Twitter Marketing and Using Twitter Tools

Since the advent of the social media phenomenon, Twitter, internet marketers now have a way of generating traffic to their sites almost immediately without having to revert to pay per click advertising.  If you are looking to learn internet marketing then social media marketing will be an important aspect of that training. In this blog I will examine how to set up your twitter account, how to manage it and what twitter tools or software to use.

Firstly, when you set up your twitter account at www.twitter.com, if you are using if for internet marketing, you want to make your user name a keyword. For example my twitter user name is webmarketing09. I wanted to use Internet Marketing but Twitter only let use so many characters.

You need to optimize your look at feel for gathering the right followers. Successful Internet marketing is all about targeting the right type of traffic to take the right kind of action and Twitter marketing is no different. So making your Twitter account look like your key market is important. For example you would not choose a background with flowers on it in pink if you are wanting to attract people from the business industry.

When you first login to your Twitter account, click on settings then design in the menu bar at the top. In here you can change your background. Another good site to go to where you can have more design options is www.freetwitterdesigner.com.  To upload your picture simply click the image at the top left of your screen and follow the instructions there.

In the Settings menu you will also want to add your bio. This is where people will decide whether or not to follow you. So here you will want to put in your keywords of your target audience. My bio reads: Keeping You and Me Up-to-date on Web Marketing, Internet Marketing, Internet Opportunities, Internet Tools, SEO, Email Marketing, Social Media Tools.

Now it’s time to get followers. There are a lot of free and paid tools out there. www.twollow.com and www.socialoomph.com both offer a 7 day free trial to get followers. Personally I like twollow better for this purpose because they seem to get more quality followers for you. I didn’t notice too much of a flurry with the 7 day free trial for Social Oomph (which use to be called Tweet Later).  There is also another free tool you can use at www.autofollowtwitter.com. This is easy once you figure out how to use it. All of these tools allow you to follow people who follow you automatically so you don’t have login to your account and click each follower individually. This is too time consuming.

HOT TIP: Never follow more than 200 new people a day or you will run the risk of having Twitter shut your account down for spamming or doing something they don’t approve of.  You’ll see many internet marketing and twitter tools advertising they’ll get you 1,000’s of new followers a day. This is only really possible if you happen to give good tweets. You don’t want your follower to following ratio to be more than 150% either. For example if you have 1,000 followers make sure you have no more than 1,500 that you are following.

Every few days logon on to Twitter Karma at http://dossy.org/twitter/karma . Enter your Twitter account and press Whack! This will get rid of anyone who has not followed you in the past few days, which basically means they do not have auto follow or are fussy about who they follow so do it manually. Get rid of the tire kickers so you can then start following more people who are likely to follow you.

If you intend to have several Twitter accounts to cover several industries or interests or be using social media marketing techniques you will want to automate your tweets. www.socialoomph.com is a free tool you can use for that and it manages all of your accounts in one place. You will need to sign up for the paid version if you want to repeat your tweets throughout the day. It costs about $27 a month.  www.autofollowtwitter.com is a free tool that you can use to schedule your tweets but it is complex to use and difficult to manage several accounts simultaneously.  I use both. Social Oomph is a great all round tool you can use to manage a variety of tasks without having to log in to several other twitter tools. It’s easy to use and time saving. There are number of tools I’ve also tried but not mentioned here because they are either too difficult to use or cost more than their competitors.

A word of warning about embarking on Twitter marketing. It can be very time consuming for the results you get. Some products and services do better than others as well. So automating as much of your tweeting and twitter marketing with simple to use twitter tools will be critical to the enjoyment and success of your social media endeavors. It can be a lot of fun so set it up from the beginning to have fun.

Janet Jay
www.LearnInternetMarketingBlog.com