Everywhere you look, people are talking about Web 2.0, social networking, Twitter, Facebook, Tweetdeck or Twhirl, to name a few.

There’s even a whole new Twitcabulary: tweets, tweeples, retweets, twitpics, etc. which can make things seem a lot more complicated.

Here’s the skinny on social networking. . .

Social networking using sites like Twitter and Facebook are an AMAZING way to build relationships, connect with others and yes, even generate leads.

My friend, mutual client and Mastermind buddy Nancy Marmolejo is phenomenal at social networking and building relationships online.

I highly recommend you follow her and read her blog in order to both learn a ton and have great fun!

5 simple ways to make lead generation “easy peasy” by combining social marketing with things you’re already doing (gotta love that repurposing!).

1. Link your Twitter and Facebook accounts so whenever you post to Twitter, Facebook is updated.

2. Link your blog to each Twitter, Linked In and Facebook so whenever you post a new item, the 3 separate sites will share the title and a link back to it automatically.

3. Link your Ezine Articles account to Twitter so whenever a new article is accepted, it will update Twitter (and therefore Facebook) with the title and a link back to it automatically.

4. Schedule “tweets” to go out offering great tips daily. I send out quotes and repurposing tips, my co-host in Raw Professionals Online, Karen Knowler sends out “Successfully Raw Daily Bites” – what will you do?

5. Create a “tweet ring” with those who you admire and complement your business.

Just imagine the amount of people your articles and posts are now reaching! Your friends, friends of friends, complete strangers – all are now exposed to your information AND given a link where they can learn more and sign up for your list.

It’s important to note that the above is a supplement to participating in actual conversations and chatting with others and is not a substitute for the “social” aspect of “social networking”.

I like to think of it as a big party with a ton of great people and interesting conversations that I can pop in and out of based on my schedule – and I don’t even have to “dress up”.

Make It Real: My Request To You

If you haven’t yet set up a Twitter and Facebook account, run, don’t walk, to Twitter.com and Facebook.com – there’s no cost and they can be set up in minutes (seriously, you can tweak things later).

And then implement items 1 – 5 above in order to maximize your social networking presence and easily repurpose all that article writing you’ve been doing!

If you know you need to get everything set up and linked together, but it’s not your passion or desire to futz about with the techy stuff, check out my new Social Networking: Done 4 You service here and let my team handle all the details while you simply chat.

Talk about “easy peasy”. . .

Sandra P. Martini
http://www.articlesbase.com/relationships-articles/social-networking-easy-peasy-lead-generation-738541.html

The social marketing tool, Twitter is one of the latest and greatest Web 2.0 tools out there. People who join this social networking microblogging tool often become so addicted that they use it constantly. They have it on their computer as well as on their cell phone and they spend hours on it having discussions and “tweeting” with others. This makes the tool ideal for those who want to sell something online. Internet marketers love social media tools for the potential new clients they can bring.

But there are myths associated with this tool that those who want to use it for internet marketing need to know. Here are three popular misconceptions about using Twitter to sell your ware.

Myth #1: Everyone who follows you will click your link.

Myth #2: The More People You Follow, the Better

Myth #3: Controversy Is Good

Myth # 1. Not everyone will follow you. You can target people by looking up people with specific keywords but you have to appear to be interesting in order to get followed. If your username or bio look too spammy, people won’t be interested.

People often look at the quality of someone’s tweets before they do follow them so keep that in mind and if you’ve been using Twitter for a while look at the last ten tweets you have posted and consider whether you appear follow-worthy to potential followers or not.

Myth#2: You might think that following a large number of users is a wise decision but when you look at your profile and see that you have a handful of followers but are following hundreds or thousands of other Twitter users, you won’t look very appealing. Striving for a balance of having more people follow you than you are following makes you look Twitter worthy to potential followers.

Myth #3: Controversy might get you a bunch of people visiting your regular blog because people often want to see a good flame war but on Twitter, it gets old real fast. If you start getting too opinionated or too political, people will tire of your tweets really fast. Those who pump out too many social bookmarking requests or don’t appear to be willing to participate but want people following them instead will appear to be a selfish twitterer. You also don’t want to be too brash on this tool or you’ll see your follower numbers quickly dwindle.

Twitter is a great tool to get noticed. If you’re interesting, people will re-tweet your tweets and follow your requests for a Stumble or Digg. If you integrate it with other social bookmarking tools it can also make it more interesting for your followers as well.

The thing with Twitter is that you want to be followed and so you need to be follow-worthy. Be interesting, provide value and reciprocate. Be funny, witty, charming and you can even be sarcastic or silly once in a while but strive for a balance that makes you interesting enough to keep following. Just like a friend’s antics can get old real fast in the real world, a Twitter friend can get tiring as well if they do too much of one thing and not enough of just being interesting or entertaining.

For marketers who strike the right balance on this tool, they can get more buyers, sell more widgets, learn more interesting tips in their industry and maximise their social marketing experience so that it does benefit them but those that try to cheat the system or exploit it won’t have much effect for long.

Matthew Bredel

Can you make money in an internet income MLM work from home MLM business opportunity?  Of course!  However, I am not going to lie to you and say that it is going to be easy.  There is definitely a lot of competition online, so you have to have the knowledge (or be willing to do the research to find it) to really succeed.  Also, it would be very wise to find a mentor is willing to walk you through, step by step, how to make money online.

The most popular (and successful) way right now is to use Web 2.0 marketing.  This includes using social networking like Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook (there are hundreds of other social networking websites as well).  Another popular way of using Web 2.0 marketing is using video sharing sites like YouTube and Google Video.  Videos are valuable in online marketing because it allows you to connect more personally with people you may never meet.  They can meet you, see you, and feel like they know you without you having to talk to hundreds of people every day.

 Another thing using videos for building your internet income MLM work from home MLM business opportunity does, is get your message across to more people and you can ever talk to you in a day without you having to say the same thing a hundred times.

You can absolutely make money online, if you are patient and winning to learn the ropes.  This does include making mistakes (sometimes mistakes that will cost you money and devoting time (and a lot of times money) to figure out what works and what doesn’t. You probably will not just make thousands of dollars overnight in your internet income MLM work from home MLM business opportunity.  But, if you are willing to put in the work necessary, it can pay you massively for your efforts!

Eric Taylor
http://www.articlesbase.com/internet-marketing-articles/internet-income-mlm-work-from-home-mlm-business-opportunity-can-you-make-money-in-an-internet-income-mlm-work-from-home-mlm-business-opportunity-734746.html

Internet marketing has become a very popular thing in the internet. There are many ways to make money online now. However, do you know that there is an easy way to make four and five figures, even six figures in the shortest time? This way is known as affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing is the easiest way to make money online because you do not need your own products, deal with customers and so on. A blog is not compulsory too. You will get paid my promoting other merchants’ product. There are many super affiliates who make over 6 figures in just few hours!

Generally, affiliate marketing can be classified into 2 kinds: Pay-Per-Sale and Pay-Pay-Lead.

1. Pay-Per-Sale Affiliate Marketing
This is the most popular affiliate marketing which many bloggers are doing. Based on the title, you can easily know what it means. The merchant only pays the affiliate when a visitor referred by the affiliate make a purchase.

In this type of marketing, you need to be highly selective when you want to choose and promote a product. Choose a product which is profitable and hot in the market is very important. You also need to be strategic when you want to promote a product.

2. Pay-Per-Lead Affiliate Marketing
For this type of affiliate marketing, you will get paid by generating leads for the merchants. It is usually used by finance and insurance companies. Whenever a visitor referred by the affiliate to the merchant’s website requested a quote or filled up an online application form, the affiliate will get the commission.

Find out what I am doing by following my twitter. If you need to know more about making money online stuff, don’t forget to subscribe my e-mail updates so that you will not miss any post. Do not forget to grab my FREE e-book worth $37 by joining my free newsletters!

Jeen Hao
http://www.articlesbase.com/affiliate-programs-articles/basic-information-of-affiliate-marketing-682166.html

Copyright (c) 2008 OnlineBizU.com

I’m lazy by nature and like to do as little work as possible. Therefore, when I have the opportunity to automate tasks, I jump at it. As I started getting heavily involved in social networking, I quickly became frustrated with having to update my status at several sites, as well as trying to figure out how to introduce my blog, my articles, and my ezine to my social networking audiences.

After much trial and error, here’s how I connect and repurpose all of my social marketing strategies:

1. Set up accounts. Make sure that you have current accounts with Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, MySpace, and any other social networking platforms you regularly use.

2. Open an account at Ping.fm. The Ping.fm service automatically updates your status on all of your social networking sites, 21 of them at the current count. Depending on the number of networks you use, it will take you 10-50 minutes to connect your Ping.fm account to your various social network accounts. However, once everything is set up, you simply log into your Ping account, post your status update (no more than 140 characters), and your status is automatically updated on all of your social networking profiles. Rather than posting updates directly on Twitter or Facebook or MySpace, I instead use Ping.fm as the starting place for my daily status updates.

3. Display Twitters on other accounts. If you go to your Setting tab in your Twitter account and then down to “More Info URL”, you will see a link to “Add Twitter to Your Site.” By clicking on this link, you’ll be taken to a page where you can add your tweets in a separate box (not the Status updates area) in your MySpace and Facebook profiles, on your blogger or Typepad blogs, or get the Flash or HTML widgets to add to other sites like Squidoo lenses or to your website. Just follow the instructions connected to each application. If you use Typepad for your blog, you can also do this through the Widget gallery by finding Twitter widget in the “Publishing Tools” section.

4. Connect your blogposts to Twitter. Twitter Feed, http://www.twitterfeed.com/, enables you to feed your blog posts to your Twitter account. Simply create an account, go to “Create New Twitter Feed”, and enter the RSS feed of your blog. You can control the frequency with which Twitter displays your blog post, as well as the text used to preface your blog feed. I use “Blog update” to preface my posts.

5. Connect your blogposts to Facebook. I use Typepad for my blogs, so if you use a Wordpress blog, there are probably plugins that handle this, as well. When you create a new blog post, you can choose to send a link to that post into Facebook. These links will appear in your Mini-Feed on your Facebook profile, and may appear in your friends’ News Feeds.

In your Typepad account, go to Weblogs > Configure > Publicity, select “Prompt me to share new posts on Facebook.” When this item is selected, TypePad will automatically display a prompt from Facebook when you create and publish a new post on TypePad. The Facebook prompt will only appear if you have selected the option in your weblog’s publicity settings, and only when you create and publish a new post. The prompt will not appear when you save a post as draft, when you edit a post, or when you change the status of a post from Draft to Published.

6. Update your EzineArticles.com account. Article marketing is a smart and easy way to drive traffic to your site. If you’re submitting articles online to article directories, you definitely want to be using EzineArticles.com, the biggest and most popular article directory online. To connect to Twitter, click on “Profile Manager” in your account, then “Edit Author Bio” in your Author’s Area. Add your Twitter account information here. Each time a new article is accepted and published at EzineArticles, a post is automatically made to your Twitter account.

7. Update your aWeber account: I use aWeber as my email marketing service. You can now send an automatic Twitter post to all your followers on Twitter with a link to the HTML version of your ezine. When you create a broadcast in aWeber, select the option to publish a broadcast via RSS feed or to an archive, and then enter your Twitter account info, When your ezine is published, all of your Twitter followers will be notified.

There are probably others ways to connect the social networks and to repurpose content on social networks, but these 7 steps are all I need at the moment. Take 30 minutes out of your day to connect and repurpose your social networking, and watch your traffic and list begin to grow!

Donna Gunter

Social media and discussions about social networking are peppering every meme on the Web. This is bringing everyone into the game–big and small business. Does that mean all of the opportunity is gone? No. The real truth most people are completely off the mark.

Getting a MySpace, Facebook, or Twitter account is not social networking. Social networking requires participation and valuable contribution to the community. These are some of the secrets to getting real impact from your social network.

Listening

Getting into the conversation starts with listening to your community. Take some time to research your target audience–people you want in your community. These are my favorite approaches:

* Use Google’s Blog Search to find blogs and commentary associated with your business
* Set-up Google alerts to email you tips on new content related to your marketplace
* Use Twitter Search to monitor community related conversation in real-time

Not only will listening tune you into your target audience–it will reveal opportunity.

Participating

Note, the first word is social networking is “social.” That means that people expect connections in their network to participate. They are looking for a conversation. Getting the most out of your social networking means giving your community what they want. These are techniques I use:

* Ask questions. Want a big crowd? Ask for advice.
* Answer questions. This demonstrates expertise and adds value.
* Link to great resources. Linking gives to the community and builds goodwill.
* Share good content. I good proportion you should share your own content.

Participating shows a genuine interest in the community, building your credibility and reputation–important to powering a successful social network.

Audience Building

Once engaged in your social network, it is time to build your own audience. Your audience should be folks that follow you and are influenced by you.

Be the leader in your social community and you will maximize your return. This of course requires trust and reputation. Each is built over time and based mainly on useful and valuable participation.

Join the conversation, help people, and be willing to learn and your audience will grow. However, one powerful suggestions–focus on conversations and interactions that have keyword clues. This will help attract an appropriate audience. Also, every social network has a search tool–this is how most audiences get built, like websites it takes a little smart SEO.

Mobilizing

As you build your audience don’t be shy to get them doing something. Folks love to support a cause or be a part of a community effort. Most will happily get involved. So, start mobilizing your audience early. This creates a real powerhouse as your audience grows–giving you the opportunity to tackle really big campaigns.

Are you now convinced that social networking is more than a seizure inducing MySpace page, a college reunion FaceBook network, or a java fueled blasting of what your ate for dinner? Social networking is about–listening, participating, and mobilizing. Get yours started today.

Bill Rice
http://www.articlesbase.com/internet-articles/social-networking-going-beyond-the-myspace-facebook-and-twitter-737091.html

How would you like to “spy” on your niche, be more connected in your marketplace, and know what your competitors are doing, on a daily basis and with little to no work?

It’s easy to do, using a combination of twitter.com and tweetlater.com, one of the coolest free twitter tools out there. Twitter is a very popular micro-blogging platform. Many of your potential customers and competitors are there, actively participating. Here’s how you can monitor conversations about any subject, keyword, or person you are interested in.

1. Set up an account at tweetlater.com

2. Complete your profile. Add a picture, bio, etc. Don’t use some silly avatar or a picture of your product or a pile of cash or any other spammy image.

3. Set up an account at tweetlater.com

4. Log into tweetlater and click on “Manage My Tweet Keyword Tracking & Alerts”

5. Check the box “E-mail me a keyword alert digest, and choose how often you want to receive your alerts, the range is once per hour to once per day.

6. Choose the keywords you are interested in being alerted about.

Obviously, you’ll want to enter the keywords you are most interested in, but I also recommend you enter your own name and the name of your company. If somebody is going to comment about you, don’t you want to know about it? If it’s positive, you can simply thank the person for the love. If negative, you can enter the conversation and address the problem.

Once you stat receiving your keyword alert digests, you can quickly scan them for interesting intel. Here’s what you can do with your new found knowledge:

-Follow those people who share your interests. Many of them will follow you back.

-Engage in private conversations with people who interest you

-Identify potential new members of your Tribe

-Proactively handle any complaints or problems people are having with you or your company

-Learn how popular your niche really is and how many people are discussing it

-Watch your competitors. Learn what sites they’re promoting, what offers they’re making etc.

This solution is free, it’s easy to set up, and will make you one of the most informed and connected people in your marketplace.

Dave
http://www.articlesbase.com/internet-marketing-articles/spy-on-your-niche-and-competitors-with-cool-twitter-tools-704928.html

The world is saturated with twits, tweets, and tweeps. Everyone, from Oprah to NPR has decided that this is the most brilliant application ever devised by man. They constantly cite it, talk about it, and overhype it to the Nth degree.

The one thing they never explain about twitter is how it is intended to be used. They don’t explain the reTweet, or spambot followers. They just tell random people to get online, and drop their thoughts, in 140 characters or less, of course.

It’s not their fault, really, as twitter doesn’t really have a defined purpose. The idea is that it is supposed to enable real-time communication, sort of a text message broadcast to the entire world. The actual purpose of tweets are left up to the users’ imaginations.

It was too much for me to get my mind wrapped around when I started, that is for sure. With this in mind, I’d like to tell you a couple uses that will make twitter a valuable investment of your time.

This article will serve a very practical purpose, both for the novice user of twitter, and for those who have lost interest: It’ll tell you how, what, and why to follow certain users, along with giving you the ability to find and organize that data in a meaningful manner.

With that in mind, let’s begin. There are around 7 major types of twitter users. Your interests will determine which of these folks it would be in your best interest to follow:

1. Newsies: The New York Times, Tribune Media, Huffington Post, Drudge Report, and various other news agencies use twitter as a point of distribution for their articles. Updates commonly carry newly published content, or respond to readers of their content, which will naturally drive new readers to their site.

2. Gurus: These people, like Tony Robbin or Robert Kiyosaki(of Rich Dad, Poor Dad fame) use their accounts to push out mini-seminars. Their updates range from the inspirational to motivational, deliver news updates, and of course, push product in-between.

3. Gossip Gals: They don’t miss a single controversy. It doesn’t matter how small, these girls(and guys—think Perez Hilton) won’t let it rest. While TMZ and the Smoking Gun throw out some really interesting stuff, I wouldn’t put it in the category of “news”.

4. Info-Marketers: Pushing everything from get-rich-schemes, to plugging their latest eBook, these folks peddle all things downloadable. They are always mentioning some resource that seems designed to help you make money, but will make them money instead.

5. Regular Marketers: Generally, tweeps of this ilk are pushing a physical product, or building up that brand. You’ll see everyone from tire companies to toilet paper purveyors interacting with their customers and fans. To spice things up, fun facts and interesting news are served with soft-sell promotional tactics.

6. Power Tweeters: This is an odd group. They generally tweet about anything and everything. Most of the time, they are female in gender, and are a mixture of Gossip Gals and Newsie fare, with a spatter of hometown chatter. They never sell anything. Many times, they will live-tweet their thoughts on concerts, television shows, and fashion.

7. Everyone Else: This encompasses roughly 97% of the twitterverse. They followed a few people, didn’t learn how to link, reTweet, or even reply inside of twitter. Eventually, they get tired of the whole thing, and move back to playing “Mafia Wars” on facebook.

While there are sub-groups within every group, these are where the lines are generally drawn. The most important takeaway from this breakdown is the following: Most people on twitter are trying to sell you something. Now that you know who’s online, how can you get the most out of twitter?

Glad you asked. The first thing to get is a twitter client. For the purpose of this article, we’re going with TweetDeck, a leader in the twitter client arena. It’s easy to use. Download it, open it up, enter your username and password…and magically, you have a bird’s eye view of everything happening in twitter(or at least who you are following, and their activity).

You’ll see your live twitter feed on the far left, in-between you’ll find any replies that have been made to your messages(if you’ve just opened an account, there won’t be any messages here), and on the far right, your direct messages(private messages between you and another user that are not broadcast to other users).

The first thing you should do is find twitterers who meet your basic informational needs. For that, I actually prefer to use google, as it generally does a better job of finding who, or what you are looking for than twitter’s native search service. Google your local station’s call sign and add twitter to the end.(e.g. WKPY twitter). Let’s say we were searching for a our local station in New Mexico. We’d follow @KOBTV. That will be useful for weather alerts, local news, and community events.

Next, get a national news feed you trust. CNN, MSNBC, and Fox all have twitter feeds kicking out news at the speed of type. You can now see what is making waves at the national level, along with any upcoming special reports.

Now comes the fun part…your interests. Love tech…grab @TechCrunch. Need your daily fix of stats and scores: Follow @ESPN. Pick 2-3 twittering entities that don’t overlap. For instance, unless you just love too much information, don’t follow ABC, NBC, and CBS news.

From there, it’s time to find interesting people to follow. See if your favorite celebrities, nobel laureates, or trashmen are online. Check out their profile online, either by searching google with their name, followed by twitter, or by going to their website, and finding out what it is. This is probably the greatest chance at interaction with the rich and infamous that you will get. Rainn Wilson(Dwight Schrute of “The Office”) is one celebrity with particularly interest thoughts, links, and conversation.

You have a base of good, solid tweets that you are now following. Here comes the fun part. There are people around the world having conversations about the latest news, movies, restaurants, whatever. Now, you just have to find them. Pull up the search feature in TweetDeck. There are two ways to search: hashtag, or plain text. Hashtags denote a post in a certain category. For instance, if you were looking for all the updates that include the President, but don’t actually mention him in the body, this is the easiest way to search. If you are just looking for all mentions of Barack Obama, you would enter his name in plain text.

Searching in TweetDeck will open a column that automatically updates each time the search term is mentioned. For instance, you could keep a column opened for any topics you are interested in, and monitor them in real-time. I like to keep an eye on precious metals, mining, and tire news(boring, I know). When I am monitoring twitter, I keep a #gold, #silver, #mining, and #tires tab open, so that I can keep abreast of what is happening. It’s like a stock ticker. Glance, see something you like, and read any article links that come through. If I see someone who is tweeting regularly about a topic I am interested in, I follow them, so I can see any of their general tweets as well. Rinse and repeat for each topic you have an interest in, and the list of people you follow will be over 100 in no time.

Now, for the bad part: Taking out the trash. Twitter is full of people who will spam you, by doing the most flattering thing of all: following your account. Since twitter sends you an email notification that someone is a follower, your curiosity makes you want to check them out. Many times, they will masquerade as a female in a bathing suit(or less). Their names will often be followed by a dash with a 4-digit number. You should immediately go to your follower page, and hit “report as spam”. This helps twitter eliminate them from the roster, and keeps any of your followers from checking their garbage out.

On a lesser note, I try to clean out people I follow from time-to-time. Some of them have reverted to inane chatter, instead of providing important news. Even worse, they are tweeting more often, and saying even less. If you are spending time in twitter, make sure that dump a few people to keep things uncluttered.

Some of you might be wondering how to get legitimate followers. It’s simple advice: Be you. If you are chatty, be chatty. Talk about your interests. ReTweet things from others that you find interesting. Be consistent. Spend time on twitter. The more you are engaged with others, the more likely it is that people will like, and follow what you have to say.

Now, let’s recap how to get the most out of twitter:

1. Know the major categories of Twitterers. Filter them out based upon your interests.

2. Get a twitter client, like TweetDeck, to help you manage the vast streams of information coming through.

3. Make sure you are following a local news station, national news station, and sources that cover any informational gaps that you might have.

4. Follow celebrities that are active and intelligent.

5. Use search and hashtags to sort out topics and people to follow that are of interest to you.

6. Take out the trash regularly to make sure your feed isn’t overloaded with garbage. Block or report bots as spam.

7. Gain more followers by contributing to the conversation, and being yourself.

That’s all for now. There are far more advanced methods of tweeting, following, and being heard. Most of those methods are custom rules, developed by each user. You wouldn’t think publishing a message would need rules. After all, how complex should sending out 140 characters be?

Evidently, as complex as we can possibly make something that has no definable purpose.

Kurt Hartman

The world is saturated with twits, tweets, and tweeps. Everyone, from Oprah to NPR has decided that this is the most brilliant application ever devised by man. They constantly cite it, talk about it, and overhype it to the Nth degree.

The one thing they never explain about twitter is how it is intended to be used. They don’t explain the reTweet, or spambot followers. They just tell random people to get online, and drop their thoughts, in 140 characters or less, of course.

It’s not their fault, really, as twitter doesn’t really have a defined purpose. The idea is that it is supposed to enable real-time communication, sort of a text message broadcast to the entire world. The actual purpose of tweets are left up to the users’ imaginations.

It was too much for me to get my mind wrapped around when I started, that is for sure. With this in mind, I’d like to tell you a couple uses that will make twitter a valuable investment of your time.

This article will serve a very practical purpose, both for the novice user of twitter, and for those who have lost interest: It’ll tell you how, what, and why to follow certain users, along with giving you the ability to find and organize that data in a meaningful manner.

With that in mind, let’s begin. There are around 7 major types of twitter users. Your interests will determine which of these folks it would be in your best interest to follow:

1. Newsies: The New York Times, Tribune Media, Huffington Post, Drudge Report, and various other news agencies use twitter as a point of distribution for their articles. Updates commonly carry newly published content, or respond to readers of their content, which will naturally drive new readers to their site.

2. Gurus: These people, like Tony Robbin or Robert Kiyosaki(of Rich Dad, Poor Dad fame) use their accounts to push out mini-seminars. Their updates range from the inspirational to motivational, deliver news updates, and of course, push product in-between.

3. Gossip Gals: They don’t miss a single controversy. It doesn’t matter how small, these girls(and guys—think Perez Hilton) won’t let it rest. While TMZ and the Smoking Gun throw out some really interesting stuff, I wouldn’t put it in the category of “news”.

4. Info-Marketers: Pushing everything from get-rich-schemes, to plugging their latest eBook, these folks peddle all things downloadable. They are always mentioning some resource that seems designed to help you make money, but will make them money instead.

5. Regular Marketers: Generally, tweeps of this ilk are pushing a physical product, or building up that brand. You’ll see everyone from tire companies to toilet paper purveyors interacting with their customers and fans. To spice things up, fun facts and interesting news are served with soft-sell promotional tactics.

6. Power Tweeters: This is an odd group. They generally tweet about anything and everything. Most of the time, they are female in gender, and are a mixture of Gossip Gals and Newsie fare, with a spatter of hometown chatter. They never sell anything. Many times, they will live-tweet their thoughts on concerts, television shows, and fashion.

7. Everyone Else: This encompasses roughly 97% of the twitterverse. They followed a few people, didn’t learn how to link, reTweet, or even reply inside of twitter. Eventually, they get tired of the whole thing, and move back to playing “Mafia Wars” on facebook.

While there are sub-groups within every group, these are where the lines are generally drawn. The most important takeaway from this breakdown is the following: Most people on twitter are trying to sell you something. Now that you know who’s online, how can you get the most out of twitter?

Glad you asked. The first thing to get is a twitter client. For the purpose of this article, we’re going with TweetDeck, a leader in the twitter client arena. It’s easy to use. Download it, open it up, enter your username and password…and magically, you have a bird’s eye view of everything happening in twitter(or at least who you are following, and their activity).

You’ll see your live twitter feed on the far left, in-between you’ll find any replies that have been made to your messages(if you’ve just opened an account, there won’t be any messages here), and on the far right, your direct messages(private messages between you and another user that are not broadcast to other users).

The first thing you should do is find twitterers who meet your basic informational needs. For that, I actually prefer to use google, as it generally does a better job of finding who, or what you are looking for than twitter’s native search service. Google your local station’s call sign and add twitter to the end.(e.g. WKPY twitter). Let’s say we were searching for a our local station in New Mexico. We’d follow @KOBTV. That will be useful for weather alerts, local news, and community events.

Next, get a national news feed you trust. CNN, MSNBC, and Fox all have twitter feeds kicking out news at the speed of type. You can now see what is making waves at the national level, along with any upcoming special reports.

Now comes the fun part…your interests. Love tech…grab @TechCrunch. Need your daily fix of stats and scores: Follow @ESPN. Pick 2-3 twittering entities that don’t overlap. For instance, unless you just love too much information, don’t follow ABC, NBC, and CBS news.

From there, it’s time to find interesting people to follow. See if your favorite celebrities, nobel laureates, or trashmen are online. Check out their profile online, either by searching google with their name, followed by twitter, or by going to their website, and finding out what it is. This is probably the greatest chance at interaction with the rich and infamous that you will get. Rainn Wilson(Dwight Schrute of “The Office”) is one celebrity with particularly interest thoughts, links, and conversation.

You have a base of good, solid tweets that you are now following. Here comes the fun part. There are people around the world having conversations about the latest news, movies, restaurants, whatever. Now, you just have to find them. Pull up the search feature in TweetDeck. There are two ways to search: hashtag, or plain text. Hashtags denote a post in a certain category. For instance, if you were looking for all the updates that include the President, but don’t actually mention him in the body, this is the easiest way to search. If you are just looking for all mentions of Barack Obama, you would enter his name in plain text.

Searching in TweetDeck will open a column that automatically updates each time the search term is mentioned. For instance, you could keep a column opened for any topics you are interested in, and monitor them in real-time. I like to keep an eye on precious metals, mining, and tire news(boring, I know). When I am monitoring twitter, I keep a #gold, #silver, #mining, and #tires tab open, so that I can keep abreast of what is happening. It’s like a stock ticker. Glance, see something you like, and read any article links that come through. If I see someone who is tweeting regularly about a topic I am interested in, I follow them, so I can see any of their general tweets as well. Rinse and repeat for each topic you have an interest in, and the list of people you follow will be over 100 in no time.

Now, for the bad part: Taking out the trash. Twitter is full of people who will spam you, by doing the most flattering thing of all: following your account. Since twitter sends you an email notification that someone is a follower, your curiosity makes you want to check them out. Many times, they will masquerade as a female in a bathing suit(or less). Their names will often be followed by a dash with a 4-digit number. You should immediately go to your follower page, and hit “report as spam”. This helps twitter eliminate them from the roster, and keeps any of your followers from checking their garbage out.

On a lesser note, I try to clean out people I follow from time-to-time. Some of them have reverted to inane chatter, instead of providing important news. Even worse, they are tweeting more often, and saying even less. If you are spending time in twitter, make sure that dump a few people to keep things uncluttered.

Some of you might be wondering how to get legitimate followers. It’s simple advice: Be you. If you are chatty, be chatty. Talk about your interests. ReTweet things from others that you find interesting. Be consistent. Spend time on twitter. The more you are engaged with others, the more likely it is that people will like, and follow what you have to say.

Now, let’s recap how to get the most out of twitter:

1. Know the major categories of Twitterers. Filter them out based upon your interests.

2. Get a twitter client, like TweetDeck, to help you manage the vast streams of information coming through.

3. Make sure you are following a local news station, national news station, and sources that cover any informational gaps that you might have.

4. Follow celebrities that are active and intelligent.

5. Use search and hashtags to sort out topics and people to follow that are of interest to you.

6. Take out the trash regularly to make sure your feed isn’t overloaded with garbage. Block or report bots as spam.

7. Gain more followers by contributing to the conversation, and being yourself.

That’s all for now. There are far more advanced methods of tweeting, following, and being heard. Most of those methods are custom rules, developed by each user. You wouldn’t think publishing a message would need rules. After all, how complex should sending out 140 characters be?

Evidently, as complex as we can possibly make something that has no definable purpose.

Kurt Hartman

Twitter is undoubtedly one of the most popular websites on the social networking circuits. And most people on twitter just tweet and tweet more.  If you are doing just that on twitter, you have surely underutilized Twitter’s potential.  There is a lot more you can do on twitter than just tweeting.  There are number of third party Twitter services that allow you to use Twitter alternatively.  It just takes a little bit of exploring and some creativity.  Here are some fun tweeting alternatives

• Tweetpic: tweetpic allows you to post photographs on Twitter. You can post pictures using your iPhone or Twitter’s API.  You cab then viral these photos easily on other platforms.

• Find a job:  a lot of users on Twitter post job tweets.  Network, explore and simply apply to jobs available.

• Play someone else:  ever wondered how twitter looked to other people?  Stop wondering.  By using ctwittlike application, you can view twitter from someone else’s eyes.  Just enter the name of the person who you want to explore and you will get the list of latest tweets from users being followed by that person.

• Send a twitter business card:  gone are days when strangers used to exchange printed visiting cards. Strangers these days exchange their social media profiles.  And why not, you get to know the person beyond his/her name, contact number and designation.  But if you are still lingering on to the idea of exchanging visiting cards, there is a cool virtual way of doing it.  By using twtBizCard, you can you can send your formal tweet address to someone and correspond with them through this.  All you need to do is card a tweet card; send a tweet with the #twtbizcard hash tag.

Vikas S
http://www.articlesbase.com/seo-articles/four-twitter-application-for-beginners-1184034.html