UNDERGROUND TWITTER TACTICS
Transcription
UNDERGROUND TWITTER TACTICS
________________________________________________________________________ UNDERGROUND TWITTER TACTICS _________________________________________________________________ Underground Twitter Tactics 1 ________________________________________________________________________ TABLE OF CONTENTS What Is Twitter? .............................................................................................3 How To Setup Your Twitter Account.................................................................4 What To Tweet ...............................................................................................7 Building A Following ........................................................................................9 Getting Followers From Your Followers .......................................................11 Searching For Followers .............................................................................11 Finding Followers Outside Of Twitter ..............................................................12 Getting Followers From Your Blog, Email And Forum Postings .....................18 Twitter Badges.......................................................................................20 What To Do If you Reach Your Following Limit ............................................22 Be Sociable ...............................................................................................25 Thanking Your Followers ...............................................................................26 The Real Secret To Twitter Success................................................................31 Get People Interested In Your Tweets.........................................................31 Join In On The Conversation ......................................................................32 Retweet ....................................................................................................32 Twitter Backgrounds .....................................................................................33 Twitter RSS Feeds.........................................................................................38 Twitter Tools And Automation........................................................................39 Automating Your Tweets ............................................................................39 Tools For Keeping Up With Tweets .............................................................41 Twitter Management..................................................................................41 Twitter Applications.......................................................................................42 Other Twitter Resources................................................................................43 Conclusion....................................................................................................43 _________________________________________________________________ Underground Twitter Tactics 2 ________________________________________________________________________ What Is Twitter? Perhaps one of the most talked about Web 2.0 sites today is Twitter. It’s no surprise though because this seemingly simple platform is actually a great way to stay in contact with your favorite people as well as build a targeted business following. One of the things that has made Twitter so popular is it’s simple interface. Just login and type a few words (literally a few – less than 140 characters) and you’ve broadcast a message to your followers and with over 10,000 people joining Twitter every day that’s a lot of eyeballs on your product or service. While at first glance, this microblogging which allows only 140 characters might seem pretty limited, you’d be surprised at how much information you can pack into those characters and the simplicity and ease of use make it a quick way to blast out a message. And if that isn’t easy enough for you, there are tools that will help you integrate your twitter account with your blog or website and automate the whole process for you! Indeed, with it’s millions of users, Twitter offers that internet marketer a powerful tool to connect with your prospective customers and develop a relationship with them. Not only can it help channel traffic to your website, but it is also a great platform to do market research with. If you’ve tried social networking websites in the past and found them difficult to use or too time consuming, then you will love Twitter. _________________________________________________________________ Underground Twitter Tactics 3 ________________________________________________________________________ If used properly, it can catapult your business to the next level and gain you more customers than you thought possible. In the next chapter, I will show you how easy it is to take that first step – setting up your account. How To Setup Your Twitter Account In order to start getting traffic from twitter, you first need to setup your account. The setup itself is easy, but there are some things you might want to give a bit of thought to before you blast right in there and get going. The most important, is the name you will use. This depends on your business model and how you want to present yourself. Should you use your actual name or a business name? That’s entirely up to you but something you should carefully consider before making your account. One thing to think about though is that your username becomes part of your URL and that (along with other items in your profile) is directly tied in to Twitters search function. So using your real name or keywords can help your profile come up when people search for those keywords on Twitter. Now, if you run several businesses, you might want to set up more than one account and use your pen name, or business name to keep them separate. You can have as many accounts as you want, but keeping track of them might get confusing if you are not well organized! To register, you want to go to twitter.com and select the “Sign Up Now” Button. _________________________________________________________________ Underground Twitter Tactics 4 ________________________________________________________________________ On the next screen you will be presented with the following fields: Full Name - Enter your firstname and lastname here Username – This is the username that will be shown on Twitter and will be part of your url (http://twitter.com/username) so choose wisely. You can type in the name and then it will show you if that name is available. If your chosen username is already taken, you could try using hyphens or adding numbers like 123 to the end. Password – The password you want to use when you login to twitter Email – the email address you want associated with your account When you are done, enter the captcha code and click the “Create my account” button and your account will be instantly created! Easy, right? Now that you have your account, there are a few more things you should do to set it up properly. Once you login to twitter, you will see a menu in the upper left that looks like this: _________________________________________________________________ Underground Twitter Tactics 5 ________________________________________________________________________ You want to click on the setting tab because this is where you can enter information about yourself and manage your account. The first tab that we will explore is the “Account” tab which you will probably be presented with by default. If, not click that from the menu you see at the top left of the screen. From here you can enter more information about yourself and your business. This is important because the information here will be used in Twitter search and it can help people find you based on the keywords you use for your business. Most of the fields are self explanatory. You want to be sure to enter your website address and pay particular attention to the One Line Bio field because this is where you can list your product or service. This is your opportunity to “sell” yourself and your business. You only have 160 characters to get the job done, so you will really want to think about it carefully. You want to use as many keywords as possible, but don’t spam it with just a mess of keywords, write out a readable sentence that incorporates your keywords. The Protect my tweets button should always be UNCHECKED in most cases. Checking the button will prevent your tweets from going out to the Twitter community at large and you don’t want that because this is how you will get new followers! If, for some reason, you only want your tweets to go out to approved followers, then check the button, otherwise leave it as is. _________________________________________________________________ Underground Twitter Tactics 6 ________________________________________________________________________ The other tabs allow you go do basic functionality: Password – change your password Mobile - setup text messaging Notices - tell twitter if you want it to email you when people follow you or when you receive a direct Picture – upload a picture that will be associated with your account – a really good idea if you are trying to brand yourself! Design – change your background design. There are several designs supplied but you can also have custom twitter backgrounds made that match your business or reflect your personality. More on that later in the book! What To Tweet Ok, so now that you are all setup it’s time to start tweeting! But what do you tweet about? First, you have to think about why you are on twitter to begin with. You want to get traffic to your offerings, right? But not just any traffic, targeted traffic that wants to buy what you have to offer. And not any targeted traffic, but traffic that you have a relationship because this type of traffic will be more trustful of you and willing to buy. So, what you need to do is start developing a relationship. _________________________________________________________________ Underground Twitter Tactics 7 ________________________________________________________________________ You want to tweet about interesting things in your niche, maybe give out some links to free products or helpful information. If you want to add a personal twist to your communications, feel free to tweet about what you are doing – this will make you seem more “human” but don’t overdo it, no one really cares to know that you went grocery shopping or what you are doing every 15 minutes. Tweet about interesting events in your life in moderation and you won’t bore your followers to tears. While it might be tempting to start posting sales messages right away, you really want to keep this to a minimum. Don’t spam your list with sales pitch after sales pitch or you will soon find that you don’t have any followers at all. Try to treat your followers like you would want to be treated by someone you follow. Basically the strategy for Twitter is the same as the strategy you would use for an email list – send out lost of useful informational tweets and then throw in a sales tweet every once in a while. Tweeting is easy, simply login to your account and you will be presented with your home page. Right smack dab at the top is the “tweet box” where you simply type in your tweet. _________________________________________________________________ Underground Twitter Tactics 8 ________________________________________________________________________ The number in the upper right shows you how many characters you have left for your message - (remember, you are only allowed 140). You can put text in here as well as a url but it all must fit in 140 characters. When you are done just hit the “Update” button and your tweet will be sent out immediately! As you can see, it’s simple and easy but if you do screw up, you can delete your tweets by highlighting it on the list below the tweet box and clicking the trash can icon. There is also a star icon at the top right of each tweet and clicking on this will allow you to select the tweet as one of your “favorites” Building A Following Now that you have started tweeting, you want to start building a following and like with anything else, you must give in order to receive. Now, I know a lot of manuals will tell you to go follow a bunch of people and they will follow you back which basically gives you instant followers. But do you really want these kinds of followers? Basically they are only following you because you followed them, not because they are interested in your product or service. _________________________________________________________________ Underground Twitter Tactics 9 ________________________________________________________________________ In order to get the kinds of followers you want – ones that are in your niche and might be interested in what you have to offer – you need to become a contributing member of the community. The first step is to be sure that you have added a few valuable tweets to your account. Add stuff that will really get people interested in following you. Making tweets that are interesting and point to information that is valuable for that niche will go a long way to getting you respect, credibility and trust. Once you have a few good tweets under your belt, you can search twitter for people that are in the same niche and follow them. Take the time to read their tweets and reply to them specifically (you can highlight the tweet and hit the reply button, then type a reply). If you find a really great tweet you might retweet it – just highlight the tweet and click the retweet button and this will retweet it to your followers. You want to get in the habit of spending some time on Twitter each day – making a few tweets that update your followers on what you are doing with your business as well as information that is happening in your niche and looking at other peoples tweets as well. But remember, when it comes to tweeting, quality is better than quantity. Once you have some followers, then you can check out who else they are following as well as who is following them and find even more people in your niche that you might want to follow and who might follow you back. _________________________________________________________________ Underground Twitter Tactics 10 ________________________________________________________________________ Getting Followers From Your Followers So how do you find out who is following you? Simple, login to your account and look on the right hand side. You will see a box with your picture and under that will be your number of followers as well as how many people you are following. Click on followers and you will get a screen of all your followers. Click on the image of any follower and another screen will come up with their statistics. You can then click on “following” or “followers” to see who else they are following or who is following them. From there you can follow any of these people that you think might be beneficial to your or who you want to follow you back in return. Searching For Followers Another thing you can do is search twitter for people that are in the same niche. You do this by typing a keyword into the search bar on the right hand side of your twitter “home” or by going to search.twitter.com and simply typing in the keyword of your niche. So, if you are in the internet marketing niche, you might type in “internet marketing” which would yield a list of people who have this keyword in their profile or in the tweets. _________________________________________________________________ Underground Twitter Tactics 11 ________________________________________________________________________ From this list of people you can find ones that you might like to follow you and then follow them – you’ll find that many of them follow you back and these are people that are truly interested in what you have to say. When you are thinking up keywords to search on, sometimes it pays to think out of the box. You want to try to think of complimentary keywords where people might want to buy your product. For example, if you sell an ebook on weight loss, you might want to target people of a certain demographic that usually are interested in weight loss. Middle aged women, women who have just had a baby - etc… Sometimes thinking out of the box can get you new customers too! Finding Followers Outside Of Twitter Once you are done searching Twitter, there are a couple of other places you can look for followers. One of these is twellow.com. You can search through this site using the different categories to find people with your same interests and people in your niche. You can also add your account so that like minded people can find you! _________________________________________________________________ Underground Twitter Tactics 12 ________________________________________________________________________ To search, you can browse the categories on the home page, or use the search feature to search for your keywords. When you do, a page will come up with all the people who are listed in the category or with the keywords you have searched for. There are millions of profiles so you are sure to find plenty of people that you think might be prospective leads. You can also look at their details to find out more about what they are about and How active they are on twitter. _________________________________________________________________ Underground Twitter Tactics 13 ________________________________________________________________________ When you do find someone that you want to follow, you can simply click the “Follow” button under their picture. Of course you want to add your profile to Twellow so people can find you too! To do that, simply click the “Get Listed” link at the top right corner. Twellow automatically pulls profiles in from Twitter so you might find you are already listed, but if not you can add yourself manually. If you find you have good luck and like Twellow, you might also try a similar site WeFollow.com. _________________________________________________________________ Underground Twitter Tactics 14 ________________________________________________________________________ If you want to connect with like-minded people in your area, then LocalTweeps is the next place you want to sign up for. Simply click the “List Yourself” button and enter your twitter account information along with your zip code. _________________________________________________________________ Underground Twitter Tactics 15 ________________________________________________________________________ Once your account is created, you can search for people using the zip code / city and / or keywords. _________________________________________________________________ Underground Twitter Tactics 16 ________________________________________________________________________ You’ll get a list of other tweeters that match the criteria of your search and you can easily follow them by simply clicking the follow button! Another avenue you might want to try is to get matched up with other people who might be great leads or great for you to follow. You can do this at MrTweet.com. This site goes thorough your tweets and relationships and comes up with a list of suggested people you could follow. It’s easy to use and well worth signing up for as it can lead you to lots of people who are interested in your niche. _________________________________________________________________ Underground Twitter Tactics 17 ________________________________________________________________________ Getting Followers From Your Blog, Email And Forum Postings One way to get targeted followers that you know want to hear what you have to say is to add a “follow me on twitter” link on your blog. You’d be surprised how many people that visit your blog or website and like what you have to say will want to follow you. The best place to put this is in a prominent spot – either up in the header or at the top of the sidebar usually works pretty good. Of course, you want this to be eye-catching, so I recommend that you use a niche twitter graphic instead of just text. Luckily, you can get animated .gif files made specifically for this purpose for free! There are quite a few places that offer this, but I get mine at SiahDesigns where there are plenty of cute buttons to pick from. _________________________________________________________________ Underground Twitter Tactics 18 ________________________________________________________________________ It’s easy to add this to your website. Simply copy the image up to your server and add the following to your sidebar or header: <a href=”http://twitter.com/USERNAME”><img src=”path to graphic”></a> Replace USERNAME with your twitter username and “path to graphic” with the actual path to the graphic on your server. This will make a clickable link to your Twitter account where the person can elect to follow you. Another thing you should probably consider is adding a link to follow you on Twitter to your signature in niche forums that you frequent as well as in emails. As you may have guessed above, the link to your twitter account is http://twitter.com/USERNAME – you can add this as a link to just about anywhere that allows links. Now, if you are not tech savvy and you want a neat little graphic, you can go to Tweetbars and enter your username and it will create a GIF image and spit out the associated code that you can use for forums or for webpages. _________________________________________________________________ Underground Twitter Tactics 19 ________________________________________________________________________ Twitter Badges If you want to post your tweets on your blog, twitter offers a great way to do that with widgets. You can go to http://twitter.com/badgeshttp://twitter.com/badges _________________________________________________________________ Underground Twitter Tactics 20 ________________________________________________________________________ And click the Continue button. The next screen allows you to select the type of widget you want. Make your selection and click “Continue” and it will generate the code that you can easily cut and paste to your website or blog. _________________________________________________________________ Underground Twitter Tactics 21 ________________________________________________________________________ What To Do If you Reach Your Following Limit Following all these newfound friends can be fun, but don’t get carried away because twitter does have some limits. Currently, you are limited to 1,000 per day and there is a maximum you can have which is 110% of your follow count. Don’t worry, though if you reach this limit you can easily get rid of some of the people you are following who are not following you back and to do that you need to go to Huitter.com. This site has some great tools to use with Twitter, but the two that are most useful are the two on the left side – the Mutuality tool and the Message cleaner tool. I’ve circled them in red in the picture below: _________________________________________________________________ Underground Twitter Tactics 22 ________________________________________________________________________ The Mutuality tool will let you unfollow everyone who you are following that is not following you. This can clean out some of the “dead wood” and allow you to follow other people who might be more inclined to want to follow you. Mutuality has two versions – Manual and Auto. I find that Manual works fine for this purpose. _________________________________________________________________ Underground Twitter Tactics 23 ________________________________________________________________________ Once, you select “Manual” simply click the button on the next screen to unfollow everyone who you are following who is not following you and click go. Sometimes you might have some key tweeters that you still want to follow even if they don’t follow you and you can enter their id’s in the exclude field. You will be presented with a status bar and you can see how many people are being “unfollowed” . The Message Cleaner is another cool tool that can help you clean out all your Direct Messages. If you have a lot of them, doing this manually from your account can be a pain and this tool just goes in and automatically deletes them all in one fell swoop! Simply put your username and password in and click “Go”. _________________________________________________________________ Underground Twitter Tactics 24 ________________________________________________________________________ All of your DM’s Will be displayed and you can choose to delete them one at a time or select all and delete the whole bunch! Be Sociable Remember, twitter is a social community, so if you want to get the most out of it, you have to be active in the community and set yourself apart with your quality tweets. This is really how you will gain the most followers and customers. If you take the time to tweet about hot topics in your niche people will notice. Another thing you want to do is to provide great content but, of course, you can’t really do that with a 140 character tweet! The way to make up for this is to start a blog (if you don’t already have one) or use one of the article directories to submit articles that have informational value to your followers. Then do a short tweet letting them know you have posted the article and give them the link to the article. At the bottom of the article, put a link to your related product. If you do this consistently, you will get a growing list of regular followers that will anxiously await your next tweet and line up to buy your products! Don’t forget to join in the conversation! Find other people in your niche that are talking about interesting topics and join in on the conversation by replying. _________________________________________________________________ Underground Twitter Tactics 25 ________________________________________________________________________ If you run across a great tweet, don’t be afraid to retweet it. Retweeting is simply sending someone elses tweet out to your list of followers. When you do this for others, they may be more inclined to retweet your tweets too! Thanking Your Followers Sending a “thank you” to each and every one of your followers when they follow you is a nice personal touch and it’s also a great opportunity to get them to your squeeze page. There’s a free service SocialOomph.com that helps you do just that! It takes advantage of Twitters Direct Messaging functionality which allows you to send a direct message (DM) to just 1 person, but it does it all automatically for you so when someone clicks the button to follow you, it automatically sends a direct message to the person! Now, in order for this to have the most effectiveness, you want to create a special squeeze page just for people who follow you from Twitter. On the page you want to offer a report or some other freebie that will be of interest to people that are following you. The key thing is to offer something of great value that will really benefit the reader so that they are compelled to sign up for your list. Remember, people aren’t following to be sold to but they do want to hear what you have to say so if you make them an offer they can’t refuse then you just may have gained a new targeted subscriber. _________________________________________________________________ Underground Twitter Tactics 26 ________________________________________________________________________ What you need to do is go over to SocialOomph.com and click on Register in the upper right. Fill out the form and register – you will have to verify the registration in your email before your account will be active Once you have done that, login and you will see the following screen: _________________________________________________________________ Underground Twitter Tactics 27 ________________________________________________________________________ You want to pick “Manage My Scheduled Tweets and Twitter Account Automation” and you will see this screen: Choose “Add Account” from the tab menu and then select “Twitter” from selection box and click Continue. _________________________________________________________________ Underground Twitter Tactics 28 ________________________________________________________________________ On the next page, enter your twitter account name and twitter password, then fill in the captcha and press “Save”. You will notice that your twitter account is added to the bottom of the screen. Now go all the way to the right under “Actions” and select “edit” to customize your DM. On the next screen, you can automate the DM (direct message) that is sent to your followers. You can even rotate messages and elect to follow the person as well. Just fill it out as you see fit (this is a good opportunity to direct them to the special squeeze page we talked about above) and click Save. Once you do this, your message will be sent to each and every person that follows you. _________________________________________________________________ Underground Twitter Tactics 29 ________________________________________________________________________ It’s important to not be too “salesy” with this message. Twitter is a social community and people are not following you to be sold to. Trying to push a sale with your DM is a sure fire way to get “unfollowed” right away. Instead, let them know how following you will benefit them and send them to a place where they can download a free report or a free tool. The real benefit is Twitter, as with any social media, is creating a relationship and building trust. Do this right and the sales will follow. _________________________________________________________________ Underground Twitter Tactics 30 ________________________________________________________________________ The Real Secret To Twitter Success So, what’s the real secret to twitter success? It’s really just being yourself. Forget about making a sale in your tweets and think about what you can give instead of what you can get. You want to really get a grip on the pulse of your niche and be the first to post relevant information. Believe me, if you can do that then plenty of people will want to follow you and, once you get followers you can earn their trust and they will be happy to open their wallets when you have something to offer. Get People Interested In Your Tweets Don’t be a boring drone. Don’t just post mechanical boring tweets that state the facts. Liven it up a little with a funny post or something controversial. Think about your tweets like you do the article headlines that you use – write something that will grab their attention! Personally, I think funny posts are the best – everyone wants a good laugh but not too many people want to just see a mechanical stream of boring tweets. I have personally followed people just because of their funny posts even if they weren’t in my niche! _________________________________________________________________ Underground Twitter Tactics 31 ________________________________________________________________________ You might even try some link baiting posts. These are posts that are made specifically to draw attention. Something really controversial and usually something that relates to current events. Of course, you don’t want to get too off-topic but if you can tie the event into your niche you might have a winner. Think of Twitter as an opportunity to interact with your followers and try to get them engaged in what you are about. Have a contest or create a poll they can take on your blog. Send out a tweet asking them to critique a new article you wrote. If you get people involved like this, they will feel they have vested interest in what you are doing and it shows that you care about your followers and are interested in what they think too. Join In On The Conversation Get involved in the conversations that are going on in your niche. If you follow interesting and highly respected people, you can get yourself noticed by replying to their tweets. Make an intelligent reply and you never know how many people might start following you. Retweet Retweeting is a great way to send good info to your followers and to develop relationships with others in your niche. _________________________________________________________________ Underground Twitter Tactics 32 ________________________________________________________________________ Retweeting someone else’s tweet is like paying them a huge compliment and don’t you love it when you get a compliment? Everyone does so retweeting is a great way to build a relationship with others who are prominent in your niche. When you retweet a tweet, it’s bound to be appreciated and may even end up with you having one of your quality posts retweeted in reciprocation. Twitter Backgrounds To make your twitter account stand out from everyone else, you can create a custom background. You might have even noticed this on other peoples twitter pages if you have clicked in to follow someone and seen a custom background that matches with their business or one that is just really eye-catching. Having a custom background can really set you apart from the crowd and add to your professionalism and credibility and they aren’t even that hard to make if you have some basic graphics skills. You can approach this 1 of two ways: The first is that you can make a small background that will tile. A great use for this is to put your logo or even just your website url made with some nice text in a graphics program. Depending on how busy your logo or text is, you may want to make the tile larger or smaller. _________________________________________________________________ Underground Twitter Tactics 33 ________________________________________________________________________ I don’t like it when the background is too busy because it is just too distracting and people can’t really read it, so I find the best thing is to use a simple logo and make a 250 X 250 size jpg. Then you can upload it to your account and set it to tile which I will show you in a minute. The other approach is to make a full sized background. This is great if you wanted to have a big picture like a photo of the woods, or a starlit night. If you want to take this route, then you have to be careful to make your image the right size for the Twitter screen. I have found that the 1600×1200 pixel size works best for most screen resolutions. To make a Twitter background, you will need access to a graphics program – there are several free ones you can use such as Gimp. It helps if you have some basic graphics skills too! Once you have designed your background, log in to your Twitter account and click “Settings” in the upper right menu. Then select “Design” from your settings menu. This will bring up your design page which has a bunch of default backgrounds that you can choose. If you don’t have the means to make your own background, you can browse through these premade backgrounds and pick one that suits you. _________________________________________________________________ Underground Twitter Tactics 34 ________________________________________________________________________ To add your own twitter background, you want to select the “Change Background Image” button on the bottom. Then, on the next screen, browse to the image you have created. If you want the image to be tiled, then check off the “tile background” box. Tiling will repeat your image over and over again on the background, if you don’t tile it, it will simply show the image once. _________________________________________________________________ Underground Twitter Tactics 35 ________________________________________________________________________ When you are done, click the “Save Changes” button and your new background image will be applied! If you want the text color, links and sidebar color to match with your image, then you can select the “Change Design Colors” button. _________________________________________________________________ Underground Twitter Tactics 36 ________________________________________________________________________ You will see blocks for all of the elements on your Twitter page – Background, Text, Links, Sidebar and Sidebar Border. Select any one of these and a color picker will pop up where you can choose any color you want so that your entire Twitter theme will match your new background. Don’t have the design skills to make a background for yourself? No problem! Due to the popularity of Twitter, tons of sites have sprung up that cater to Twitter users and there are quite a few where you can even get Twitter backgrounds for free. Some of my favorites are: _________________________________________________________________ Underground Twitter Tactics 37 ________________________________________________________________________ TwitterBackgrounds.com – Tons of free backgrounds for every season, occasion and use. How cool would it be to be able to change your background for different holidays and seasons? Get them for free here. Or, you can have a custom one made if you really want to brand your Twitter account. Twitter-Backgrounds.net – Another site loaded with free backgrounds including some really nice photography ones. Twitrounds.com- More free backgrounds, or have a custom one made for only $79. If you want to get some cool ideas for neat Twitter backgrounds, or if you have made one yourself that you want to show off, then check out Twitter Backgrounds Gallery where people submit their backgrounds for voting. Twitter RSS Feeds Your Twitter account has an RSS feed that can be used to promote your tweets. Just like any other RSS feed, people can subscribe to your Twitter RSS too. When you login to your account, you will see the RSS icon on the bottom of the right column. Click the orange RSS button and your RSS feed will be shown. There are a lot of things you can do to help promote your Twitter account with your RSS feed. You can add the feed to your blog as an RSS widget on the sidebar. If you have feeder blogs, then add the feed to there as well. _________________________________________________________________ Underground Twitter Tactics 38 ________________________________________________________________________ You can also encourage people to subscribe to your feed, that way if they don’t want to constantly be looking at Twitter, they can have a direct in to your feed on their desktop. They can subscribe to the feed the same way you subscribe to any other feed And, of course, you can submit your feed to the RSS directories. Twitter Tools And Automation As with any other popular social media site, a plethora of tools have been created to make working with Twitter easier. There are tools to automate tweeting, tools to help you manage your account and tools that help make following easier as well. These are just some of the more popular tools – a Google search will surely yield a ton more! Automating Your Tweets As I have mentioned before, the amount of success you have on Twitter depends on how much you interact and give to the community so leaving your account on autopilot isn’t wise. That being said, it can be smart to take advantage of some of the tools that will help you automate the process. Automating your business tweets will leave you more time to interact, reply to other interesting tweets and add more social tweets of your own. _________________________________________________________________ Underground Twitter Tactics 39 ________________________________________________________________________ I don’t think you will get stellar results if you depend solely on automation, but if you combine it with adding your own personal flair to your posts then it can make the job easier. Here are some tools that can help: WordTwit – WordTwit is a wordpress plugin that will automatically turnm your posts into tweets and tweet them from your account. You can choose to include or exclude tweets based on tags or categories and even have the url shortened plus customized the content of the tweet text. Social Oomph – As mentioned earlier in this book, Social Oomph has a ton of tools that will help you manage and automate the Twitter aspect of your business. When it comes to automating tweeting, it has a great feature that allows you to schedule tweets (this used to be Tweetlater). This can be very useful if you want to send a tweet at a certain time, but won’t be at your computer or if you are going on vacation and want to still get tweets out on schedule without having to ruin your vacation activities by being tied down to a business schedule. This is a great way to get out tweets 24 hours a day so that your followers in all time zones can hear from you! TwitterFeed – This is a website that allows you to feed your blog posts to your Twitter accounts. It basically does the same thing as the wordpress plugin mentioned about but works with RSS feeds so if you have a regular website you _________________________________________________________________ Underground Twitter Tactics 40 ________________________________________________________________________ could use this as a wordpress plugin wouldn’t work. It can also send the feeds to Facebook and has some stats tracking built in. Tools For Keeping Up With Tweets If you follow a lot of people, then keeping up with all the tweets can be problematic. Luckily, there are some tools that allow you to integrate that right into your browser so you can easily see tweets without having to login to Twitter. TwitBin – This is an extension that works with the Firefox browser and shows your Twitter conversations on the sidebar. It allows you to send and receive messages as well as share links right from the browser. Twitterfox – This is another Firefox extension that shows you all your friends tweets on your browser. A handy little icon on the status bar of the browser lets you know when a new tweet is added from someone you follow. Click the button and it pops up a window with the latest tweets. There is also a line where you can enter a message to reply or tweet a new message of your own. Twitter Management Tweetdeck – Tweetdeck is a great application that allows you to organize things when you have lots of tweets to go through. The problem with Twitter is that you can only see the last 20 tweets on the first screen so if you are very active, you have to scroll back over and over again. Plus it isn’t that easy to see all your DM’s. _________________________________________________________________ Underground Twitter Tactics 41 ________________________________________________________________________ Tweetdeck solves that by showing you your tweetstream plus all your replies and DM’s on one screen. It makes it a lot easier for active users to manage all aspects of the Twitter social interaction. Splitweet – Managing multiple twitter accounts can be a nightmare but Splitweet makes that easy. Here you can monitor and manage all your Twitter accounts in 1 place. Twitter Applications There’s a ton of Twitter applications that can make your tweeting a little easier and more are being added every day. Here are just a few you might want to try out: TwitThis – This site allows you to instantly tweet a url that you find interesting – just paste and click. FriendFeed – FrinedFeed isn’t really an application to help you use Twitter per se, but it does merit mention here. It is a tool that allows you to link together your social accounts in one place and publish a feed that is an accumulation of all your accounts, including Twitter. Here, you can link your Twitter and Facebook accounts together and have all your tweets posted on your Facebook wall. _________________________________________________________________ Underground Twitter Tactics 42 ________________________________________________________________________ Twitdom – if you need more Twitter applications, then Twitdom is the place to go. It is a huge repository of twitter applications with over 1300 applications in it’s database and growing. If you can’t find what you need here, it probably doesn’t exist! http://twitdom.com Other Twitter Resources Twictionary – If you’ve ever wondered what some of those “twittery” words you have heard mean, you can find it all at http://twictionary.pbworks.com/ Twittangle – Got too many friends? Twittangle lets you rate and tag your friends so that you can find the tweets that are most important to you. http://www.twittangle.com RetweetRanks – Want to find out who has been retweeted the most or what your retweet ranking is? Then check out http://www.retweetrank.com TwitterKarma – This shows all your twitter friends and how many mutual friends and followers only you have. http://dossy.org/twitter/karma TwitterHolic – Find out who has the most twitter followers and check your ranking at http://twitterholic.com Conclusion Twitter can be a very powerful tool for connecting with your prospective buyers to develop a relationship in the hopes of turning them into customers. _________________________________________________________________ Underground Twitter Tactics 43 ________________________________________________________________________ Just like everything else, though, you have to give first before you can get. If you think of Twitter as a way to reach out and connect with people more than as a way to just sell stuff, you should do OK. Certainly, there is no social media site that is more popular or growing more rapidly than Twitter and if you use it wisely, you will soon find that it can have a tremendous impact on the growth of your business. _________________________________________________________________ Underground Twitter Tactics 44