8 Ways To Use Twitter
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If you haven’t already tested this out, you probably want to add me on Twitter.
Twitter is a social networking tool that enables individuals to create micro-blogging sessions. This allows you to update followers on what you are doing by the second. This has wide implications and a highly valuable set of processes you can use to utilize this new social media.
#1 - Establish an information thread for credibility.
As with traditional blogging, information threading on Twitter can help you generate more followers who find that your information is useful. Obviously, you will need to have other people read your “tweets” (posts) and mention this to their followers. In that sense, it truly is a word-of-mouth device for leveraging.
#2 - Establish internal corporate communication.
Ever wonder how teams can communicate using Twitter? Well, load up www.Twhirl.com. Once you get yourself on your desktop, add your thoughts and feelings into your Twhirl interface, and start working. Not only does Twitter now serve as a reference, it also can be used to chat with colleagues on the go. It’s not as rigorous as chatting on MSN or Yahoo Messenger or Skype, but the mode of communication literally spreads as though everyone can read your mind. If you started the day with a tweet saying “Energized for the day… looking forward to crunching numbers”, you end up being better able to let your colleagues and team members know what you are doing and feeling. Certainly helps with team dynamics!
#3 - Prelaunch a Product.
Jeff Walker - eat your heart out! Twittercasts will enable individuals to create a larger proportion of buzz. This is particularly useful when you already have a following. People who are interested in what you do. If you want to instantly disseminate information to people who are already rabidly snapping up your content, you will want to use Twitter to do so. A Twittercast (sending information “live” on Twitter) will enable people to dynamically receive great content, while you generate pre-launch (or in PLF-speak… pre pre-launch) buzz.
#4 - Seek Advice.
Posting a question generally gets people answering you. Polls - instant polls - can be done. Darren Rowse of Problogger.net used this several times as far as I can see… about whether to eat a McDonald’s meal or not! 
Certainly there are further applications for such approaches.
#5 - Gather expert information.
Recently, Ken Little posted an interesting resource which I’d never heard of before. http://Surchur.com. I visited it because of his recommendation, and it turns out that there’s a lot more going on with that site that made my mind go “wow, interesting”. When you send information tweets, you get more fans, and increase your credibility, but you can literally use this as a source of updates on things going on around the world.
#6 - Build a following.
Yes, it seems like a numbers game. But being able to have a thousand followers is powerful. Recently, Simon Leung tweeted that there was a bad hotel he was staying in. I’ll bet hundreds of people got to know about it that very instant. Good for Simon’s followers, BAD for that hotel. I call this “Death by Twitter”. You can literally destroy a person’s or organization’s reputation by tweeting it to death. So it’s important to build a following.
A cool way to do this is to start following others worth following and then you go out and notice who tweets whom. Usually it starts with a @ sign, so that whatever is being tweeted will also be received by the other party. So if you wanted to send me a broadcast message and also let my followers see it, you will probably have @stuarttan appended to that message on twitter.
Then, suddenly, when you are chatting with other prominent people on the Tweetersphere, they get to know about you, and add you. There are all kinds of combinations here - getting people to Tweet with you, scheduling a Twitterview (an interview using Twitter), checking out people who are interesting and adding them… the list will continue!
#7 - Get followers to visit your blog posts.
This one is huge. It’s a social tool, right? So you probably want to get people to know you a bit more. Gee, add some personality to your blog posts so that others will get to know WHO you are rather than WHAT to learn. That’s why I’m all messed up. I have “presentation” style articles that I put on my blog, but I also have these “stream of consciousness” articles like this one that popped out from nowhere. Oh well… post your blog link to Twitter with a CLEAR subject headline that gets them interested. This will pull more than just a couple of people to your bog posts.
#8 - Update with pictures!
There’s something called TwitPic (ya - I know it doesn’t sound great but well…) and you can upload interesting photos of that capture the imagination of your audience. Oh, and remember to add your URL to the photo as well. Sometimes, your picture can be also instructional in nature - like a chart or something.
Okay… I’m a little out of text here, so I’ll think more about this and see what else I can do to whip up creative ideas with Twitter okay? In the meanwhile, happy tweeting!
Source: tweetcast
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