Some people love it, others hate it. Some think it’s what the Internet was created for yet others think it’s the biggest waste of bandwidth ever envisioned or created for use anywhere in the Universe. Like it or love it, Twitter is here, it’s staying and it’s getting BIGGER.
To understand why Twitter will feature big in the arsenal of webmarketers, socialites and me-mes everywhere we need to know who use it, why they use it and how that knowledge can be used to grab followers and sell products.
Back in 1997, Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed Google Search which revolutionized the way we navigate the Web. Nearly 10 years later, in 2006, Jack Dorsey created Twitter which has revolutionized the way we chat over the Net. Were I a gambler I would bet my money that all three men took dentistry lessons from the same teacher because they kitted their babies with the same competition eating gnashes. Both Google and Twitter have:
- An easy to use interface,
- A clear-look, no clutter design, and
- a configurable layout,
In short, Google and Twitter could be distant cousins. Both let people turn-up and browse; both let people sign-in and take ownership of their homepage; and together they satisfy our basic human drive to forage and to socialize. Not satisfied there, they then crowned those big gnashes by quenching our thirst to be control freaks; and Twitter goes that little bit further by allowing us to feel special, wanted and interesting by allowing us to compete for followers and shout to the world about what we are doing, when we did it and who we did it with. Indeed, in the 80′s and 90′s we had the mile-high club and now we have the tweeting riders club. Yes, some people can’t wait to drop their kegs and start twittering as they’re shivering with pleasure.
Before moving on, know that what follows below is information that most Twitter users will find useful and enlightening; however, it is intended for webmarketers and whoever wishes to artificially increase their number of followers. I only recommend the described practices for those who are not real microbloggers i.e if you are a genuine Twitter users then you shouldn’t really use these methods because you’ll only pollute your twitter stream with too many tweets to follow.
The best advice I or anyone else can give anyone who wants to increase his or number of followers is this:
Be genuine and treat Twitter users as real people. Most Twitter accounts (over 1 billion of them) have a real person tweeting real thoughts and feelings who responds with thought and feeling to other people’s tweets. Do not find and create followers under the guise of friendship when your sole interest is to advertise. If you intend to use Twitter to advertise then say so or at least give some entertainment in return for loyalty.
I use my main Twitter account to microblog and to inform my followers about new posts at JournalXtra. I do not sell products through diondeville@Twitter.
However, I do have several other Twitter accounts that I do use to sell products. Through some of them, I offer their followers serialized narratives from fictional characters in which I plug the products I wish to sell them. I advertise that fictional status so that followers can make an informed decision of whether or not to follow.
With the above advice read, continue to read onwards and learn something new about twitter marketing and about increasing your number of twitter followers without getting your account suspended by Twitter.
Twitter is a microblogging platform that allows its users to post up to 140 characters of text which can be read by other people. To give that short explanation a more meaningful definition, here are some example ideas of what it is to different people:
- Webmarketers view it as an opt-in/opt-out marketing platform,
- Networkers see it as a way to meet like minded people,
- Most people see Twitter as a good, cheap, easy and convenient way to communicate,
- Sociopaths think it’s a popularity contest,
- Me-mes think it’s a cool place to show-off their latest antics,
To sum up Twitter in my own words:
Twitter is a wild west saloon in a town without a sheriff: a free-for-all micro-forum that lets people join in when they want, leave when they want, lock the gates when they need and sell snake-oil to whomever will buy.
Sociable people who like to chat with their friends, meet new people and flirt with deranged, hairy truck-drivers masquerading as twenty something pornstars;
People who want to know what their favorite celebrity had for breakfast or who their role models are bedding;
Webmarketers, businesses, celebrities and socialites who feel the need to blast us with their latest products, offerings and activities; and, on the more criminal side
Drug dealers, escorts, their punters and the rest who find it a good, near anonymous, way to arrange meet-ups.
In short, Twitter is used by everyday people, everyday stalkers, everyday criminals and everyday spammers – nearly all the people who were put into a ship and blasted off to a planet called Earth in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and all the rest who stayed behind to do something useful: the hair-dressers, the plumbers, the quantum physicists, the mothers, the politicians, the health and safety executives… Twitter doesn’t discriminate. It has something to draw-in everyone and its simplistic interface is so easy to use that not an airhead nor genius struggles to operate it despite lacking the regular common sense that is second nature to most.
How do we turn this knowledge into followers?
Firstly, we know that most tweeters see Twitter as a popularity contest so will follow almost anyone who follows them and any tweeter they happen to notice who follows someone they follow or someone who appears popular.
Secondly, by following people whether we know them or not we get a bit of a status rub. Some of those people who follow celebrities often follow their followers because they want to be part of a bigger group. That status rub makes an even bigger mark on whom their celebrity follows.
Thirdly, people search Twitter for text that relates to a subject they care about like their celebrity, role model, country, workplace, environment or a current news item. People search Twitter for just as many different subjects as they do Google, Bing and Yahoo. Mention someone’s search terms in a tweet and your tweet is likely to be found. When a reader likes it he or she might retweet it to his or her followers. Some people who read retweets look at its original tweeter’s profile and click the follow button.
Let’s convert those three observations into productive actions and short statements:
Action: Follow people to grow your followers
Statement: The more followers you have the more followers you will attract
Action: Follow celebrities to gain some of their status rub
Statement: People like to join up with other fans of their celebrities
Action: Follow celebrity followers and those whom are followed by celebrities
Statement: Many celebrity followers are predisposed to follow others
Action: Follow your competitors’ followers and the people your competitor follows
Statement: Your competitors will already have followers who are inclined to buy their products. If you can offer better for less then you might just steal your competitors’ customers.
Knowing how and why people use Twitter alerts us to how we can create attention grabbing tweets to increase our market reach. To my mind, there are four important characteristics of a good tweet:
- It must appear to be natural,
- The content must interest its intended target audience,
- It must illicit an emotional response, and
- The text must contain the right keywords and must impart the right meaning to create the desired effect.
People do not like to see their twitter stream filled with URLs and sales blurbs unless they choose to follow the sender because they are specifically interested in the products offered so try to keep a low ratio of tweets containing URLs compared to those containing no URL’s. It’s often a good idea to send three or four tweets consecutively within as short a time span as possible with a “click me now” URL embedded in only one of those tweets to ensure that your message is visible among the vast number of other tweets in your followers’ twitter streams.
Treat your twitter page as you would any other website you promote: give it the right look, send visitors to it and attract visitors to it.
Answer this question:
when you scan your twitter stream for tweets by a specific sender, what do you look for?
I reckon you look for the tweeter’s avatar. You are not alone. It’s easier to recognize a picture than read a name. Use an avatar that attracts attention and stands out from all other avatars. Only change it if it does not grab enough attention.
How do we make use of this dream marketing and social networking platform?
The Five Steps to Twitter Success
There are 5 steps to Twitter success. Yes, you read that right, just five steps that will help you utilize the information described above and earn and collect followers, talk with your followers, and organize them into related topic groups for easy access to their tweets.
- Create a Twitter Account
- Register with SocialOomph and Time2Tweet
- Connect with Refollow or Twerpscan
- Register with different Twitter directories
- Engage your followers
Those five steps are the important factors of successful twitter management. Let’s work through those steps one-by-one:
Give this one a little thought. What’s your purpose for using Twitter? Do you want to connect with like-minded people? What are you trying to sell? Gather a few ideas then decide whether you should register under your real name, a pseudonym, your business name, your website name or a title that relates to your product. Remember you can have multiple accounts. There are many free desktop and web-based twitter applications that assist the management of multiple accounts.
SocialOomph is a Twitter, Facebook and StatusNet automation service. It autofollows new followers and sends them one of any number of your preset welcome messages and it lets you create Tweets to publish at scheduled times. It does not recommend people you should follow nor does it use access to your account to advertise itself. SocialOomph will not, on its own, cause your account to be suspended provided you use it responsibly and follow its usage guidance notes.
Do you use twitter lists? SocialOomph can automatically organize all your twitter followers into twitter lists; I’ll explain more about these lists in a few moments. It does much more to ease the burden of looking after a large number of followers than any other twitter app I have so far found.
It comes in two and a half flavors: free, paid and trial. The free version is very usable and allows you to schedule tweets, to auto follow new followers, to auto unfollow those who unfollow you, and to create welcome messages to be sent automatically to new followers. The paid version additionally offers automatic twitter list creation. Both flavors do much more besides. The trial of the paid version is well worth taking up just to get your twitter lists organized and your followers categorized accordingly. Make the most of the trial version, build up your followers before you decide to use it.
Time2Tweet is one of the more useful automation services. Created by axemclion, and hosted on the Google App Engine it allows its users to upload CSV files of tweets, complete with future publishing times, for them to be streamed to Twitter on autopilot. This is a dream batch tweeting application for those of you who need to tweet lots of information already stored in a file to the twitter stream. For example:
I found this app while looking for a way to stream customer reviews to one of my websites via Twitter. Over six thousand reviews were already stored in a CSV file. All I had to do was reformat the data to match Time2Tweet’s requirements, add time stamps, wordwrap the lines to 135 characters (140 max, I chose 135 to be safe), apportion the files into 1,000 line segments then upload it, check them and confirm them. So simple!
The CSV file should has particular requirements. Some CSV files separate data in the “quotation mark, comma, quotation mark” format, e.g
“data1″,”data2 three four”,”data3″
Time2Tweet uses only commas, e.g
data1,data2 three four,data3
And the data line should contain only 3 commas, e.g
dd/mm/yyyy,hh:mm,status update
Time2Tweet assumes the date and time of a status update with empty time and date fields (e.g ,,status update) is the same as the status update that precedes it.
This app is so useful that I will create a separate user guide post for it during the next 7 days.
Click here to read updates about Time2Tweet on axemclion’s blog.
Connect with Refollow or Twerpscan
This is an online application that allows you to sort your followers, mass unfollow those who no longer follow you and mass follow those who follow (or are being followed by) other tweeters.
Do not follow or unfollow more than 50 people per day or Twitter will label you a bot or spam account thus will suspend your account or remove you from Twitter search results.
Register with Twitter Directories
Some people find people to follow by visiting the many twitter directories to search for people who share their interests or who tweet about subjects they care about. You won’t get many followers through them unless you’re particularly unique or famous but you will get some over time so register with them. Used in conjunction with Refollow, these directories can dramatically increase your entourage of followers who are interested in your products.
Use directories to find people who might be interested in your products then use Refollow to find and follow all of their followers and all of the people they follow.
A note of caution: do not follow and unfollow more than a 300 people per day or Twitter will label you a bot or spammer thus will suspend your account.
Here are 6 Twitter directories to get you going:
Send tweets as @ replies to other real users else spoof accounts you create for this purpose. Remember to retweet from spoof accounts too.
You must interact with your followers if you want them to click your links, read your tweets, retweet your tweets and suggest you to their followers. The best way to interact is to read the tweets that appear in your twitter stream and reply to the ones that you can meaningfully comment on. Remember to read your @’s and private messages and reply to those that warrant it.
Click the Trend Words displayed to the right hand side of your twitter stream to find tweets to which you can send @messages; and use the many tweet search applications to find tweets that mention subjects relevant to your interests. For example, were I selling travel products I would search tweets for the key words “I”, “want”, “travel” (or their equivalents) then send @messages to some of the tweeter’s who wish to travel. To be careful, I would follow them too and possibly strike up a conversation first.
Twitter is a free-for-all quick-fire forum where people expect to receive regular updates about the people they follow so update your status regularly with meaningful tweets. Make statements, observations and witticisms about anything and ask questions to elicit responses. Don’t make every tweet a sales tweet or URL tweet, they’re not required, expected or liked except when the recipient has followed a tweeter to specifically receive sales and promotional tweets.
And for that extra smile, go that extra mile
Join some of the games that are available to Twitter users. I’ve joined several games and have met some delightful people and made good friends while playing them. Twitter games are a good way to increase your reach to real people – when people like your playing style or if they want to chat with you they follow your twitter profile.
As said earlier, those are the five steps (plus the sneaky sixth) that will help you develop you online social profile with Twitter. Many people who use Twitter also use Facebook, MySpace, Digg and other Social Networking and Bookmarking communities. If you have a proven track record and strong following through Twitter your twitter followers will also join you in other online social communities.
Here’s a Little Bonus Information
Twitter’s Mysterious @ and # Marks
There is much more to twitter than just sending and receiving short messages. The message box accepts a whole range of commands that make it easy to connect with others and join in conversations. Here are two that are very useful for marketers but be careful not to over use them because doing so could get your twitter account suspended:
@ is a way to communicate with a specific user with a tweet targeted at him or her. The great selling point of these @ communications is that you do not need to be following or be followed by the recipient; all you need to send an @message is the recipient’s user name. It’s usage is simple: put an “@” immediately in front of the recipient’s user name then type your message. @Messages appear in your twitter stream and in the target recipient’s twitter stream and @Messages page. @Messages are public and do appear in all of your follower’s twitter streams.
# is a method of tagging a tweet. More commonly known as the hash symbol, when used to tag tweets it as called a hashtag. The idea is simple: place a hashtag in front of a word within a tweet and that word then categorizes that tweet. Any word may be used as a hashtag by placing a hash symbol (#) in front of it. Ideally, that word should describe the tweet’s subject but some people try to gain extra popularity for their tweets by tagging words that do not relate to their tweets but which are highly searched for at the time of the tweet’s creation. Multiple hashtags may be used within one tweet and they may be placed anywhere within it. Savvy people who search for tweets search for hashtags. More information about hashtags is available here at Twitter.
More messaging commands are detailed in Twitter’s help page.
…And Twitter’s Not-so-Secret Functions
Twitter provides some excellent functions to make it easy to share, organize and search tweets, pictures and videos
Retweet is a way to send a tweet from any twitter user to all of your followers. It could be a tweet from one of your followers or a tweet from someone you do not follow or who does not follow you. A retweeted tweet is a good tweet. It could get you more followers and it could get your products better noticed.
Lists are a means to categorize the people you follow. This allows you to view tweets from a specific group of followers e.g family members, news broadcasters or cartoon creators.
Twitter Search and Twitter Advanced Search is Twitter’s own search engine that allows people to search the global tweet stream. It is not the best option for searching Twitter (two better alternatives are given below).
TwitPic is Twitter’s own answer to Flikr; it allows tweeters to upload and share their pictures.
TwitVid allows people to share videos and tweet via video. I am unsure whether TwitVid is an official Twitter product; it probably isn’t but what the hell, it’s functional and useful.
These next two products are not official Twitter offerings; they are produced by third parties. Both make it easier to search tweets and see current hot trends:
TwitScoop is a tweet search engine and trending application. This package connects with your twitter account and assists with analyzing it.
Tweetzi is a simple search and trending application that does not require access to your twitter account.
The Six Most Common Twitter Mistakes
It’s very easy to be get a Twitter account suspended or removed from Twitter search. These are the six actions that will definitely get you into Twitter’s blacklist:
- Repetedly posting duplicate or near-duplicate content (links or tweets)
- Abusing trending topics or hashtags (topic words with a # sign)
- Sending automated tweets or replies
- Using bots or applications to post similar messages based on keywords
- Posting similar messages over multiple accounts
- Aggressively following and un-following people
That list comes directly from Twitter’s list of no-no’s. Pay attention to that list because Google indexes Twitter Search. The last thing you want to do is to be banned from appearing in Twitter Search because it will damage the reach of your tweets.
If you do find yourself blacklisted then all is not lost. A quick guide to getting de-blacklisted is available here.
Write good tweets, do not send links in every tweet, communicate with your followers, use hashtags to categorize your tweets, organize your followers into lists make use of SocialOomph to engage and organize your followers, use ReFollow to find followers, use TwitScoop to research current trends and find tweets that might be good sales leads and register with the many available Twitter directories. Now go forth and twitter 
You can read some facts about Twitter, Facebook and other social bookmarking sites here:
Trak.in – Social Media Statistics Facebook Twitter Flickr Linkedin
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