Four steps for getting more out of Twitter

Are too many people describing this on Twitter?
Image courtesy of stltoday.com

Do you REALLY care what one of your Twitter followers had for breakfast?  I'm guessing not.  And recent research from Hubspot suggests that you're probably not alone.

In its current State of the Twittersphere report, Hubspot is finding what it calls some "surprising things."  The biggest surprise seems to be that many "Twitterers" aren't actually using it:

• 79.79% failed to provide a homepage URL
• 75.86% of users have not entered a bio in their profile
• 68.68% have not specified a location
• 55.50% are not following anyone
• 54.88% have never tweeted
• 52.71% have no followers

So, maybe we really don't care about each other's breakfast menus.  And part of the problem may be that many users are jumping on the bandwagon without having a real purpose and system for using Twitter.

Assuming that certain users want to use Twitter for online marketing, Jerry Work, President of Work Media, LLC has a system for making the most of it using only free tools.

Download TweetDeck - go to www.tweetdeck.com and download this free application.  According to Work, it will enable you to manage the conversation from the people you follow and organize them into logical groups.  Once you begin grouping the people you follow, you'll be able to actually read postings from people you're interested in.

Sign up with TweetLater - go to www.tweetlater.com and sign up.  It will enable you to automatically follow back to those who follow you.  It also enables you to send a personal message to all your followers.

Install BigTweet - BigTweet enables you to distribute interesting information from the web to your followers.  Install it on your browser's toolbar from www.bigtweet.com. When you find interesting information (or useful information to your followers) just highlight it and click the BigTweet button.  If you don't highlight content, the text of your tweet will be the title of the web page.

Search for people to follow  -- you can do this either through your Twitter interface or by using a tool like www.twitseeker.com.  If you follow a few new people each day, the list of people who follow you will grow quite rapidly.Post your tweets - by clicking on the Apps button at the bottom of your Twitter page and using the Twitter widget that appears.  It's a way to make further use of the content you create when you use your account.

By establishing a systematic approach to communicating through Twitter, it can become great tool for building that word-of-mouth presence that all marketers are looking for.

Online Marketing Glossary

Pay per sale (PPS) - online advertising payment model in which payment is based solely based on qualifying sales.

Site stickiness - the amount of time spent at a site over a given time period.

Unique visitors - individuals who have visited a website (or network) at least once in a fixed time frame, typically a 30 day period.

Website traffic - the amount of visitors and visits a website receives.

Follow me on Twitter!  https://twitter.com/jcbodary