Twitter Guide Part #7: Multiply Your Twitter Audience

The early sections of this guide taught you how to grow your audience of Twitter followers because without an audience, you are just talking to yourself. But let me show you the hidden power of Twitter that so many people don’t get… You don’t actually need direct followers to have an audience! You can leverage other existing networks.

Publicize Your Twitter RSS Feed

Did you know that your Twitter feed is also available as an RSS feed? Go your profile page and then scroll down to the bottom. There on the bottom left is a ‘RSS’ button. Click on it for the link. It looks something like this:

http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/7875772.rss

Because this is an RSS Feed, you can publicize it! First there were web directories, then article directories and now there are RSS directories too. Here is a massive list of RSS Directories that you can submit your feed to. Be careful though… if you tend to tweet mainly about what underwear you have on, don’t go submitting it to a medical directory. Use some common sense.

Twitter / Blogging Mashup

Do you have a blog? Many blogs have a large audience, there are more people that read blogs than people who use Twitter. First let me talk about a service called LoudTwitter. This will take all your tweets from one day, package them up into a blog post and publish it on your blog.

Why is this useful? Remember that Twitter is a real time application and people on the Internet are spread all over the world. I am based in the UK and yet most of my blogging and Internet marketing friends are based in the US or Australia. Many people watch Twitter while they are awake but not everybody will go back over their timeline from the night before.

By posting your tweets to your blog you can make sure that you’re readers don’t miss a thing. Of course you must be careful with this. I don’t use it because I tend to keep my blog strictly on-topic but I like to have a bit more fun with Twitter and I don’t necessarily feel that my blog audience would appreciate all my tweets.

Twitter Social Button

We have Digg buttons, Stumble buttons, Delicious buttons etc etc and now we have a Twitter button. TwitThis makes it very easy for your blog visitors to publicize your blog post via their Twitter feed. You can see an example at the bottom of this post.

Wordpress Plugins

Now if your blog audience and your Twitter audience match and you happen to have a Wordpress blog, then you can make use of some specific plugins that allow a more fluid integration.

Why would you want to do this? In a recent blog post I spoke about the benefits of untargeted traffic. Think about how much traffic you get on a daily basis that doesn’t hang around. If your latest blog post doesn’t grab their attention then perhaps your latest tweet will. That could net you some extra followers who might become blog readers further down the line.

Anwanore’s Widget - Allows you to post several of your latest tweets into your blog and you can put it anywhere by calling a php function from within your template. The author is working on future enhancements such as an optional avatar display.

Sidebar Widget - If your theme is widget-enabled then you might want to check out this plugin which allows you to create a highly customisable widget for the sidebar.

Twitter for Wordpress - Another plugin that creates a widget for you.

TwitterTools - This plugin by Alex King allows you to archive your tweets, make blog posts out of them, send tweets from your sidebar and lots more.

TwitTwoo - Twitter in your sidebar, AJAX style - so no reloading of the page is necessary. Very stylish and easily customisable from the options page.

Third Party Twitter Integration

If you’ve looked at some of the previous sections of this guide you’ll already have seen a whole bunch of third party tools that have been developed for Twitter. Some of these tools can be used to send out your tweets to audiences on other networks and the cool thing is that these people do not need to be directly following you on Twitter.

Integrating with Facebook

Twitter have developed a Facebook application that integrates your Twitter feed into your Facebook feed. This is only useful if you actually have friends on Facebook :-) If you don’t have many, you can start by adding me…

When you login to Facebook the first page you see is the news feed which displays selected news items from all of your friends.

With this application installed, your tweets appear in the news feeds of all your friends! Of course they only stay there for a certain amount of time until they get bumped off but still, this is exposure without direct followers and I think it’s pretty damn cool!

There is another Facebook application called TwitterSync that will actually cause your latest tweet to become your Facebook status. One thing to note - any links will be stripped down to plain text so don’t think you can get a load of backlinks with this!

So why is this app useful? Well it depends on your Facebook usage - I often forget to update my status so it doesn’t usually say anything. By using this app, it makes my Facebook status more interesting which can encourage people to check me out.

MyBlogLog

I don’t think that MyBlogLog has quite the support that it has enjoyed in the past but this is still somewhere else that you can propagate your Twitter feed to and of course once it’s setup, you don’t need to do anything.

Login to MyBlogLog and then click the ‘Edit Profile’ link from the green buttons on the right. From there click ‘Services’. It’s easy to miss this. From here you can link in your profiles from a ton of other networks such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and of course Twitter too.

Once you’ve incorporated your Twitter feed your latest tweet appears on your profile page underneath your avatar though I have found this to be a little buggy lately.

Jaiku, Pownce & Tumblr

Jaiku is the biggest competitor to Twitter and it has recently been acquired by Google so it will become an important platform. Pownce and Tumblr are also micro-blogging Twitter competitors. Now before you panic about having to choose between them all… relax!

HelloTxt is an aggregation service that allows you to post once through their interface and have that message propagated to all the major micro-blogging networks - Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Tumblr and a few smaller ones as well. Of course the tricky bit is getting followers on all those other networks!

If you only use Twitter and Jaiku then another solution is TwitKu which provides an integrated interface to both networks.

Twitter Badges

So we’ve covered your blog, Facebook, MyBlogLog and other micro blogging platforms. But there’s more… There are lots of places in which you can own a little piece of the Internet - MySpace comes to mind.

Twitter have released support for official badges which you can customise in a number of ways. There are Flash and Javascript versions so wherever you put these needs to have support for those technologies.

How Twitter Promotion Can Go Viral

When something is publicized via Twitter it can sometimes go viral. For example, person A tweets about a site they are browsing and that goes out to their followers. One of those people picks it up, likes it, tweets it also but it now goes to a whole new groups of people and the effect goes on. Of course this will only happen if the content is tweet-worthy but it is much easier to twitter about a url than to link it in a blog post.

Let me try to explain this more clearly with this somewhat messy diagram:

So the first tweet comes from someone whose audience is the yellow group. Perhaps it is you promoting your latest blog post… all the people in the yellow group see it. One of those people likes it and also twitters it to their group - they are the red group. Suddenly your link has hit a whole new crowd. Now someone from the red group picks it up and tweets it and this goes out to the green group and so on.

The beauty of this effect is that it happens with absolutely no participation from you! All you need to do is attract twitter followers to your blog. Writing a Twitter guide helps :p Joking aside, I have seen a massive increase in the referral traffic from Twitter as this guide has been rolling out throughout the week.

For example, at the time of writing I have around 150 followers which is not a huge amount. However Ed Dale (who introduced me to Twitter) has 1684 followers so when he tweets about my guide (which he did, thanks Ed!) it goes out to a massive audience that is far larger than I could have reached on my own.

But it doesn’t stop there… Ed is Twitter-savvy and his tweets are automatically posted to his blog which has another large audience. You could argue that any form of link bait can have the same effect. True, but there is one vital difference - link bait requires that people have the ability to link. They need to run a website or blog etc, they need to get out their editing software, write a post etc etc. That’s a lot of effort. But with Twitter, 2 seconds and you’re done. It’s just so damn easy to Twitter-promote something!

Summary of the Twitter Guide

This has been a long guide, not everybody will read it. Let me sum up what I think are the benefits of Twitter and what you can do with it:

• Twitter is mobile - instant communication, any time, anywhere
• Twitter enforces your chosen brand in a non-selling way
• A ton of tools allow you to send / receive tweets any way you want to
• Twitter can be propagated far and wide, further than just your followers
• Twitter can be a source of up-to-the-minute information
• Twitter is fun!

I hope you’ve enjoyed the guide. Note that this is a work in progress. I subscribe to all sorts of Twitter related blogs and alerts so I can keep myself up to date and I shall be updating the guide regularly. Please leave feedback on the discussion post and don’t forget to bookmark it, stumble it and anything else -it, you can think of :-)

This post is just one part of the larger Big Juicy Twitter Guide. There is reader discussion post and you might also want to follow Caroline on Twitter.

Twitter Guide Part #6: Hacking Twitter

On the surface Twitter seems so simple and yet there are a load of cool things you can do with it.

The reason you can do so much cool stuff with Twitter and the reason that so many mashups / hacks are coming out is that Twitter has an open API that allows developers to build apps around, much like Facebook. If you would like to learn more about it check out the Twitter API Help page. StartupSquad also has some good information about the Twitter API.

Pimp Out Your Twitter Profile

Once you start to get the hang of Twitter, you can make yourself stand out from the crowd by adding some unique touches to your profile. To get started go to your Twitter home page and click on the ’settings’ link at the top.

Set Your Bio

From your settings page there are a couple of things you can do here. First of all you can set the ‘More Info URL’. This link appears in your profile page and is a do-follow link. Twitter profiles tend to rank rather highly in Google so this counts as a quality backlink.

Next you have your ‘One Line Bio’. You only have 160 characters here so you need a short, snappy description about what you are all about.

Lastly you can set your Location. One option you’ll see down the bottom of this page is ‘Protect my Updates’. If you are trying to gain exposure for something via Twitter then this should not be checked because it means that people have to obtain your permission in order to follow you. However this could be useful for a private Twitter account that functions as part of kind kind of paid membership perhaps.

Set a Unique profile Picture

Arguably the most important thing is to set your avatar. Every time you send an update the image you set here is displayed. Also, your avatar will appear on the profiles of anyone who is following you. By having a distinct avatar that stands out (or at least something unique) you are far more likely to get clicked on by intrigued users.

Personally, I have a standard profile picture which is a photo of me from about a year ago. I use the same picture everywhere - on my blog, profiles on all Social media accounts, blog directories etc. In this way people will get to know the picture and recognise me which then means that it stands out. It becomes an effective branding tool.

If you have profiles on other Social media sites like Facebook, StumbleUpon etc then I suggest that you use the same picture for all of them for this reason.

Alter the Design of your Profile Page

The default Twitter colour is a bright sky blue but you can change all of that under the ‘design’ link. You can upload a picture but this doesn’t work all that well because it places the picture in the top left corner of the page and doesn’t allow you to stretch it or center it. You can tile it which is ok for some graphics but not for others.

Personally, I’ve just played around with the colours a bit.

Funky Twitter Mashups

Twitter Via Email

EmailTwitter is a simple Twitter gateway that allows you to send updates via email. This is useful because it allows you to send updates via SMS without incurring the usual fees. Very nice.

Send Emails from Twitter

So you can Twitter via email so of course the reverse must be possible right? Why on earth would you want to send an email from Twitter? Because you can! Feed your inner geek with this cool Twitter hack from Lifehack.org.

Use Twitter for Reminders

TwitterTimer is a special user that can send you reminders. Send a direct message in the format “d timer <mins> <message>” for example “d timer 30 check Caroline’s blog” and in 30 minutes time it will send you a message to check my blog :-)

Note Taking With Twitter

So you spend far too much time on Twitter and an idea pops into your head, what to do? You could fire up Google Notebook or similar, or you could stay right where you are and makes notes from your Twitter account to retrieve later. TwitterNotes allows you to make notes, and tag them.

Leave Twitter Voice Messages

Jott is a service that allows you to call a number and leave voice messages that get propagated to various computerised services. Jott Links is an extension that supports include Twitter so you can tweet in actual speech, rather than text.

Twitter / SecondLife Mashup

SecondLife is a virtual world which is entirely driven by user created content. Anyway, for the techies amongst you you might be interested in these three twitter apps that have been created. I don’t use SL, so I’m not entirely sure how these things work :-)

I’ve also now been told about SLtweets, which again, I don’t fully understand :-)

Twitter / Outlook Mashup

If you are a frequent user of Microsoft Outlook then you may prefer to access Twitter directly within Outlook rather than using a separate client. OutTwit allows you to do just that.

Twitter / Skype Mashups

If you are a Skype user you can send tweets from your Skype account. See Twitter4Skype. Also, an application called Twype allows you to pull in a Twitter feed and use that as your Skype mood.

Twitter Groups

Twitter Groups is a third party service that offers functionality sorely needed by Twitter (and indeed many other social networks). One of the problems that I alluded to in the earlier parts of the guide are that you need to decide whether you want your Twitter account to represent your personal or business life.

Of course it’s never that simple is it? See the trouble is that you may have close friends and potential clients following the same account. How then do you tailor your tweets to the audience without alienating some of them? You can’t with Twitter in its current form.

Twitter Groups allows you to sort the people that follow you into groups and then send updates to just a particular group. Personally I think a simple tagging approach would have been easier but it’s better than nothing. If you have multiple audiences this is well worth a try until Twitter put in some official support for this functionality.

This post is just one part of the larger Big Juicy Twitter Guide. There is reader discussion post and you might also want to follow Caroline on Twitter.

Twitter Guide Part #5 - Twitter Tools | Web Applications

This is the second half of the Twitter Tools section of the guide and this focuses on all the great web applications that work with Twitter. I have loosely categorised them but sometimes that can be somewhat subjective.

Productivity / Useful Apps

LoudTwitter - Publishes a daily post on your blog containing a digest of all your tweets of that day. See part 5 of the guide for more information about this.

Remember the Milk for Twitter- Remember the Milk (rtm) is a popular GTD web application. By adding the rtm Twitter member as a friend you can send commands to your account via the Twitter interface. This is particularly useful if you are using Twitter by SMS when you are out and about and you only have your mobile phone and no Internet access.

RSS2Twitter - Allows any RSS feed to be fed to a Twitter account. Useful if you want to keep track of blog updates when you’re mobile perhaps.

ServerMojo - Monitors your web server and will send you update notifications via Twitter.

SugarStats - If you are diabetic then check out SugarStats. This site allows you to monitor your sugar levels and gives you all sorts of graphs and charts. Plus you can send in your data via Twitter.

TwitterDigest - Twitter Digest lets you read Twitter updates in a more manageable fashion. Just pick the usernames you’d like to generate a digest for, and you will see all updates made by them during the past full day.

TwitterFeed - Automatically feeds your blog posts through to Twitter. Very handy if you post a lot.

Twitterment - A search engine for Twitter.

TwitterNotes - Make notes using Twitter and tag them for later use.

Twitticious - This little application will allow you to setup an automatic import of links from any Twitter timeline (even the public one) into a Delicious account for later tagging.

Map Mashups

There are so many web applications that are a mashup of Twitter and map software such as Google Maps that I put them in their own section.

GeoTwitter - Fetches the most recent updates from the public timeline once per minute and displays them on an interactive map.

Twitter Atlas - I couldn’t really get this to work so somebody please enlighten me as to what it is supposed to do!

TwitterEarth - Shows you the location of live tweets but this is one of the prettier apps of its type in my opinion.

TwitterMap - You can search for any location in the world and see in detail, all the Twitter profiles that are registered there. Search is a bit slow but once it comes up you can use the usual map tools to zoom in and move around.

TwitterVision - Brings up selected Tweets in real time as they are posted. You can click on their profile, links within the tweet if there are any and you can even click a like/dislike button to say what you thought of it.

Just for Fun

Mobypicture -  With Mobypicture instead of typing where you are or what you’re doing you can show your friends real-time. Just plug in your Twitter details, send a photo+text to your Moby address, either from your phone or normal email client, Mobypicture automatically posts the text and a link to the photo to your Twitter account.

Swotter - “A new kind of talking book”. Swotter is a unique application that reads books to the world via Twitter! Check it out here.

TweetVolume - Type in some words or phrases and see how often they appear in Twitter.

Twiddeo - Twitter + Video = Twiddeo. Don’t just tell people what you’re doing, show them!

Twitstat - Monitors the updates from any users following the Twitstat account on Twitter. The Twitstat collects data about the updates and allows you to get various stats such as the most active users for the last few days.

Twitter Confessional (Possible Adult Content!) - Forgive me, for I have sinned in 140 characters or less… This is quite funny - it allows you to send tweets anonymously which appear in this profile. There is a small amount of spam on there but it’s mostly sexual confessions! If you’re open minded it’s quite funny, if not, you might be offended :-)

TwitterBuzz - Shows an aggregated view of all the domains that people are linking to via Twitter. However it’s not that accurate because the top domain is tinyurl which of course is integrated into Twitter to shorten long urls. Still interesting though.

Twitter Mosaic - Very creative pictures made just using Twitter avatars. Check out this Casablanca example.

Twitterholic - A ‘top users’ page showing the top 100 Twitter users based on either the most amount of followers, friends or updates.

This post is just one part of the larger Big Juicy Twitter Guide. There is reader discussion post and you might also want to follow Caroline on Twitter.

Twitter Guide Part #4: Twitter Tools | Platform Specific

The Twitter home page is rather limited and of course is only available via a browser. In this installment I first list tools specific to mobile devices, Windows based PC’s and Macs. I then have a list of Firefox plugins.

The tools are listed alphabetically within each section, the ordering does not represent any kind of ranking.

Mobile Tools

jTwitter - A Java application that you install on your phone. You can leave it on all the time without fear of incurring data charges.

Pocket Tweets - A web based Twitter client for the Apple iPhone.

ThinCloud - Post to Twitter from your iPhone. It’s very finger- and eyeball-friendly, much more in fact than other iPhone apps. It’s got huge buttons and a friendly graphical interface

TinyTwitter - TinyTwitter works or any Java enabled device and allows you to avoid the SMS fees from being incurred by having multiple tweets going to and from your phone.

Twapper - If you wish to get Twitter updates to your mobile phone you can become overrun by messages. Twapper is an alternative that allows you to monitor your feed from a browser and it is designed for mobile browsers (but can be used by any browser as well). In addition, Twapper integrates with 30 Boxes, an online calendar.

Windows Tools

triQQr - An oddly named client from Germany. Not much information about features.

TwitBox - This desktop client has many features that I have not seen elsewhere, such as support for multiple Twitter accounts.

Twitterlicious - A Twitter client with some nice features including highlighting of new updates, and lots of keyboard shortcuts to make it much faster to use.

Twitteroo - A Desktop client for Twitter. Lots of nice features and customisation options.

Mac Tools

Twidget - A Dashboard utility to allow you to update your Twitter status, but does not show your timeline.

Twitgit - A rather simple application allowing Twitter access from the Dashboard.

Twitteromatic - A Mac tool that will post all sorts of information to your Twitter account automatically. For example, weather status, word of the day, lotto numbers, and many more.

TwitterPost - Has some unique features such as avatar caching for faster browsing, Growl support, and in built support for iTunes.

Twitterrific - One of the more widely used Mac clients. This is a stand-alone application with a small desktop footprint and boasting features such as highlighting of unread tweets, audio notification, keyboard shortcuts and lots more.

Multi-Platform / Others

gTwitter - A GTK+ based Twitter client for Linux.

Snitter - A Windows / Mac application based on the new Adobe AIR platform. This has a great many features and has been generating quite a bit of buzz lately.

Spaz - Another client based on the Adobe AIR platform. This one is open source.

Firefox Plugins

For users of the Firefox browser, there are a few nice plugins to try.

TweetBar - A sidebar for Twitter that works in both Firefox and Flock. This takes up a permanent part of your screen real estate and if you have another application running in the sidebar (I do), they can’t both run at the same time.

TwitBin - Another sidebar plugin for Firefox.

TwitterBar - This plugin is very handy if you like to tweet about web pages you are currently browsing. This will add a tiny icon into your Firefox address bar that, when clicked, will send an update containing everything in the address bar. The cool thing is that in addition to the web address you can type in additional text which is appended to the tweet as a note.

TwitterFox - Shows you a popup notification when new tweets come in and shows a number in brackets in your status bar showing any that are unread. Click on that to expand the timeline. Very discreet and efficient. Also highlights personal messages, and uses member name intellisense. I use this plugin and I love it.

TwittyTunes - This is a sibling of the popular plugin FoxyTunes. It integrates with a number of music players and lets you easily tweet what you are currently listening to.

This post is just one part of the larger Big Juicy Twitter Guide. There is reader discussion post and you might also want to follow Caroline on Twitter.

Twitter Guide Part #3: Using Twitter Properly

Twitter Technicalities

140 Character Limit / Plain text Only

Twitter updates have a limit of 140 characters. This is to allow them to be easily sent over mobile SMS systems. Twitter has since been coined a ‘micro blogging’ platform due to this reliance on short updates. The updates have to be plain text. You cannot embed HTML or any kind of control codes. The only exception to this rule is links, which I mention below.

Embedding Links into Tweets

Updates must be plain text but the one added bonus that Twitter provides is that it will turn links into hyperlinks. These are no-follow so don’t think you can get backlinks from these! Most links are long and so to keep the tweet size as small as possible Twitter automatically uses the TinyURL service to shorten them. This is automatic - you paste in a full link and Twitter will do the rest.

Starring Your Favourite Tweets

In the picture above I show a snippet from my Twitter page that shows where I have seen somebody else’s update and decided that I would like to save that one. I have blotted out the personal details for privacy reasons. To the right I have circled the star button. Simply click this to mark that update as a favourite. This will be shown on your stats panel to the right of your home page:

Twitetiquette

Image Source: Amazon.com

Yes I just made up that word! This section is about the etiquette of using Twitter. People can stop following you at any time and you will not know about it unless you manually track your followers.

Don’t be Too Noisy

In Part 2 I explained some ways in which you can keep the incoming Twitter noise to a minimum. Turning that around, you need to make sure that you are not one of those noisy people otherwise you’ll find yourself either being ignored or losing followers. Either way, you will no longer be getting your message across.

What is a good number of tweets? There is no absolute number and it varies according to your audience. Generally speaking, I would try not to update more than once per hour so in a standard day, that’s probably no more than a dozen.

Occasionally something interesting might happen that tends to cause many more - like the recent fires in California, but dont tweet all day long about mundane stuff.

Don’t be Too Quiet

Let’s not go to extremes though. Twitter is not a service on which you should lurk. If you want to get followers you have to have something to say, and it needs to provide some kind of value - interesting, entertaining, controversial etc. Basically there has to be a reason why people would want to listen to you.

Remember that your personal profile shows a history of all your tweets so if somebody comes to it and it’s just empty, or you only post a mundane update every day or so, why should they bother following you? Yes this can be difficult to do in the beginning when you don’t have many direct followers but stay tuned to this guide because I will show you how you can get your voice out there without followers!

When To Break all the Rules

The problem with writing guidelines about how active to be is that they are highly subjective. Some people will think that my figures are way too high, and of course others think they are too low. Twitter is a personal communication tool and everybody will have different preferences and tolerances.

Some people are always able to break rules. Robert Scoble breaks all the twitter rules yet he is the most followed Twitter user on the planet! Steve Pavlina breaks all the rules of blogging and brings in over $40k a month from his blog. John Chow just breaks every rule he can find, yet his income just grows and grows.

Like anything else if you are going to change something it’s always best to test it. Note down your followers and then change your Twitter pattern for a week and see if you lost any in that time (minus any new followers you got). If it goes down you did something wrong. Change it and try again. Let your results dictate your actions.

Using Twitter for Marketing

If you are using Twitter to market something, whether that’s a business, a blog, organisation, etc then in addition to the previous guidelines you also need to read this section. This stuff can be the make or break on your Twitter success so pay attention!

The Tao of Twitter by Ed Dale

Ed Dale knows Internet marketing and he knows how Web 2.0 works. He has put together a little video showing what he calls the ‘tao’ of Twitter which is worth watching a few times until it really sinks in.

Twitter is not an IM Client

One of the points that Ed talks about in his video is the danger of using Twitter as an instant messaging system. I would like to show you how somebody did this recently, albeit accidentally. Look at this image (click to expand):

If you read the messages from the bottom up you’ll follow along a conversation between two people. If you have your Twitter updates coming in real time, this is very distracting. In all fairness, you can see by the top tweet that this member noticed his error and corrected it shortly after.

At times you will get caught up in a conversation that requires a personal response. If you need to do this then do it sparingly. Placing the @ symbol in front of somebody’s name indicates that this message is for them. For example, @cmiddlebrook <blah blah>. Some tools will even help you out with this by incorporating intellisense so that once you type the @ symbol it will help you find the username of the Twitter member.

However, here’s the thing - personal tweets are still public! My Twitter client gives me intellisense and highlights personal tweets in a different colour. This makes it easy to forget that it is still public. When you are sending a personal tweet bear in mind that some people who are following you, may not be following the person you are talking to. This means they get only one half of the conversation, and that’s why it can seem so rude.

To offset the problem, if you are going to do this, try to word your tweet in such a way as to allow spectators to have some idea of what you are talking about. That way, they can feel more included in the conversation and it doesn’t seem so rude.

You might also want to try using the direct message system that Twitter provides instead. This allows private messages (still limited to 140 characters) between two Twitter users who are following each other.

Fly on the Wall Conversation

In the tools section of this guide I will show various ways in which you can get other people’s updates from Twitter. Whilst it is possible to get them sent directly to you via email, due to the volume of messages that can generate, most people prefer to use something that is less invasive. For example, I see updates as popup notifications. I’ll also see a little number in brackets (6) that shows me there are six new tweets to see. But I can choose not to read these if I want to.

Most people do not read all the tweets that come in. Many of the people I personally follow are not in the same timezone as me so I miss a lot of their tweets anyway. I usually load up the Twitter home page in the morning and have a quick skim through the nightly activities but I do not feel compelled to actually read them all.

This is how Twitter differs from direct communication methods like email. When somebody sends you an email you feel somehow obligated to respond if it is a personal message. If you are receiving an email from somebody because you are on their ‘list’ then as Ed says in the video, your defenses are up. But when I see people like Ed twittering about his latest Internet marketing products I can choose to completely ignore them if I want to. There’s no pressure.

The True Value of Twitter for Marketing

Of course, another key point is that just seeing Ed’s tweets come up now and then just lets me know that he’s out there, he’s doing something. Sometimes he’s out swimming with his daughters. This shows me that he’s a human too and not just some guy trying to sell me something.

Trust is such an important factor in today’s markets. We hate sales letters, we don’t trust salesmen and marketers. We think most advertisements are full of hype. Twitter allows you to expose the person that you are. It slowly allows you to build trust with your audience and this can have a massive impact further down the line.

This is the very essence of the value of Twitter from a marketing perspective. I’ve touched on these points several times in the guide but I think the repetition is important to really ram home the point. If you are still thinking, What’s the point of Twitter? then I can only assume that you have nothing to market and you are using it purely as a personal toy.

If you have anything at all to market, Twitter helps you build your brand and promote yourself without direct email, without a sales letter, without any kind of sales pitch at all. If you don’t like the hard sell, then start using Twitter!

Don’t Use Twitter Only for Self-Promotion

Of course, there are some people who DO like the hard sell and they will try to use Twitter as another avenue for selling. This is a big mistake folks. The beauty of Twitter is that it is personal, it can be fun and hard sell messages can interrupt the experience and seem incredibly out of place.

Even if you promote yourself in a gentle way, don’t overdo it. You need to intertwine your promotional messages with the rest. Sometimes I click on people’s profiles and all I see is a stream of ‘New Blog Post” tweets. Really, I can get that just from their RSS, their Twitter account becomes pointless.

Remember that even though Twitter is real time, your personal history is saved on your profile. It’s worth looking at it now and then to see how it looks to an outsider. Would you follow yourself?

This post is just one part of the larger Big Juicy Twitter Guide. There is reader discussion post and you might also want to follow Caroline on Twitter.