Buffer App – you may have heard about it over the past few months. Lots of people have been talking about how they use the Buffer App to Tweet more effectively.

You may be wondering – What Is Buffer App. In this article I’ll explain what it is and why you may (or may not) want to use it.

What Is Buffer?

The Buffer App website says it best:

Buffer makes your life easier with a smarter way to schedule tweets. Work out all your tweets at one point in time during the day. Then fill up your Buffer with your tweets and Buffer schedules them for you. Simply keep that Buffer topped up and you will then be tweeting consistently all day round, all week long.

Buffer App is really very simple. It works on the premise that a lot of the time, the Tweets that we send aren’t seen by our followers. This is because of the way that Twitter is. Twitter, like Facebook (well at least, like Facebook used to be) is based on a timeline. So your tweets appear as they happen in someone’s Twitter stream. If they have a lot of friends, then they may not notice your tweet, particularly if they aren’t looking at Twitter around the time that you make your tweet.

So if we accept that a lot of our tweets aren’t getting the biggest audience that they could, we need to figure out how to change that.

And this is where Buffer App comes in.

Buffer lets you schedule your tweets at a time that your followers are more likely to see them. I’ve written before about how I live in Australia and most of my followers are in America and Europe. So I’m asleep for a lot of the time that they’re active on Twitter.

The way I get around this is that I automate some of my tweets, using TweetAdder. But whilst Tweetadder is good, it doesn’t give me as much control over the timing of my tweets as Buffer does.

How Do I Use Buffer App?

Schedule Your Tweets For The Maximum Audience

Buffer is very simple to use.

Firstly, you register on their site and enter the details of your Twitter account.

Next, you go into the ‘Settings’ tab and enter your preferred Tweet schedule.

I’ll add another blog post soon about how to determine your ideal tweeting schedule.

Next, you download the Buffer App browser extension. I use Firefox, so I downloaded the Buffer App extension for Firefox. Once the Buffer App extension is downloaded, you’ll see a little Buffer App icon sitting at the bottom of your FireFox window.

The rest is so simple. Whenever you’re on the web and reading something you want to share with your readers, you click on the Buffer App icon at the bottom of your Firefox window. This will open a pop up box that has the title and description from the web page.It also automatically shortens the URL. You can also add your Bit.ly details in the Buffer settings if you want to use Bit.ly as your URL shortener.

You’re able to change any of the text around to suit what you want to say (HINT: always try and add the Twitter ID of the person who’s content you’re tweeting. If you do this they’re more likely to see that you’ve re-tweeted their content).

When you’re happy with your Tweet, just click on the ‘Add To Buffer’ button at the bottom and the tweet is added to your buffer.  It’ll be sent sometime in the future, depending on how you’ve set up your Buffer account.

It’s that simple.

There are some other ways you can add content to your buffer – I’ll explain these in a later post or alternatively, head on over to the Buffer App site and see what else it can do.

What Is Buffer App – Is It For You?

I’ve blogged before about how some people are comfortable automating some aspects of their Twitter use, and others aren’t. That’s fine. Figure out what suits you and do it.

If you’re not comfortable with automating any aspects of your Twitter use, then Buffer App isn’t for you. But consider this – Buffer App isn’t just mindless automation with no quality control. You determine what goes into your buffer. The only bit of the automation is when the tweet is sent.

If you are happy to automate some of your Tweeting, Buffer App has its place.

Buffer App – Pricing Plans

I’ve been using the free version of Buffer App. It gives me the ability to add one Twitter account and one Facebook account. I can have a maximum of 10 tweets in my buffer.

There are two other paid plans that give you the ability to add more Twitter and Facebook accounts and have more space in your buffer. Whether you need these extra features depends on how you think you’ll use the Buffer App.

My advice is to start with the free version, get used to it and work out whether you need one of the premium versions.

And if you refer other uses to Buffer App, they give you one extra space in your buffer for each new user you refer. So use my link please!

Other Options

I mentioned earlier how I use TweetAdder for some of my automated tweets. It does the job, but doesn’t allow me to schedule specific times for the tweets to go out. It also does a bunch of things that Buffer doesn’t, so it’s not fair to compare the two.

Hootsuite is my main Twitter dashboard, and it gives me the ability to schedule tweets. The only problem is that it’s more complicated to do this than Buffer App. Buffer is set up to send tweets at the times I’ve pre-set. With Hootsuite I’ve got to enter the date and time in every time I want to schedule a tweet.

The concept of Buffer App is excellent. No-one wants to send out Tweets that don’t get seen, and Buffer App helps you increase the visibility and effectiveness of your tweets. I wouldn’t be surprised to see more companies copy the Buffer concept. I just mentioned Hootsuite – it’d be a relatively simple thing for them to add some customisable tweet schedules like buffer. Or alternatively, perhaps the Buffer App starts to talk directly with the other Twitter apps out there so the scheduling happens automatically.

My preference is to have all my tweeting done from one interface, so using Hootsuite, TweetAdder and Buffer App is not the ideal, but it gets the job done.

I’m convinced in the merits of using Twitter to connect with other bloggers and people who would be interested in the topics I write about. Buffer App is another tool that I can use to make sure I’m getting maximum leverage out of Twitter. Go ahead, sign up for the free plan and see what you think.

Did you know that you can feed RSS feeds into Twitter? In this article I’ll explain why you may choose to automatically feed an RSS feed into your Twitter account, and I’ll explain how to do it.

Why automate an RSS feed into Twitter?

In previous articles I’ve written about how to get more Twitter followers and how to use Twitter more effectively. One of the keys was to make sure you Tweet lots of interesting content.

When I made a decision to use Twitter more effectively as a strategy to get more people to visit my site, I found that Tweeting other people’s content was a good way to get noticed, and it was also a great way to help other people. I didn’t want my Twitter stream to be all about me, so having a healthy amount of links to other blogs was a good thing. I also discovered that people who’s blogs I liked reading may not be as well know to my Twitter followers, so it was a good opportunity to introduce my followers to some other quality bloggers.

When I talk about ‘Tweeting other people’s content I’m not talking about re-Tweeting their tweets. I do this sometimes, but not all that regularly. What I am talking about is tweeting other people’s blog posts. So if I was  reading a good article on a blog, I’d make the effort to hit the Tweet button (if there was one) or I’d copy and paste the link into Twitter and post it there.

After a while, I realised I was Tweeting a lot of posts from a small group of bloggers. Around the same time, I discovered how to feed RSS feeds automatically to my Twitter account. In the rest of this article I’ll show you how to automate this. I’ll show you how easy it is to get RSS feeds into Twitter.

What if I don’t want to automate it?

I know that whenever people talk about automating anything to do with Twitter, it opens up a can of worms. I wrote an article about why I automate my Twitter Direct Messages a while back, and it generated a bit of interest.

At the end of the day, it’s up to you to decide how you feel about automating things. I’m comfortable automating some things to do with Twitter, but I’m still very active on my Twitter account, making sure I interact with people.

In my opinion Tweeting other people’s blog posts can be a good thing as long as the content is valuable to your followers. You may decide to automate this. If your entire Twitter stream is full of these Tweets, it’s not a good thing. There needs to be a healthy balance.

As I wrote last week, wear your own armour – make a decision about your values and the way you want to do business. If you’re comfortable adding RSS feeds into Twitter, then do it.

Using TwitterFeed to add RSS feeds into your Twitter account

I use a service called TwitterFeed to manage the RSS feeds I want to put into my Twitter stream. It’s very simple to use, and it’s free.

There are other ways to do this, but I wanted to find a way that was simple and automatic, and didn’t need me to remember to login to a program or website to make it happen.

Step 1 – Set Up An Account

Go to TwitterFeed and you’ll see an option at the top of the screen to create an account. Click on it and it’ll ask for your email address etc.

Once your account is set up you’ll be able to start adding feeds.

Step 2 – Find a Feed

Find a site that you want to promote and grab its RSS feed. You’ll usually see an RSS button somewhere on the site. Copy the RSS feed URL to your clipboard.

If you’re looking for a good one, you can always add http://feeds.feedburner.com/Bloggerbusinessplan!

Step 3 – Add The Feed

In the TwitterFeed dashboard, you select the option to add a new feed. You name the feed (only you see the name), and copy the feed URL into the URL field. There’s an option to test the RSS feed – select this to make sure you’ve got the right URL.

Once the feed is in place, select the ‘Advanced Settings’ button to open up some more options.

Update Frequency – the option you select here determines how often TwitterFeed will check the RSS feed for new blog posts. You are also able to tell it how many new posts to Tweet at a time.

Post content – you have the option to choose both the post title and the description to be added to the Tweet, or just the title. A lot of the time I choose just the title. You do have the option to post to other social media accounts, such as Facebook. If you are posting to Facebook, you may prefer to post both the title and description.

You also have the option here to shorten your post link using a URL shorter. I set up an account with Bit.ly and entered my account details into here. The advantage of having an account with Bit.ly is that you’re able to login to Bit.ly and check your stats – in particular to see which URLs have been clicked on and how many times.

Post Sorting – I leave this set at the default option of the most recent published date.

Post Prefix and Post Suffix – you’re able to enter up to 20 characters for the post-prefix and post-suffix. I tend to not use the post-suffix option, but do use the post-prefix option. Usually I enter something like ‘latest article from …’. I’ll either add in the name of the blog or the twitter name of the blog’s author.

Keyword Filter – I haven’t used this option, but it does allow you to filter the RSS feed by adding certain keywords. It may be useful if you are adding an RSS feed that features a whole bunch of different topics, but you only want selected tweets on a certain topic to come through.

Once you’ve completed all the options here you select the ‘Continue to Step Two’ option. This takes you to the next page.

Step Four – Select Your Account

On the next page, you will have the option of selecting which social media accounts the RSS feed will go to. You have the option of Twitter, StatusNet, Hellotxt, Facebook and LinkedIn. At this stage, I’m only adding RSS feeds into Twitter. In the future I may also post them to other Social Media accounts.

When you’re starting out, you need to authenticate your Twitter account before you’re unable to add it. This is a really simple process and involves you logging into Twitter and authorising TwitterFeed to post to your account.

When you’ve done it once, next time you will be able to select your twitter account from the drop-down box.

And that’s all there is to it. As you can see it’s really simple to add RSS feeds into Twitter using a tool such as TwitterFeed.

I also like using TwitterFeed, because its dashboard gives me the ability to automatically pause or edit the RSS feeds. So if I want to stop automatically tweeting somebody’s blog posts, I can simply pause that feed in the dashboard rather than having to delete it completely. I can then turn it back on later if I want to.

RSS Feeds Into Twitter – What Else Do You Need To Know?

I must admit, I got a bit carried away when I first started doing this. I added a lot of RSS feeds to my twitter stream end soon realised this was properly too much. I added some feeds that weren’t producing a lot of great content so I quickly paused these and stopped automatically tweeting them.

I suggest you start off small, and perhaps only add a couple blog feeds initially (including mine of course!). I also will only add RSS feeds for blogs that I also read regularly, and that produce quality content. I’m very careful who I will tweet about.

What do you think about adding RSS feeds into twitter. Do you think it’s a good idea? Is it something you’ve done before? Do you think you would do it now?

Leave a comment below and let me know what you think. And don’t forget to Tweet this post!

Over the past month I’ve been writing about ways to Get More Twitter Followers.

In today’s article, I want to provide a summary of the strategy I use to get more followers.  Because this looks at the strategy, I won’t go into detail about the actual sites of programs I use to do it.  There’s two reasons for this:

1. Probably within a year, some of the sites I use will be closed or substantially different to what they are today.
2. It’s more important to understand what I do, instead of how I do it.

If you understand the strategy I use to get more Twitter followers, then you can go away and find the best tools that suit you and do it in the way that you feel most comfortable with.

My process is actually quite simple.  To find new people to follow on Twitter, here’s what I do:

1. I search for people who Tweet about interesting topics, have certain terms in their bios, or who follow people who operate in my niche.
2. I follow these people.
3. If they don’t follow back within a period of time, I unfollow many of them.  There are some people who I whitelist (don’t unfollow).  These are some of the big Twitter users.  I don’t expect they’ll follow me back (yet!), but I want to continue to follow them.
4. I keep a close eye on the ratio of people I’m following against those who are following me back.  I make sure I never follow more than 110% of the people following me.  For example, if I have 3,000 followers, I’ll make sure I don’t follow more than 3,300 people.
5. Because I’m regularly following new people and un-following others, I can usually keep the ratios in check and make sure that every day I’m adding some new followers.
6. I don’t try and follow too many people, too quickly.

Here’s a diagram for those of you who prefer visuals.

In addition to finding people, I want to deliver value to my followers, and help other people find me.  Here’s how I do that:

1. I have some RSS feeds from blogs I like converted into Tweets.
2. I have some regular Tweets I schedule in advance.  Between (1) and (2) this ensures there is a regular number of daily Tweets to my account.
3. I communicate with people who follow me.  I’ll re-Tweet Tweets that I like, I’ll thank people for re-Tweeting mine.  I’ll have conversations with people, ask questions, answer questions and make some random posts about what I’m doing.  This is an important part of my strategy.  I don’t mind automating some of my Twitter posting, but I’ll always make sure I’m interacting with people a few times a day on Twitter – that’s what it’s about.

These last three steps are very important.  There’s no point trying to gain 100 followers each day if you lose 100 of your existing followers because they don’t see any value in your Tweets.

How To Get More Twitter Followers

This has been a very high level view of the strategy I use to get more Twitter followers.  I hope it makes sense and helps you to become more successful on Twitter.

I’m interested in your feedback.  How to you get more Twitter followers?  Do you schedule Tweets?  Do you have another strategy you use that works for you?

And please don’t forget to follow me on Twitter!

See all my Twitter posts on this summary page – How To Get More Twitter Followers – Summary.

I’ve been posting about how to get more Twitter followers for a while and looked at a range of different strategies and tactics to help you grow your Twitter presence.  Today I want to look at one of the essential keys to success with Twitter – regular Tweeting.

Twitter is different to email.  With an email you can send it to your subscribers and it’ll sit in their inbox until they take some kind of  action with it – delete it, read it etc.

With Twitter, your post is put into the Twitter stream, and unless your followers are watching the stream at that point in time, they’ll probably miss your Tweet.

So whilst it may be easier to build up a list of Twitter follower quicker than an email list, this method of communication is not as effective.

So why are you Tweeting?

Don’t Tweet for the sake of Tweeting.  When you post make sure you’re saying something that other people will find interesting.  I have a couple of goals with each post:

• That it’s interesting for my current followers to read.
• That some of my current followers will re-Tweet it to their followers.
• That new people will find me and follow me because of the post.

Don’t talk about automation!

Automating your Tweets is a bit of a controversial topic.  The Twitter terms of service don’t allow automation of Tweets other than for an automatic direct message (DM) to new followers.  Despite this, there are a number of programs out there that allow varying degrees of automation.

My view on automation is this:

• You can send spam and rubbish out either manually or automated.
• Automation done well can save time but still needs be interesting to my followers.
• You can’t automate everything.  You need to have real conversations with real people.

How to automate some Tweets

There’s a couple of ways to automate Tweets.  In the last article on How to Get More Twitter Followers I looked at using TwitterFeed.com to automate Tweets from RSS feeds.  There are a few blogs I regularly read, and I’m comfortable re-Tweeting their content.  I use TwitterFeed to do this automatically for me.

I don’t use this for lots of blogs, but it may lead to approximately five tweets a day recommending content from other people’s blogs.

It’s also possible to schedule future Tweets.  I live in Australia, but a lot of my followers live in other parts of the world.  They’re usually awake when I’m asleep so it would be difficult for me to converse with them in real time.  I schedule some Tweets to go out overnight while I’m asleep so my followers get to see them.

There are a few ways to schedule Tweets – I use the function within Hootsuite sometimes, but I also use TweetAdder to schedule future Tweets.  TweetAdder enables me to queue a series of messages to be sent out in a random order over a period of time. This is less time consuming to set up than HootSuite where you need to individually load each message.

Is scheduling Tweets the same as automating Tweets?

Technically, ‘yes’.  But is it?  And is it a problem?

I don’t have a problem with scheduling some Tweets for the future.  I do it with blog posts – I don’t see that my Twitter stream is any different.

I do have a problem with sending out a lot of Tweets in a short space of time that don’t add any real value.  Particularly if by using automated means you can send out a lot more.

The conclusion I’ve come to is that it’s ok to schedule some tweets that I’ve created to be posted at some time in the future.  It’s also ok to use some RSS feeds to highlight other bloggers who I read and would usually re-Tweet.

I balance this with a requirement to manually Tweet each day.  I’ll thank people who RT my Tweets, I’ll feature other articles I’m reading etc.  It’s very important to me to have daily interaction with my Twitter followers.

So, what do you Tweet?

Over the course of my day I’ll post some manual Tweets.  It could be in response to other people’s Tweets – answering questions etc.  I may Tweet a link to an article I’m reading or a news item.  I may Tweet about  a song I’m listening to or a book I’m reading.  Sometimes I ask questions about how to do something.  I try not to be boring, but I also try not to censor my thoughts too much.

So, how do you feel about automating Tweets or scheduling Tweets?

What do you Tweet about that’s interesting?

Leave a comment below.  And don’t forget to follow me on Twitter!

See all my Twitter posts on this summary page – How To Get More Twitter Followers – Summary.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been looking at How To Get More Twitter Followers.

In Part 1 I gave an overview of how I think you can use Twitter to drive traffic to your website. In my last article I looked at another way to get more Twitter followers by finding other people to follow.  Today I’ll continue the series and look at strategies you can use to get people to follow you.

Remember, these articles are written from the point of view that Twitter is an excellent way to not only connect with interesting people, but also to drive traffic to your web site.  Once they get to your web site, ideally you want them to take some kind of action – subscribe to your email list, buy something etc.

Are You Follow-Worthy?

Be honest.  Would you follow yourself on Twitter?

I started on Twitter in the middle of 2009 and I had no idea what I was doing.  I actually felt sorry for people who followed me because I hardly ever Tweeted, and I’d only visit Twitter every couple of weeks.  I now feel like I have a much better system to make my Tweets interesting to people – I think I’m now ‘follow-worthy’!

As I explained in my last post, there are two options to gain more Twitter followers:

Strategy 1: Follow people you’re interested in and hope they follow you back (i.e. find people yourself).

Strategy 2: Make your Twitter identity (bio, Tweets etc) so interesting and relevant that people start to follow you (i.e. people find you).

Strategy two makes a lot more sense to me.  I think I’ll always use a combination of the two, but I hope to reach the point where the number of people who find me and choose to follow me far outweighs the number who follow me back because I first followed them.

Becoming Follow-Worthy

The simple way to become follow-worthy is to create great, compelling, interesting, (insert adjective here) content that your chosen niche loves. OK, so how do you do that….read on.

A large factor in your Twitter success involves being visable on Twitter.  This means you can’t post once a week – you need a strategy to create regular Tweets so that people can find you, either through the general Twitter stream or by targeted searching.

Here are some strategies I’ve been using to help people find me on Twitter.

Have a great Twitter page

I mentioned this in my last article where I suggested using sites like mytweetspace or twitbacks.com to help create a custom Twitter background.  Twitter doesn’t give you much space to write, so use the left hand side of the page on your custom background to write more about what you do and the benefits you provide. If you have a mailing list or give away a free report be sure to mention this.

On the right hand side make sure your bio is interesting, and contains the right keywords (remember, people can search bios by keywords to find people to follow – you did this last week).  Make sure you include a good photo of yourself, and the URL of your website or landing page.

Your objective with your Twitter page is to appear interesting enough to people so they’re motivated to click through to your web site.

The Hashtag is your friend

Use Twitter hashtags as much as you can. Look at a site like WeFollow.com and search for the popular hashtags.  Make a note of the ones that are relevant to you and use them as much as possible.  For example if I were a restaurant in Sydney, Australia, I’d be using the #Sydney tag as much as possible.

Hashtags give you two advantages – people search by them, so it makes you more easily findable.  Also, there are a number of Twitter uses who try to aggregate feeds for their local area or their niche.  Use the right hashtag and you may find yourself being Re-Tweeted to thousands of other people.  Hopefully some of them will find you interesting enough to follow.

Re-Tweet other people’s stuff

One of the things I love about Twitter is the ability to Re-Tweet interesting content. I love finding a good article or seeing a good tweet and then sharing it with my followers.  And I love it even more when someone Re-Tweets something I’ve written.  This gets my Tweets out to a larger audience.

So make an effort to Re-Tweet other people’s Tweets.  Get in the habit when you’re looking at blogs on the internet to Tweet about interesting articles you’ve found.  It helps people learn more about what you like reading, and it helps others find articles they would never have found themselves.  And if they like the things you Tweet about, they may Re-Tweet it as well.

Use RSS Feeds

Many people don’t realise that they can automate RSS feeds to post to their Twitter account.

Now, the obvious example of this is to feed your blog to your Twitter account so every time you post something, it also gets posted on Twitter.

That’s great if you’re posting daily, but what about if you’re only posting weekly?  It doesn’t help to build up your Twitter posts.

Why don’t you post from RSS feeds from other blogs or content providers that are in your niche?

This is so obvious I don’t know why I didn’t come across it earlier.

I use TwitterFeed.com to automatically post RSS feeds to my Twitter accounts.  There are some blogs that I read regularly that consistently provide great content. I plug in their feed details to TwitterFeed, link my TwitterFeed account to my Twitter ID, and every time the RSS feed is updated, it posts a Tweet to my account.

Here’s an image from the dashboard showing the options I have with the feed.

As you can see, I have the ability to schedule how often the RSS feed is checked for updates, and I can also add a prefix or suffix to each post.

I only use this for blogs that I trust to provide quality content.  In the example above, I’m using the feed from DailyBlogTips.com.

So, are you ready to become ‘Follow-Worthy’?

You’ve just read a bunch of ideas on how to beef up your Twitter stream to produce great content that allows people to find you.  It won’t produce thousands of followers overnight, but that’s not my goal.  I’m more interested in producing content that is interesting and relevant to the people I’m trying to reach. I use all these ideas, and I definitely Tweet more than once every couple of weeks now!

One thing I haven’t covered here is the concept of recurring and automated tweets – we’ll look at this next time.

What do you think of these ideas?

What other strategies do you use to make your Tweets more interesting and attract more Twitter followers?  Let me know in the comments below.

And remember, if you enjoyed this article, please Re-Tweet it.  An don’t forget to follow me on Twitter!

See all my Twitter posts on this summary page – How To Get More Twitter Followers – Summary.

When people ask me how to get more Twitter followers, I explain that there are only two ways to increase the number of followers they have.

Strategy 1: Follow people you’re interested in and hope they follow you back (i.e. find people yourself).

Strategy 2: Make your Twitter identity (bio, Tweets etc) so interesting and relevant that people start to follow you (i.e. people find you).

Obviously strategy one has the potential to be more time-consuming than strategy two.  However, when you’re starting out on Twitter, strategy one may be the quickest way to build up your followers over a short period of time.

Strategy two (people finding you and following you) is the most attractive as it requires little work on your behalf.  Also, I have a belief that these people have the potential to be better quality followers than those who only follow you back after you follow them.

In this article we’ll look at ways to find more Twitter followers.  In my next article we’ll discuss ways you can attract more followers.

Find people on Twitter to follow – Twitter Advanced Search

The easiest way to find interesting people on Twitter to follow is to search for them.  Go to http://search.twitter.com/advanced and have a look at all the search options.

Assuming you’ve already done your research about the type of person you are targeting, think about the words to search for. In this example I’m searching for users who are Tweeting about Frank Kern.  At the time of writing, Frank is launching a new product and there’s a lot of Tweets about him.  Parts of my target market are people who are involved in internet marketing.  Many of these people would be tweeting about Frank’s product launch.

If I use Frank Kern’s name in the ‘Exact Phrase’ search box and submit the search, I’m taken to a page that lists all the people who’ve been tweeting about Frank. I can then click on each person to view their user profile and decide whether I’ll follow them or not.

You can also search by Twitter hashtag. This is helpful if there’s a tag (or tags) relevant to your niche.

What if your business targets a specific geographic region? Say you own a restaurant in Boston and want to target people in the Boston area.  Use Twitter’s advanced search to find people who Tweet from the Boston area.

Find people on Twitter to follow – WeFollow

WeFollow.com is a useful tool to find people to follow on Twitter.  You search for people to follow via the use of tags.  Interested in internet marketing? Just enter ‘Internet Marketing’ into the search bar and it’ll show you the most popular people in that field.

You can also register your Twitter account and select from a range of tags (categories) that reflect your interests – internet marketing, entertainment etc.  Once you’re registered people can find you using the website.

Find people on Twitter to follow – Follow other people’s followers

Identify who the influential people are in your niche and follow them to see what they’re tweeting about.  But take it a step further – follow their followers.

Think about it.  The followers are following this person because they’re interested in what they’ve got to say.  If they’re interested in him, they’ll probably be interested in you and the things you’re tweeting about.

Head to ReFollow.com and login using your Twitter ID.  On the right hand side of the page you’ll see an option to search “Users who are following…”.  Type in the name of an influential Twitter user and ReFollow will display a page showing 100 of their users (there is an option to see more).  Click on the users’ picture and have a look at their Twitter profile.  If they look interesting, follow them.

Find people on Twitter to follow – Search their bios

I’ve been using Tweetadder to help with some of my Twitter following.  It has a neat feature that allows me to search the content in someone’s bio.  This is particularly useful if you want to search for specific words in someone’s Twitter bio.

Looking for guitar players?  Use Tweetadder to search the bio boxes for the word ‘guitarist’.

Use your imagination, but think about how powerful this tool can be. I’ve used it a bit recently to search for people in particular niches and it’s been very useful.

A free tool that also searches bios is TweepSearch.com.

So there you go.  Some simple ideas you can implement right now to get more Twitter followers.

In the next Twitter article I write, I’ll look at strategies to get people to find you on Twitter.

Let me know what you think about this article.  I know there are a lot of different sites out there that make following someone on Twitter easier.  Let me know your favourite sites and any strategies you have to get more followers.

See all my Twitter posts on this summary page – How To Get More Twitter Followers – Summary.

I’ve been spending a bit of time on Twitter over the past few weeks trying out some ideas I’ve picked up from Profit Geyser. Over the next week I’ll look at how to get more followers on Twitter.

In this post I will talk about why Twitter could be worthwhile considering as a marketing tool for your internet business, and cover some of the broad concepts I’ve been trying out.  In the next posts, I’ll cover each concept in a bit more depth.  Over the next month I’ll blog about my experience with some of the different Twitter software tools that are available, so you can see how I’m using some of the tools to help me get more Twitter followers.

Why Bother With Twitter?

When you’re trying to run an internet based business, or promote your offline business on the internet, one of the most valuable assets you can possess is a list. Not just any list, but a list of people who are good prospects for your product.

Google Adwords is a very effective form of targeted advertising, because you can set up your ads to show for very specific search terms and in certain geographic locations.  This makes it very cost effective because you’re targeting the right people, and it’s only costing you money if they click on your link.

The best way to create a list is to set up an opt-in form on your web page that enables people to sign up to an email list.  Offer a free e-book or something similar to encourage people to sign up to your list (don’t forget to sign-up to mine – form on the RHS!).  The problem with email lists is that you can only build them if people come to your site.

If you’re not getting a lot of traffic to your site, you can’t get many opt-in’s to your email list!

And this is where Twitter becomes very effective.  If you can get more followers on Twitter, you can promote your site to them, and drive traffic to your web site.

You Have More, And Less Control Over Your Twitter List

This may sound contradictory, but hang in there and I’ll explain.

You have more control over your Twitter list because you can target potential followers, a bit like Google Adwords (more on this concept in the next section).  It’s easy to build up a targeted list of Twitter followers to a certain limit.

The downside of building a Twitter list is that you have less penetration to your list. What do I mean by this?  Think of it like this.  If you have an email list, it usually consists of people who have made the effort to opt-in to your newsletter.  If you use Aweber, they probably had to go through the double opt-in process.  So these are people who feel comfortable receiving emails from you.  And we all know emails go into an Inbox where they sit until they’re opened or deleted. They have to decide each time they receive an email from you what they will do with that email – open it and read it or ignore it. The important point is that they have to do something.

Consider a tweet that you send out.  Depending on how many people your followers are following, and the time the tweet is sent, they may not even notice it.  And because you only have 140 characters, it can be harder to get your message across so that they act on it.

So whilst it’s quicker to build up a list of followers within Twitter than it is to build an email list, I think you’ll find the response rate from tweets will be lower than from emails.

So What Is The Point Of A Twitter List?

In my opinion, the major aim of building up a Twitter list is to get people to opt-in to your newsletter and visit your site.

Yes, you can still try and sell things to them direct through Twitter, and yes, people are very successful doing this, but if this is your goal you need to watch out.  You could find your account banned by Twitter at any time if you’re reported for spam, and Twitter could also change their rules at any time.  You don’t own your Twitter account – they do.  You do own your email list.

So, How Do I Get More Followers On Twitter?

Firstly, my goal is to get many followers on Twitter, and encourage them to visit my site and sign up for my email newsletter.  Here are the strategies I’m using:

• Decide on your target market. Think about the people you want to reach, what they’d find interesting and what they would see as valuable.
• Decide on a good Twitter user-name. Think of something that’s descriptive of what you do and perhaps something that links well with your website and brand.
• Set up your Twitter page. Take some time to write out a descriptive bio, and remember to place a link to your website.  When writing your bio, think about the keywords or markets you’re trying to target and include them – you want people to find you as much as you want to find them.  More about this in the ‘search’ section.
• Image is important. Get a customized Twitter background.  You can try sites like mytweetspace or twitbacks.com. Alternatively use Photoshop or The Gimp (free) to create something yourself. Use the left hand side of the page to write more about what you do and how you can help people.  Also make sure you upload a decent picture of yourself.
• Now that your profile is set up, think about the content you’ll be tweeting. One of the best ways to do this is to follow a couple of high profile people in your niche on Twitter and see what they tweet about. Think about the tweets you find most valuable.  I share a mix of tweets that include inspirational quotes, links to products and links to my blog and articles.  I also tweet a lot of things from other bloggers or from other content providers that are targeted to my niche.
• Use hashtags #.  It’s less effort if people find you than if you need to find them!  People will search via hashtags to find content that is of interest to them and then they will follow those people.
• Get searching.  Find people who you want to follow.  You can use Twitter search to search by hashtags or topics. Another option is to look at who is following someone else in your niche and follow them also. When I started, I looked at @problogger and followed some of his followers who looked like they’d be interested in my tweets. I also search based on what is written in their bio.  I may search for the word ‘Blogger’ or ‘Internet Marketing’ within bio’s and follow those people.  There’s also an option to search by geographical location.  More on searching in future posts.
• Use lots of RT’s and @replies. If all you’re doing is sending out tweets with links, you look spammy.  Would you follow yourself?  Share some Twitter love and Re-Tweet interesting things you find. It’s a great way of building up a relationship with other Twitter users and you may find they Re-Tweet something you put out.  Now your tweets are going out to a bunch of people who are hearing about you for the first time. @replies are also important – it shows you’re real if you’re having conversations with people.
• Follow people back. Some people will find you and befriend you on Twitter before you find them.  This is good because they’ve selected you – they’ve obviously decided that you look interesting enough to follow.  Follow them back.  Also, consider a good DM (direct message) that you can use to welcome new followers.
• Be consistent.  Tweet regularly but make sure you’re interesting.  Remember that people can search by the content of your tweets so make sure you use some keywords in your tweets that people in your niche may be searching for.
• It’s ok to repeat things. There’s different views on this, but I believe it’s ok to repeat your tweets (to a degree).  I live in Australia, and most of my niche live overseas in different time zones.  If I send a Tweet out in the afternoon here, most of you are in bed and will miss it.  I’ll sometimes schedule tweets to go out at regular intervals over a 24 hour period to promote a blog article.

I’ll leave the list there for now, but there are still other ways you can do this.  At the time of writing I’ve been working on this strategy for around three weeks and have just reached the 2,000 follower mark. I probably could have done it quicker, but I’ve made a few mistakes along the way and learnt a lot.  This is your gain as over the next month I’ll blog about the things I’ve learnt and hopefully prevent you from making the same mistakes.

So, if you’re interested in learning more, subscribe to my blog and follow me on Twitter.

See all my Twitter posts on this summary page – How To Get More Twitter Followers – Summary.

Photo credits: CuriousLee, 7son75

I’m sure you’ve all heard about Twitter.  It’s one of the fastest growing social networking sites and provides huge opportunities for internet marketers.

But ask any group of Twitter users about how Twitter should be used, and you’ll get a range of different responses.

Some people prefer to use Twitter like Facebook – follow a select group of friends, tweet about the things you’re doing, have a lot of conversations etc.  These people will follow people they’re interested in, but this consists of mainly friends and celebrities.

At the other end of the spectrum, you’ve got Twitter users whose main goal is to build the biggest list they can.  They’ll frequently follow anyone they can, and use a largely impersonal approach.  Their goal is to build a big list, and Tweet links to their own sites or affiliate sites so they can make money.  To these people it’s a numbers game – get enough follows and you’ll make money even with a small click through rate.

These are two extremes – don’t forget there’s so many options and variations in between these two examples.

You also have the Twitter celebrities like @JohncMayer and @Oprah.  They follow very few people (only those they want to follow), but have a massive amount of people following them.

I’ve summarized these options in the matrix below.  You can go for a high relationship / high touch Twitter strategy where you follow and interact with a low number of people, but on a deep and personal level, or you can go for a low relationship / low touch strategy where you follow a lot of people and try and automate your Twitter activities to the level you feel comfortable with.

Twitter Matrix -Deep relationships or large lists?

Many Different Ways To Tweet

So, there are many different ways to Tweet – which one is right for you?

I’m a big believer in deciding on your objectives before before you commit to a strategy.  Let’s look at your Twitter objectives.

1. Do you want to use Twitter to promote any of your online activities? For some people the answer is ‘no’.  they only want to use Twitter to keep in touch with friends.
2. Should you have different Twitter accounts? If the answer to ’1′ was ‘yes’, then do you need to consider multiple Twitter accounts – maybe one for your personal Tweets, another for your internet business etc.  I know some people who have multiple Twitter accounts – one for each niche they’re involved in.  If you want to target multiple (unrelated) niches, you’ll need to set up different Twitter accounts.
3. How personal do you want Twitter to be? If you’ve been on Twitter for a while you’ll know how hard it can be to keep track of people’s tweets.  I’ve read some articles that say that once you follow more that 150 people it gets too hard to keep on top of everything.  There are some Twitter interfaces that make it easier to filter tweets, but the reality is that once you start following a large number of people, keeping it personal can be difficult.  This could be a good reason to at least keep separate personal and business accounts on Twitter.
4. What keywords are relevant? Do your keyword research for each niche you’re targeting. If possible, select a Twitter username that reflects your niche and target market.  Take time to set up your bio using the relevant keywords etc to ensure you give a good description of what you do.
5. What will you tweet? Quite frankly, I don’t care about what you had for breakfast (unless you’re @JohnCMayer!!).  You need to think about the content you will tweet about, and decide on what will be interesting to your target audience.  Spend time looking at Twitter users you like and analyse what they’re tweeting about.
6. How often will you tweet? Decide on a frequency of tweeting that works for you and is sustainable.  Don’t try and tweet 10 times a day if you can’t do it.  Start off slow, or consider using one of the tools that allows you to schedule tweets.

Can You Automate Your Tweeting?

This is a bit of controversial area.  Twitters terms of use forbid people from using automated means to add followers, unfollow people etc.  They’ve recently instructed a couple of sites to turn off their unfollow service as it is against the spirit of their terms of service.

There are tools out there (both paid and free) that allow you to automate a number of your Twitter tasks, from finding people to follow, scheduling tweets and messages, unfollowing and following back new followers. People have different opinions on whether these tools are useful or not.  Some people are opposed anything that automates the Twitter process, others try and automate everything.

Over the next month I’ll be writing more about Twitter and reviewing some of the tools that are available to Twitter users.  I’ll spend some time initially discussing some Twitter marketing strategies, then I’ll look at the different tools and how they can help you achieve your marketing objectives.

I’m interested in your opinions.

How do you use Twitter?  Are you happy with the way you use it?  What would you like to learn more about?  Is there a particular tool you use to make your tweeting easier? Do you feel it is possible to have a large Twitter list but still maintain a high level of personalization?

Daniel Scocco over at Daily Blog Tips published a post called ‘Should I use my personal name or my website name on Twitter?’   In the post he discusses whether there’s sense in having individual Twitter accounts for different web sites, or whether one Twitter account is the way to go.

I made a comment on his post and that’s prompted me to write about it here in more detail.

Daniel makes the comment that guys like Shoemoney may have multiple web sites, but one Twitter account.  To me, that makes sense if you have related web sites all aimed at a similar audience.  They follow you on Twitter and get value out of your tweets.

Other people may have different web sites on very different topics.  People who follow them because they like their tweets about one topic may not necessarily enjoy your tweets on other topics.

And this is where your vision and goals are important.

If you’ve taken time to decide on your vision for your business, then decisions like having different Twitter accounts become a bit easier.

If you’re looking to build an online business that revolves around your personality and identity, then it makes sense to have a Twitter account that reinforces that.  Shoemoney is a good example of that.

If you have different web sites that cater to different interests, then maybe having separate Twitter accounts makes sense.  Darren Rowse is a good example, with his ProBlogger Twitter account, and his Digital Photography School account.  Interestingly with Darren, he also has his TwiTips website, but doesn’t actively use a separate account for that one.  Instead he has a message directing people to follow him via the ProBlogger account.  He must feel that the two audiences have a lot in common.

By making your Twitter profiles more targetted and catering to specific niches, you make it easier to attract the right sort of follower – someone who is interested in your topic.  If the majority of your tweets are valuable, you increase the likelihood of being re-tweeted, and exposed to a larger audience.  This is because your followers are more likely to read your tweets, because they know they will be relevant.

Another good reason to consider separate accounts relates to building up lists.  We all know that building up subscribers to our blogs is a good thing.  Giving people multiple options to subscribe is helpful.  My perception of Twitter is that there can be a fair degree of crossover – your Twitter followers are possibly more likely to also subscribe to your blog in some way.  Regardless of this crossover, building a fan base in Twitter helps to get your message out to a wider range of people.  If you ever plan on selling your blog, having a separate Twitter account with thousands of followers may also enhance the sale price you receive.

So, do you have a plan for your blog?  Do you have a vision of how it could look?  Does this vision help to guide your decisions?

Let me know what you think…..and please Re-Tweet this article if you enjoyed it!