Twitter Tips and Strategies

For the past two days I've talking about twitter and mentioned some twitter basics. Today I'm writing about how to find people on twitter, and some strategies if you're using twitter for a business.

How to find people

1. On the upper part of your twitter screen you'll see a link saying "Find people". If you click on that you'll see a search box. If you type, say, "craft" in that box and press search it will come up with popular people whose username contains craft.
2. My preferred way to find people though is through the search function. If you go back to your home page you'll see a search box. Type something in there, like, say, craft. It will come up with a list of people who have just tweeted about crafts.
3. Another good way to find people is to go to someone's twitter page (click their username) and see who is following them, or who they are following.
4. Each Friday you'll see tons of tweets that start with this: #FF. That stands for Follow Friday. It's basically just shoutouts to people they are following and it's another great way to find new people to follow.

Twitter strategies
I'm just going on the assumption that you're not using twitter for solely fun reasons, but that you're also going to use it to as a marketing and selling tool. If you're doing it for fun, then just start tweeting!

1. If a large number of followers is something that is important to you there's a few things you might want to do before you follow a bunch of people. First of all, I'd definitely fill in your profile. You can do that by going to settings, then profile. Many people, including me, don't automatically follow back, so the profile is something I look at to determine if I want to follow you. You also add your avatar in the profile section.
2. I'd also recommend adding a background picture. Go to design, then all the way on the bottom is "change background image". Click "tile background" if you want the pic to repeat, instead of just having one pic filling the screen (you might have to resize it). If you're selling something tangible, this is a good place to show off a product.
   
3. Decide what kind of account you will run. There are some businesses that just tweet updates. This might work as a sales tactic for well established and popular sellers, but I for one hardly ever follow people like this. It is however the easiest and less time consuming way, so you should decide if you want to go the easy route, or if you also want to use twitter for networking purposes. I haven't had any sales from twitter, so I can't really speak from experience how to exactly get sales, but I've read that it's much better if you tweet "conversational" things as well as sales type posts.
   
4. Do a bunch of tweets first. I also base whether to follow back or not on what someone tweets about. So I'd do maybe 10 or so tweets over a few days before you start following a bunch of people, especially people whose "following" number is much lower than their "followers" number.
5. What do you tweet about? Anything really. If you want a successful etsy seller to emulate I'd check out CrochetGal's twitter page. You can tweet about something interesting you saw that day, a cool recipe or pattern that you came across, etc. I'd also start talking to people right away, using the @. If I see a twitter page of someone who doesn't have any @ on their page of tweets I often don't follow them. To me that means you're not interested in the social aspect of twitter, and that don't like helping, sharing, or encouraging other people (at least on twitter).

And that's all I can think of. Let me know if I can answer any questions, and say hello to me at http://twitter.com/thatyarnstore