Twitter Tips for beginners

I am in no way a Twitter expert, but I have been diving head first into this phenomenon and I have learned quite a bit over the last several months.  Twitter is doubling in size almost every two months, even Howard Stern (24,000 followers in 3 days) has a Twitter page now.  Almost every blogger will tell you that Twitter is a vital part of their traffic formula these days.  According to my analytics, Twitter accounts for over 12% of my traffic and is the fourth best traffic source.  The great part about Twitter is that it is easy to use (once you get the hang of it) and it only takes a couple of minutes per day to use it. 

I started using Twitter about a year ago under another account name but really never put the time into it and let it fizzle out.  Last month in coordination with the launch of this blog, I really started to get serious about learning everything I can to get the most out of this dynamic resource.  I wanted to pass along some helpful tips that I learned that will hopefully help out some Twitter beginners out there.

·         Profile is key- During the first couple of weeks I did nothing to customize my profile and as a consequence I got very few followers.  Think of your Twitter profile like you would your blog theme.  If is dull, boring and common, it is less likely to draw people in.  I used Twitbacks to help me customize m y theme.  TwitBacks is a free service that lets you choose from hundreds of templates and makes it easy to put your own stamp on your Twitter page.  It is also a good idea to use a real picture or your gravatar or logo would work as well.  The point is to create uniformity between your blog and your Twitter page.  Don’t forget to link to your blog!

·         Swim with the big fish- What I mean by this is that you want to identify and associate with the most active users and key influential people in your niche.  This will help you by tapping in and associating with their network.  For example, I am following Rob from Bloggeries (36,000 followers) and John Chow (19,000 followers).  The cool thing about both of these guys is that they will follow you back; in fact they are following more people than they have following them. 

·         Retweet- Twitter has turned into a viral marketing machine with the advent of retweets.  A retweet is when you tweet somebody else’s tweet.  Once your tweet gets picked up and retweeted it has a snow ball effe3ct and infiltrates other networks and keeps going.  I have found the best way to get your posts retweeted are to (1.) Keep your tweet short and sweet. (2.)  Keep your tweet interesting, use a teaser..)( 3.) Use a url shortning tool, I use tinyurl.com.  This will help you keep track of your traffic.  (4.) Ask – Sometimes all you have to do is ask.

I have seen a nice bump in my numbers over the last couple of weeks as a direct result of these three tips.  Hopefully, they work for you as well.

Follow me and I will follow you.. Just drop me a comment below too so I don’t miss you.