I have spent the last 72 hours becoming immersed in twitter on my free time and I believe this will be one of the most comprehensive posts on how to use and leverage twitter as not only a social networking tool, but a way to promote your blog and blog posts. First off I want to say Twitter is ideal at finding and connecting people within your local area and state, you can follow hundreds or thousands of people in your city and state and at any time see what is on peoples mind. I have seen people post about traffic accidents local news and announcements and using twitter to learn whats going in in your local area is one great use of the tool. This direct instant messaging type communication with anyone who is a member makes it probably the most ideal method of real time communication with a large group of people on the same topics that I have ever seen. I was blown away at how great this tool is.

Second people can use Twitter solely through the web browser, and I will post all of the functions to do so. Then at the end I will post about this tool that was recommended to me called TweetDeck which put so much power at my fingertips and made sorting tweets so much easier.

So lets begin this post shall we?

• What is Twitter?

Here is what I can describe of Twitter, it is a hybrid of Instant Messaging Client, Myspace, and Chatroom into a single combined interface. This interface allows the freedom to talk to mass groups of strangers as a chatroom, the ability to follow and join up with friends, and the searching and finding topics, people and genre plus the personalization of your custom page like MySpace. (Though there are no widgets or anything, it is pretty much just a background, logo and some text about yourself).

All you do with Twitter is chat and read chats period. Twitter is a communication tool, much like AOL Instant Messenger you just type and press enter or click submit. And your text is seen by the world, and anybody that follows you. If you care to have a private network and only have a personal list of friends follow your communication you can set your profile to private, where what you type cannot be read by the world and people who want to follow you must send you an email requesting to become a follower.

• What is a Tweet?

A Tweet is your message that you type and submit. Twitter limits you to 140 character messages, but you can compress links that would normally take dozens of characters to only use up a handful of characters with TinyURL. Tweets are your personal communications with the world and the communications that you read from other people.

This is a tweet:

When you type a tweet you often will want to include hyperlinks to your blog posts such as http:///blah/blah. These hyperlinks can be quite long and really take away from your 140 characters. This is why twitter implements “TinyURL” which encodes your URL string to a handful of characters, that decode to your correct site. Now, if you just type your URL in the Tweet Box, and click submit, it converts to TinyURL automatically. However, this still restricts you to 140 characters and a long URL may prevent you from posting all you want, so use the TinyURL Creator Plugin for Firefox, to shrink your URL and then cut/paste it into your tweet so that you can fit more of what you were trying to say. The Twitter Application known as TweetDeck does this too, more on this later.

Here is your FULL URL in TWEET Box:

Here is the FULL URL converted to TinyURL in Tweet:

Be careful, if you are having a conversation with someone and you are using the “Reply” feature, these tweets are still visible to Everyone. you just see an @user in the tweet message, but everyone can see these. The only way to have private tweet communication is to “Direct Message” someone.

• Okay I Signed Up For Twitter Now What?

Twitter Home Profile Page (click to enlarge):

Now you have signed up for twitter and are at your home profile. You see your “Tweet” bar where you can type your messages, your # people you are following, your followers, and the number of updates you have made. Underneath your Tweet box is a list of all active tweets from the people you are following.

If you have nobody following you, then people will only see your tweets if they are viewing “Everyone’s” tweets or have searched for a “topic” and your tweet had a keyword match that will make it show up in that persons list. So in order to leverage Twitter you need to build a list of people you follow and people who will follow you.

Think about what you are looking for as Twitter is for people with something to say, who is your target audience, and who do you want to read your messages?

One of the first things I did when signing up for twitter was find local people in my state to follow.  This is a good way to get to know what people are talking about locally.  Without followers and a following not very many people will read your tweets unless you happen to use a keyword that someone is searching for, so start building a network as quickly as possible.

Searching for followers is a simple as going to http://search.twitter.com, then type in what “Keyword” you want to search for.  This will display a list of all tweets that have your keyword in them.  This is a good way to follow people who talk about your favorite topics.  An example of this, is I did a search for anyone who mentioned “Arizona”

Arizona Search (truncated to only first 2 results):

After you do the search, you would click on the people’s Twitter Name and get their profile page, then you would click “Follow” to see tweets from that person.

One thing I have notices is about 10% -15% of the people you “Follow” will follow you back out of courtesy or because they have seen something in your tweets that interests them. As of this writing I was following about 444 people and about 85 were following me, most were people who followed me only because I followed them first.

• Advanced Searching

Now that you have learned to find topics and see what people are saying about your keywords, it is time to find people based on advanced criteria.  Go back to http://search.twitter.com and this time click on the “Advanced Search” Link.

Now you can search for words, phrases or multiple words in the top part, but my favorite part is the Places search.  You can specific a city and then choose how many miles from this city.  I did my Advanced search for Phoenix and within 15 miles.

Advanced Search by Location:

So find many people in your immediate area, one thing I have learned is that there are something called “TweetUps” where twitter folks in the same city get together and have lunch or dinner and meet each other. This is an ideal social tool for not only inviting people to become followers of your blog, but also to make friends as well.

• Twitter Etiquette

Now that you have signed up for Twitter and gained some followers and a small social network you should know a few things about twitter etiquette.  Don’t spam the same tweet over and over repeatedly, if it is something important that you want to share, send updates every few hours, like a link to a special post or a special message.  Think about random people reading your tweets and try to make your tweets make sense.

• Twitter Tips

Ok, one of the limitations of using twitter through the browser is that on your home page it doesn’t update unless you hit the refresh button.  Secondly, it is hard to screen your “Replies” from everyone’s Tweets.  The first thing you want to do is go to tweetbeep and setup some email alerts.

Tweetbeep allows you to setup alerts, so that if your specific keywords you specify are typed in a Tweet, you receive an email alert. This is a great way to find new people as well, as you can type any topic and get email alerts as to who is talking about your topics.

• TweetDeck

TweetDeck is by far the most useful Twitter application I have found to date.  This application allows you to see all messages in pretty close to real time (1 minute updates by default).  You have multiple columns, you can have one for “Everyone” which means everyone you are following, then you can have columns for your @ Message Replies, and another column for Direct Messages.  You can also create additional columns based on search criteria, and you can have up to 10 columns total.

If you hover over someones picture in TweetDeck in a tweet, you see symbols where you can reply back to the user, or direct message them. You can also click on the little tiny i button next to their tweet username at the bottom of the tweet, this will popup up that users profile and you can click on follow them right from tweetdeck.

You can also cleanup clutter by using the trashcan symbol to empty your twitter columns so that you can easily see when new messages arrive.

From within TweetDeck you can do searches for keywords and get another column that matches all your keywords, you can select Local or Global. Local only searches the keywords on the people you are following, global will catch everyone which allows you to find and follow new people. I wish Tweetdeck gave you a column for “Location” and showed you all tweets from people in a certain geographical location but this is a minor wish.

Without a shadow of a doubt, I liked twitter 100x more when I learned of Tweetdeck and installed it, you can get so much more done, and keep track of your tweets much easier. Plus when you go to sleep and come back in the morning, you can easily just catch up on your direct replies and messages without having to go through all the tweet clutter.

If you use Twitter and you want to be serious, give Tweetdeck a try.

• In Summary

Okay, so this about sums up my blog post about Twitter.  I wish Twitter lets you link multiple sites for your profile, as I am only able to list one blog site for people to see on my profile.  As a result however, I have only been using Twitter for 2 weeks and already 3% of my blog’s traffic comes from Twitter, Twitter has resulted in over 100 hits to my blog site this week.  And I really have only started to power use twitter for 2 days.

I will also show you that Twitter users have an average of 70% bounce rate, vs 96% bouncerate for Entrecard visitors, which means people visit and read your content on your site.

I am going to follow up with more statistics and twitter updates in the future, stay tuned.
Also, you can Follow Me on Twitter, and just say hi.

-Dragon Blogger

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Written by dragonblogger (1110 Articles Published)

Working in the IT Industry for over 10 years and specializing in web based technologies. Dragon Blogger has unique insights and opinions to how the internet and web technology works. An Avid movie fan, video game fan and fan of trying anything and everything new.

Follow dragonblogger on Twitter @dragonblogger

Tags: advanced twitter, blog networking, blogger, blogger twitter guide, blogging, blogging and twitter, blogging with twitter, learning twitter, making friends, promoting your blog, social networking, tweetbeep, tweetdeck, Twitter, twitter and blog, twitter for blog readers, twitter guide, twitter search, twitter tools, using twitter

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