Build a Twitter Account for Marketing Purposes

If you want to use Twitter to build an effective marketing channel, the first thing that you should do is to set up your Twitter account and populate it with several engaging tweets about you and your business.

Once you are up and running, begin following people who are in the same business area as you are, and you will hopefully find that most people will follow back. When your entire Twitter feed has blanks, though, most people will not bother to follow you. Once you start a micro blog post, you can get on with following any target demographic, and this can be done in either of two different ways.

1. Use the search facility within Twitter to search keywords that relate to the demographic that you are targeting. For example, if you are trying to sell an application for the iPhone, you could use the keyword ‘iPhone’ or ‘iPhone app’ or anything else that may find people who own an iPhone. It’s easy to follow people. If your posts are interesting and relevant, you will probably pick up some followers this way.

2. Locate Twitter accounts that you want to follow by clicking the ‘Find People’ option. Then enter your keywords, related industries, locations or other defining detail to locate followers, and begin following them.

As you work on developing your targeted demographic, you need to keep your followers engaged, so you will want to tweet, or post, often. Make sure to retweet relevant tweets from other Twitter followers. This is another great way to pick up new followers, and when they start to follow you, you also are plugged into their followers. Retweeting is one of the fastest ways to build your following or network.

How to Leverage Twitter For a Flood of Traffic

If you are not using Twitter to drive traffic to your websites, blogs, and articles then you are missing out on a great tool and leaving lots of traffic for your competitors. Traffic properly handled turns into profits.

Let’s take a closer look at how to leverage Twitter to drive tons of traffic to your articles, whether your content is on your website, blog, or an Article Directory.

7 Steps to a Ton of Traffic

Step 1 – Tweet that you are working on a new piece of content. Include the working title and when you expect to have it done by. This builds the anticipation in your followers and puts a bit a pressure on you to get in done.

Step 2 – When you submit your article to a Directory, let your Twitter followers know your new content has been submitted. Include the title, and let them know when you think the article will be out by. This continues to build anticipation.

Step 3 – When you set up your account at EzineArticles correctly, your newly published articles are “auto-tweeted” to and announced on Twitter, including the title and the link. This is done automatically for you. If your article is coming out on another Directory, watch for it’s publication and then tweet that the article is out. Include the title and the link.

Step 4 – Along about this time a really cool and powerful thing begins to happen. Your followers on Twitter begin to Re-Tweet (RT) your article, and now you are reaching all of their followers as well. Thank those who RT your article and Re-Tweet their announcement too.

Step 5 – Follow up the automated announcement of your articles with announcements of your own. Just because your article was automatically announced does not mean every one saw it. Twitter is much too fluid for that. So follow up with announcements of your own. Ask “Have you seen this yet?” and include the article title and link.

These first 5 steps drive traffic to the Article Directories that host your article. When you have written your article well and crafted your Resource Box well. this will quickly turn into traffic to your websites and blogs.

The next 2 steps involve repurposing your article on your own sites and driving Twitter traffic their as well.

Step 6 – Repurpose your article onto your website and then invite your Twitter traffic to check out the article there. Now you are driving Twitter traffic to your own website.

Step 7 – Repurpose your article onto your blog and then invite your Twitter traffic to your blog to check out your article there. Now you are driving Twitter traffic to your blog.

5 Twitter Tactics for Building Your Brand

Micro-blogging tools like Twitter have introduced the concept of group conversations.  Anyone that signs on to “follow” your Twitter profile will receive an alert—via instant message, mobile text message, or email—each time you send a new message.

How can you use services such as Twitter to build your personal or professional brand?

Assuming that you’ve already matched your Twitter username to your personal or company brand, here are some suggestions for using Twitter to build your online reputation:

1. Start conversations with notable peers

Don’t be the guy that jumps on Twitter, “follows” 10,000 people, then tweets “@” them every two minutes. That’s not the type of reputation you want to build for yourself.

Do be the guy that follows those that have influence and audience in your industry. You’ll learn a lot just from listening to their often unguarded comments, but if you have something valuable to add to their conversation, send them an @guykawasaki or @tonyrobbins. If you can engage them in a conversation, they might just @ you back–alerting their thousands of followers that you’re a person worthy of their time, in the process.

2. Share valuable industry news

If you’re the kind of person that’s always discovering breaking stories, share those with your Twitter network. Maybe you’ll “tweet” something not yet seen by a popular blogger. They may not always give you credit in their blog posts, but you can bet you’ll quickly get on their radar.

I’ve personally credited and linked to Twitter followers that gave me a “heads-up” on a breaking story and seen others credit me for sharing a story with them. How’s that for reputation building? You’ve just become the guy that keeps the top bloggers “in the know.”

3. Build your blog audience

We all know how hard it is to build a blog’s audience. How often do you check your Feedburner stats to see if you’ve inched up or down that day? Conversely, building your following on Twitter can take much less time. I’m adding up to three times as many Twitter followers each day, than blog subscribers.

OK, but how do you get your Twitter followers to start reading your blog?  You cherry pick your best blog posts and share them with your Twitter followers – many of whom likely don’t already read or subscribe to your blog.

Tools such as Twitterfeed can automate the process for you, but be careful not to overload your Twitter followers with blog post updates – you want to build a positive reputation, not be known as a spammer!

4.  Stay connected at conferences and trade shows

Twitter really shines, when it’s used by conference attendees.  You may attend a conference as a complete noob, but Twitter can help you leave as a “someone.”

The next time you attend an event, look for the official Twitter account. @BlogWorld is one example of a conference that makes heavy use of Twitter. Follow the Twitter updates at your next conference and you’ll learn the location of the secret parties, or where Bill Gates plans to have dinner that night.

For anyone uncomfortable with networking, Twitter is a great tool to connect with other conference attendees and build your reputation without having to actually shake hands.

5.  Monitor your Twitter reputation

Monitoring Twitter for mention of your personal, or corporate, brand can save you a lot of future reputation headaches. Conversations about your brand can happen on Twitter, hours before someone decides to migrate the conversation to something more widespread, such as a blog.

5 Great Ways to Make Money with Twitter

There are more and more ways being developed for Twitter users to make money from their Twitter usage.

Here are five of the most well known.

1. RevTwt

RevTwt is like Google Adsense for Twitter. With the help of RevTwt you can earn money on the basis of Cost per Click(CPC), Cost per Thousand Followers (CPT) and Cost per action(CPA). In CPC, you just have to post the advertisement you like to your twitter timeline. When the people who are following you click on the ad you posted, then you get paid for each valid click according to the ad conditions.

On the other hand, with CPT, you can earn a fix amount for every 1000 followers. Yet, this type of advertising still needs some pace as the advertisers are hardly few and aren’t willing to put their money easily into it but still you can try your luck. And CPA is simple. You can post it anywhere you want, like on forums or blogs. When a user completes the full given action stated by advertiser like email submit, then you get paid for it.

2. Be-a-Magpie

Be-a-Magpie is another way to make money with Twitter by posting ads. But on be-a-magpie you will find mostly lead based advertisers who will pay you a certain percentage or money on every sale you offer. So this might be hard for many twitterers, but at the end you will get a big amount on every sale.

3. Twittad

Twittad can help you make money with twitter if any advertiser sponsors your profile for a time period.

After registering and submitting your twitter account info you will be asked to set a price for a time period like 7 days,15 days etc. After setting a price say $15 for 7 days, if any advertiser is interested in sponsoring your twitter profile then you will get that money. Remember that the advertiser will now have control to post the ad any time during that period, so you may lose your credibility with your hard won followers if you aren’t very careful.

4. Sponsored Tweets

Sponsored Tweets are not a new idea in making money with Twitter. You make money for sending out tweets relating to  advertisers.  As it is new, there are very few advertisers on the network yet, but if you have a lot of followers or you are a well known in your industry  then you might get advertisers interested in you. I havent got any offers from Sponsored Tweets  yet but still have a close watch on what they can offer in the  future.

5. Assetize

Assetize allows advertises to place ads within you twitter timeline. After registering, list your account and select keywords relating to the overall  subject matter of your tweets. Advertisers can then place ads in your time line. If you have the ability to build followings in different areas of commerce you could potentially make money on a regular basis, but you will ave little control over what ads get placed.

I hope you will find all those 5 sites helpful in making  money online with Twitter. Make sure you don’t upset your hard won followers by sending spammy advertisements to them. Keep a tight control on your account and only publish adverts as part of your Twitter time line which hopefully will already be packed full of useful and entertaining items!.

Twitter Lists Go Live

After a two-week test launch, Twitter Lists are now fully functional.

The new feature allows Twitter users to organize the people they follow and streamline their feeds. Others can then follow their lists, sparing them the time of hunting for individual Twitterers with shared interests. As previously noted, the lists create something like a popularity contest, as anyone can see how many lists a Twitterer has been added to.

Twitter Lists launched in beta earlier this month but was only available to select users, who were asked not to tweet about it. Many of them disregarded the request, spurring an unofficial word-of-mouth-marketing campaign for the feature.

TechCrunch reported yesterday that Twitter employee Nik Kallen said that one quarter of all users had lists. The feature disappeared briefly after that, followed by a subsequent Kallen tweet: “Alright Lists are back on. BTW, currently 50% of all users have Lists,” followed by, “Thank you TechCrunch for ruining my afternoon.”

The phrase “Twitter Lists” quickly rose to the top of Twitter trending topics Friday morning, as users began chatting about the new-to-some feature. Some are offering lists of Lists and questioning whether Twitter Lists might even serve as an adequate RSS-feed function like Google Reader.

Using Search to Build a Targeted Twitter Following

It is quite simple to build a Twitter following, you just follow hundred of random people, a percentage will follow you back, delete the non followers, repeat, repeat.

This is all well and good if you have a generic or personal message to tweet, but supposing you want your tweets to reach an audience of like-minded people or potential clients? Then you need to build a targeted following, either by geographic location, subject matter or industry.

This obviously takes a lot longer than building a random list, but the rewards will be much greater in the long term.

My preferred method of list building is to use the search facility in either Twitter itself, Twellow or Tweetdeck. Each method is slightly different, but all produce results.

Twitter

As an example let’s use the subject of guitars to build a targeted following.

In the Twitter search box, just type “guitars”.

This will then bring up a list of tweets with the word in, in real time. At the top of the list you will see an update from time to time saying something like “25 new tweets since searching”. Just click the box and the list will update. You now have a list of everybody who is currently discussing guitars. briefly scan each tweet and decide if the person tweeting would be a useful follower for you. If they are, follow them. Hopefully, they will follow you back and you are on your way to creating a nice useful list of guitar buddies.

On a side point, avoid sending out an automated response to new followers, especially ones with a spam link in them about teeth whitening or adding 16,000 followers a week. Nothing will earn you an unfollow more quickly.

If you want to send a direct message (DM) to welcome a new follower, take the time and personalise it. It will be much more warmly received and will help your followers build trust in you.

Twellow

Twellow can be used in a similar way, but also more specifically. Firstly you need to add yourself to Twellow and create a log in, which will verify your Twitter account. This is important, as you can then follow people directly from Twellow, without having to return to Twitter.

Twellow has a search facility too, but this one will bring up results from peoples description and location, not their tweets. Lets use guitars again, but this time add UK to the search. This will then bring up a result of any guitarists in the UK, assuming they have mentioned both pieces of information in their description. Obviously the results will be less, but they will be highly targeted; a useful feature. You can create combination phrases to search for, picking off highly targeted potential followers this way.

Tweetdeck

Tweetdeck is an Adobe application that needs to be downloaded and installed first, but it’s free and very useful. You can use it in the same way as the first two applications, but in Tweetdeck you can set up multiple real time searches, and follow directly from the results. If you have multiple Twitter accounts you can also switch between them, allowing you to respond to tweets from any account you choose.

These methods will, over time, allow you to build a (hopefully) loyal and useful following for whatever use you desire; building traffic to a niche blog, alerting potential new clients to your service or products, building a community around a subject, or whatever you can think of. Try it!

10 Ways to Increase your Market with Twitter

We all know that Twitter is a hugely popular microblogging service. Although your Tweets are technically supposed to answer the question, “What are you doing?” Twitter has moved far beyond that.

Tweets are used to share stories, link to photos, promote content, break news, and a whole lot more. Twitter has also become an incredibly important tool for social media marketing professionals.

Here are 10 ways in which Twitter can be used in your social media marketing campaign.

1. Sharing Links to Items of Interest

As soon as you read something online that you think is interesting, it is easy to share it on Twitter with all of your followers. Twitter is highly effective in this manner because it is such a quick way to be able to reach a large group of people. You can also get a lot of great ideas for blog posts from Twitter since many new ideas and stories are floating around that haven’t even made it to the blogosphere and definitely not to mainstream media.

2. Building Your Network

Using Twitter is a great way to build your social and business networks because it allows you to find and follow people with similar interests. You can use Twellow or a similar service to find people who live in your geographical area. You can also use other tools that help you find new people to follow based upon who your Twitter friends follow.

3. Build Relationships within Your Current Network

People in different networks often use Twitter to connect with their contacts instantly rather than using instant messaging for that purpose. Furthermore, many people use Twitter to connect with their network during events like conferences.

4. Re-Distributing Content from Your Blog or Website

Twitter can be used to redistribute content from your blog or website. However, you should take care to do this thoughtfully since many of your Twitter followers may already read your blog. For that reason, you may want to avoid using a blog plug-in that automatically Tweets your posts. Your best bet is to Tweet your content manually and customize each Tweet so it doesn’t get old.

5. Get Involved in Live Tweeting Events

Live Tweeting events are great because they are a form of citizen journalism that allow you to connect with several new people in your niche while making active and valuable contributions to current discussions in your community.

6. Pitching Stories to Journalists on Twitter

You can send a direct message to a journalist who is following you on Twitter to pitch a story idea.

7. Communicating with Your Team

You can use Twitter as a company intranet that connects all of your employees. Twitter can be particularly useful in this regard if you have a virtual business with employees in different geographical locations. You can set your updates to private for security reasons. Anytime you are working on group projects, you can stay in touch with your team members using Twitter.

8. Brand Monitoring

Stay up to date with any mentions of your business on Twitter. If there is anything negative, you will be able to counter it quickly. You can also use Twitter as a way to receive feedback from your customers and improve your business. Just ask your followers to give their opinion on something. For example, if you designed a new website, ask your followers what they think about it and get their constructive criticisms so you can make your site design even better.

9. Acquire More Votes on Social Media Websites

If you have submitted a story to Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, or any other social voting website, tweet a link to that submission to try to score more votes from your followers. If your followers like what they see, they are sure to vote for your content.

10. Build Your Personal Brand

When you use Twitter to talk about things as mundane as what you ate for breakfast or how you are going to sleep early tonight, you make your followers feel like you are casual and approachable. Even those with running a company that has a cold, corporate brand image could create more appeal and build a unique personal brand using Twitter.

Free Twitter Buttons For Your Blog or Website

Here is a very useful links for you.

All the following links have free graphics for you to down load and use on your own sites. Create a link to your Twitter profile from the graphic, and you will slowly pick up new followers from your website or blog visitors.

This is a great way to organically build followers. It may take longer, but you will be attracting followers who are already interested in you as they visited your site in the first place. I strongly believe in building a following in this way, rather than using one of the many automated scripts.

If at some point you want to start marketing or selling to your followers, you will be much more likely to succeed if the  potential buyers have arrived in this way.

So download a graphic or two, and get linking!

http://tinyurl.com/3u66xj

http://tinyurl.com/4yq9d4

http://tinyurl.com/2uonto

http://tinyurl.com/666dz2

http://tinyurl.com/2me5kt

http://tinyurl.com/3fb37z

How To Earn Money From Twitter

I found this new money making opportunity today; A way of earning money from writing tweets for advertisers.

Sponsored Tweets is a new Twitter advertising platform, owned by IZEA, that connects advertisers with Tweeters. Advertisers can create sponsored conversations on Twitter. Tweeters can earn money for spreading the word.

Your tweet price is based on many factors, like number of followers, number of tweeters you’re following, the age of your account, how often you tweet, etc. Sponsored Tweets will give you a recommend price you should charge.

However, there is an important point you have to pay attention to. You would not want your followers to stop reading your messages just because they are overwhelmed with advertisements. A good way to avoid this is to continue sending the usual information people expect from you and add an end line with the marketing message.

Experienced social marketers recommend sending a promotional tweet only after every 5 to 7 non-self-serving tweets. After you’ve built trust and rapport by sending helpful or interesting tweets, you might increase the number of times you advertise.

But always remember to do it subtly. One way to do that is to point them to a webpage where they can read an informative article or watch a video that “pre-sells” your product. You may also give them a free report branded with your own offers. Avoid blatant promotions and you will get more sales.

You may run the risk of losing some followers, but if you act intelligently, and write tweets that are directed to your niche you should be ok. If you can earn $5 per tweet that should only take a minute to write, it may be a much quicker and easier way of making money than trying to build affiliate sales.

You can find out about how to sign up here

Create a Twitter Background Image

Since the visual impact of your Twitter background is the strongest tool you have available, customizing it carefully can give your followers all the information about you that want to give them.

You can make your own image on your computer and upload it under Settings – Design – Change Background Image. The first 200-250 pixels width on the left hand side is a great place to put additional profile information and list websites.

For a quick solution, you can create just the sidebar (250×700) as your background image with “no tile” selected. Then, modify the rest of the Twitter color scheme to complement it. You can use the first 200 pixels from the top for your picture or “header” for a possible logo and tagline.

The rest of the 400-500 vertical pixels should be used to tell others what you’re about and most importantly, what you’re looking for. Are you using Twitter to get business? To gather ideas for a project? To get feedback from customers? This is the best place to reflect your interests and other facets of your professional life if necessary, so that others can see it immediately.

Alternatively, you can use it to tell people how best to contact you with your email address, website, Facebook page, etc.

Remember though, the background is only a graphic…you can’t add clickable links to it so make your contact addresses easy to read so followers can copy them.

Still not sure about the dimensions? You can use Browser Shots to see what it will look like on different screen sizes and browsers.