Twitter is a great tool. There are millions of people who are tweeting this very moment and the phenomenon is not going to end anytime soon. The idea of tweeting “What are you doing right now” has caught on so well that we see even President Barack Obama on Twitter! Twitter is here to stay, at least for a while till something much simpler than Twitter comes on the net.

As such, should you get on the bandwagon and tweet your Internet marketing collateral online? Twitter is a great business platform and it helps the consumers as much as it helps the businesses. However, just like any other thing, Twitter has its good points and bad points. Using Twitter for business purposes, hence, has its advantages and disadvantages.

Advantages of Twitter

Your Internet marketing can be done free of cost if you use Twitter wisely. Your target market is out there for you to seek and understand. Understand from their tweets, their passion and interests. Do your research on your target market by following the tweets of your target market for better understanding. Identify the strategies used by your competitors by following their tweets as well.

Twitter allows you to network efficiently and with large groups of people. Twitter and its third party applications allow you to segregate and interact with your target markets effectively. You can direct your Internet marketing campaigns at relevant groups efficiently by using Twitter

Twitter allows you to communicate directly with your target market instantly. Normally, the process of communication takes time. For example, if you have a Website, the communication would be via polls, which are not personal or though contact forms which are time consuming and impersonal as well. With twitter, you can expect instant communication with your target market. You may have just posted a tweet, but a reply from your target market could come in an instant as well. Twitter helps you to gather real time intelligence from your very own target market as well as obtain valuable feedback. The speed of communication is just fantastic with Twitter. Moreover, your near approach helps to builds lasting relationship as you will come across as a company that cares for its consumers instead of just hard selling.

Disadvantages of Twitter

Twitter is the number one site for spammers. You will have to filter and weed out spammers from your lists from time to time, if you want to have a good gauge of your target market. Otherwise, the followers total will be an inflated number which will not help in your Internet marketing campaigns. Filtering spam tweets is a lot of hard work. Other means of Internet marketing may seem feasible in the long run.

Twitter is addictive. It is very easy to get distracted as you join in the conversations or receive tweets outside your business interests. You will have to strike a balance with getting friendly with your followers and meeting your Internet marketing objectives

In conclusion, how you want to use Twitter is up to you. Like any other means of communication, Twitter has its own advantages and disadvantages. Advantages far outweigh disadvantages. Hence, use Twitter for your Internet marketing needs and ensure that Twitter is used sparingly. Your tweets can be classified as spam as well, if you are just posting tweets with inks and not connecting with your followers.

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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.

httpv://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 networkingsites 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.

httpv://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” 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.

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