Twitter for business

Okay, I covered some of the cool stuff about Twitter from a personal perspective, now let's look at it in the realm of income generation. Income generation on Twitter is founded on the building of a large following on Twitter

Many of you reading this will have come to this blog because you saw the result of my efforts to produce a viral tweet that would lead people like you to this blog. That means you want to know how I went from having a handful of followers on Twitter and a half dozen updates that no one really cared about to being ranked in the top 2% of tweeters (http://twitter.grader.com/drnice) in the English speaking "twitter" world. (And all without, at this posting, breaking the annoying and misguided Twitter 2000 follow limit.)

Though I won't tell all here, I promise that you won't be disappointed, because anyone who will do the handful of simple things I'm about to explain, which I figured out how to do by intensely researching and testing various strategies over a 3 week period, can build their own following and ranking level in a similar time period. Actually you should be able to build your following faster, because I've already done the trial and error part.

Before you begin you have to ask yourself why do you want a large following on Twitter.

You will have your own reasons. However, so we can be clear, let me share a few categories of reasons, which will influence how you actually build your own, individual large following:
• Fame - Notoriety, recognition, or in the most simple terms: Attention. This is a basic human need every person has; the need to have people pay attention to them. The need is greater for some than others and is perfectly natural within a reasonable range.

Those who achieve great fame intelligently develop a significant level of positive attention, which is always preferable to negative attention. Those who have developed negative attention getting strategies online in chat rooms and forums would be well advised to reconsider their approach as they expand in the Twitterverse.

• Income - Nothing succeeds like success and, for good or ill, money is often treated as a scorecard of success. Legitimate methods of marketing can be used to broaden your client base and market your goods or services on Twitter, which can make a huge difference in your bottom line. Illegitimate actions on Twitter will come back to bite you on the rear fast and furiously due to the viral nature of Twitter and it's complete accessibility for those who use it publicly.

Through Twitter you can offer your followers special deals, notify them of changes, challenges, sales, events or other offers or news relating to your business. You can expand your marketplace substantially and you can use Twitter to steer your business into greater profitability by learning about trends and how to capitalize on them. You can post links to marketing or training videos, articles about your products and/or services, product point of sale pages, even affiliate marketing links. You can quickly build a reputation as an expert and develop a rich referral market.

• Message - You may have some special knowledge you want to share, or a cause you want to promote. You may have a belief about how things are in this world or in another realm of existence that you want to share with others, to protect them or benefit them in some way. You have a message that you want to share with as many people as you can.

Your personal reasons will impact how you go about promoting yourself; on Twitter, online, and in day to day life, and is something you will need to ponder as you set about to build a following on Twitter. (BTW You can have more than one account and use different accounts for different purposes. You don't have to put everything you want to accomplish into one twitter account.)

Though you may think you want everyone to follow you, this is virtually never true. You have a target audience. There are values you will use to chose who you associate yourself with as you follow people on Twitter.

For example, in my case, I will not follow anyone who is clearly promoting pornography or sexual services on Twitter. That is contrary to my personal values and I won't associate with people who are openly engaged in such on Twitter. I don't block those who follow me, because my reason for building a large following is to share messages and concepts I believe will benefit others and I wish to make them available to anyone willing to seek them, however I won't return the follow.

You also have some special interest that you want to connect with people concerning. It would be a waste of your time and the time of those you follow to connect if you have no common interests. For example I do not seek to follow people whose twitters are nearly exclusively about sports, music, hunting, fighting or guns because I do not share those interests. I return follows from all those who seek me out and follow me other than the sex trade people.

You will want to really think about who your target audience is. For example my target audience are those i perceive to be intelligent, educated, compassionate, noble, with desires to be involved in making the world better, and those who are experts in the online marketplace and in other areas of personal interest.

The first step to building a large following is to decide who you want to be connected with. Who will pay the most attention to you, provide you with the most financial benefit or give the most heed to your message? Young/old, male/female, fellow countrymen/foreigners? What ethnicities, cultures, sub cultures, educational level, and even more specific qualities will best serve your purpose? What interests do they share with you?

Knowing your target market is critical because you will be tweeting things that are likely to appeal to them specifically. Nothing appeals to everyone. Niche marketing is all about understanding the people you serve, know what they like and abhor, what excites them and disgusts them, what is important to them.

By now you probably have a fair notion of your why and your who. The next step is the how, which is what you came here to learn. So here are the basic rules for growing a large following and climbing into the ranks of the top tweeters fast.

• 1. Follow to be followed.
The fastest way to build a following is to follow other people. People who are part of your target market, who share a common interest that you can Tweet on, (or ReTweet on), people who are already doing what you want to do on Twitter. The simplest, fastest way is to go to http://search.twitter.com/ and do a search for a word or short phrase about the topic of interest you are planning to focus your tweets on. For me that was cannabis legalization and permaculture.

Go to the home page of who are tweeting about your target interest. In their profile look for the following things:
They have a following of over 200, they have posted at least 100 updates, and their updates are clearly closely related to your purpose. open their list of followers and follow all of their followers who seem to fit your target market.

Twitter does not allow you to follow more than 1,000 people per day. However if you are using this method, as opposed to some automated method, you can on a practical basis only follow a few hundred per day (I set 200 per day or 1,000 per week as my goal).

Twitters other limit, which is that you cannot follow more than 2001 people until your followers number 2000, is an issue that be resolved with effort, but it takes a serious time commitment that only the dedicated twitterer will undertake to overcome rapidly. It will happen on it's own over time once you get over 1800 followers.

You may be tempted to seek some automated method of developing a lot of followers, but this approach is counterproductive because though you may get numbers on your profile, you end up with a following who doesn't care about you or your tweets. You will be to them the same thing they are to you, just a number on the screen. The real value of Twitter comes from connecting with like minded people, who will care about you and what you have to say, because you care about them and share with them some common interests and values.

There are other techniques you can use to build your following, but if you only did this you would be successful in developing a large following in a short period of time time.

• 2. Tweet often. Tweet well.
It's pretty easy to get people to follow you, but to retain them you have to give them a reason to pay attention to you, and your tweets, retweets, links and hash marked tweets are what form the basis for people to pay attention to your tweets.

You should be tweeting a minimum of 4 times a day average, though 10 or even more is better, up to a point. Frequency should be in part based on the quality of information you tweet about and the urgency and timeliness of your message. Twitter is very real time so matters of current event can be tweeted about heavily without driving away your followers with too much information.

Unless you are already a famous personality in the real world no one cares what you are doing moment to moment. Save that sort of thing for an account that just your close friends and family follow.

There is a great, short, article you should take a moment right now to read at http://www.twitip.com/anatomy-of-a-successful-tweet/ that outlines several keys for what to tweet and why. It covers retweeting, which can really pole vault your popularity rapidly and using hash tags.

As you receive tweets from various experts or interesting people or news feeds, etc. . . that you follow, you can retweet those to your followers. This makes you look like an expert, or at least someone in the know, to your followers and serves the people you retweet by spreading their message virally. To properly credit the retweet type "RT: @"and the twitter name, then copy and paste the tweet you are retweeting.

When you retweet you may have to occasionally reword or edit the tweet to fit in the 140 character limit of each tweet after your addition of the RT credit. Knowing this, set your tweets up for easy retweeting by leaving enough unused character space to include RT: @ and your twitter name, and maybe a couple extra characters extra.

As your read or find things online that really grab your attention, tweet those, with links, in a form that is easy to retweet. A great video like the Susan Boyles BGT performance or a great article or a report on a discovery or catastrophic event in the world, are all things to tweet about. Your purpose is to become an important conduit of valuable information, and/or a resource for goods and/or services valued by your followers.

Be as brief and to the point as possible. Learn to use & instead of "and" and use other contractions and common abbreviations, but don't use text speak stuff like "u r gr8". Use a URL shortener for any links you tweet like http://is.gd/, or http://bit.ly/ or the well known http://tinyurl.com/ or any of the growing number of URL shortening services. ALWAYS TEST YOUR LINKS BEFORE YOU TWEET THEM!!!!!


• 3. What gets measured improves.
The best way I think a person can track their progress in growing on Twitter is http://twitter.grader.com/ which calculates a grade or ranking in the English part of Twitter, (and some other social networking sites), based on how many people you are following, how many are following you, how many updates you have tweeted, how frequently you tweet, and how often you have been retweeted. I check my grade several time a day and record my progress, using that as a measure of the outcome of various methods and strategies I have tried as I have built my following.

Another useful measurement tool is http://tweetstats.com/graphs/ which provides charts on your tweeting that give you valuable feedback on how you twitter. They also have some decent trending data.

• 4. Stay on the cutting edge.
You will want to immediately follow @mashable, who tweets links to articles on his site by various authors about the cutting edge of Twitter, social networking and the internet. Through his tweets you learn about APIs, or applications on various sites that access and manipulate the information Twitter makes available. One of the greatest powers of using Twitter stems from the applications/web sites that are growing up around Twitter.

Twitter affords you with a very real time connection with your followers and it can provide great real time data about what matters to people right now. Sites like http://twistori.com/, http://www.twitscoop.com/, or http://www.retweetradar.com/ give you access to the Twitter data cloud which visually reveal trends and hot topics on twitter and are good resources for selecting things to tweet about. When you see a word specific to your interest appear and begin to grow on one of these sites research it and find things to tweet relating to it, and your tweets may get caught up in a viral effect just by being part of a hot topic or trend.

I have given a lot more than I planned to here, but I believe that Twitter is becoming tool of communication that will sweep the world and change how we communicate forever and that almost everyone should be involved in it in some way.

Follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/DrNice and check back here periodically to learn more in future blogs.

I've become Twitter-pated (with apologies to Disney)

Do you remember the scene in the Disney movie "Bambi" when Owl explains that age old moonstruck condition of infatuation and love to Bambi, Flower and Thumper, describing the condition with a single word? Twitterpated!



I got onto Twitter several months ago, to see what all the hoopla was about and frankly at first I was unimpressed. It appeared to be pretty useless, kind of a glorified, temporary chalk board to leave notes to friends on. Then one of my Facebook friends, Mashable, who is big on Twitter and Facebook was posting interesting articles about Twitter, so I started following him and then I looked at the people he is following, thought some were interesting and started following them. Of course they followed me back and then I started learning about support sites and applications and pretty soon I was totally Twitterpated!

As I have learned more about the growing number of support applications and web sites surrounding Twitter I realized that Twitter was at the beginning stages of becoming gigantic on the net. Like EBay, Facebook, and Myspace kind of gigantic. With the potential to put a dent in Google's web dominance. Google has added a new word, it's name, to our language, Twitter has already added several.

What I have learned in these past couple of weeks has so changed my perspective about how individuals like you and me can make a living online and interconnect is networks of real time support that I've decided to take a detour in my planned blogging and write a series of articles about Twitter, related support applications, sites and hardware as I personally explore this emerging technosocial phenomenon.

When I try to tell my non tweeting friends about Twitter they often are just like I was before I got hooked, they can't imagine why they would want to tweet. So to start out here's a brief list of reasons to:

• You can discover many new, interesting people from all over the world who are active in the internet community.
• You can share your personal experience, wisdom and even quirks with others, connecting with others of like mind.
• You can make a living, make extra income or otherwise enhance your financial situation through wisdom received from others or the marketing of yourself and/or your goods and services.
• You can do extensive, free test marketing, perform a wide range of social experiments, follow trending in real time, study information data clouds, and other forms of research, essentially taking the pulse of the world of Twitter on any topic, phrase or word.
• You can quickly and effectively communicate with family members, friends, associates clients and businesses.
• You can provide a level of customer service that was unimaginable before Twitter, thereby developing a deep level of customer satisfaction and loyalty.
• You can inspire others, and be inspired.

I could go on and on. Like I said, I am totally Twitterpated!

So let's assume that you have signed up for a Twitter name. What's next? Well, that depends on if you are in it for social interaction or business.

I know this blog is about making money online, however every cent you ever receive will be given to you by other people, so let's look at the social side first.

Finding real world friends or family members on Twitter is easy if they have used their real name or you know what their Twitter name is. Just use Twitters built in friend finding search features.

If you want to find people of like mind you can do a hash tag (#) search on http://search.twitter.com/ for any word and find who is saying what about that topic.

For example let's suppose you are interested in gardening. You go to http://search.twitter.com/ and search for garden, or gardening, or landscaping, or any other related term you can think of and you immediately get a list of everyone who has recently tweeted about that term. You go to their pages, read their bio, look at their tweets and decide to follow them if you find them to be of interest to you.

This is a pretty amazing feature when you stop to think about it. You can find people all over the world who have tweeted something, in the past few minutes or hours, that is of interest to you and connect with them. You can DM (Direct Message) them if you want to discuss something off Twitters continuous, public feed, or you can publically message them by putting an @ sign and their Twitter name in your tweet, like you could tweet: "@drnice thanks for blogging about the advantages of Twitter. I liked what you wrote." and I would see that, as would all of your followers and anyone who does a hash tag or @ sign search for drnice.

There are several support sites to facilitate finding people, interest groups and topics on Twitter. There's http://wefollow.com/ which allows you to list yourself as being associated with three hash tags.

In our earlier example of you having an interest in gardening you might list yourself on http://wefollow.com/ under garden, gardening, & plants, and then new people searching we follow will find you listed with others who have selected each of the hash tag categories. You can also find people to follow who have done this under any topic of interest you may have.

On http://wefollow.com/ you can leave yourself in the three categories forever or you can periodically change the categories you list under. Once you select three new ones you will no longer show up under the previous ones. This allows you to put yourself in a position to meet a lot of people looking for your shared interest who you might otherwise never connect with.

In a category that could only be called "Cool Twitter Stuff":

http://twistori.com/This is nothing but cool! Twistori has 6 hash tag terms that you can choose from: "Love, Hate, Think, Believe, Fell, and Wish". You choose which word and Twistori feeds you a continuous stream of tweets with that word in it. The result is a pulse on humanity that is funny, insightful, depressing, invigorating and maybe a bit overwhelming, because it is such a peek inside the human psyche and so represents humanity at large.

http://www.twitscoop.com - A site that shows a real time date trends on Twitter.

As you can tell, there is a lot to Twitter. Probably the best explanation as to what Twitter is and how it is used is by listening to CEO Jack Dorsey talk about How Twitter came to be.

See this video on Vator.tv »