Twitter can be a great marketing tool but it is never going to make you any realistic direct sales so don’t waste your time and definitely money buying the next big 1 click wonder software.
Twitter is a platform to communicate and form relationships, the overall aim should be to provide informative content linked to your blog and be active in engaging with other followers, if you do this well you will naturally drive visitors to your website and then you can start a selling process.
Here is a list of the top tips to get the most out of Twitter
- Follow folks who are interesting to you. Find the people that are of actual value to YOU. Don’t just follow a popular account because everyone else does. After all, it’s your Twitter feed and you’re the one that has to read it!
- ·Don’t follow too many new people at once. Whether you’re just starting out or old hat, be sure to follow people on a regular basis but try not to ‘over follow’ or suddenly your stream might become a deluge of tweets from people you didn’t realize tweeted so often.
- Search for relevant people using WeFollow. It’s a simple tool that organizes Twitter users by category. Great for any kind of teacher, student, parent, admin, or user!
- When you find a new user (to you at least) that follows you, check them out and then don’t be afraid to follow them back. Be sure to check up on them though so you know they’re not a spambot etc. As Howard Rheingold likes to say, it’s all about ‘crap detection.’
- Find Twitter users near you.Twitter is a global network but there’s people using it in your school and neighborhood. Use a site like Geofollow to track them down.
- Join a hashtag conversation.
- Be a lurker (in a good way) or participant in a chat like #edchat or #followfriday. Check out Edudemic’s A-Z list of hashtags to find some relevant hashtags.
- Link Your Blog to Twitter. Most blog hosts will allow you to link up with Twitter so that each time you update your blog, an automatic tweet of your latest blog post goes out to all your followers.
- Comment is Free. Be generous and retweet (RT) interesting comments and reply to others in order to make your mark and start a conversation. If you help others to raise their profile, they are more likely to repay the favour.
- Tweet Regularly. Obviously you don’t have to spend all day updating twitter as this will only annoy your followers, but around 5 tweets a day is considered to be good twitter etiquette.
- Get to Know the Twitter Rules. Generally speaking, be polite, don’t spam people or tweet lots of links back to your own website, don’t drink and tweet and don’t treat celebrities like they are your new best friend.
- Connect with your Twitter Followers. Post relevant and interesting information that is of use to them.
- Don’t buy followers. Seriously, this is a thing. Don’t ever purchase followers. You may get thousands of followers but they’re all spam bots. Probably not worth your time or money.
- Find people by their authority on Twitter. Using a tool like the aptly named Twitority (say that tens times fast) will help here.
- Don’t sweat your follower count. It really doesn’t matter. As long as your Twitter stream helps you and is of value, it’s invaluable. Whether you have 10,000,000 followers and 10, it’s about quality not quantity.
- Find users and tweets in Twitter Advanced Search. Head over to the ‘advanced‘ search part of Twitter to search by keywords and more. Worth a try.
- Don’t try see every single tweet. You won’t be able to do it. I promise you that. Use Twitter when you have the time but don’t get overwhelmed!
- Use RSS to subscribe to tweets. You can use the built-in RSS feeds on Twitter to use sites like Pulse and Google Reader to monitor a particular hashtag or topic.
- See what’s actually trending without using Twitter’s Trending Topics. Try out sites like TweetStats Trends or Twist to find out what everyone is tweeting.
- Use a third-party tool. Sites like Tweetdeck and Tweetake are helpful because they offer alternative tools not found on Twitter.com. For example, you can back up your tweets using Tweetake!
- Use Twitter clouds. These are like Wordle clouds but they show you what you’re talking about.
- Have some variety in your stream.
- Be real. Act like a human and people will treat you like that. Reply to @mentions, reach out to others, just use it like you know you should. If you act like a machine or big company, people won’t want to chat with you. Would you want to talk to an entire multinational company or would you rather talk to someone who has an actual name and face?
- Talk about what interests you. Don’t feel like you have to always talk about the same thing. Talk about whatever interests you. That way, the people who follow you will follow the real you, not some online version.
- Be a helpful tweeter. When someone asks a question on Twitter, answer them if you have an answer! You don’t use Twitter 24-7 so use it to help others when you can!
