Twitter - I just do not get it...

ya its actually pretty simple.

people (non-IM, regular everyday people) use twitter to be streamed information about people and groups that they like. its like an RSS feed for non-bloggers almost, if that helps. It might also help to think of it like a regular email list, replacing email addresses with followers.

once followers have been established tho, you can leverage more publicity with retweets. you tweet something, have something special for anyone that retweets and boom, you've got 100-20,000 people all doing advertising work for you. since friends and like-minded people will often associate, its more likely to get targeted traffic, and because your followers are doing the retweets its essentially free.

List -> Twitter
You send Emails to People -> Followers Retweet
(thats an analogy and not actually a chain of events)


it's not going to double or triple sales or anything wild like that, though i suppose it could in some cases. for the most part its a free traffic growth tool and is more useful in the later stages of marketing than the beginning (once presence as an authority or highly valuable product/service has been established)

Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets". Twitter is micro-blogging. It is social messaging. It is an event coordinator, a business tool, a news reporting service and a marketing utility.

Hi, I primarily use twitter for list building, I make a few direct sales from it, but nothing exceptional. Where I do benefit though is by building my lists on my money sites I have all of my posts automated, I pull them from RSS feeds and use twitterfeed to handle the posting, I also use Pingfm software to send my updates out to multiple ping fm accounts and this works very effectively.

I also actively engage with my followers, so it's a mixture of services that I use. Also I have a good tip for you. If using Twitter Adder software make sure that you follow the followers of stars in your niche, this is far more effective than following by keyword.

Following by keyword will get you the bots and the spammers primarily, whereas following by user gets more real people. I've been using this technique for a while and am growing my Twitter account by 100 to 300 followers a day.

Hope this helps

Rob

Hi there,

Twitter is basically a numbers game, what you have to remember is the amount of your followers actually on Twitter when you Tweet is very diluted, so you need to make sure you are tweeting at peak times.

I use a service called easy retweet.com although i limit the number of people i retweet on here simply because i do not just want to retweet anything to my followers, you can purchase credits cheaply and get your tweets retweeted to thousands of people, what you must remember though is the people you are being retweeted to may not be in your niche, but the art is in getting hashtagged keywords into your tweets and when they are retweeted to thousands you get picked up in search for your keywords and that results in more targeted followers.

You then need to get yourself an auto welcome message for when these new followers follow you, you can do this free with socialoomph.com and put your link in there to your website etc.

You can also use socialoomph to set up automated tweets to go out through the day at say 1hr intervals getting you more exposure to when more of your followers are actually on twitter.

Always have your link showing on your viewable profile and make sure you place your link into your tweets but not all the time.

Also make use of the trend section, try write tweets incorporating trend topics into you tweets and hashtag the trend topic keywords.

This is just a few of many things that will help to get you better results from twitter.

All the best,
Steven.

Use it as a brand/website marketing tool just like creating a facebook page for your website or business.

Hi I have just deleted most of the people I follow on Twitter and am now going to change tack.

I aim to only follow close friends and those that are doing great things in my specialist areas.

For people to follow me I aim to be doing something that will attract their attention or encourage my friends to recommend me for the progress I am making.

For me it is time to leave the playground and put the 'I'll follow you if you follow me' routine behind me.

Of course the trick is to do something great, lol.

igor

Twitter is the retarded brother of text messaging, and the inbred cousin of email.

It only has 140 characters instead of SMS's 160, it broadcasts to everyone on your list instead of just the person you want to send it to, and you tweets are then ignored by 99.9457% of your followers.

Hope that helps.

Hi!

Twitter served well about a year ago. Now it is full of spam.

It is still good for website updates but thats about it. I know a lot of people with success stories how they earned a lot from Twitter but that was a long time ago and I don't really see it happening again.

But nevertheless, there is a great mass of internet users. With a right technique you can profit.

Daniel

I cleaned out all those Twitter spammers some time ago and started fresh and started following people who are funny, interesting, thought provoking. Now I enjoy Twitter the way it was intended to be enjoyed. I hated before that and as for using it for marketing ... it's like pissing in the ocean. When your account is full of Twitter spammers and Twitter spammer bots and the same are following you back, there's little chance of your Tweets converting.

I check into Twitter daily because it's now fun.

Hello Rob. I follow people/companies who are my target market for my business. I also follow other writers for a social aspect, making friends. My main goal is to find my target market and follow them. Retweet their informative tweets. People love it when their tweets are retweeted and they love it when they are mentioned.

It is time consuming but can be profitable.

When I solicit business, I can mention who I am on twitter and it seems as if we have already established a relationship.

So lots of useful information on twitter marketing here.I am also not an active user of twitter as I'm in Facebook.However the key success to twitter I think is getting people to follow you who have similar interest just like yours.am I right?

If you follow people who are part of your target market, you can add a new blog post to your blog. Tweet it and include a tiny url to your blog. With bity service, you can see the statistics of your blog post - how many people viewed it, etc.

Use it as a marketing tool. But, in my opinion, your have to befriend people sincerely. If you come out of the gate and start blasting something for sell, it won't work. Anyone who does that with me, I unfollow them. Earn respect and trust from your "friends" on Twitter and it could definitely lead to sales.

Twitter does have its uses as a "trend" indicator. Follow enough real people who tweet about various things, perform data analysis on the tweet, and you can get a pretty good idea about various trends. Problem is you are limited to 2000 follows unless you have 2000 or more followers, so you would have to create several accounts if you were doing any real data analysis on this.

Twitter is a great tool for getting eyeballs on your content. I blog everyday and tweet out to my twitter accounts. I also repeat previous blog posts out on Twitter each day through Tweet Adder.

I don't think Twitter is a great tool for making sales, but if you are directing enough targeted eyeballs to your content, provided you have monetized this properly, you will make extra sales from your Twitter followers eventually.

Keith

In my opinion TW is silly try FB TW is good only when you want to get "their" attention that's all.

Personally I do very little with Twitter. It's one of those things, you either love it or hate it. My thing is that it seems to be used more of an announcement tool (tell people about a new product, a new post, etc.) it is filled with a bunch of spam in my opinion. If you have a niche site and have ALOT of quality information about that niche then it can be helpful, because you are giving people what they want, but if you are in the IM Niche then you just get a bunch of followers promoting their own stuff, and your tweets fall on deaf ears for the most part. Some people have alot of luck with it, just not my thing personally.

I have always enjoyed using Twitter, even before I started using it for marketing purposes. It is similar to a stripped down version of Facebook...all you have is the status. However, the ability to post statuses can be a powerful thing, if used correctly. I enjoy it because I can quickly learn about new blog posts by friends or marketers, gain traffic to my own blog posts, announce special discounts/new products, and follow celebrities and other funny people for the times I need a break from work.

I get where Twitter is useful, I just think the signal to noise ratio is too high!

I didn't get twitter years ago either, but a very good business friend of mine insisted. I got involved in twitter having it to have nothing to do with IM and build a pretty big following over the years.

I have "met" some cool people from all over the world and have even been offered some joint ventures (not IM) from the connections I've made on Twitter. It really was my favorite social network. (Although now it is tied with facebook :-) )

Since then, I've recommended Twitter to some of business friends who also "don't get it" to begin with until they start chatting to people and get hooked.

:-)

Now, that I'm doing IM, I have created a different twitter account for that because my other account, although very large, is not in the IM area at all.

I recently posted this advice on my blog and I thought it may help the OP here.

Unless you’ve been living under a marketing rock, then you probably already know that you should be using Twitter for marketing your brand. This does not mean simply signing up for a twitter account and tweeting about your grandma’s flower garden or sending out a link to your blog every now and then. This method will NOT get you any traffic or new customers. Neither will randomly vomiting out affiliate links. (gross!) You have to know when, what and how to tweet for your Twitter account to be effective at all.


That being said, I can give you a few tips today to make your Twitter account much more effective. If you’re going to do it, do it right. There are 5 tweets that you absolutely must make in order to get new followers and more traffic to your website.



Motivational Tweets: Motivational tweets serve two purposes. You will help others by giving them a boost during the day and these kind of tweets are very likely to get retweeted – exposing your brand to many, many others. Here’s an example: “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined. – Henry David Thoreau”. This type of tweet is a win/win for both you and the reader. #winning


The Pertinent News Tweet: This is a tweet that you would make when something important happens in the news. You want to make sure that your clients know that while you are busy making money, you are also keeping up with what’s going on in the world. This could be something like a teeny tiny newsflash: “President and congress finally settle budget”. (I’m sure you already know that one’s fiction.)


The Hashtag Tweet: You have to be careful with this one. The hashtag is an artform all its own. It took me a while to understand how to do a hashtag tweet properly. Sure, you could make a tweet like: “I’m so happy to be hanging out in the garden today! #gardening” and you might think, “Hey! I just made a tweet with a hashtag! I’m awesome!”. While technically you did indeed make a tweet with a hashtag, you did NOT however, do it in style.


Here is a good example of the art of the hashtag tweet: “This or that? Jesus Christ Superstar or The Book of Mormon Musical? #cnndebate” (If you don’t get that one, I can’t help you.) Besides doing it for the art, you must hashtag for the science. Twitter users LOVE to search for topics they are interested in. By using a hashtag, your tweets and your twitter account could be viewed by thousands, giving you new followers and new clients.

The Trending Tweet : Also along the same lines as the hashtag tweet, the trending tweet serves the purpose of getting you more exposure. Look on the right side of your twitter page and you will be able to see the trending topics. You can either choose one that has a hashtag or one that does not.


Either way, by tweeting about these topics, you will show up in tons of searches. Be careful, though, not to tweet something stupid just because it is a trending topic. For instance, right now, one of the trending topics is “Dear Netflix.” You should NOT post a tweet such as, “Dear Netflix, where’s all the nun porn?”. Believe it or not, this could actually cause you to LOSE followers. And clients.


The Promotional Tweet: Your total tweets should only consist of about 10 -20 percent of promotional tweets. If the only posts you make are about your blog or affiliate product, then I am going to unfollow you and so will everyone else. When you are making a promotional tweet, you should make it short, interesting and helpful: “Need help with graphic design? www.yoururl.com”. The reader should know a little about what they are getting into when clicking your link.


Remember kids, be a responsible twitter user. Especially with your business account. Nobody wants to know about how you really want to punch your mother-in-law in face or what you had for lunch. Keep it relevant, helpful and fun. Oh – and follow me @jennybizz.

thankfully i was smart enough to know not to "follow" any IMer. Not becuase I don't like them but I knew a lot of them would abuse Twitter just like regualr email I didn't want my twitter account to be full of spam tweets.

there are some great posts in this thread, some that are giving me ideas I never thought about.

@ Jennybiz thanks great post.

one that I would suggest is to set up your twitter account and then do not "follow" any IMer for the first month or so, just follow regular everyday people and you will see how twitter is used properly, or normally, lol.

Then you will see what Twitter is meant to be without all the clutter of twitter spam.

I have the same problem with women's logic.. I just don't get it.

But like Twitter... they are part of life.

I don't understand it either, Rob. That said, I do think Twitter makes for a great news aggregator. For awhile, I was actually using it as my primary news source. (Follow people who frequently post links to news stories which you are interested in... and VOILA!... your Twitter homepage now becomes a great place to get your daily news).

Twitter is one of my 10 free massive traffic methods. You can create many twitter accounts. If you have 500 followers everyday, you only need to sell your product for 50 followers, you win.

Some good info here.
I have stopped using Twitter for anything other than posting links to my pages to help get indexed faster.
I don't interact with followers anymore; just to time consuming and a distraction to me.

back in the day I use to make around $600 a week just off of tweets, now I dont even use it. I like some of the things it brings if you use it correctly and with the right mindset and I would probably only use it to follow sports people these days if I was still using it.

I watched Lee delete his whole twitter account and it did not effect his bottom line at all. He even said if anything it helped because he could now focus even more on making money.

For about a year there were a bunch of us on it and we would talk about new ideas and new product creation. It was rich because people could jump in. When something caught fire we would start a online video chat and drill down on the ideas. We would invite all our friends on twitter, back then i had over 25,000 followers.

Those were rich times, and a great sounding board for me. But it all kind of waned out and most of my crew is not on anymore.

The problem with twitter is that it's difficult to have an ongoing conversation with someone. For example, this forum is designed to have ongoing dialogue where we can type more than 140 characters and easily see what the person wrote right before we add new content. Twitter does retain all of this, it's just more difficult to find. For that reason, I attempt to get everyone to Like one of my pages on facebook as soon as possible. That's where the real business building comes into play with Twitter....getting your followers over to facebook (and now G+ of course).

The other thing that I've found twitter to be great for is "mining." Facebook doesn't do a very good job of giving you a list of all people who are "conference meeting planners" for example. Using tools connected to twitter that search based on member bios, like Twellow.com for example, you can get a full list and THEN go find them in facebook to schmooze and connect.

I also second the motion of tdbasha where he said he only tweets to get his pages indexed faster. This is a GREAT reason to use twitter. Make a post or new page to your website and then tweet about it on twitter. Google picks it up in minutes. I've had new blog posts show up top of google in 10-30 minutes average. My record so far is 8 minutes. Google definitely watches and is highly connected to Twitter for the real-time search component.

Dan Zarellas science of retweets is a great read

danzarrella.com/science-of-retweets.pdf

Thanks

As a marketing tool twitter is good. Following spammers make your tweeter full spam. We should use the twitter to branding our self in the market. As time goes people will know about us and they will respect and trust us. And then we can sell what we have by twitter.

The real power of Twitter is in transforming online connections into real-world relationships.
For me, Twitter has become the most powerful tool at my disposal to bridge the professional/personal gap and drive offline relationships.

Oh btw...for brands looking to communicate with customers in real time, the micro-blogging service is a great way to carry on conversations in 140 or fewer characters.

I've learned a lot about Twitter recently, I posted some tips in a thread here: http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...g-twitter.html

The real trick is to build a relationship with your followers and try and get involved in the community like you would a forum. Remember, people go to Twitter go get informed and have fun. With each tweet you want to make your followers either think or smile (or both)!