Tagged with Followers

You can take a Tweet to a Twit but you can’t make them click

The power of Twitter is in the Retweet. Links are currency and you invest them in your following by sharing your content via a URL link in the hope that having piqued your Followers’ interest they will pay you back with a kind Retweet.

On the assumption of using Twitter predominantly as a ‘microblogging publishing’ platform – as opposed to Tweeting the inane what you eat or weather updates model – Twitter is a critical tool in the dissemination of your content. Your website or blog is the host of this great collection of content and you wrap up individual gems of content into a shortened link within a Tweet to get noticed in the shopping window of the constant stream of Tweets.

Tweeting is as much about maximising each Tweet’s potential as it is about sharing. Obviously the larger your following the greater your Twitter reach. Twitter reach can be measured by adding up the number of followers each of the people who follow you have to give you a figure of potential maximum exposure should each of your followers ReTweet you.

The beauty of your followers (and beautiful they indeed are, having crafted your following through careful targeting on your part, right?) is that they want to follow you and have an interest in you and what you have to say and if they deem your Tweet content worthy enough they will share it with their following too.

Now you have written your spot on article, blog post or uploaded your latest set of stunning photographs etc, you want to show it off to the world. You know you have to work within the confines of the 140 character limit set by Twitter and you know you know you need to a) grab the attention of the reader and get them to click through to b) your shortened URL directing them to your target content.

The best tip you should heed for getting your wonderful Tweet Retweeted by a follower is to work to a character limit short of the 140 but still making it attention grabbing and informative. You need to leave enough space for your followers to start their Tweet with the following:

RT @yournamehere…

Doing this sets your Tweet free on a journey into the unknown and spreads your content to a wider audience, because after all, you put time and effort into your content, you certainly want as many people as possible to see it and as Twitter for Business expert Mark Shaw says:

@markshaw: The life of a single tweet is minimal. The life of a retweet is exponential. Spread great tweets. thanks @unmarketing

You can follow me on Twitter by clicking here

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A Basic Guide to Tweetdeck

This brief explanation has been prompted by friends and followers who use Twitter and are curious and/or sceptical about Tweetdeck.

@jamesainsworth i have it installed, but i rarely open it in an effort to convince myself that i’m not actually that sad. i am really.

Having previously written of the virtues of Tweetdeck in ‘Monitoring your Company,’ under the guise of my professional capacity to call myself a Twitter expert, I feel I can safely express an informed opinion to you of why this Twitter application will improve your tweeting life.

Tweetdeck is a 3rd party application which requires installation and can run in the background of whatever internet and computer activities you have running and affords you targeted searches of terms with real time streams of results.

The beauty of Tweetdeck in relation to its prowess over the standard web based Twitter site itself, is that it feeds all mentions of your Twitter username, Direct Messages and a number of search terms on topics of your choosing into one window.

The functionality of Twitter.com is a well known weakness of the site and is duly reflected in the statistics which point towards Twitter applications taking the Lion’s share of traffic away from Twitter.com. For those that use applications such as Tweetdeck, Seesmic and many more, there is no real reason to return to Twitter.com once initially registered.

More on the search capabilities of Tweetdeck…

If you have a particular interest and you want to follow any Twitter activity related to said topic – or you wish to increase your following by targeting those who speak about a specific topic, Tweetdeck allows you to do all this in a matter of clicks.

If your interest of choice is #BB10 (Big Brother) or if you’re partial to Le Parti Socialiste in Nice, then Tweetdeck searches in designated columns are essential to find out what everyone on Twitter is talking about in relation to these terms.

The usability of Tweetdeck comes with perseverance but once you are over the initial exploration and set- up, it will be your primary source of Twitter related activity and enable you to share, discover and target your Twittering.

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