20 Dec 08 How to maximise your Twitter potent potential?
Twitter’s been the latest Web 2.0 craze, and there’s no doubt about that.
What is it? Well you have a bunch of friends that follow you, and you follow a bunch of friends yourself. This creates a stable social network, and eventually snowballs into a massive online community – so to speak. The point of the idea is to allow other people to know what your doing, pretty much as you do it. You have 140 characters to say what you want to say, and let your followers know!
Now many web developers use this social media network to gain traffic and you can do the same! More traffic means more revenue 
What you firstly need to do is, obviously sign up for an account. Then build up a good network of friends. This isn’t a short-term or “over night” traffic booster. Getting traffic from twitter will take some time, but the advantage is that it will be EXTREMELY targeted, simply because the visitor shows great deal of interest.
Once you sign up and build a good network of friends, you can start Twittering and letting people know what your doing, and every now and post a link to your site/page/product. Twitter will automatically cloak long URLs but that’s not a worry!
One of the biggest mistakes newbies using Twitter is that they go randomly mass adding people – DON’T DO THIS! It’s regarded as spam and you won’t succeed, just don’t even try! However, you can use the following 16 tools to maximize your Twitter Potential!
Twitter Specific Tools:
1) TwitterFox is a Firefox extension that notifies you of your friends’ status on Twitter and lets you make posts from your browser status bar. It also allows you to switch between multiple Twitter accounts in one click. This is my #1 must-have, deal-breaker, cannot live without Twitter plug-in.
2) Retweet This is an application designed for use with the Greasemonkey Firefox plug-in. It allows you to append a retweet button to the end of each Twitter entry to encourage your followers to retweet your posts.
3) Classify Twitter Users is a script that allows you to classify Twitter users and decide whether they are worth following based on their friends, followers and post ratios. Another Greasemonkey app, it’s a great tool to help you weed out the Twitter spammers and fan boys from the socially healthy.
4) TwittAd allows Twitter users to monetize their account by accepting advertising on the background image of their Twitter user profile. You decide the duration and price advertisers pay for exposure and get paíd for every hour you serve the ad.
5) TwitterCounter lets you add a daily updating TwitterCounter to your blog so everybody can see how popular you are by the number of persons following you.
6) TweetBeep is just like having Google Alerts for Twitter. It enables you to keep track of conversations that mention you, your products or your company via email. You can even keep track of who’s tweeting your website or blog. It’s a great tool for online reputation management and you don’t even have to be a Twitter user to benefit from it. TweetBeep is another one of my personal *must haves*.
7) Twitter Grader measures the reach and authority of a Twitter user, calculated by the pace of their updates, the completeness of their profile, their number of followers and the network power of those followers.
Twitter Grader displays as a score out of 100 and is consistently updating and adapting as your Twitter account grows. Based on those grades, Twitter Grader lists the Twitter Elite globally and in each country, just like Technorati does for bloggers.
TwitPic, as the name suggests, is a photo sharing tool for Twitter. When logged in, it allows you to upload photos and post them with comments as a Tweet. It works with a range of Twitter clients such as Twitterific, Twhirl and MobileTwitter and stores all your photos in a single location with updated viewing stats. As far as Twitter image sharing goes, this is king for reliability.
9) Twuffer is a Twitter buffer. It allows Twitter users to compose a líst of future tweets, and schedule their release. Twuffer is ideal for making hourly, daily or monthly announcements or send post-dated birthday greetings or reminders to people about upcoming events. It’s also perfect if you’re the type of person who wants to give the impression that you don’t ever sleep.
10) Twistori I have a real soft spot for this one. One of the developers is Amy Hoy, one of my favorite speakers from Webstock 2008 and a goth geek to boot. Twistori is a social experiment that taps into the Twitter conversations revolving around life’s central activities: Love, Hate, Think, Believe, Feel, Wish. You can click on any of these emotions and witness a live feed of Tweets that use them. It’s voyeuristic and utterly compelling.
11) iTweet is another interface for Twitter. It has built-in auto-refresh, search and hash tags and features full follow, block and notifications features. Users can view and post user bio, location and URLs inline with their tweets. Another cool feature of iTweet is the ability to Retweet a user post with a single click.
12) Twitturly is a service for tracking what URLs people are talking about as they talk about them on Twitter. Similar to Digg, on Twitturly, people “vote” for a URL. The more votes it gets the better it ranks. If it does well enough, it gets promoted to the home page and as the votes rise it gets displayed higher up the home page. Twitturly differs from Digg in that instead of voting on their site, you vote by participating on Twitter. Each time that you send a link to your followers on Twitter, Twitturly takes a note of it and applies your vote to that URL. It’s a great way to follow the loudest global conversations.
13) Mr Tweet is another big favorite of mine. Similar to LinkedIn , it looks through your extended network and makes suggestions to help you build effective relationships on Twitter. For example, which of your followers should you be following in return? Who are the most influential people you should be following? Who are your followers following?
14) Twitter Search is Twitter’s own built-in and oft-overlooked search tool. You can use it to search for other Twitter users, keywords, hash tag topics and a range of cool shortcut items.
Non Twitter Specific Tools:
15) FlipTitle is, not surprisingly, a tool that enables you to flip text upside down. It’s great for Twitter because sometimes your tweets can get lost in the conversation. Using FlipTitle makes sure they get noticed.
16) Bit.ly is a very cool URL shortener that also includes click-thru statistics. Why is it perfect for Twitter? Because the length of the converted URLs is generally much shorter than other URL converters like TinyURL. When you are tweeting, space is premium as your whole post can only consist of 140 characters including spacing.
Good luck with your Twittering Adventures!
Tags: backlinks, free, potential, SEO, tools, traffic, twitter
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I think you are thinking like sukrat, but I think you should cover the other side of the topic in the post too…
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