Top 10 Twitter tips and tricks

Below is a listing of our top 10 favorite Twitter tips and tricks. These tips help make your Twitter experience more enjoyable and can help increase your followers.

Customize

• Change your profile picture. Use a picture of yourself to make it seem more personalized if this is your personal Twitter account.
• Utilize as much of the 160-character limit Twitter BIO space allows. Include keywords your followers or potential followers may be trying to find.
• Create your own background image. However, do not make the image too much like an ad or sales pitch. The background image must be less than 800k and we recommend a size of 1600x1200 for a large image or smaller if you plan on tiling the image or just having it on the left-hand side. Finally, keep in mind that smaller resolutions and monitor sizes hide much of the background.

Third-party tools

Take advantage of the hundreds of different third-party online tools and services that enhance your Twitter experience. Below are a few of our favorites.

• TwitPic - Take advantage of TwitPic to post pictures on your tweets. If you want to post pictures while away from the computer, use the Twitterific app.
• Qwitter - Great service that sends an e-mail anytime someone unsubscribes from your Twitter profile and mentions a possible Twitter post you made that may have caused them to leave.
• Manageflitter - Fantastic site for managing your followers and getting an overview of people not following you back, quiet users, and inactive users.
• WeFollow - Great website that allows you to add yourself to a listing of Twitter users by tags you find interesting.
• SocialOomph - Another great service with a collection of free Twitter tools including the ability to schedule when tweets gets posted.
• Twitter Fan Wiki Apps - Finally, this wiki has a listing of several hundred different Twitter applications and tools for users wanting more.

Use Twitter search

Take full advantage of the Twitter search tool. Below are just a few tips that can help improve your search capabilities on Twitter.

• Search for your website or blog URL and see if others are mentioning your page.
• Search for anything near you by adding near:"city state". For example, typingnear:"Salt lake city Utah" club would return current tweets that have happened in Salt Lake City, Utah with the keyword club in them.
• Find people whom you may enjoy following by searching for keywords that interested you.
• If you do not want tweets with links add ? -filter:links at the end of your search query.
• Need more options, use the Advanced Twitter search.
• Anytime you get excellent results click the "Save this search" button to save that search. These searches can then be found under "Saved Searches" on the right-hand part of your profile on the old Twitter interface or under the "Searches" tab next to your timeline on the new Twitter interface.

Followers

• Engage followers.
• Do not follow too many people. No one wants to follow someone following thousands of people with only 10 followers.
• Retweet interesting posts.
• Retweet and participate in conversations with people with lots of followers.
• Realize it is impossible for anyone to read every tweet.
• When first joining do not follow hundreds of people, doing this may mark you as a bot.

Create useful and interesting tweets

• Try to make all your tweets informative, useful, or funny.
• Do not post mundane posts, e.g. eating a bowl of cereal.
• Add hashtags to your tweets. For example, if your tweet is about computers, consider adding #computer in the tweet.
• Tweet frequently. No one is going to follow someone they do not know who has not tweeted in months. Try to tweet a few times a week or daily if you can manage.
• Do not whine or complain. Most people unfollow anyone who constantly whines or complains.
• Try to make your valuable tweets during the times people will most likely see them.
• Keep some space available in your tweet in case someone retweets your post.
• Use special characters in your tweets.

Know the lingo

Know the Twitter lingo, these are just a few examples: @reply, Direct Message (DM),Follower, Hashtag, Retweet (RT), Trending Topics, and Tweet. See the Twitter description for a complete listing of Twitter terms and Lingo and related terms.

Follow the masters

Following a few of the masters of Twitter and Social Networking give you an understanding of how to tweet better, posts to RT, and inspiration for tweets of your own. Below are the top ten Twitters we recommend following.

@GuyKawasaki
@Scobleizer
@jeffbullas
@briansolis
@tonyrobbins
@kevinrose
@timoreilly
@donttrythis
@zappos
@brainpicker

• Twitaholic - A full listing of the top users on Twitter based on Followers, which is great for finding and following the top users and learning what they are doing with their account.

Tip: Many of the first few hundred people are celebrities on Twitaholic, if they do not interest you skip the first page.

Create and use lists

Twitter lists are an excellent method of filtering filter through the people you follow. To create a list, click the Lists link, and then click Create a list. After creating a list, visit the person's profile page you want to add and click the list icon (shown to the right). Our Computers and Tech list is an example of a public list we created.

Go Mobile

Apple iPhones, Blackberry phones, Android phones, Windows phone 7 phones, and most of the other smartphones have Twitter applications. Take full advantage of these applications. For users who do not have smartphones Twitter also has extensive support for SMS, which can send tweets over a text message.

Advertise

• Mention your Twitter page as many places as you can, e.g. your business card, e-mail signatures, web page, blog, and on Facebook.
• Create a tweet button or at least your Twitter name on your pages, similar to the examples below.

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