Do you have a Twitter addiction? Are you a Twitter addict? I think as of this post, I have a bit of a Twitter addiction. I’ll explain how and why I use Twitter every waking hour of my day, along with some Twitter statistics to help motivate new users to Twitter.

Some of you may not even know what Twitter is, there is a nice video on YouTube that breaks it all down. It’s called “Micro Blogging” and you might be doing it already on others sites like Facebook or MySpace or LinkedIn and not even realize it.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddO9idmax0o

This month marks my one year anniversary with Twitter. Altho I’ve only started taking advantage of Twitter the last 5 months according to this TweetStats chart. The first part of my year I was just using Twitter with Ping.fm and updating all my social networking sites at one time. I think it was finding TweetDeck that really made Twitter work for me. I’ll post a video I found that will show you how to take advantage of TweetDeck even with 15,000 followers. That was the biggest problem for me, how to read what 100’s (at the time) of people are saying, there is no way to digest all the content in a timely fashion.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByhBzwTCa_M

So the million dollar question is how you build up your followers count. The simple answer is, you follow people. Follow people that are interested in the same thing you are, and chances are they will follow you back. You’re not going to get a new follower for every person you follow, but you will start to get more and more. You also need to post updates, I’m into a few things but “vbulletin/vbulletin” target=”_blank”>vBulletin” is a big part of my live and I’m always talking about it. So than when someone uses Twitter Search, and searches for “vBulletin” I’ll likely be on the front page and usually get followed. The same thing goes with any topic, the more you talk about it, the more followers your get that are interested in what you have to say. My next suggestion is to drop the default icon and background. Do a google search for Twitter Backgrounds and you’ll find tons of sites that will help you generate one like I’m using @BrandonSheley. I’ll go through my followers when I get time and stop following anyone that has the default icon. If you can’t tale 10 secs to upload ANYTHING, a picture, your logo, than I doubt you have anything good to read.

Twitter will place caps on the number of people you can follow, so from time to time you’ll need to unfollow those who aren’t following you back. For that I use Twitter Karma but when you get above 10,000 followers/ following Twitter Karma doesn’t work. At that point I search around and found Huitter.com Mutuality, it doesn’t give as many options as Twitter Karma did, but it works just the same.

I wouldn’t try and follow more than 500 people a day; twitter will tend to suspend your account, so take it slow and build your content. This is just like your real blog, Content is King, and a quality membership takes time to build but well worth the effort.

This post got a little longer than I thought. There is just so much good info on how to build a relationship with your followers and how to find perspective clients using Twitter tools. I’ll stop this post right here and continue a part two in a few days. I’ll explain what Twitter tools I use on my phone and the power of the ReTweet (RT) and why you should be using it.

]]> http://www.brandonsheley.org/twitter-addiction/feed/ 11