How to Twitter

Over the year or so I've been on the forum, I've uncovered a lot of great information, and here's a small way I can see to give back:

I've spent the last month analyzing Twitter--how to use it, when to use, and what to use it for. I hope my opinion on these matters help you in your IM journey, and while I've discovered some interesting insights, I'm far from a Twitter "expert," so I look forward to your input and additions!

First, I used to be one of the "anti-Twitter" people, not finding any use for the growing micro-blogging platform that was sweeping the internet scene. Always the optimist, I created an account anyway and began connecting with friends I'd met both on- and off-line. After following about 20 people I'd heard of (@guykawasaki, @timferriss, etc.) I realized I wasn't getting much out of the system.

About the same time, I was determined to grow the readership of my personal blog, and decided Twitter might be an interesting way to further connect my followers with my content, and possibly get a retweet or two. Here's what I learned:

1. Getting Followers: like any other social platform, quantity is put on a pedestal quite often. Twitter offers a unique, quick way to offer quality content to a huge network of interested prospects, and so the first step in a good Twitter campaign is to seek out those who are "interested" in what you have to say.

To do this, I looked around for Twitterers who were either in my niche or in a closely related niche and were considered well-known. Many of these well-known industry leaders had a blog that advertised their Twitter account. After following them, I browsed to each of these gurus' followers list and started following many of their followers. Don't hold back, you've got until about 1,700 people before you need to start being a bit more "picky!" (Since Twitter will cut you off when you get to 2,000, until you have more than 2,000 followers yourself.

2. TweetLater: I also signed up for an account at TweetLater.com, which will allow you to "auto-follow" people who start following you. The idea of auto-following is considered bad practice by some, and I admit--most of the people I've auto-followed haven't really been helpful for my business, but it does help catch the followers who find you through their friends who've also followed you.

3. In addition to the auto-follow concept, TweetLater allows you to send out scheduled automated Tweets at a given time and date. I used this service to find out what brought in the most clicks and conversions to my blog and products (you can also check out bit.ly, which offers some great link-tracking--for a fee, of course!). Here are my findings:

Most people are on Twitter and in a "responsive" state in the late morning (11 am PST) and just before bed (7-9 pm PST), however this may be subjective to your area--try out different times and try to reach people during these times, wherever they are.

I created a .txt file that had a bunch (100-200) of tweets ready to go, and uploaded them into TweetLater's service. Then I set up TweetLater to send out these tweets every 5-7 minutes throughout the next few days, and sat back.

4. For most of my tweets at the start of my experiment, the results were as expected: not too much interest. The ones that stood out and actually converted (got a retweet/sold something/were clicked) were the ones that had a link. While it's hard to measure the success of a tweet that doesn't have a link, it seems that none of my tweets that didn't a link had any success selling a product or an idea.

If you're going for retweets, the best way I've found is to simply ask "Please retweet!" at the end of your tweet. This can be a great way to create a viral campaign if your link is a video, article, or other free item.

5. The best sentences for tweets were not Capitalized Like This Sentence--people seemed to associate capitalized sentences as headlines for a news post, not a genuine tweet that adds value to a connection with my followers. The best converting tweets I used were ones that just simply stated "hey--check this out if you want to make money online using AdSense" or something like that.

Honestly, #hashtags and other keywords didn't seem to promote my tweets as much as I'd hope--not to say it's not worth it.

I found success tweeting different versions of the same tweets numerous times (maybe spurts of 5-6 tweets with the same link 2-3 times a day). Using a service like TweetLater will let you easily manage these "spurts" for different products, blog posts, campaigns, and affiliate links.

Also, most of my followers liked to click through to content that I created (original). Many of my followers didn't care about affiliate products I was promoting either. If they would click through, they wouldn't buy the product.

Overall, I found Twitter to be just like any other online system for money making--if you're not adding value, people won't care about you and want to buy from you. If you are abusing the system, people will quickly unfollow you and the system may even ban you.

Your thoughts? Let me know if you've met with success using these or other methods on Twitter!