JaxWorks Blog

Twitter can be a great way to promote you, your brand or your company. People and businesses use Twitter as a way to connect with fans and promote themselves to millions of people.

But how do you build up a Twitter following? These simple tips will help you get started.

Follow People. The number one way to gain followers is to follow people. Many Twitter users follow anyone that follows them, while others check to see if the profile is active before deciding to follow it. You can find interesting people to follow by doing a Twitter search.  You can also find people on Twellow, a twitter yellowpages, by their businesses or region.

Be Active. Post messages daily or several times a day and make sure what you have to say is interesting and engages people.  If you’re a business, talk about interesting things in your business.  For example, if you are a restaurant, you could talk about the entertainment.   Ask questions, post interesting tidbits, follow other people’s discussions, anything to keep you friends and customers engaged.  There are ways to set up tweets for several days at a time.  Check out 10 Best Twitter Tools, Plugins, Widgets for WordPress blogs to see some of the automatic tweeting sites.  Also, something interesting is automatic posting of Google Alerts to Twitter as a way to gain targeted Twitter followers.

Promote your Profile. Add a link to your Twitter profile to your blog, website and as part of your signature in email messages and discussion forums.

Retweet. When someone tweets something of interest, retweet it. This is a great way to honor someone else’s great information and get it out there in the twittersphere!

Participate in Follow Friday. The Twitter community has many different customs, one of which is Follow Friday, whereby users call out some of their favorite people to follow.

Twitter is sometimes hard to navigate if you are new to it and don’t know the lingo!  Here are some terms you may want to be familiar with when “Tweeting”:

10 Days of Twitter!

Tweet – A twitter post or update – this is known as a tweet.

@ – The @ sign is a way of referring to others on Twitter. You can use the @ sign to send a public message to someone or to refer to or talk about someone else in a tweet.. The @ is useful in helping you find those that are talking about you. For example @JaxWorksSEO means someone is talking to me or about me.

Retweet – Retweet means sharing a Tweet of one user with your followers. Proper etiquette is to use the retweet feature when sharing someone else’s tweet rather than to just post it as your own tweet. A Retweet looks like this RT @JaxWorksSEO.”

Reply – A reply is when you respond to someone’s tweet. It looks like this @JaxWorksSEO. For example you could say “@JaxWorksSEO I’m reading your 10 Days of  Twitter blog” and that would be a tweet that is a message to me that I would see.

Direct Message – A direct message is different than a reply because it is private. You can only send a direct message to someone if they are following you. A direct message looks like this: DM JaxWorksSEO.

Hashtags or # – This is the most common term that people get confused by. Hashtags are words that begin with the number sign and represent a topic or an event. You can learn more about hashtags at Hashtags.org.

Follower – A follower is someone that follows you on Twitter. This does not have to be a reciprocated relationship – a person can follow you without you following them. However, it’s best if you follow your followers back, this way you can both engage with one another.

Blocking – Blocking is when you block a user and they are unable to follow you. You will also no longer see their tweets in your Twitter stream. This is different than unfollowing. When you unfollow someone, it means that they can still follow you, but you are not following them.

Un-following – Unfollow means that are not longer following a user on Twitter. They, however, can still follow you.

Tweeple, Tweeps, Twits, Twerson, Twitterai – These are people who are known as people, members and users of Twitter.Twitterverse – The ever-growing universe of twitter.

That’s it for now – have fun tweeting!