TWITTER BASICS continued...

You’ll see in their last tweet box how many followers they have. If they have a bunch, click on their twitter user name to go to their home page. On the right side of the page you’ll see how many people they are following and how many are following them. Click on the word ‘followers’. Their list of followers will come up. Then take a quick look at the pictures of the followers and click ‘follow’ on the ones that look like people you’d want to know. If they didn’t put enough effort into their twitter account to include their picture, they are probably not worth following. Click away page after page. Generally about a third will follow you back.

While you are adding to your follower’s list, send out your own tweets. The number you send will show up on your home page as ‘updates’. Twitter has some basic rules and one is that you need to have sent out about 50 updates to follow more that 1,000. What do you say in those tweets? First thing, what you don’t want to do is just spam your opportunity constantly. Inspirational quotes, news, or anything you can offer of value that doesn’t come with a pitch should be more than half of your tweets. If you do send a link, use a service like bit.ly.com (a great free service) to shorten URL’s and track the tweets you send.

More than half of those you follow will not reciprocate. Maybe they are busy or just not on top of their twitter account. Do you want followers who are not on top of their account? No. So use a service like Tweetular.com or dossy.org/twitter/karma to bulk unfollow- and bulk follow as needed. These are great services and time savers.

The next rule you will deal with is that you can not go over 2,000 that you follow until you have at least 1,850 following you. It took me a day to balance that once I got to 2,000 people I was following. Pass that milestone and you’ll deal with the 10% rule where you can only follow 10% more that are following you. If you have 2,000 followers you can follow 2,200. If you have 20,000 followers you can follow 22,000. There is no ceiling on how many people you have as long as the ratios are maintained.

I’ve mentioned a couple of services to automate your twitter system. There are too many to get into here, but one I’m sure you’ll like is Twollo.com. You set up your free account with them (and use the same codes for all these sites to help keep your sanity) and you can put in specific words for Twollo to look for in the tweets all over twitter. You put the word “sandbag” into your Twollo account and if someone uses “sandbag” in their tweet, Twollo will automatically follow them for you.

Using bit.ly to track some tweet results, I’ve had as many as 10% of my followers click on an appealing link. That’s huge. I’ve sent others and gotten almost nothing. It’s something you have to play with and perfect.

Remember that these Social Networking activities take time, and offer easy ways to get you sidetracked. It’s easy to log onto Twitter and have an hour go by without accomplishing much. Be careful, especially if you have an addictive personality. And have fun. That's what Social Networking is supposed to be all about.