subject: Why You Must Be on Twitter If You Want to Make a Living Online [print this page] Why You Must Be on Twitter If You Want to Make a Living Online
Twitter is the social media phenomenon of the 21st Century. It's easy to quickly build a huge network of contacts all around the world via Twitter. People who will come to visit your website, buy your products or give you help and advice.
Like anything new, it's hard to get started without good advice. This article is designed to give you some solid guidelines.
Following
I don't follow everyone who follows me. I check their bio out, and if it interests me in any way, then I follow.
Unfollowing
If someone is simply constantly Tweeting links to their site, or generally Tweeting rubbish, I tend to unfollow them. Every now and then I check out Twitoria which is a great site where you can see which of your followers have been inactive for a period. I unfollow those who haven't used Twitter for a month or more.
General Communication
I really enjoy just chatting with people about things that interest me. I've made lots of new scuba diver and Formula 1 fan friends via Twitter. It's easy to set up a search on Tweetdeck or via Twitter Search on a key word and find other people interested in the same thing. The whole "international" thing is very appealing to me - I love the fact that I'm chatting with people in so many countries and get so many different points of view.
Lifestyle
I enjoy sharing my life on Twitter, so I'm quite active in telling people what I'm doing and sending Twitpics via my Blackberry. I do this because I live in an unusual place, and I enjoy seeing other people's lifestyles in the same way. It also contributes to promoting my brand, and therefore my blogs, on Twitter
Tweeting Interesting Links
I've got in the habit of Tweeting links to sites I find interesting - again because I find so many interesting things that other people Tweet. I do my best to retweet the good stuff onto my followers.
Tweeting My Blog Posts
I Tweet my own posts, usually 2 or 3 times over a 24 hour period, to catch the different time zones. I feel as long as that's not all you're doing, it's acceptable. I find about 1% of my followers visit the link each time. That seems low, but remember that at any given time less than 10% of your followers will actually be logged into and reading Twitter. I have a theory that this percentage rises as your authority increases on Twitter - so could it be that 5% or 10% of Chris Brogan's followers check his links? Maybe Chris will let us know.
Auto DM's
I don't use them. In fact I don't use any automation tools at all - it feels weird to me to automate something that's social. I don't like receiving auto DM's, and I suspect the majority of users feel the same way - do you? When I get the standard kind of "Follow this link to make money" style DM, I tend to reply "No thanks, but I look forward to chatting anyway."
And that's it! I tend not to think too hard about any of it. I try to give value as someone to follow, and try to get some benefit for my business.
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