, but will also give you vital data that can be used to craft new posts. Over To You I've been using twitter for last one year and found it extremely valuable tool in my arsenal to promote the blog. Do you have a twitter plan to increase your blog readership? Are you getting the desired results or finding twitter a waste of time? Related Reading: 1. How To Lose Your Twitter Followers 2. MicroBlogging: Twhirl Guide For Beginners Image Credit: Harrison / Peppery