Jason Preston (@jasonp107) is the Director New Media at the Parnassus Group, hosts of 140: The Twitter Conference (@140tc)

Let’s face it, Twitter is all about search. Real time search. Why else would they redesign their home page to show off their search functionality? The amount of real-time information pulsing through their service at any given minute is impressive, to say the least.

But for all that, Twitter’s built-in search is a frustratingly limited tool, providing access to a very limited amount of the data set available via the web site or their API.

Enter TweepSearch, a search application built by Damon Cortesi that allows you to search through the profile information of over 10 million unique accounts.

Here are three things you can do with TweepSearch that you can’t do with Twitter Search:

Search By Profession

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could find other marketers on Twitter? Other journalists? Other social media experts? Well it turns out that you can, at least as far as people volunteer their professions in their profile.

Searching for “journalist” on Tweepsearch yields, at the time I write this, 16,099 people you could potentially follow. “Marketer” pulls in 89,061.

These are all people who have added the term “Journalist” or “Marketer” somewhere in their Twitter bio information. You’re not going to get everyone of course, but then again, you’re probably not going to follow 16,000 people, either.

Search by URL

Let’s take the “profession” trick one step further; what if you wanted to find out who, on twitter, is associated with a certain business URL.

It’s a bit of a hack because TweepSearch won’t independently search the URL field, so if someone types a URL into their “bio” field, it will also show up too. That said, it works pretty well.

Say you want to know who on Twitter is associated with the game Spymaster. A good start would be to search for people who list playspymaster.com as their profile URL. Type:

www.playspymaster.com

into TweepSearch, and you’ll see a list of 22 results. Easy enough to comb through and pluck the real ones from the list.

Search within someone’s friends

Another cool trick you can pull with TweepSearch is to search within the bios of someone’s friends only. For example, if we wanted to see how many of Robert Scoble’s friends mention Rackspace in their bio, we’d type the following into the search box:

@scobleizer rackspace only:friends

This particular search turns up 69 friends. I Guess Scoble is popular at the office

There are a number of other cool types of search you can do based on the data Damon has available through TweepSearch. If you’re interested, there’s even a handy help page to walk you through it.

Happy hunting.

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.

Just starting out on Twitter? Looking for some Twitter Tips to get you started?

Twitter is bound to have a load of new users today as it is being featured on Oprah - so I thought it might be a good day to share some tips for the beginner Twitter user who is just getting going with the medium.

1. What’s in it for Your Followers? - How to be Useful on Twitter
2. 10 Easy Steps for Twitter Beginners - good sound advice and tips on getting going on Twitter
3. 8 Sure-Fire Ways to Tick off the Twitterverse - a few things to avoid on Twitter
4. 5 Ways I Benefit from Twitter - this outlines why I love Twitter in my business of building blogs
5. Defining Your Twitter Goals - this one is more for those who want to use Twitter for other purposes than just letting their family know when they’ll be home.
6. How to Set up a Twitter Account - most of your are probably past this one but it could be useful if you’re a ‘Pre-Twitter’ user.
7. 5 Steps to Model Successful Twitter Users - an exploration of a few ways that Twitter is being used
8. Think Like a Toddler and Find Your Voice on Twitter - using the analogy of growing up as a kid to growing as a Twitter User
9. Twitter in Plain English - cool video on the basics of Twitter
10. What Twitter Application is Right for You? - looking at some of the tools people use on Twitter
11. 10 Traits of Highly Effective Twitter Users - some good advice for growing your profile on Twitter
12. How to Get More Followers on Twitter - a question many ask. If you’re not a celebrity to start with - you might want to read this.
13. 6 Ways to Maximize the Use of Your 140 Characters - basic ‘Tweet Writing Tips.

To keep up to date with more Twitter Tips and Tutorials for both individuals and businesses wanting to get on Twitter - follow us on Twitter and subscribe to our news feed.

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.

Since it was launched last fall, over 1.5 million people have graded their profiles using Twitter Grader.

But what does a Twitter Grade actually mean — and how can you use it to improve how you use Twitter?

Here’s the scoop: Your Twitter Grade is a measure of how well you’re using Twitter as a marketing tool. The number is a percentile score based on how effectively you’re following best Twitter-for-business practices, compared to all the other people that have been graded.

To give you a better sense of how you can improve your use of Twitter as a marketing tool, here’s a breakdown of a few questions Twitter Grader asks when grading your profile (as well as some of the thinking behind them):

1) How many followers do you have? Reach is important, and Twitter Grader puts some weight on the number of people following you. Offering interesting content and interacting often online will get you more followers. Also, those who have a lot of followers are frequently thought-leaders in the space.

2) What is the power and influence of those people following you? Choose your friends wisely, and build a network of people who have have large networks themselves. To have influential people follow you is powerful.

3) How many people are you following? If you are following more people than are following you, it reduces your grade a bit. This “poor ratio” often (although, not always) implies that a person is following too many people at once, instead of letting organic relationships naturally develop. Remember to build your network organically, step-by-step.

4) How often do you update and interact with your network? Being an active member of the Twitter community defineitly gets you points. Remember to consistantly interact with your network. However, tweeting excessively without reason can hurt your grade.

5) How often does your network engage with you? Twitter Grader thinks very highly of people who are tweeted at, cited in the context of a tweet or retweeted. To have people interact or reference you shows authority. Give people a reason to talk about you.

What do you think? Are there other best-practices Twitter Grader should be assessing? How do you use Twitter for marketing?

You signed up for Twitter, added a short bio, uploaded an avatar and are Tweeting regularly, but still nobody’s following you.

Now what?

The way most Twitter users (especially new ones) build a base of Twitter followers is by following people themselves. Lots of people follow-back people who follow them, so by going out and following people you should be able to accumulate a lot of followers.

I recently spent some time using data from Twitter Grader to test this assumption. I broke up the database into “buckets” of users based on how many users they’re following. If you’re following around 100 users, you’re in the 100-user bucket, if you’re following close to 1000 users, you’re in that bucket.

The graph below shows the number of users in each bucket (the red line) and the average number of followers the users in each bucket have (the blue line).

The red line indicates that most users aren’t following a ton of people, which is expected given that most users aren’t Twitter-addicts. The blue line, however, tells a more interesting story: People who follow lots of people tend to have lots of followers themselves.

Let’s look at little closer at the follow-back assumption. The graph below shows the distribution of Twitter users at each following to follower ratio.

We see that most users have close to a 1:1 ratio of following to followers, meaning that many users follow-back those that follow them.

So does that mean you should go nuts and follow tons and tons of people? To answer that question, let’s look at how your following/follower ratio is related to the number of people that follow you.

The graph below shows the average number of followers of users based on their ratio. A ratio of 0.5 means that you follow half the number of people that are following you, and a ratio of 2 means you follow twice as many people as are following you.

This shows that users with a low following to follower ratio tend to have a high number of followers. That means that if your goal is to build a Twitter account with lots of followers, and we assume these factors have some sort of causal relationship, you should try to keep your ratio near or under 1 (following the same number of people as follow you or less).

Conclusion

The data shows that the best way to build a robust Twitter account is via a stepped approach. Follow a few people (a few of them will follow you back), then follow a few more. Don’t go crazy following thousands of people. Do it slowly and build up your followers gradually.

We’ve all heard people say “I won’t follow you back if you don’t have a link and bio” etc. But do people really mean it? Does having a bio and website link in your Twitter profile really make a difference in the number of followers you have? The answer is yes.

I dugg back into the data we’ve collected from Twitter Grader. We have a bunch of different information on over 1.6 million Twitter accounts, including bio, link and follower data.

The first “aha” moment from this slice of data is the sheer number of users without bios and links. Almost two-thirds of users don’t have a bio or link listed on their Twitter profiles.

Looking at the average number of followers shows a very distinct trend. Users with a bio have over 8 times more followers on average than users without a bio and users with a link have over 7.5 times as many as users without.

Beyond sheer number of followers, power users are even less likely to follow you if you don’t have a bio and link. (Power users are Twitter users with high Twitter Grades.)

Users with a bio have over 15.5 times more power followers than those without a bio. Users with a link have over 22 times more power followers than without.

And of course your Twitter Grader score is effected strongly.

The bottom line here is that if you haven’t already specified a site and a bio for your Twitter profile (and lots of you haven’t) go do it now.

by Web Designer, Copywriter and Author Sherice Jacob from iElectrify and Get Niche Quick (follow her at @sherice).

Who would’ve thought that a service like Twitter could help you not only reach more potential clients, but also help make your day more organized? Here are 10 “must have” Twitter applications and plugins to add to your marketing arsenal. Start using any one of these Twitter tools and watch your productivity (and your customer list) grow by leaps and bounds!

1. TweetDeck - TweetDeck not only shows you the last 200 tweets made by your followers and followees, but also organizes @ replies directed to you, direct messages, search terms and the latest news in the Twitterverse all into manageable columns.

2. Twhirl - Twhirl works similarly to TweetDeck, except it lets you access multiple Twitter accounts directly through the software. With Twhirl, you can keep your business and personal accounts separate without losing track of either of them.

2. Ping.fm - While not exclusively a Twitter tool, Ping.fm lets you broadcast Twitter tweets to other popular social networks including MySpace, Facebook, Hi5, and dozens more. Using ping.fm keeps everyone up-to-date on your current projects and widens your “social net” to attract more customers to your networking base.

3. Twitter Tools - Integrate your Wordpress blog with Twitter and vice versa. You can turn your blog headlines into tweets and your tweets into content for your blog. It’s also widget-friendly, so you can simply drag it to your Wordpress sidebar to display your latest tweets to your blog readers.

4. Tweetburner - Shorten, send out and track links sent via Twitter. See how many clicks your latest blog or article has generated. A great way to gauge the popularity of your content. See the most-clicked Twitter links on the Tweetburner homepage. Also works with FriendFeed.

5. GroupTweet - Perfect for when you only want certain messages to go out to a group of your followers, friends or family or for when you’re working on a web development project and need to send or receive client-confidential information. Registering is as simple as creating a group name and making its settings private in Twitter.

6. Twittercal - Integrate Twitter with your Google Calendar. By simply adding @gcal as a friend, you can tweet events, to-do’s and reminders directly to your Google Calendar and have it checked every minute.

7. Twitter Timer - To get reminders directly through Twitter, follow @timer and send a direct message to @timer as simple as 10 order pizza. It will remind you to order pizza in 10 minutes.

8. Tweetbeep - Get Twitter alerts whenever someone mentions any keyword you want to follow. Use it for your name, company name or to find potential clients (by getting an alert for the term “web development” for example). Tweetbeep works even if the original poster uses a URL shortening service like TinyURL.

9. Qwitter - Find out when you get un-followed by using Qwitter. Qwitter will not only alert you as to who is no longer following you, but they’ll show you the tweet you posted that (may or may not) have caused the person to unsubscribe.

10. TweetLater - TweetLater lets you schedule your tweets for a later date/time, saving you from being glued to Twitter. Also emails you keyword alerts, sends “thank you” notes to new followers and handles multiple Twitter accounts effortlessly.

Give these Twitter tools a try to help simplify your social networking while getting more exposure with half the effort. Reach more clients, free up more time and stay organized. Once you start using these Twitter applications and plugins, you’ll never know how you got along without them!

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.

by Marinel Mones

Twitter, the popular micro-blogging site, publishes online messages with a maximum of 140 characters. Currently, Twitter has an estimated 4.1 million visits to the site and climbing per month in the U.S. alone. It is considered to be the fastest growing social network, and is one of the most viral social media tools freely available. Many brands attempt to use the tool to market their services and products, but the successful brands use Twitter to listen and engage with their stakeholders. (img from seyDoggy’s photostream)

Brian Solis, a Principal at FutureWorks, said, “Of all of the social tools and services that are pervasive throughout our digital society, only a select few communities can boast the pseudo fanatical conviction that Twitter’s users unanimously possess.”

Twitter can be compared to skimming the headlines, only viral with links, tweets and conversation moving at the speed of 140 characters. At the same time, it lacks the depth of other forms of social media, like content rich blogs or a contact manager like LinkedIn.

Similar to other social networks, organizations should not just jump onto the Twitter bandwagon. Before engaging companies and organizations need to assess their purpose and potential benefits of using Twitter. Below are key questions to consider:

• What can Twitter do for my organization? Twitter connects organizations to their target audiences and allows them to build trust and relationships. This micro-blogging site is excellent for nonprofits and social good advocates to raise awareness for their efforts and a good place for micro-campaigns.
• What can we do for our Twitter community? Can we add to the conversation? What value do we bring to potential followers on Twitter? Are we ready to be present the other 90-95% of the time when we don’t have a need to communicate with the marketplace? Are we ready for an ongoing conversation?
• One account or multiple accounts? One account per organization is recommended. Multiple accounts create confusion. It’s OK for employees of an organization to have their own personal account as long as employees are being transparent of who they are and who they work for, i.e. “@Richard from Dell”. Organizations can elect a person to manage the account and engage with stakeholders. All Twitter correspondence regarding the organization’s information can be addressed with the main account. Employees could provide the Twitter handle (username) of the organization’s main Twitter profile on their own profiles (crosslinking is important for consistency and unification).
• How do I use Twitter? The opportunities for organziations to use Twitter are incessant. Twitter is a tool meant for engaging, not just following people and vice versa. The Dosh Dosh blog shares different ways beginners, professionals and organizations can you use Twitter. The list includes:
  • Networking – There are many ways to network on Twitter. Organizations should use Twitter search to find fellow industry organizations, professionals, and potential stakeholders to follow. If organizations can effectively build relationships on Twitter, the potential for leveraging Twitter in promotional efforts is endless.
  • Receiving feedback – As with every social media tool, listening and engaging with fellow Twitterers are fundamental. Network Solutions is a prime example of this. Network Solutions monitors the “Twittersphere” for conversations about the company – from customer service to providing potential stakeholders with coupon offers. Network Solutions responds to Tweets (the post/entry made on Twitter), often asking for feedback, and in turn learns how to better serve their clients.
  • Direct traffic – Crosslinking blog posts, new campaign information, etc. about your organization will help drive traffic to your site. Synchronize updates with your website. Micro-blogging sites offer badges (an image, usually squared and displayed on a blog, which signifies the blogger’s participation in an event, contest, or social movement) and widgets (mini applications that performs a specific function and connects to the Internet) to embed on web pages such home sites or blogs.
  • Provide information – Share information about organization on your profile and in your Tweets. This information should be relevant to your stakeholders. Information about local events, conferences, etc. are all appropriate. Providing information does not mean pitch your organization.
  • Read News – Twitter users tend to share information using tiny URLs. This can be blog posts or online news article URLs. In addition to following and engaging with industry professionals, the organizations should read the content – including the links – of those they follow and their followers, if the Tweet deems relevant.
  • Branding – An organization’s brand should permeate on and offline. Remember, brands are perceptions of organizations in the minds of their consumers. Be consistent by using established logos, colors, etc. Consistency signifies a united front for organizations.

For example, social media consultant and social media for social good advocate, Beth Kanter, used Twitter to help a young Cambodian woman receive treatments for her health. Kanter challenged people at the Seattle Gnomedex 8.0 Conference in August 2008 to use their Twitter networks to raise money for this woman. In 90 minutes, Kanter raised $2,500 and by the end of the conference $4,000. Kanter was successful because she has a large network, but she also cultivates her relationship with her Twitter followers.

What Twitter Can Do For You

Tracking keywords and conversations is one of the benefits of Twitter. Organizations can follow dialogues and research key issues using Twitter Search and hashtags (#). Following conversations provides the organizations with benchmarks and results.

• The tracking keywords feature is used on your phone or IM. People simply send text messages with “track” in front of the word they’d like followed (i.e. “track nonprofits”). Results are given in real-time.
• There are many tools for performing Twitter searches. The most popular is Twitter Search (formally known as Summize before Twitter acquired it). Twitter searches enable organizations to filter conversations.

If an organization wanted to see what the Twittersphere was saying about them, they could easily use Twitter search to monitor the conversations. Twitter search also provides an RSS Feed (a system that generates frequently updated information from a site) for specific terms. Organizations could really use the search to answer questions and track trends.

• Hashtags make it easier to follower conversations on Twitter. Words or phrases marked with a hash (#) as a prefix signify tracking. People create hashtags in order to view the results and conversations in the Twittersphere. Hashtags are excellent to use for campaigns.

Communicating provides only140 characters to capture your stakeholder’s interest. If organizations continuously build relationships and network on Twitter and the campaigns are thoughtfully executed, then the campaign will be successful. It’s critical for 98% of marketers out there to ensure they don’t just broadcast using a Twitter profile (CNNers, Guy Kawasaki and Shaquille O’Neal aside). Success demands participation and conversation.

Take the Twit2Fit effort as an example. Twit2Fit is an ongoing Twitter movement that supports the health and wellness of people and challenges Twitter users to exercise and create or maintain a healthy lifestyle. When people tweet about exercising, they add the #twit2fit to their post. The movement encourages people to become healthy and allows Twitterers to show their support for better health and wellness.

Another example is Epic Change’s Tweetgiving campaign, an effort to raise money to fund a new classroom for a school in Tanzania. In just 48 hours, Epic Change was able to raise $10,000 through the power of Twitter and social media.

The best benefit organizations get from joining Twitter is the relationships. The Twitter community is continuously growing and thrives on participation and interaction. Think of your Twitter relationships as investments of the organization. To keep a client, you must continue nourishing that relationship and offer assistance as needed. Offer your Twitter community with information by providing answers pertaining to their sector-related questions. Listen and engage with your stakeholders.

Conclusion

Twitter is a helpful tool when effectively used. The dynamics of the Twitter community allows organizations to use connect with their stakeholders and offer information about themselves or their cause. Through this micro-blogging tool, the organizations can meet new people, share information with their stakeholders about organization updates or events, track trends and conversations in the nonprofit industry and even create a micro-campaign. With Twitter, organizations are listening, engaging and building relationships that extend beyond the social network.

Ever wonder how often you should be tweeting? How much is too much, and why do some people seem to do nothing all day but sit around posting to Twitter?

One of the great things about tools like Twitter Grader is that they allow you to do all sorts of interesting data analysis. Our database includes stats on more than 1.6 million Twitter user.

The average tweets per day (TPD) I measured was 4.422 and the average number of followers for users in the database was 103.39.

Below is a graph of the distribution of those 1.6 million Twitter users’ average number of tweets per day. Notice that most users fall towards the low end of the range, meaning that most users only tweet a few times a day (or less).

What is more interesting than that is what happens when we the graph average number of followers of users at various TPD levels. As you can see by the graph below, a sweet spot emerges. Users who tweet between 10 and 50 times per day have more followers on average than those that tweet more or less frequently. The “peak” of the curve below is at about 22 tweets per day.

There are a small but siginificant number of users who tweet more than 150 times per day on average, but when added to the above graph they only continue the downward trend to the right.

At the extremely high-end of the spectrum the TPD metric shows top users at a variety of different posting rates. The blue line on the first graph represents the follower counts of the 50 most followed users, and the red line represents their tweets per day. The table at the end of this post is the tweets per day of the 20 most followed users in our database.

User		Followers	Tweets Per Day
	barackobama	316651	0.38
	CNNBrk	263730	0.81
	stephenfry	226854	8.06
	twitter	205758	0.37
	britneyspears	191126	0.53
	kevinrose	177949	2.72
	Nytimes	174635	39.04
	lancearmstrong	164864	7.85
	algore	156223	0.12
	ev	148709	3.67
	the_real_shaq	144201	3.48
	aplusk	143299	12.13
	nprpolitics	142835	11.84
	mashable	136364	19.65
	techcrunch	129105	9.64
	Veronica	129017	3.98
	ijustine	128965	7.33
	wilw	128160	6.16

If you’re just using LinkedIn to job hunt, you’re missing out on the power of Twitter. Here’s expert advice on how to tweet your way to new contacts and opportunities.

By C.G. Lynch

February 25, 2009 — CIO — Though LinkedIn tops the list of professionally-oriented social networks for job seeking, you can also use Twitter to get the word out about your skills and talents to relevant people in your industry.

But you must take some steps to be a good Twitter citizen before you tweet yourself into your next gig. We spoke with some career and social media experts on how to utilize Twitter for the purpose of job seeking, and the ways in which you can promote your own interests while helping others at the same time. (As you’ll find, you can’t do one without the other).

If you’re new to Twitter, we recommend reading our beginners’ guide to Twitter, as well as our Twitter etiquette guide, to learn more about what makes this community operate. Overall, it’s important to remember that Twitter is about exchanging ideas and letting people know more about you based on the content of your tweets.

Read article…

by Jamie Harrop (follow him at @jamieharrop and learn more about him at the bottom of this post).

Having reached 750 followers earlier today and wrote over 6,000 updates, I’m a big fan of Twitter. But over the last week I’ve found myself becoming too much of a fan. Defending Twitter to the death has become a part of my daily life.

Across Facebook and forums, I’ve conversed with hundreds of people who “don’t get” Twitter, and people who claim to “get it” but really don’t.

Now, I have no problem with people who don’t understand Twitter. It’s a phenomenon, for sure, and one that is going to take time to develop in to a household name in any area outside of Uber-Geek-Street. But it’s when people claim to understand Twitter, but still say they hate it, that I step up to the plate and feel the need to bear arms and defend.

Sausage and Eggs for Breakfast

The conversation usually goes like this:

John Doe - “I hate Twitter”
Jamie - “Why?”
John Doe - “I don’t want to know what somebody ate for breakfast!”
Jamie - “If you used Twitter, you would know it’s nothing like that”
John Doe - “I have used Twitter, and it’s exactly like that”
Jamie - “Maybe that’s because you’re not using Twitter in the best way?”

At this point I usually scuttle away to John Doe’s now defunct Twitter account to find his last Tweet that reads “Had sausage and eggs for breakfast. Eggs didn’t smell too good”.

The law of attraction plays a huge part in your Twitter experience

If you follow boring, selfless, “I ate sausage for lunch” twitter users, your experience of twitter will seem boring and selfless

When I open up Twhirl each morning, all I’m concerned about is how much value Twitter brings me. But after 19 months of using it, I’ve come to realise that the amount of value I get from Twitter is directly determined by the amount of value I give to Twitter.

If you want Twitter to give you value, try giving some value first.

5 ways to Give Value to Your Twitter Followers

Here are five ways to give value to your followers, in the hope that value is returned.

1. Retweet Messages

There’s not many things on Twitter that grab the attention of somebody more than a retweet. A retweet instantly builds a relationship. It shows the person you’re retweeting that you enjoy what they just wrote and you want to engage in conversation.

When someone retweets a Tweet by me, I’m much more excited, engaged and grateful than I am when I receive a normal reply. Retweets to Twitter are what StumbleUpon is to blogs and word of mouth recommendations are to offline businesses. Positive comments and feedback are great, but it’s so much better to see people taking the time to share your message with others.

2. Build friendships by Replying

It’s very easy to be one dimensional when using Twitter. You wake up in the morning and reach the office, open up Twhirl or Tweetdeck, write a couple of Tweets, minimise the program to the task bar, open the program again at lunch and write a few more Tweets, then minimise it again.

It’s the people who take time to keep Twhirl or Tweetdeck open, and take the time to read their followers Tweets, and take the time to reply to those Tweets, that truly make the biggest impact on Twitter.

Even if it’s just for 30 minutes a day, take time to actively read your followers Tweets and reply to them. Be two dimensional in your use of Twitter and you’ll provide much more value to your new friends.

3. Treat Twitter Like a Party, Not a Show and Tell

Much like how at a party it would be classed as rude to walk up to every person and throw them a business card, it’s rude to show off your blog address on a regular basis in front of people you haven’t built a relationship with.

Parties and networking events are not meant to produce instant results, but rather meant to aid in the building of new relationships to ensure there is a return in the far future. Whether that return is a new customer for your business, or, possibly in Twitter’s case, a visit to your Web site, the relationship should be built first and done so over an extended period.

Don’t expect quick results from Twitter. You must build solid, honest relationships first.

4. Introduce New People

Twitter is a game of emotions and relationships. It’s no surprise, then, that the key to Twitter is to make people smile and to stand out from the masses. Introducing new people is a fantastic way to do this.

Maybe you’ll send a Tweet recommending to your other followers that they “follow John, he’s a great guy!”. Or maybe you’ll send a Tweet recommending several people at once. #FollowFriday, the weekly occurrence where users recommended other people to follow is exactly what this is.

You’re making people feel special, while letting them know how much you appreciate their Tweets. Win win!

5. Start a Conversation and Share the Results

In the same way that bringing interactivity to your blog and letting your audience generate the content is a fantastic way to build relationships, using polls and starting questions for debate on Twitter are excellent methods to engage your audience and promote interaction within your circle of followers.

A poll or question for debate each day will go a long way in helping you establish relationships. Of course, you should always share the results of any poll or debate you manage. All too often, I see Twitter users ask a poll question and then never Tweet the results. What use is a community poll if the community can’t see the results? Tweet your poll results, and retweet good answers to your questions.

What Results Can You Expect to See?

At just over 750 followers, I’m by no means the most popular Twitter user. However, even this relatively small number (relative to the likes of Darren’s 37,000 followers), Twitter has brought me:

• Two job interviews
• $5,000+ of freelance Web development and blogging work
• A quarter of my blog subscriber base
• The ability to build a monthly blogger get together in my local area
• The chance to meet some fantastic people and network like I’ve never done before

When you use Twitter with the community in mind, the results from even a small amount of followers can be quite amazing!

Give to Twitter what you want Twitter to give to you.

What has Twitter brought you? Do you try to ensure you use Twitter as a 2D medium, engaging in conversation with others, rather than just writing about what you are interested in? Let us know in the comments!

This has been a guest post by Jamie Harrop. Jamie has been Tweeting for 19 months @jamieharrop, and blogging for over four years. Today, with posts such as 7 Reasons Why I Wonít Comment On Your Blog, he writes about customer service, business, blogging, social media and self improvement at Jamie Harrop Dot Com.

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.