Rodney Payne

If you’re looking for ways to hit your Twitter targets, this is the post for you. First of all, you should ask yourself, what are your Twitter targets? You want lots of followers? Sure, that might lead to some bragging rights, but what’s the point? Really what you’re after is community which translates into meaningful followers. How do you get meaningful followers?

I queried some other successful Twitter-ites to learn about their favorite Twitter Tips. Here’s some ideas to take your Twitter Page from Topsy-Turvy to Titillating!

• Tweeter, Push Thyself! Don’t have a personal trainer or an agent pushing you to meet those personal deadlines? That can make reaching a goal even more difficult. Annabel Candy wrote recently about using Twitter as a source for motivation. She tweets her goals to help hold herself accountable for daily goals. Talk about baking two loaves in one oven (my alternative phrase to the more gruesome bird and stone saying). Not only does this make her more accountable to her own goals, it also piques the interest of her Twitter followers. For example, she might tweet about her goal to write another chapter today to which her followers might lift an eyebrow and say, “Is Annabel writing a book?” Curiosity can kill more than a cat, it can also drive traffic to your site.
• Know Your Niche. Twitterista Jaden of the fabulous blog Steamy Kitchen, suggests this Twitter rule: be entertaining, useful or both! People on Twitter are busy and in order to get their attention, you have to fill a niche. Think of your Twitter account as a blog…in 140 characters. Then next ask, why would someone want to follow your Twitter “blog.” Are you like Neil deGrasse Tyson and provide useful scientific tidbits? Or are you more like Ellen DeGeneres providing folks with funny, entertaining quips throughout the day. Go for one or the other, or find your own middle ground in between.
• Sir Link-a-Lot. Grace Langlois of La Mia Vita Dolce doesn’t just post on lovely sweets, she also connects with others on Twitter. Her suggestion? Link to interesting stories. If you find something noteworthy, chances are there might be others who will too. Your blog may have a theme but you can share some of your other passions via links to other articles from aha moments, inspiring to informative articles.
• Reduce. JJ of the blog, Blah Blah Blahger shares some great advice on using tools to help manage your Twitter Account. JJ says that by using a bit.ly or ow.ly, url reducer, you can push followers to your site. With a condensed, clean web link, your message won’t get lost AND you’ll be able to track the number of click-throughs that you get!
• Be a Connector. Have you ever been at a party and been cornered by someone who does nothing but talk about themselves? Well, think of Twitter like one big party. You can be one of the dull people at the party only talking about yourself or you can be a connector. Suzanne Broughton of the OC Family Blog says “help others first on Twitter before linking to yourself.” She recommends this technique on your Twitter page: “Give twice. Take once.” For every tweet linking back to your site, retweet something of someone else’s and find some other way to spread the Twitter love.
• Clean up the Clutter. My personal Twitter tip is to be sure to clear out the clutter from time-to-time. Once or twice a year, I go through my “follow” list from beginning to end and “unfollow” those people that are not following me back. Of course, there are some people I’ll follow no matter what. You know, like Steven Colbert. I don’t really expect him to follow me back (but it sure would be cool!). And there are some organizations I follow with expecting a follow back. You have to make these decisions for yourself, but if you use my advice, be ruthless. Keeping your Twitter follow list clean is important. It helps your Twitter experience to be more of a community rather than a sycophantic one-way dialog with someone who really isn’t that into you (another party metaphor, but it’s relevant).

Following these tips can help you reach your Twitter Targets, but it can also just make Twitter a lot more fun too.

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.

Top Tips for Your Twitter Targets

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I started a new business Twitter account and acquired 350 relevant followers in one month being relatively unknown and without spamming.

Most companies have joined Twitter by now but there are a few that have lagged behind. If you’re a part of this group (as my company was), it can be really intimidating to jump into the social media scene when your competitors already have established accounts with hundreds (or thousands) of followers. I used these techniques to jump my new account from 0 to 350 followers in one month, bypassing the awkward infancy period of a new Twitter account almost entirely.

Why should you care? Getting an established account is the best way to attract new followers, and even more importantly, more interaction with your followers and a quick intro into your local Twitter community, driving communication and clicks through to your company’s website.

Set up the account

As soon as possible, grab your business’s name on Twitter if it’s still available. Mine wasn’t, but luckily the account was inactive and we were able to file a copyright request, releasing the account over to our name. If this isn’t possible, grab an available username as close to your business’s name as possible. Avoid underscores and dashes as much as possible.

Design your twitter account to look human, like the @zappos account does above. One of the best ways to do this is to add a custom background with someone’s real picture — preferably the person tweeting from the account but you can use the founders/CEOs of the company as well. Stock photos are worse than having nothing at all. Customize the colors and the rest of the background to reflect your company’s branding.

Before any promotion of the new account, write twenty tweets to fill out the first page, spacing them at least 15 minutes apart from each other. Thereafter, continue to tweet every day, 4-5 times at max for the first few weeks, and taper (if you wish) after. We want the account to look active and get that tweet count up as fast as possible without spamming. A great tool to use is CoTweet, so you can spend 10 minutes in the morning setting up your tweets for the day, spacing them 2-3 hours between each other.

Very important: Make sure your tweets are high quality and useful to your audience. At the end of the day, your account is to promote your business, but will be more follow-worthy if you interact with the community and post about other items of interest in your field. I usually try to have three or so posts per day promoting our website, one retweet (varying between native retweets as well as non-native which can add commentary), and one link out to something interesting elsewhere. You want to emphasize that you’re a real person, not a robot.

Acquire followers

Now that you have a follow-worthy account, it’s time to get followers. It would be easy to just let this happen naturally, but I’ve found that accounts with high follower counts are more desirable, and therefore attract more people. So while the goal is to get a high number of interactive followers, we’ll start out with finding twitter accounts (ideally in the same field) that auto-follow back.

The best way to do this is to use an online application called Tweepsect, built by my friend @shazow, that analyzes a twitter account’s “stalkers” (those that follow but the account doesn’t follow), “stalking” (those that the account follows without following back), and “mutual” (mutually following).

Find other businesses in your field on Twitter and inspect them using Tweepsect. What we’re looking for here is the “mutual” list, and then we can scroll through those mutually following accounts and find those that have nearly identical following/follower counts — sure sign of an auto-follower. Follow every one of these accounts you find for a very quick boost to your following count; if it’s over a hundred accounts, follow only about 50-100 per day to allow for your own following count to rise.

You can start promoting the account once you’ve reached about 100 followers: for example, write a post on your company’s blog, add links from your website and Facebook pages, tell your employees to promote it via their twitter accounts, etc. Why didn’t we do this first? People are more likely to follow an established account.

Bonus: Lists are another great metric, and still a fairly new feature. Use this to your advantage — inspect the lists that your competitors appear on and follow those that create those lists. Usually these creators will add your account to their lists as well. You can also go to Twibes.com and add your business’s account to lists in as many terms in your field as possible.

Find the community

Once you’ve completed these steps, it’s now time to find people in your field to follow and interact with. As large as Twitter is, I often have trouble finding where the good communities of people are. Tweepsect again comes in handy here — we used it before to find auto-follows but now we can use it more generally. Take a look at the “stalking” list in addition to the mutual list to find who other businesses in your field are following. Watch out for inactive accounts, designated on Tweepsect with a face next to account — these accounts haven’t been updated in 90 days.

Another great way to find those in your field is to use Twitter Search. Search for relevant hashtags of topics: #education, #gardening, #marketing, as well as related topics: #onlineeducation, #organicgardening, #ppcmarking, etc. Search for these topics once daily to get a snapshot of others in your field that are promoting that conversation on Twitter. While general topics are hashtagged fairly rarely, conferences almost always have a hashtag for the attendees. Specifically in the education space, #educon occurred about two weeks after we created our Twitter account and it provided a great resource of people to follow in our space.

If you find some really great accounts to follow, I would recommend creating a private list to stick these people on. As your account grows larger, it’ll become impossible to watch the feeds of 300+ people per day. Stick the highest quality accounts into one list and read that instead every morning.

Continue growing and interacting

Hopefully at this point, your account will have the valuable combination of a high amount of followers that also interact, placing yourself directly within the Twitter community and on the same level as your competitors. It’ll be a lot easier to coast your Twitter account since people finding your account will be more likely to subscribe – give months later, the account has more than 800 followers.

Any other tips? I’d love to hear them in the comments!

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.

Jump-Starting Your Company’s Twitter Account

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??There were a lot of things that were new to the World Cup 2010. Of all the things that were new, one of it was the fact that this was the first World Cup after the onset of the Twitter fever.

A few days back I read a post somewhere that talked about Twitter having set a new record of about 3.2K tweets per second, thanks to the Japanese football fans. That is more than evidence that Twitter has changed the way we saw the World Cup.

Twitter certainly gave us a different view of the World Cup this time. It was the match between Brazil and Chile. I wanted to get an update into the match and before I could get an update from any other website, I could get it from Twitter. I was continuously updated about the match. All I had to do was search Twitter with a few hash-tags like #brazil and #football. I could get the latest on the world cup. Just imagine the amount of tweets surfacing on Twitter every second.

Twitter showed us all a glimpse of their “promoted Tweets” just before the USA-Ghana match. Searches with hash-tags of #USA, gave results with a promoted tweet being the first results. This tweet was from Nike Soccer. It was there until the game was over and then they pulled it off. But, one sure got to know how Twitter’s promoted tweets are going to look like.

Twitter has influenced us in more than one ways. World Cup football is one such thing, but a macroscopic view shows that it was not just confined to the World Cup. Twitter is a more important member of our Internet family, more important than even Google. Or, so at least for me. Why?

1. Because I can get updated news feeds on Twitter, much faster than Google.
2. Because I am able to market my products on Twitter at zero cost, in comparison to the thousands that I would have spent at Google.
3. Because I have been able to make some good friends at Twitter.
4. Because Twitter is fun and Google is not.
5. Because I can research about anything that I wish to sell, much easily at Twitter than Google.

These are just some of the things in addition to the searches on Twitter. Carefully built search parameters can get you the desired results extremely easily and much faster than Google. What’s more, you can even save the search for future so that you do not have to write the query again and again. How useful is this? It depends upon your purpose of the search. It saves a lot of time if you are researching your market and that is where I think it is pretty useful.

As the World Cup nears its finale, it would be not be wrong to say that, at least Twitter has stamped its authority as a news channel. Twitter has given us a new perspective to the way news was read. Staying updated has a new meaning and I am sure that this World Cup will be remembered as a “Twitterified World Cup”

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.

A Twitterified Football World Cup

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ChumpDump is a new Twitter unfollow game for Google Android and Apple iPhone.

We think you’ve got too many chumps in your friends list. Friends are today’s 21st century currency in life. You see it in every social network, this obsession with collecting friends. But how many of them are really friends?

The game’s daily lottery picks a winner out of your friends this and then digs through a month of tweets and tells you a story about this “supposed friend” you’ve been following.

The analysis includes the usual: # of DMs, # of replies, and whether they are even following you to more sophisticated stuff like a Klout Influence Score and even a social graph for you to check out. The game then presents you with your friend’s latest tweets and begs the big question – SAVE or DUMP?

You earn the most points when you dump someone. You earn a little less when you save someone. And most of all, you earn more equally if you tell the game why.

“Why’s” are what we feel make the game really entertaining. Come play today!

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.

ChumpDump – A New Unfollow Game for Twitter

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Yes, today I’m obsessed with the letter “T”.

I was looking through the site stats this morning and decided to see what the most popular posts were here at Twitip. It’s an interesting list, with the number one post having over 384,000 views! (Number 20 on the list has just over 23,000!)

Check them out, which one’s your favorite?

1. 181 Free Twitter Buttons, Badges, Widget and Counters to Help You Find Followers
2. Make a Good Impression with a Custom Twitter Background
3. Twitter On Your BlackBerry
4. How to Get More Followers on Twitter
5. Twitter versus Facebook: Should you Choose One?
6. Ten People All Twitter Beginners Should be Following
7. 13 Twitter Tips and Tutorials for Beginners
8. How to Set Up a Twitter Account
9. 10 Easy Steps for Twitter Beginners
10. How to Grow Your Follower Numbers to Over 10,000 in a Week
11. 11 Useful Twitter Tools That Don’t Require Your Password
12. Twitter User Names: How did you Come Up With Yours?
13. 7 Ways to Be Worth Following on Twitter
14. 6 Tips for Using Your Twitter Profile to Get New Followers
15. 10 Twitter Tools that Help You Work Smarter
16. 10 Reasons To Use Your Real Name As Your Twitter @Name
17. How To Unfollow On Twitter With Class
18. Construct your own ‘Top 10 Must Follow’ List as it relates to your own Niche
19. Custom Twitter Backgrounds: Tips for Better Readability
20. Get a ReTweet Button for Your Blog

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.

Top 20 Twitip Twitter Tips of All Time!

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Today’s post comes from Pongrob Saisuwan of TwitBlend. He’s showing us how to use the service. You can follow Pongrob at @twitblend.

There’s so many auto-generated list of tweets out there but the results are mostly spam. So why not make it ourselves?

With a service called TwitBlend you can easily create your own “collection of tweets” or “tweet list” yourself and it’s very easy to use!

This is what I got from spending two minutes on TwitBlend, The Foursquare Cling

TwitBlend helps you search for tweets and arrange, color, share and put it on your website.

How can I make one?

1. Click on “Create new blend” on top-right menu
   
2. Enter your Twitter’s account information and click “Allow” to login (TwitBlend uses Twitter’s API so you don’t need to sign up separately.)
   
3. This is “New Blend” page. You can use menu on left-side to search for your tweets, you can see your tweets from your “Home” timeline, “@ mentions”, “Sent by you” and your favourites. You can also find tweets from your own list.
   
4. There’s a search tab for you to search tweets from a keyword or username.
   
   

   Below is the search dialog:

   

5. After you search for tweets you will see something like this:
   
6. You can drag and drop tweets from the right side to the dropbox on the left side, arrange and color it with “color button” on the bottom of each tweet.
7. After you are happy with this list you can click “Save…” at the bottom.
8. In this save dialog you can enter the title and tweet it to share it with your friends.
   
9. Now that you have created your own blend, you can share it with your friends or put it on your website using TwitBlend’s widget. Below is an example of TwitBlend widget on my WordPress blog.
   

Have you used TwitBlend before? Let us know what you think in the comments!

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.

Create a Custom List of Tweets with TwitBlend

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[Hey everyone - our submission form has been acting up, so if you have submitted a guest post and have had troubles, please email it to me at lara@twitip.com - Thanks!]

Today’s post comes from Jenni Izzo, a Drexel University graduate turned PR Account Coordinator with a social media obsession. You can follow Jenni at @jenniizzo.

Whether large or small, Twitter can enhance your event in a number of ways. Take a hint from MTV, who recently used a live Twitter Tracker for their 2010 Movie Awards. They encouraged those in the audience, as well as those at home, to get in on the action by tweeting their thoughts, reactions and questions. Throughout the night, tweets containing “MTV” hit over 400 per minute. But, even if you aren’t planning a star-studded event, you can still use the following tips to create a tweet-worthy event.

Establish an event hashtag.
Long before you start promoting the event, create a hashtag. It should be easy to remember, short and relevant. This will be key in incorporating Twitter into your event. Include the hashtag on everything from the Evite to the Facebook page to signage at the event. Other creative ideas include: event t-shirts, business cards and centerpieces.

Create buzz before the event.
Now that you’ve established the event hashtag, get out and there use it. Tweet about sponsors, ticket sales, guest appearances and topics. Get people excited before the event and it will ensure that the enthusiasm carries over to the day-of.

Encourage attendees to tweet during the event.
Using the previously mentioned tips, make sure the hashtag is visible at the event. If you have a PowerPoint or Keynote presentation, make sure it is included on the title slide. If you will be taking planned breaks, display slide encouraging attendees to tweet — or better yet…

Host a live stream.
During scheduled downtime, replace your presentation with a live stream. A live stream should also be incorporated at all times on a projection screen. If you are announcing winners or honorees, use Twitter to share the big news. Also keep your audience actively engaged by tweeting trivia questions and giving an award to the first to tweet the correct answer.

Take advantage of post-event insight.
Twitter gives event coordinators a valuable opportunity to look back attendees’ candid thoughts. Review tweets marked with your hashtag to see what worked and what didn’t. Use this as an opportunity to improve your next event or connect with people who had further questions.

When it comes to using Twitter to enhance your event, the possibilities are endless. Feel free to add to this list and share some of your favorites in the comments.

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.

How To Incorporate Twitter Into Your Event

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Treegger has launched a service allowing Twitter users to chat in real time using an XMPP client such as Miranda, Pigdim, Adium, iChat (see the list here).

Messages exchanged during conversation are not stored or published on the web or anywhere else.

Bidirectional relationships (people followed and following you) are set as chat friends so if you are a massive twitter user with tons of followers don’t expect to see them if you are not following them. Unfortunately, this service is probably unusable with classic client software if you have thousand of bidirectional relations.

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.

Twitter XMPP Instant Messaging with Treegger

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If you’re new to Twitter, you probably have no real concept of retweeting (commonly seen as RT) and what that can mean for your success and fun on Twitter. I’ve seen it go two ways with my clients who are new to Twitter: (1) some get on Twitter and don’t retweet – ever – because they either don’t know how to do it or don’t want to, and (2) some get on Twitter and retweet like the devil, but they either retweet junk, or they don’t know how to use it to their advantage.

Why ReTweet?

Well, it totally fits the purpose of Twitter, which is to share thoughts, news, insight, rants, advice and other things that are worth sharing to people who follow you. When you retweet, you are re-sharing something that is already on Twitter to your followers, who may not have seen it.

Retweeting is meant to enhance and improve social engagement on Twitter; but it can be abused, so just use some common sense. Here are some ways to become better at it.

Note: if you have no idea whatsoever about retweeting, check this out. There are new ways to retweet and strategies, etc., but that guide is a good place to figure out what we’re all talking about.

Don’t ReTweet Junk – Check out the links first

First of all, if you retweet external links (and I know this is not going to fly with everyone) you shouldn’t be retweeting stuff you haven’t actually looked at. I made this mistake once (in the spirit of being transparent) and when I opened the link after I retweeted it, it was a post written really badly with lots of cheesy ads and it was just something I would never have passed on. You must look at the link – it could be a link to a page filled with malicious software and/or viruses – you never know. Why ruin your follower’s day by passing on B.S.?

Add something to the ReTweet

I don’t always do this either, but I try to when I can. If you retweet directly from the Twitter website, you won’t be able to add your personal message or any hashtags. But if you use a service, like HootSuite, you can add something, as well as schedule that retweet for later.

ReTweet from the Source

Many blogs, news websites and magazines have a re-tweet option built right into the site. If this is the case, retweet from the source, because it gives the original Tweep some visibility, and sometimes their re-tweet function includes their desired hashtags.

ReTweet People Who You Want to Follow You Back

If there are people who aren’t following you, but you want them to notice you and follow you back, try retweeting some of their tweets. Retweeting is a huge sign of respect. So, if you respect what they say, retweet them and see if they don’t take notice of you and become a follower.

Don’t Let ReTweeting Take Over Your Twitter Account

The last thing I’ll add for beginner Tweeps is to not get caught up in retweeting. Add your own thoughts to the mix. There are retweeting bots and other spam accounts that just retweet other people’s stuff, and while that seems okay, it’s not and you don’t want to be “that” guy. I typically detest silly etiquette rules and lots of structure in something that’s supposed to be personal and social, but on Twitter you need to try and fit in. Your experience will be a lot more fun if you can.

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.

Not all ReTweets are Created Equal

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How to Drive Traffic from Twitter using @Anywhere

How to Drive Traffic from Twitter using @Anywhere
@Anywhere is a new set of widgets (or plugins) from Twitter that allows you to add Twitter Features to your Blog or Website. @Anywhere is great because it lets your users do the most common activities relating to Twitter (tweeting, following) without leaving your site. Not only that, there are a couple of ways you can use @Anywhere to drive traffic to your site.

Hovercards
This plugin automatically converts every Twitter username (in @problogger format) on your web pages to Twitter links, complete with hover cards (think tooltips on crack) that have the all important “follow” button in them.

Tweet Box
The Tweet box option simply puts a tweet box on your site that users can post tweets with without leaving your site. The benefit of the Tweetbox is anything your user posts to their account includes your website name (even if they didn’t type it).

Adding @Anywhere To Your Site

1. Sign Up
You’ve got to let Twitter know that you’re hosting @anywhere and this is the part where you can set the text that will appear in tweets user make from your site (See above screenshot). Go to this URL on Twitter and fill out the form: Sign Up for @Anywhere

On the form, make sure you set the following correctly:

• Application Name: This text is what will appear on your user’s tweets
• Callback URL: Just set this to your home page address
• Default Access Type: Has to be Read & Write – make sure you set it!

Don’t close the next screen when you’ve submitted the form!

2. Copy API Key
Once you’ve submitted the form, Twitter will provide you with an API key – this is the bit of information Twitter will look for to tell that users are Tweeting from your site. Copy this, and save it some place you can refer to it.

3a. Add @anywhere to your site manually
I’ve created a really small HTML sample page showing both hovercards and the tweetbox in action. You’ll need to edit this and put your API in it to get it working. Once you can see it in action, you should be able to integrate the same features into your site. Download Here (zip, 1kb, right click & save)

One thing I’ve done in this sample is to get the Tweet box pre-populated with the title of page your user is reading. If you *really* know what you’re doing, you’ll want to add a shortened URL to the text box via server side code (not for the faint of heart).

3b. Add @anywhere to your site as a WordPress Plugin
If you can’t edit the code for your blog / site, there is a WordPress plugin you can try, you’ll need the API keys for this as well: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/add-twitter-anywhere/

Summing Up – @Anywhere is a great start to Twitter breaking out of it’s own walls, in a similar way to Facebook’s Connect platform. As you’ve seen there are useful options for integrating it with your website,
You can find out more (including documentation) about @Anywhere at Twitter’s dedicated site:

• dev.twitter.com/anywhere

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.

How to Drive Traffic from Twitter using @Anywhere

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