Yeah, I know everyone tells you that you have to use Twitter as part of your marketing plan, and Twitter is the greatest thing ever. But how exactly do you use Twitter effectively? Do you just throw out some links to all your Twitter friends and then they instantly go buy whatever you told them to? Is that how it works with your mailing list? Does everyone just do what you tell them to or do you only get a certain percentage of people to act?
Quick Facts about Twitter
Please don’t let the popularity of Twitter fool you, a good portion of accounts on there are owned by the same people, just using different names. Some people may have 1 account others may have a dozen or more accounts. It’s like Facebook or Myspace, there are a lot of real people on there then a lot of people pretending to be other people as well. Think AOL about 10 years ago when you could have 5 screen names per account so someone could be JohnDoe one second and then JaneDoe the next time they log in.
So who does the majority of the tweeting? Celebrities and internet marketers. The marketers are of course trying to shove another product down your throat and ironically they’re pitching it to other internet marketers. Basically it’s whoever is the best salesman in the situation wins. But don’t let this little rant of mine talk you out of using Twitter, as there are other ways you can use Twitter effectively aside from Tweeting.
Twitter Lists
Ah, the Twitter list, this has to be the greatest invention of all time. So you reserved yourself a Twitter screen name for the keyword you wanted to target. Guess what my twitter name is… pokermoneyclips. Anyway, now that I have my name I can’t really get any more use out of throwing keywords into my titles now can I? Yeah, I can through the use of the “Twitter List.” A twitter list is something you can create in about 5 seconds, where you throw some additional keywords in as the title of your list for SEO purposes. Please keep your titles related to what you talk about though as Twitter is erasing accounts on an hourly basis for mischievous acts. It works something like this, I sell a poker novelty, so I created a list called “poker novelties.” The phrase itself doesn’t generate a ton of traffic but hey I wanted to rank on the SE’s for it so I went after it. So now I have an additional page on the SE’s for my desired keyword phrase that features all my tweets to links of stuff I want people to look at and my main url on the right hand side of the page.
Twitter for one way links
Another reason to be on Twitter is for the one way links back to your website. There are a ton of websites out there that feature twitter user profiles and keep track of who is following who. If someone is following you that is on one of those websites, that’s an additional link back to your site. Not only that, it’s also a link from a website that is not considered a “bad neighborhood.” 99% of poker websites are considered bad neighborhoods by Google, which is why you have to do more work to gain any PR. Let me put it to you like this, I built a website in another “good neighborhood” niche, and well it has a PR of 3 in a matter of weeks with less than 20 sites linking back to it. For us poker webmasters we have to work a little bit harder. Any one way link you can grab is a good thing, and Twitter lists allow you to grab a handful of links without any additional effort.
How To Gain Followers
Being that there are about 5 million products currently on the marketplace to grow a following I’m not really going to spend much time on the subject matter. I will however caution you against paying for automated programs that follow people based on keywords as you won’t see your desired results. You’ll spend more time un-following people than you should and your list of followers will still be incredibly low. Search around for a free alternative, follow a few people a day (if you follow too many people too quickly your account can be terminated) and just run with it as it only takes about 5 minutes a day to grow a decent following. As with the search engines, people following you is equivalent to people linking back to your website.
Now go out there and make the most of this opportunity.
Jason Narog wants to know what kind of poker card protectors you’re using
