This article was written by Jeff Machado, an Inbound Marketing Implementation Specialist with Modern Marketing Support, an Internet Marketing Virtual Assistant company.

One of the hardest things about marketing on Twitter is that it doesn’t even look like marketing.

In fact, the closer you watch those who have made a success using inbound marketing techniques, you’ll see that it seems that they’re not doing much of anything at all. Sure, they’re talking to people and sharing some great resources, but that can’t be marketing …

But it is marketing - and it’s a powerful kind of reverse-marketing. It’s relatively easy, it’s fun, and it’s really effective.

Looking for ways to tap into this almost effortless style of business promotion? Here are eight easy steps you can follow:

1. Choose Topics Outside Your Niche

As hard as it may be to swallow, you are not your niche. A niche is something you have. But it is not who you are. Choose 5 other things you could possibly Tweet about. On my list are cooking, origami, personality tests, colors, and office supplies. Find more opportunities to Tweet and talk about other things than what your business is. Getting people to like you first is a great place to start on Twitter.

2. Define the Personality You Want To Reach

Thanks to David Meerman Scott, we have the concept of buyer persona and a method for applying it to marketing. Thanks to the Myers Briggs Type Indicator, we have a tool for getting inside that buyer persona’s mind. It was easy for me to choose ENFPs (Extraverted, Intuitive, Feeling, and Perceiving) as my target market. They’re the types who get lots of ideas and are natural entrepreneurs but struggle with things like internet marketing implementation. 4 little letters can give you a lot of potential Tweet ideas.

3. Use the Search Button at Least 3 Times Per Day + Tweet at Least 15 New People

Lots of Twitter help articles will say “Join the conversation!” but if the people you’re following don’t seem to engage in conversation and only promote themselves or send out quotes for Re-Tweet bait, what are you supposed to do? That’s where the search button comes in. Search for something you’re interested in. Find someone you’d like to talk to. Then repeat as much as possible. Use your @ function more than anything else. Engage, don’t broadcast.

4. Ask 5 Questions on a Daily Basis

Once you start to find more followers, just ask questions. Will they always get answered? No. But did it cost you a ton of money to ask? Absolutely not. You can’t take it personally if no one answers the first time around. But if you’re focusing on your buyer persona, you get closer to getting inside their mind. You’ll know you’re asking the right questions when you start to get responses. Easy to do, easy to measure.

5. Answer at Least 3 Questions Daily

The fewer questions someone has on their mind, the more at peace they are. Questions, especially ones that don’t get answered, are the things that keep us up at night. Though it might seem extreme to say, it’s very likely that anytime you answer someone’s question via a Tweet, you’re helping them sleep better at night.

6. Send Out 10 Useful or Entertaining Links (But Be Sure To Track!) Every Day

While desktop applications like TweetDeck or Twhirl offer convenient URL shortening, they are not necessarily the best. You’re missing out on one of the best features of Bit.ly and other URL shortening tools like it: click tracking. This is the simplest way to find out if you’re Tweeting things that your Followers actually want to know about. Just sign up for Bit.ly’s service and Tweet from there when sharing articles and blog posts.

7. Share at Least One Blog Post, Article, or Video Per Week

There are so many options for connecting your blog posts, articles, videos, and all your content to your social media venues. But self serving promotional content just doesn’t cut it. Remember the question theory? Use it to your advantage. Think of the questions your target market (or even better, your buyer persona) has and make sure your content answers those questions. Provide content that makes it easier for that person to sleep at night.

8. Test a Different Landing Page from Your Twitter Profile Weekly

If you’re doing everything above, you’re getting closer to people being more interested in what you have to offer. What will they find when they visit you? Are they going to know exactly how you’re going to help them sleep better at night? If not, you need to create landing pages that express just this. As with all good landing page practices, keep on testing.

So what do you think? Is Twitter about as reverse-marketing as it gets? And what other ways are there to measure your success on Twitter? Let’s get the conversation rolling in the comments.

With around 21 million unique visitors to Twitter each month, Twitter is quickly gaining traction with small businesses. However, some local businesses are wondering if such a global audience is worth engaging with.

Last week, Deb Ward, a local business owner and Inbound Marketing Certified Professional, posted a thread to the inboundmarketing.com forum asking how she could localize her business’ tweets to a certain geographic location.  While it is not necessary to limit your tweeting so that only certain people in your area can see them, you CAN make your business’s location highly visible on Twitter, thus attracting more people to your brand and generating a network in your area.

Here are a few ways to do this:

1. Include Your Location in Your Bio

Utilize the 160-character bio each Twitter account has to describe your business and what town you hail from. Your business’s profile will then show up in Twitter’s search results for that area which will help you get found more easily.  You can also register your business on Twellow,  the yellow pages for Twitter, to make it easier for consumers to find you.

2. Follow People in Your Area and Your Industry

Start following people from your area. Twitter best practices suggest that you start following people to increase the likelihood that they will follow you back. Twitter users can search for keywords on Tweet Scan to reach new audiences and to learn what these consumers want to know about in your industry. You can also search for the location of Twitter users with HubSpot’s Twitter Grader tool.

3. Tweet About Your Location

Make sure a good portion of your Tweets include geographically specific information — maybe town names, local landmarks or sports teams. If you figure out what people in your area are talking about on Twitter, then add to that conversation in a constructive manner, you’ll generate a lot of local followers.

4. Get Visible

Lastly, geotweet. This application from Schmap produces a link to map with an icon pointing to your business and also allows users to rate the business on a 5 star scale.  Encourage fans of your business on Facebook or other social media sites to tweet the map and rate your business to create buzz.

Finally, above all else, don’t be spammy! Just because you are following people does not mean you can message them every five minutes to go to your restaurant, bookstore, or hardware shop. Remember to keep your tweets interesting and relevant to your target audiences to get people to continue to follow you.  Tweet about promotional offerings or upcoming events that you are hosting and/or that pertain to your industry.  If you create content on a blog, tweet about it to drive visitors to your site.   Combine your geo-targeted efforts with thought leadership in your industry to get your target audience engaged while remaining relevant to the rest of the Twittersphere as well.

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.

Twitter is the easiest form of social media to measure, so make sure you’re getting the most from it.

By Marshall Sponder | Entrepreneur.com

The news is slowly sinking in that Twitter can help small businesses succeed beyond answering customers’ questions, networking and providing education. Within a fairly short period of time, Twitter could permanently change how small businesses operate to include hyper-local marketing, advertising, financial information, customer service, data mining, product and service alerts and micropayments.

Immaturity of business models and metrics and ROI questions surrounding social media are making Twitter cumbersome to use for many small businesses, but change is coming as more startups are building Twitter into their business models; meanwhile, Twitter metrics and tracking have also been rapidly evolving. New metric tools such as Twitoaster and ViralHeat are constantly being released to track Twitter’s effect on sales and marketing.

Twitter is the easiest form of social media to track, due to its open interface and data. Any kind of actionable data is worth tracking. For example, business owners can start by tracking how many followers they have at any one time, how many times their posts were shared and how many replies they got. They can also track more complex calculations such as how much their Twitter followers are worth. For example, Hillstrom’s Twitter Quality Score is calculated by dividing the number of followers by the number following, and a score of 1.5 or above demonstrates that a Twitter account is worth following and has quality information and offers for its followers.

Next, track your sales or word-of-mouth mentions back to your Twitter account. Use a URL shortener, to track how often your content appears on Twitter, and tie it back to sales. For example, you can establish a shortened link to a specific promotion and track how many times it has been clicked on and shared, which is important in social media.

Read more: http://www.entrepreneur.com/ebusiness/webmetricscolumnist/article202516.html#ixzz0M2A1pEXc

Mike Dobbs is the group director of SEO at 360i, a digital marketing agency that drives results for premier brands. The agency recently released the Social Marketing Playbook, a guide for brands. You can follow 360i on Twitter.

With all the rumors suggesting that Google will soon offer real-time search capabilities, indexing Tweets and other real-time web data, now is a good time to take a closer look at your Twitter presence. Even now, what you tweet can be held against you on the engines, although it can also work to your advantage.

As an example, Google is already indexing tweets (albeit not in real-time) so Twitter pages and even individual tweets have already started appearing within Google search results.

[Mashable’s Twitter page appears in a search query on Google.]

[Tweets are even appearing on the first page of Google for non-brand searches, like in this example for the query “pac man tweet.”]

But, never fear, you still have time to start optimizing your Twitter presence before your random tweets about what you ate for lunch start appearing in searches for your name. By following these ten Twitter tips, you, your company or your brand can build up more prominent links in high places on the engines.

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1. Choose a good handle

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Be sure to pick an optimal handle that’s relevant to your brand or campaign and easy to remember. Your handle (also known as your Username) then becomes part of your customized Twitter URL such as twitter.com/yoursite or twitter.com/yourtopic. Doing this creates a static address for future search indexing, which also helps usability for other cross-channel promotions. So choose wisely! The fun challenge: doing all this while keeping your name short and succinct so it’s easily tweetable.

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2. Select an account name wisely

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Optimize the Twitter account name to best reflect your brand. Your name is what appears next to your profile, which can be different than your handle/URL. You obviously want an account name that promotes yourself, your company or your brand. You should also consider which variation of you brand name has the most search frequency every month.

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3. Make your bio count

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Optimize your Twitter page’s “Bio” line so it includes the most important, mission-critical phrases for your brand. Take advantage of all 160 characters! (Yep, that’s right: They give you 20 more characters than a normal tweet.) Your bio is consistently indexed so its contents are what provide your Twitter page with its core relevance.

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4. Spread the word

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Now think about ways to build the link reputation of this newfound social web address. For example, you can integrate your Twitter URL into your website by placing a call to action on the site for your customers to follow you on Twitter. You could also integrate your Twitter URL within your site’s Global Footer, which appears at the bottom of every page of your site. Both of these options offer usability to your site visitors and help drive your Twitter URL up in the search engines.

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5. Remember your URL

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In the account settings, be sure to add your website’s URL or perhaps use it to promote your presence on another social platform, for example, yoursite.com. This is a great way to drive traffic back to your destination of choice; although, truth be told, the link does not provide any offsite reputation – a.k.a. SEO link juice – due to a “Nofollow” attribute that Twitter has in place. (Sorry Twitter spammers!)

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6. Select the initial characters of each tweet carefully

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The “lead-in” of each tweet appears to be important for SEO as it will determine what appears in the tweet’s title tag when it shows up as a search result on Google. Approximately 42 characters are factored into each tweet’s title tag, including the account name, as well as the initial characters of each tweet. Keep in mind that your full tweet and all its characters are still being indexed by major engines, though.

[The first characters of your tweet may have the most impact on its future SEO value.]

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7. Write keyword-rich tweets if possible

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Wherever possible, start your tweet with a primary keyword phrase to theme each message. Take advantage of any “active lingo” or buzz words as this will enable you to capitalize on timely searches on those terms. Of course, this doesn’t mean you should fill your tweets with buzz words at the expense of providing value to your followers! Rather, think carefully about which word choices will best convey your message and also allow you to leverage the real-time and long-term index relevance across the engines that continuously spider and index tweets.

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8. Mind your retweetability

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Make sure your tweet’s character limits allow for optimal “retweetability.” If you want a message to proliferate on Twitter, it’s ideal to keep it under 120 characters so your followers can easily add RT @YourHandle in front of the tweet. However, the exact number is different from everyone as it depends on the number of characters needed for someone to include the phrase “RT @yourname” in their re-tweet.

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9. Provide some link love

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Insert back links to redirect users back to your content. Twitter has proven to be a significant traffic driver for bloggers and others using the space to share links. If you do share links, use one of the many URL shorteners available (TinyURL and Bit.ly are two common shorteners). We recommend using the URL shortener Bit.ly, as it tracks click-throughs for the specific links you share on the platform. Bit.ly even has the power to track links in aggregate. For example, if multiple Bit.ly URLs were created and shared by separate users, all leading back to the same URL, the service can track and report click-throughs for all of them in aggregate. Bit.ly also tracks clicks over time, so you can see when people are clicking your links most.

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10. As always, give ‘em what they want

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When providing Bit.ly links or any other URLs, make sure the redirection leads to pages which provide a richer content experience. Twitter users are hungry for information and accustomed to getting it “right now.” Send users directly to the details instead of having them fish around for it.

Mike Dobbs is the group director of SEO at 360i, a digital marketing agency that drives results for premier brands through insights, ideas, and technologies. The agency recently released the Social Marketing Playbook, a guide for brands utilizing social media to connect with their customers. You can follow 360i on Twitter.

Savvy entrepreneurs are looking to social media as another way to market their businesses.

As Twitter surges toward an estimated 12 million registered users by year’s end (though some new stats may disagree), some of us are starting to deal with what we recently dubbed “followholism.” You’ve followed so many people, it’s hard to keep up, and it’s probably time to do a little housekeeping.

But where do you begin? Twitter’s own tools for managing followers are subpar. It’s nearly impossible to figure out who among your followers are following you back, and the interface for paging through followers is clumsy and difficult to use. Fortunately, Twitter’s API has given rise to a vast universe of amazing third party apps. So we’ve assembled a toolkit below of 10 services that can help you take control of Twitter and organize your followers. If you know any other tools that would be helpful for organizing tweeps, add them in the comments.

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Find Out Who You’re Following

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When I first joined Twitter, I started following people right out of the gate in order to get some utility out of the site — after all, the only way to join the conversation is to start following it. After I got used to Twitter, though, I had the urge to clean up my follow list. Eventually, I found that some of the people I had initially followed as a way to get into the community weren’t necessarily people that I was interested in continuing to follow. Here are some tools to help you investigate your tweeps and make an informed decision about whether to keep following them.

1. Twitter Grader - Using a detailed 5 piece algorithm, Twitter Grader assigns every users you run through its system a grade from 1-100. Using this tool you can investigate how engaged the people you’re following are and that can help you decide if you want to keep following them.

2. Twinfluence - Twinfluence is a scientific approach to measuring the influence of Twitter users. It’s another set of metrics you can use to help you figure out who you want to follow.

3. Tweetcloud - One of the most important factors when deciding whether you want to follow a Twitter user is what sort of content they tweet about. If someone tweets mostly about topics you don’t care about, they might not be the best person for you to follow. Tweetcloud creates a tag cloud of a person’s tweets to give you a bird’s eye view of the type of things they tweet about.

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Find Your Friends

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Not all relationships on Twitter are equal. Unlike many social networks, Twitter allows you to follow (most) people without their permission. There might be a bunch of people who are following you that you aren’t following back, and likewise there are probably some people you’re following who aren’t reciprocating. That’s not necessarily a bad thing — if their content is good, then you shouldn’t worry about whether they follow you back. But knowing who your friends are is helpful when you’re trying to organize your Twitter follows.

4. Twitter Karma - Twitter Karma is a great app that lets you sort through all of your follows and see who’s not following you in return, who you have a mutual follow/follow-back relationship with, and who is following you that you’re not following back.

5. Friend or Follow - Friend or Follow does essentially the same thing as Twitter Karma, helping you figure out who your friends, follows, and fans are on Twitter. The difference is in the presentation, and it might be a little easier to use for those with a large number of follows or followers.

6. Qwitter - Once you’ve done your initial cleaning, Qwitter is a nice app that will update you via email whenever someone stops following you. It will even let you know what you tweeted that caused them to stop following you, which could be useful (if you lose five followers every time you tweet about your cat, for example, that might be a hint to stop talking so much about your cat if you want to retain followers).

UPDATE: We’ve had some reports that Qwitter hasn’t been as reliable lately as it had been in the past. An alternative service that also notifies you when you lose a follower is Twitterless. If you really want to keep on top of when your followers jump ship, it might be a good idea to sign up for both services to make sure you have all your bases covered.

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Get Rid of Inactives

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According to a recent study, 80% of Twitter users have less than 10 total tweets. That might not be a bad thing — some people might join Twitter specifically to follow others and track their updates. But inactive users might also not be the best people for you to follow. Here are two tools that can help you weed out the inactives.

7. Nest.Unclutterer - Nest.Unclutterer will automatically block Twitter users who are following more than a certain number of people or who have been inactive for a certain number of days. You can specify those thresholds and white list certain tweeps so that they are exempt from the cleaning. Nest.Unclutterer is actually less about who you’re following, and more about making sure people following you are actually friends you want to be associated with.

8. Twitoria - Twitoria scans through your Twitter account and finds anyone who has been inactive for the past week, two weeks, month, two months, six months, or year.

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Manage it All

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Now that you’ve cleaned up your Twitter follow list, you’ll want to keep on top of things from here on out. Here are two apps that will help you better manage new follows and followers.

9. TweetSum - TweetSum digests all your new followers, rates them using what they call the DBI (”Douche Bag Index”), a number that supposedly weeds out Twitter users likely to be annoying, and then lets you easily follow them back or categorize them as tweeps you don’t want to follow. You can see a list of recent tweets for each new follower as well, which is helpful.

10. Tweepler - Tweepler is a new follower management application that lets you make quick, one click decisions about whether to follow people back or drop them into an ignore pile (out of sight, out of mind). In addition to being able to view recent tweets, Tweepler gives helpful stats about new followers, such as average tweets per day.

by Tim Bursch - Follow him @timbursch

Isn’t Twitter just for tweeting? Mainstream media thinks Twitter is fluttering. Can you really listen to hundreds of people? How?

SOME TIPS ON TWITTER:

• Ask a question and then listen.
• Group people on TweetDeck and help filter the noise (See bonus tip below)
• Follow your favorite blog authors on Twitter
• Check out chats and discussions on things you care about here.
• Take a day off of tweeting and just watch the stream go by. Notice people. Who catches your eye? Who and what do you seem to pay attention to?
• Acknowledge people. If someone says they are grabbing coffee, ask for one too. : )
• Watch how other tweeps engage. If someone re-tweets you they are probably paying attention.
• Set up alerts on topics or people using Twitter Search.
• Use favorites to save tweets and tweeps you want to pay attention to.
• Focus. When you are having a conversation on Twitter it probably helps to stop checking email and writing comments on a blog. (working on it)
• Use open-ended questions. How, what, why?
• Don’t pre-judge. Don’t instantly “unfollow” people if they are not like you. Great idea from Aliza Sherman (@alizasherman)- go look at the person’s profile and recent tweets. You might change your mind.
• Notice when people are absent. Pay attention to who is being quiet too.

BONUS TIP: GROUPING IN TWEETDECK

I created a conversation group made up of people that I am listening to and want to engage in discussion. I start by reading this group first and then filter through other tweets. When you find new tweeps you want to pay attention to, just add them.

Sit back, relax, and enjoy the conversation.

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.

by Travis Campbell

A lot has been made of Twitter as its popularity grows (significantly, I might add), so have the reasons for having a solid Twitter marketing strategy.  In this post you’ll learn the three rules every online and small business entrepreneur should know when using Twitter for business, and why.  Without these in place, your experience with Twitter will be of minimal value, and can even hurt your business altogether.

3 Rules of Using Twitter for Business

Ok, so you have heard of Twitter by now, but many questions remain.  Why should I use this service?  How can it help my business?  Let me encourage you to watch how others are successfully using it and follow their lead.  Here are three things I’ve observed others doing successfully, and am patterning my own profile after as well.  These are general and open ended rules, feel free to comment at the end of the post and add to the conversation.

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