A Bloggers Guide to Twitter

In this article, I’m going to talk about why Twitter is important, how to grow and manage your account and also how you can use it to earn you some money. As a blogger, I’ve grown to love Twitter, it’s a useful way to share your content and attract new readers. In fact if you’re running a business and haven’t incorporated the use of Twitter, then you need to stop writing letters and join me in the 21^st century. Twitter’s been around for some time now, but only in recent years has it amassed such a huge flow of users that have now propelled it to one of the top 10 visited websites worldwide.

Social Networking has become a major part of blogging, and nowadays people will rate the quality of a blog based on Twitter followers, Facebook likes, Diggs etc. as well as its readers, page rank and traffic. If you’ve only just begun blogging or perhaps only just started using Twitter, growing your followers from nothing can take time and effort. With the ability to drive traffic to your site or share content with a single tweet, surely it’ll be worth it in the long run? Check out some interesting Twitter stats below.

Stats courtesy of KISSmetrics and twitter.com

Growing your followers

Growing your followers naturally is the best possible way to maximize the potential of your Twitter account. What I mean by naturally is with no help from external sources, which I will talk about in the next section. The best way to grow a community is by simply posting quality and relevant information. If people enjoy what you write, what’s the reason for them not to follow you? To further increase your following, linking back to your Twitter often and getting retweets from your current followers is a must.

If growing your followers naturally isn’t good enough for you, there are other ways to boost your follow count and cheat yourself to a better social proof. The first website I’m going to talk about is Twiends. Naturally, I’ve been able to grow my Twitter following by about 100 new followers per month, nothing fancy but I’ve only been running my blog for a few months. After using Twiends, you can see the increase of followers below. Over three days I managed to boost my follow count by almost half of my original followers.

Stats from TwitterCounter.com

To begin using Twiends, if it’s your first time visiting the site simply sign in using your Twitter account, and authorize the application. You won’t receive any spam from the website and you’re free to remove your account at any time.

Once logged in, you may not be able to follow others just yet because of your ‘Twust’ score, a percentage which measures your account trust. This can easily be improved by producing a few tweets, changing your background, adding a location to your profile, getting listed by a friend etc. Basically, if you’re account is brand new, expect quite a low ‘Twust’ score. Once you’re allowed to follow others, you’re ready to go.

The website uses its own currency in the form of ‘seeds’. The basic premise is that you follow a user to earn a designated amount of seeds, and then you offer these seeds to other users in return for following your account. You can find other users based on their interests. You must set up your account by choosing: the amount of seeds to offer between 1 and 10, and who can follow you based on the length of membership or their unfollow rate (Yeah don’t forget, users can unfollow you whenever they please). Don’t worry if your seeds run out though, people can still follow you without earning anything.


You can also choose to only allow followers from your own country, and choose to follow users back as soon as they follow you.

Account settings

Also, on the right you’ll notice a featured user’s column, you can purchase a days’ worth of a featured users slot along with seed packages as shown below. All featured members offer 7 seeds, but this comes straight from twiends so you don’t even need to have any in your account!

Package prices for Seeds

When Twiends first arrived, it was a pretty unique idea, and while many people may not agree with the whole process that it offers, it’s attracted over one million members so far. Not so long ago, the site offered free Facebook ‘likes’ in a similar process, until the company blocked the application from it’s website. It’s unsure whether Twitter will follow suit in the future but with similar sites appearing like twidir, which as you can see below is actually just an exact clone of twiends, there’s bound to be a lot more websites offering unique methods to boost your followers.

twidir.com

Similar Websites

TraffUp offers a similar process to twiends, once signed up you must accumulate points from following other users, retweeting users or viewing websites. You can add your own blog url, twitter account or tweet and set the amount of points to give a user for viewing your site, following you or retweeting you.  Although similar to twiends, TraffUp actually offers you more help to promote your blog or business. It may not be as popular (yet), but with the ability to get your tweets retweeted, it should start attracting a lot more users.

Edit: Another similar website to TraffUp is YouLikeHits, which offers Stumbles, Diggs, Follows, Likes, pretty much everything your heart could desire. I've found this website to be slightly less active than others but obviously there's a lot more variety to choose from, enjoy!

JustRetweet also offers a similar service. As well as offering Follows and Tweets, you can also add your blog's RRS feed for other users to tweet!

5 minutes of fame is website where Twitter users can post their username for, yep you guessed it, five minutes of glorious recognition. Your account will appear on the homepage along with details of your website URL and location. Now watch as vast hordes of Twitter hungry folk begin following you, ravenous for more of your delectable tweets. What, no one followed you? Well you could always try for another five minutes, then maybe another five and another five and another five…

Spread your tweets is another website I’ve come across which helps you gain more followers. Basically you let Twitter authorize the application and it guarantees a follower for every person you follow. Sounds promising, but you have no control on who you follow and the application also posts tweets without asking your permission. Feel free to check it out but I wouldn’t recommend it.

The most helpful use of these websites is by giving you a better social proof, ie. more credibility. If someone finds your website and sees you’ve got thousands of followers, then they believe your website is of good quality with relevant information. This may sound appealing, but by using these websites, the quality of your followers will dwindle. Think about it, what’s better? 100 followers who are interested in your content and can’t wait to see more? Or 1000 unengaged followers who basically couldn’t give a shit. The purpose of your followers will be mostly for show!

Managing your Account

Now that you‘ve grown your Twitter following to billions of users, managing your account can only get more time consuming and boring. There are two websites I’d strongly recommend to help you on your perilous social networking quest, and they’d be Tweepi and twittercounter.

Tweepi is an application which allows you to flush, reciprocate, cleanup and follow. You can choose between using it free or creating a premium account. A premium account allows advanced options like removing people with a low Klout score or removing people who haven’t tweeted in a month automatically etc. Once you sign in, or authorize the application, with your Twitter account, the dashboard allows you to:

Flush: Remove the people you’re following who aren’t following you back.

Reciporcate: Follow people who are following you that you aren’t following already.

Cleanup: Remove inactive or irrelevant accounts that your following.

Follow: Find new users to follow, yay more friends!

Due to Twitter’s Terms of Service, you can’t unfollow bulk users at a time, just one by one. This might seem boring but it’s better than unfollowing someone you didn’t want to by accident.

Next up, TwitterCounter lets you track the amount of followers or friends you have over a weekly or monthly basis. It also allows you to track other users or brands, and compare them against each other. Again, this website has premium features, but you can get by just fine being a free member!

Looks like I've got a while to go...

Earn Some Money

You probably wouldn’t have even begun reading this article if you hadn’t noticed a section on making some cash. Before you start reading this section though, note that Twitter is a social networking website, not a money tree. These are just a few ideas about how Twitter could compliment your income. Twitter is best used to drive traffic to your site, by posting tweets relevant to your readers. By generating traffic to your site, you’re already increasing the potential amount of income your site could earn. Of course there are more ways Twitter can boost your income, albeit it marginally.

Sponsored Tweets are a way to earn money via Twitter, where someone pays you to include their website, product, brand etc. in your tweet. I remember reading a while ago about Darren Rowse, that chap from ProBlogger, who was offered over ten thousand dollars to promote a company in a series of tweets. He declined for ethical reasons, I mean ten thousand sounds great but is it worth compromising your Twitter and alienating all of your wonderful followers and readers? Well, if it is, I wouldn’t get your hopes up for offers of that vastness. Instead, you could sign up to SponsoredTweets.com where they essentially cut out the middle man, helping companies find you and vice versa. Once you’ve set up your account, it evaluates how much a tweet from your Twitter account is worth, based on your number of followers. Just a heads up, if your only follower is that account you created for your cat last Christmas, this probably isn’t the service for you.

If you aren’t afraid to alienate your followers, why not spam them with affiliate links? I mean, if you’ve got a decent amount of followers why not harass them continuously with links to get ripped in four weeks? Although waking up the following morning to find they’ve all abandoned you can feel pretty ghastly.

Finally, if you’ve had enough of Twitter and it’s #hashtag bullshit, maybe it’s time to just move on. No one forced you to be a member in the first place remember, and if you believe it’s not even helping you and your business then perhaps the time has come. If you’ve built up quite a few followers, or maybe have a unique username like @at, you could perhaps try finding some schmuck to buy your valuable account...  Anyway, thanks for reading my article, feel free to comment below!