How to best use Twitter?

[playeru]

Everybody is talking about using Twitter to promote your blog. How does this work? Don't you need many followers to make an impact? I just signed up for Twitter, I don't have any followers. Is it worth it to tweet each new post I make?

Thanks

[brynh]

I am new to twitter too and as I understand it, most important thing is to get more and more followers, depending on your blog/site theme you can follow other people. It's my guess that is for start..

[Melody]

Twitter is about being social. First develop relationships and engage with others who have an interest in the same niche. Develop quality followers, not necessarily quantity. You can see a lot about a person by how often he or she has been 'listed' (number is next to followers). Engage. Respond. Follow others in the same niche. And then after that, tweet your links. It's very slow. I've been at it for a full year to see some results.

[anthem]

good advice - I get no results from Twitter - much better traffic from facebook -

[chasesagum]

For me Twitter is less about the total number of followers and more about the quality of the relationships I build. You can concentrate on developing 50 or so strong, loyal readers around your blog with Twitter at first. You'll be surprised how much impact those 50 loyal readers will have.

[sequencehosting]

I think every niche can benefit from Twitter. How you use it will depend on the niche of your business/website. It's not always important to have thousands of followers. I have seen some Twitter profiles with fewer than 500 followers but their followers are very active.

Jack

[bwakeling]

I would set up a second Twitter account, just so your mates aren't spammed with your link every day.

[knubbl]

I am using Twitter and it can truly get you lots amounts of traffic. In order to get a lot of traffic you do need to build relationships with bloggers. Twitter doesn't work if you are solely promoting your own content. You need to promote the content of others too.

[juddpainter]

The best way to start off is to start following people from your niche - say 100. Some of these will follow you back, and you then have followers... your follower base will grow organically from here. If after a month, some of the less interesting people you follow do not follow you back, you can unfollow them and find new people to follow. The ideal is to find interesting tweeters who will follow you back. There are some really self centered tweeters who have thousands and thousands of followers but only follow 10 people themselves.... (they suck!)

Be very careful not to follow too many people at once... I did this in my niche (there are lots of interesting photographers on twitter) and I got suspended by Twitter for one awful week for "aggressive following". Made me feel like a spammer, which is not a nice feeling!

[Melody]

Originally Posted by juddpainter

The best way to start off is to start following people from your niche - say 100. Some of these will follow you back, and you then have followers... your follower base will grow organically from here. If after a month, some of the less interesting people you follow do not follow you back, you can unfollow them and find new people to follow. The ideal is to find interesting tweeters who will follow you back. There are some really self centered tweeters who have thousands and thousands of followers but only follow 10 people themselves.... (they suck!)

Be very careful not to follow too many people at once... I did this in my niche (there are lots of interesting photographers on twitter) and I got suspended by Twitter for one awful week for "aggressive following". Made me feel like a spammer, which is not a nice feeling!

I think that is pretty good advice to get a person started on twitter.

If your niche is (for example only) antique cars, then use the search button and find others who are talking about cars. Pay attention to "hashtags" - Probably a person who uses a hashtag in their tweets is either fairly sophisticated about twitter and/or really likes the topic enough to think it deserves a hashtag.

If you follow too many people, you'll end up with a whacky follower/following ratio which, unfortunately, can make you look a bit like a spammer.