Twitter Marketing

There is a lot of buzz about Twitter in these days. If you haven’t already, this is the right time to join Twitter, as it is set to be the next big social network community in 2009. The earlier you join and start building your profile and credibility, the easier it will be to use the growth of Twitter to increase your exposure in 2009.

What is Twitter?
Twitter is a social networking community and a new generation of instant messaging. It is all about sending short status updates called “tweets” of 140 characters or less. Twitterers
(people on Twitter) can “follow” each other, so people who follow you will see your tweets
and you will see tweets of people you follow.

Why is Twitter important for me?
Here are some very interesting facts about Twitter:

• Twitter traffic has grown over 600% in 2008
• Twitter became one of the top 1,000 websites by traffic in May 2008
• Twitter is dominated by newer users, 70% of Twitter users joined in 2008
• An estimated 5-10 thousand new accounts are opened each day

All these facts mean that Twitter is a growing platform where bloggers and business owners
can increase their site traffic and exposure by finding, getting in touch and providing value to
people interested in their content and services.

How to use Twitter?
Twitter is referred to as a micro-blogging platform because it allows users to send brief text
updates and in that way differs from a traditional blog. Twitter can be used as a networking
tool, it can be used to get in touch with different people, find information and trends, and it
can be used for marketing.
You have to sign up, customize your profile and start following people. If you are interesting
and you provide value in your tweets, people will follow you back. The more people that
follow you, the more exposure your tweets will get. That way your site gets more exposure
and hopefully more visitors, subscribers and customers.

What should I tweet about?
It is important to provide value to your followers in your tweets, so I try to do that by pointing
to interesting articles I’ve found online, and build credibility and influence that way. I
sometimes send tweets of personal nature, but the majority of my tweets are blog related. The
image on the front page of this ebook shows the words that I have used the most in my tweets
until now. You can make your own image at Wordle.
Twitter works very well with StumbleUpon. If you already spend time on StumbleUpon
finding and recommending quality information and articles, it will be easy for you to continue
this on Twitter. You will just have to take some time to update both your StumbleUpon and
your Twitter account for each of the links you want to recommend.
I also make sure to promote my latest blog articles on Twitter, but it is important not to be all
about promotion as that is seen as spammy, and will make it hard for you to get new
followers. Remember that everyone can see your tweet history at any point of time by visiting
your Twitter profile.