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About Mert Erkal

He left his full time job as of 1st August, 2008 to earn his living from blogging and freelance Internet projects. He also shares his 10 years of experience he gained in a giant multi-national company for Small Business companies and builds Corporate Identity. Read more about him!

Nov
25th

How To Use Twitter More Effectively

By Mert Erkal in Microblogging

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Some bloggers use Twitter to promote their blogs, or use it separately in order to gain more followers.  However, majority of them don’t effectively use the service for what it was intended, so here are a few tips on how to effectively manage using Twitter.

  • Ask your readers to follow your tweets either via your email newsletter, or an invitation text & link on your blog.
  • Use WordPress plugins like TwitterTools to update your tweets on your blog.
  • Participate in the communities within your niche which will naturally draw followers to you. Define your target niche, and eliminate the rest. Follow less but targeted people.
  • Don’t be too noisy. Keep the noise down. Do not follow noisy people, just purge those people.
  • Star your favorite tweets. This will help you to save them for future use.
  • Watch Tao of Twitter by Ed Dale.
  • Prefer easy to use twittering tools like Twshot or TwitterFox
  • Your Twitter feed is also available as an RSS feed. Check the bottom of your Twitter homepage, and you will notice your Twitter RSS feed. Get your Twitter RSS feed, and send it to RSS directories.
  • Customize your Twitter background image. Look at mine: Mert Erkal. It is not so difficult. Believe me it is worth spending your time. Do not forget to publish your blog’s logo and URL for branding.
  • Integrate your Twitter updates with Facebook using TwitterSync. This little application will publish your latest tweet as your Facebook status.
  • If you have time, I suggest you to take a look at Caroline Middlebrook’s Twitter Guide.

How do you use Twitter? Please share your best practices with me.

Popularity: 16% [?]

Comments

Baturalp November 25th, 2008

Don’t update your twitter when you write a new blog post. This can be quite annoying. There are different ways of promoting your posts such as rss, newsletter etc. but twitter is not the way of doing this.

Mert Erkal November 25th, 2008

@ Baturalp : Consider it done, sir :) You can easily remove me from your followers list if you don’t like my Twitter updates. As a problogger, I need to update my readers about my latest post. I usually post useful stuff for my readers, so I don’t feel guilty when letting my followers know about my latest post.

Baturalp November 25th, 2008

@Mert: Sorry, I wasn’t talking directly to you. I don’t believe that promoting every post on twitter is necessary and beneficial. It’s much more like sending SMS to all of your friends, if it’d be free. Probably, no one wants to bother friends because they’ve already followed your posts.

For instance, creating another Twitter account as an RSS mirror could be a better idea. That’d be special for only readers. I believe that personal Twitter accounts should reflect personal ideas and broadcast a personal/business life.

From now on, I’m talking directly to you :) Please don’t forget that your twitter followers might be willing to learn some ideas/experiences in your mind by following you. — and also they might already noticed your posts. Now, keep twitting your latest posts. :)

Mert Erkal November 25th, 2008

@ Baturalp: Sorry for my misunderstanding :) I think you are right on most of your comments. I gain 5-10 new followers almost every single day, so I want to keep them updated. I have nearly 900 followers, and it is not so easy to become friends with most of them. All I can do is to update them with my tweets. But you also mentioned very good points here. I will be thinkging about them. Thanks for joining the conversation, and honestly sharing your opinion. Good nite :)

Miguel Wickert November 27th, 2008

I don’t know if I agree with not updating twitter with new blog post… I do but it’s not the only thing I update twitter with. I share interesting reads, sites I comment on and so forth.

I right there with ya Mert, I normally share quality links or communicate with family and friends behind the scenes. If you’re only use of twitter is one dimensional (whatever that may be), you may want to rethink your approach. Excellent points all around folks! :)

Marlive November 28th, 2008

Great information Mert!

I also like Chris Brogan’s 4 goals with using Twitter which has been extremely helpful in me gaining followers:
1) Be helpful; 2) Be informative; 3) Be Human; and 4) Be responsive

rampantheart December 7th, 2008

@Baturalp is right! Well, in my case, I have been an active part of twitter for a long time now and use it mostly to network with people rather than promoting my posts. Of course I am not a pro blogger but make it a point not to annoy people. I have a separate account for my blog that updates the recent blog posts to people. I use Twitterfeed for that.

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