Entries Tagged 'Twitter For Business' ↓

At present, Twitter is one of the most popular social networking sites in the world.

But will things be the same in 2 years, 5 years or 10 years?

Who knows!

Twitter might remain at the top or it may have been superseded by newer, fresher rivals.

But after the distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) last week, we reckon a few Twitter users will have considered (or worried about) what would happen if Twitter suddenly disappeared.

What would you do if Twitter suddenly disappeared or suffered from a dramatic fall in popularity?

Okay, that might be rather drastic, but nobody knows what will happen in the future and it’s best to be prepared for any unforeseen developments.

• What if spammers swamp the network?
• What if the network shifts emphasis away from the reason that you originally joined?
• What if the network starts charging users?
• What if people get bored with it and just drift away from the network?

The internet moves rapidly. Several generations of the latest, hottest sites have appeared from nowhere, grown rapidly, then peaked and been overtaken just as quickly (Geocities, LiveJournal, MySpace etc).

So here are a few important considerations to help you future-proof the time and effort you spend on Twitter.

1) Use other networks

It’s essential that you don’t tie the long-term success of your social networking to the long-term survival of Twitter. So make sure that you spread your social networking effort over a few different sites.

Ironically, given all the bird references relating to Twitter, the most important piece of advice is summed up by the well-known saying, “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket”.

2) Don’t confuse the medium with the purpose

Ultimately, the most important part of your time spent on Twitter is the network of contacts that you develop with like-minded people, rather than the fact that you’ve got a well developed Twitter account.

Twitter is just the medium, your network of contacts is the purpose.

Twitter is great for meeting new people, it’s also good for quick communication as you build relationships, but over the long term your email address book or skype contacts list are more secure methods for communicating with and storing your best contacts.

So make sure that you take steps to transfer your network of contacts to at least one other communication platform. For example, you could encourage all your followers to join you on another social networking site, such as Facebook, while your closest group of contacts could be transferred to email, another instant messaging platform or even your Skype account.

Then, if anything happens to one of these platforms (either temporarily or permanently) your network of contacts won’t be destroyed. It also means that you “own” your network of contacts rather than any one networking site.

3) Strengthen your network

When you begin to build a group of contacts, your network consists of a number of relationships that are independent of each other. In a visual sense it represents the wheel of a bicycle with numerous spokes radiating out from your position at the hub.

However, the major weakness of this situation is that all of the relationships that create your network rely upon you.

• What if you lose the contact information of some of your network?
• What if you aren’t able to work for several weeks or months?

In certain cases, there is a major risk that your group of contacts will deteriorate unless you continue to maintain these relationships.

So as you develop your network, take every opportunity to strengthen your network by connecting people within your group of contacts. Bring people together who can help each other.

If these connections are successful, it will increase the goodwill that both parties feel towards you, but more importantly, it will allow your network to exist independently of you. If you lose contact with someone in your network, you’ll be able to reconnect through one of your mutual contacts.

Take action to secure the long-term future of your social network now, so that when Twitter falls off its perch you won’t suffer.

As always, use the comments below to let us know the steps you’ve taken to protect your network of contacts against the unexpected.

As many people use Twitter for business purposes, it’s important to be able to assess whether the time and effort you spend using Twitter is justified from a business perspective.

Unless you achieve a certain level of measurable success using Twitter, you may find it more effective to leverage your time more efficiently elsewhere.

So how do you know if your Twitter efforts are paying off?

First, you need to work out what you want to achieve using Twitter. Build a community resource? Drive traffic to your site? Network with people in your industry? Once you know what you want to achieve, set yourself related goals and use these tools to monitor your progress.

Here are a few different methods you can use to assess the effectiveness of your time spent using Twitter;

1) Number Of Followers

In the early days of Twitter, it was automatically assumed that the number of followers you could attract was the most accurate measure of your popularity and level of Twitter success.

However, it has rapidly become obvious that this measure is nothing more than a minor factor regarding the effectiveness of your use of Twitter.

10,000 followers isn’t necessarily better than 1,000 followers, especially if the smaller group is a closely integrated community with common interests.

However, a larger community of followers gives you more scope to build relationships with a select group of people with whom you have most in common. It also provides the potential for your messages to reach a larger audience.

2) Traffic

If you want to drive traffic to a certain site or a specific page within a site, there are various methods that you can use to measure your progress.

First, check the log files or analytics data for your site. Second, use a link shortener with tracking stats such as Cligs to post links within your tweets. And finally, use Backtweets to check the number of links on Twitter that point to the page that you want to promote. Just visit Backtweets, enter the address of your website and it will display all the links that point to your site on Twitter.

If you find that lots of links to your site appear on Twitter, but few people click through to your site, it indicates that the wording of your tweets could be improved to attract more attention and encourage people to click through.

Alternatively, if the number of people who visit your site is high in relation to the number of links on the Twitter network, it shows that your tweets are attracting plenty of attention. So you need to focus on getting more people to retweet your information in order to increase the number of links that appear on the Twitter network.

The best way to achieve this is to increase the quality of content that you link to, so that it inspires people to share it with their own Twitter followers.

3) Favorites

One of the most underused aspects of Twitter is the function that allows users to build a list of favorite messages. As these lists are accessible to the public, they can be used to assess the impact of your tweets within your Twitter community.

The number of people who mark your tweets as one of their favorites can be used as a measure of how much attention people pay to your messages, and more importantly, whether people value the information that you provide.

To check how often other people store your tweets as favorites, just visit Favotter and enter your Twitter username. The results will show which of your tweets have been made favorites and how often.

If you monitor these results, it’s a good way to assess the type of information that it appreciated by your community and provide them with more of the same.

4) Retweets

Retweets are the quickest way to expose your Twitter messages to the widest audience possible. The best way to check the number of retweets that your messages receive is to use the Twitter search tool to search for;

@username rt

or

@username via

or

@username retweet

Just replace username with your own Twitter username.

5) People Talking About You

What is the general level of impact that you’re creating on Twitter? How often do people mention you?

Use the Twitter search engine to search for @username. This will reveal how many people have mentioned you on the network. If you want to find the people who are not talking about your directly (i.e. those who mention your name but aren’t replying to you), just search for username -@username

This will filter out the results that include the @ symbol before your username.

6) Engagement

If your main aim is to build relationships with other people in your industry, you should focus on the number of individual conversations that you hold with other individuals rather than the results of the messages that you broadcast.

In order to achieve this, it’s important to monitor the level of engagement you achieve with people you contact. How often do you initiate a public conversation with people from your community? How often do they respond? etc

Whatever you want to achieve using Twitter, the right combination of these measures will help you to monitor your progress and allow you to assess whether your time using Twitter is well spent.

Let us know using the comments below if you have any other measures that you use to assess your progress on Twitter.

Hubspot have just published a report on the state of Twitter as of June 2009. It has a range of interesting stats collected from the 4.5 million Twitter profiles on Twitter Grader.

Did you know what Twitter is attracting 5,000 - 10,000 new accounts every day, the average user tweets 0.97 times per day and 33.44% of all tweets begins with the @ symbol.

Mmm, very interesting, but what does this mean for most Twitter users?

At first glance, not much, but when you dig a little deeper, it’s possible to identify a few things that will make your use of Twitter more productive.

Let’s begin with the basic items;

a) If you have a homepage url, include it in your profile (80% of users don’t do this). If you have a website, why make it difficult for people to find it.

b) Write a short bio to let people know who you are and what interests you. It’s only 160 characters, but more than 75% of users haven’t done this.

c) Include your location in your profile (nearly 70% of users haven’t specified a location). Many Twitter users are looking to connect with other people in their part of the world, so adding your location is another filter that will help to make your community of followers more relevant.

d) Follow relevant people who have similar interests. This piece of advice might sound insultingly obvious, but more than 54% of all Twitter users haven’t followed one person. How do they expect other people to find them?

e) Tweet. Again, this may sound too obvious, but more than 54% of users have never send a tweet. If you never post any messages, how do you expect people to interact and respond to your messages?

If you follow these five simple steps, it will allow you to build a better micro community than 80% of Twitter users.

Now let’s move on to the more advanced techniques…

One of the main Twitter trends is the rapid reduction in the amount of attention that each user can give to any one tweet. As more and more people follow more and more people on Twitter, the number of tweets that are flushed through the average users timeline, means that only a small fraction of your followers will see any one of your tweets.

This is where the report does provide some clues on how to make your Tweets stand out in order to gain attention.

Option 1: Make Your Tweets Shorter

As you can see from the graph, a large number of tweets stretch beyond 133 characters as users try to pack as much into each message as possible.

However, at the other extreme, very few tweets are shorter than 30 characters. If you can be extremely creative with your choice of letters, your tweets are more likely to attract attention because;

a) They’re much shorter than the average length of message (the human mind notices differences more readily than similarities), and

b) The eye can read your entire message in one glance (people are basically lazy and have so much information competing for their limited attention)

Option 2: Provide A More Specific Location

The Hubspot report also contains a list of the top 20 locations mentioned in the Twitter profiles studied. When compared to the same list in the previous Hubspot Twitter report, an interesting trend emerges.

Twitter users are becoming more specific in the location that they display in their profile. Instead of using a country or a state, they mention a city or a town.

This may be due to the rising popularity of tweetups where Twitter users meet other people in their locality. However, it also indicates that people are increasingly interested in getting to know people who live in their part of the world.

This emphasis on building local Twitter communities means that you will build a more relevant, focused group of followers if you specify your location more accurately. So instead or USA or Texas, try Austin or Houston.

Option 3: Timing Is Crucial

Below are the approximate number of twwets posted on the Twitter network every day of the week.

Mon 650,000
Tue 790,000
Wed770,000
Thu 850,000
Fri 810,000
Sat 570,000
Sun 675,000

The Weekend is less popular, while the number of tweets builds to a peak on Thursday.

This graph shows you the average number of tweets posted per hour over a 24 hour period. As you can see, the network has a number of peaks and troughs during the day, with three increasingly large peaks at approximately 9am, 4pm and 10pm during the US business day.

So in order to achieve maximum exposure for your tweets, focus on Tuesday to Friday and time your tweets so that they arrive on the network just before the three spikes in use (in other words, 8am, 2pm and 9pm). As more people access their Twitter accounts shortly after these times, there is a greater chance that your followers will see your recent tweets.

Click Here To Collect A Full Copy Of The Hubspot Report

What do you think about the figures presented in the Hubspot report? In what direction do you think Twitter will develop? Join the discussion by adding your comments below.

If you want an alternative to the specific Twitter search tools that have appeared in recent months, here’s how to search for relevant people on Twitter using our old friend Google.

Due to the amount of buzz surrounding Twitter (and the fear that human edited Twitter search may present a serious challenge to Google), all the new pages on Twitter are indexed rapidly, which means that Google is a good alternative to the range of Twitter search tools that are available.

If you already know some of the advanced search commands on Google, you have a great advantage. If you’ve never used the advanced Google search commands, just follow the examples and replace the sample search words with your own requirements until it becomes second nature.

When you’re looking for people on Twitter, there are four basic factors that you can search;

Name, Profile, Location and Tweets

1) Searching for Twitter users based on their name

site:twitter.com intitle:”james* * on twitter”

site:twitter.com intitle:”peter* * on twitter”

You can also search for a person’s full name, for example;

site:twitter.com intitle:”stuart laing * on twitter”

Shows there are only 3 Twitter users call Stuart Laing.

Just change the name in the search to suit your own needs.

2) Searching for Twitter users on the words used their bio profile

site:twitter.com intitle:”on twitter” “bio* * sport”

This will provide you with a long list of people who have used the word sport in their Twitter bio. Again, just alter the search term to suit your own needs.

3) Searching for Twitter users based on the location in their profile

site:twitter.com intitle:”on twitter” “location florida”

Google will return a list of Twitter users based in Florida.

It’s also possible to combine these search factors, for example, if you want to search for Twitter users based on their location and the words used in their profile, use this search formula;

site:twitter.com intitle:”on twitter” “bio* * pr” “location florida”

This will return a list of Twitter users based in Florida who have PR in their bio.

4) Seaching for Twitter users based on the words that appear in their tweets

site:twitter.com/*/statuses/* “golf”

This will return a list of all the Twitter messages containing the word Golf that have been indexed by Google.

If you prefer to use Twitter specific search tools, here are a few of the best options;

Twitter Search Is the main Twitter search engine

TweepSearch Allows you to search for people according to the words that appear in their Twitter profile

TwitScoop Allows you to keep up to date with the latest Twitter trends based on the popularity of keywords currently appearing in the main Twitter stream.

What tools do you use to find people on Twitter? Do you prefer to use tools that are specifically related to Twitter? Do you use Google? Or do you prefer using another method to find relevant people on Twitter? Please share your thoughts on the best way to search Twitter in the comments section below.

And finally, we’ve recently discovered a powerful technique that allows you to search any of these tools direct from your main browser address bar.

If you use the Firefox browser (and we recommend that you do), here’s what to do;

Step One: Select the Twitter search tool that you want to use.

We’ll start with the main Twitter search tool at http://search.twitter.com

Step Two: Type any word into the search box and click search.

Step Three: Add the search result page to your list of bookmarks.

You can click the star icon to the right of the main address bar or use the keyboard shortcut (control + D) then click done.

Step Four: Click the bookmarks menu in the browser toolbar at the top of the page and scroll down to the page that you just bookmarked.

Right click the entry, select properties from the menu and once the info box appears we have two changes to make. In the box labeled KEYWORD, enter a tag that you will use to open up the twitter search page in the future. For example, I use the letters ts, which are short for twitter search. From now on, whenever you type ts into your browser address bar and press enter, that search page from your bookmarks will automatically appear.

You can use this simple technique with any page and it will save you a great deal of time on the pages that you use regularly. However, it gets even better.

Step Five: As I just mentioned, to make our twitter search shortcut really interactive, we have to make a second change in the properties box for your bookmark. Just above the box labeled KEYWORD, you should see a box labeled LOCATION. This contains the address of the page bookmarked. So, if you typed sport into the search box before you originally bookmarked the page, the url will look like this;

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=sport

The page address now has a query string added to the end that tells the site the word to search for. We’re going to delete the search term and replace it with %s (percentage sign followed by the letter s). So the location url should now look like this;

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%s

Click the save changes button and we’re ready to test our work.

From now on, whenever you want to search for something using Twitter search, all you have to do is type your key into the main browser address bar followed by a space and then the search term that you want to find.

For example if you selected ts for your key to the twitter search bookmark and you want to search for any mentions of motor racing on Twitter, all you have to do is type the following into your main Firefox address bar and press enter.

ts motor racing

The search page will automatically appear with your results. You won’t have to find the page then enter your search term. It may only save you a few seconds every time, but you can apply this technique to any pages that you use regularly and any other sites that you search frequently, for example, youtube, twitterholic, tweepsearch and even the Twitter Power System blog.

You could even program the Google based Twitter searches into your browser bar using this technique. Just perform the search, bookmark it, add your desired tag then replace your search term with %s (please note: you can only use this technique with searches that include one search variable).

In late April this year, the Twitter community was taken by surprise when the owners of Twitter suddenly imposed a new rule (known at the Twitter slap) that limited the number of people you could follow to 1000 per day.

They have also taken action over the last few days, suspending thousands of accounts that they regard as spam. Many users have reported as many as 300 followers disappearing from their communities.

So why has Twitter made these changes?

The official line is that Twitter are attempting to strike a balance between popular users who follow people who follow them and those who follow thousands of people in the expectation of gaining new followers.

However, due to the massive growth of Twitter, it may also be an attempt to ease the load on the Twitter servers. In recent months it has been extremely slow and the fail whale has become a regular fixture on our screens.

Part of the reason behind this has been the massive increase in people using 3rd party tools to automate their Twitter account. In particular, the auto-follow tools that allow you to automatically follow everyone who follows you has placed a massive strain on the network.

Are these changes a good idea?

At first glance, these changes look like a sensible move to reduce the load on their servers and reduce the blatant manipulation of Twitter for marketing purposes.

But the more you consider the situation, the new 1000 rule has a couple of major flaws;

Problem Number 1

It’s a blanket rule. Whether you’re a super user with a gazillion followers or a Twitter newbie, you can’t follow more than 1000 users per day.

So popular Twitter users who attract more than an average of 1000 followers per day won’t be able to follow everyone who follows them.

As things stand, this isn’t a big deal (I don’t think anyone is under the illusion that being followed by a Twitter giant is anything more than a mechanical process on their part).

However, it does mark an important shift in the way that people view the Twitter service. If people become used to following certain people without the expectation of being followed back, the sense of reciprocity that was a major attraction for many people will diminish.

The sense of community will be reduced and instead replaced by an atmosphere of celebrity/guru following and broadcast announcements rather than genuine interaction.

Problem Number 2

It won’t stop many of the undesirable practices that Twitter wants to prevent. In fact, it may even make things worse.

First, the section of Twitter users who only follow other users in order to be followed will just set up multiple accounts. This proliferation of throw away accounts will lower the quality of the network.

Here’s why…

When someone spends time and effort building up a targeted community of 100,000 followers, a natural caution develops. They don’t want to do anything that will jeopardize their account.

But if they have 20 different accounts with 5,000 followers on each, they’ll be less reluctant to use borderline techniques. And if one or two of their accounts are suspended, it’s not the end of the world.

Second, if someone has one main Twitter account they may post 10 messages per day. And based on their own level of integrity, the number of those that promote their own content may range from 1 all the way up to 10.

If they have 20 accounts with their followers spread across them, they will have to post 10 messages to each account (using one of the many automation tools available) to achieve the same level of publicity for their own content.

That’s 200 tweets per day instead of just 10, which won’t do much to take the load off the Twitter servers. It will also reduce the ratio of genuine tweets to tweets with an ulterior motive by a significant factor.

Perhaps it would be best if Twitter introduced a quality score algorithm similar to the one used by Google. Several factors could be used to calculate a quality score for every user.

Each user would then be able to follow as many people as they want, with the knowledge that the total quality score of the users that they follow (in relation to the combined quality scores of their followers), will alter their own quality score which will either encourage or deter the people that they follow from reciprocating. So the overall emphasis would be on balance and developing a coherent community rather than indiscriminate bulk following.

This would give Twitter a subtle yet powerful way to cultivate the exact atmosphere that they want, without resorting to the blanket style regulations that they have imposed in recent months.

But what do you think? Do you like the new limit of 1000 follows per day? Do you think it should be higher or lower?

Was this the best rule that Twitter could have used? What rule would you prefer?

Add your thoughts below. If the folk at Twitter want to retain the loyalty of their most devoted users, every piece of feedback that exists online will help them to shape their business in a way that the majority of users can accept.

In the meantime, here’s how to protect your Twitter account from these changes?

• Don’t try to follow more than 1000 people per day.
• Try to grow your community at a stable rate. It’s better to follow 150 people every day rather than 1000 people once a week.
• Follow people who have something in common with the info on your bio or the content of your tweets.
• Don’t follow people who appear to be following vast numbers of unrelated people every day just to gain new followers.

These basic precautions will help to prevent your account tripping any of the red flags that will cause Twitter to review and possibly suspend your account.

If you want to build your Twitter community without running the risk of suffering from the Twitter slap, Tweet Adder is a new tool that allows you to manage your account and build a well targeted community.

Once Tweet Adder is setup, you can set a daily follow limit and the system will find relevant people for you to follow without having to worry about suffering from the Twitter slap. This will allow you to spend your time on the most important aspect of Twitter - interacting with people and forming mutually beneficial relationships with other people in your micro community.

After months of waiting, it’s finally ready…

The Twitter Power System launches tonight

With over 3 hours of video, 200 pages of content and several additional features it’s packed with powerful information that shows you how to build your own valuable Twitter community.

Here’s what a few early reviewers had to say about the Twitter Power System package;

“This system is a must if you want the ultimate in Twitter business building systems”
@nixthenews

“This is the most comprehensive and in-depth resource in the marketplace”
@Peter_R_Casey

“Knowing much about the Twitter content available online, I can enthusiastically recommend the Twitter Power System to you.”
@larrybrauner

“I have just finished reading The Twitter Power System and let me tell you it was really educating. For someone like me that has been using Twitter for a short time and is already educated on what it has to offer I just thought it was going to be the same rubbish that clutters the updates on Twitter.

How wrong I was! “
@dsmpublishing

So to celebrate this event, we’re holding a live Pre-launch giveaway event…

Date: Wednesday 20th May 2009

Time: 8pm est (60 mins)

Place: www.TheDailyTwit.com

We’ve also got a couple of guests lined up to speak about Twitter and social media.

But it gets even better…

(okay, the word “giveaway” in the name of the event might have been a slight clue)

We’ve got 15 copies of the Twitter Power System to “giveaway” and we’re going to announce the winners live on air.

So if you want a chance to win, make sure you’re a verified member of our Twitter Power newsletter before all 15 winners of the system have been drawn during the live show.

Click HERE to sign up for free if you’re not already a member of the Twitter Power Newsletter

So make a note of the details below and tune into the live TPS Pre-launch giveaway event

Date: Wednesday 20th May 2009

Time: 8pm est (60 mins)

Place: www.TheDailyTwit.com

Good Luck!

P.S. If you have any questions or comments please drop us a comment below and we would be happy to help you.

Once you’ve been using Twitter for a while it’s easy to lose control of your friends and followers due to the sheer amount of activity within your Twitter account.

Fortunately, there are hundreds of Twitter tools, services and applications that have been developed to make your life easier. These tools will help you to manage your followers and improve your overall Twitter experience.

• Discover who stops following you
• Identify people who don’t follow you back
• Find relevant people to follow

…and a wide range of other statistics.

In fact, the main challence is working out the best tools to use.

So to help you choose the right tools for your circumstances, here are 10 of the best tools and services to help you attract and manage your Twitter followers.

Twitter Management Tool 1 - Just Tweet It

Just Tweet It is an excellent directory of Twitter users divided into hundreds of categories that makes it easy for you to find relevant people to follow on Twitter.

Twitter Management Tool 2 - Mr Tweet

Mr Tweet is an excellent way to build the strength of your Twitter community. Thanks to a powerful formula, Mr Tweet acts as your personal networking agent by reviewing your Twitter network and suggesting other relevant people that you may want to follow.

The system also provides you with cool stats about your account, such as how often you engage in Twitter conversations and how often your recommend links.

Twitter Management Tool 3 - We Follow

This user powered Twitter directory allows you to post your Twitter details under a selection of self-defined categories. You can search through thousands of users across hundreds of different categories to find other Twitter users with similar interests and experiences. Adding your details to this popular site will also help you to attract relevant followers.

Twitter Management Tool 4 - Twellow

This is another huge Twitter directory with hundreds of thousands of other Twitter users divided into hundreds of different categories. Unlike the other directories, the emphasis is on job-related categories and industry, which makes this a perfect tool for business based Twitter networking.

Twitter Management Tool 5 - Twitoria

Discover the number of inactive people that you’re following on Twitter. Just enter your Twitter username, select the period of inactivity that you want to search for and it will display a list of all your Twitter friends that haven’t tweeted in a long time. If you like to keep your Twitter community smaller and more powerfully focused, this is a powerful tool to help weed out people who don’t add much to your Twitter community.

Twitter Management Tool 6 - Qwitter

Qwitter provides you with a email message whenever someone stops following you on Twitter. Although it’s important to not to get hung up whenever someone stops following you, it’s important to monitor the number of people and the quality of accounts that stop following you.

If too many quality users stop following you, it’s an indication that something is wrong. It could be that your profile and tweets don’t match up, the subject or quality of your tweets has changed

Twitter Management Tool 7 - My Tweeple

My Tweeple is a powerful management tool that allows you to sort your Twitter account into lists of people that you follow but don’t follow you, people that follow you that you don’t follow and mutual following relationships. This allows you to select certain people to follow or unfollow.

Twitter Management Tool 8 - Social Too

SocialToo allows you to automatically follow everyone who follows you. It also has a feature that allows you to unfollow anyone who stops following you, or any account that exhibits spam like behaviour (such as rapid following and unfollowing of accounts).

You can also choose to receive a daily email that includes the number of people who have followed you and stopped following you over the past 24 hours.

Twitter Management Tool 9 - Twitter Friends

Twitter Friends is an extremely interesting tool if you want to analyse the way you use your Twitter account. Just enter your Twitter username and it produces a wide range of detailed Twitter stats.

Discover who your closest Twitter friends are, find out how many Twitter fans you have and how loyal they are, how often you tweet, how often you converse etc.

If you take the effort to interpret the meaning of all this data, it will give you important clues about how to increase the value of the Twitter network that you’re developing.

Twitter Management Tool 10 - Twittermass

Twittermass is a relatively new suite of tools to help you grow and inspire your Twitter network. The empahasis on building business relationships makes this a powerful networking tool.

The wide range of tools gives you the ability to auto follow, local follow, manual follow, block unwanted users, track keywords, track followers, clone followers, view your Twitter metrics and get the most from Follow Friday.

By now, you may have read that Twitter can make you a better copywriter. The need to focus on getting your message across within 140 characters will improve your ability to capture the attention of your audience.

For proof, you need look no further than the list of Twitter users with the most followers. Many of them (with the exception of celebrities who attract followers due to their name alone) have developed a large following thanks to their ability to find and present relevant information in a way that makes other people want to read it.

Their copywriting skills encourage other Twitter users to retweet their messages, increasing the prominence of their username within the network.

So to help you get started, we’re going to deconstruct a few successful tweets to see if they share any common characteristics.

All we need is a friendly Twitter rockstar who is willing to have their stats audited. Step forward James Rivers, the Twitter Power Team’s resident Twitter expert.

So here, for the first time ever, we’re going to examine three of James’s top  successful tweets.

Let’s get started…

Tweet Number 1: 7,600+ Clicks

Still Don’t Know What #FollowFriday is? Watch n share (video) >> http://cli.gs/qmeHR5 PLZ RT

The first section “Still Don’t Know What #FollowFriday is?”, which broadly relates to the headline achieves three things;

First, it asks a question, which helps to build intrigue. This is a long established method used by traditional copywriters to attract their readers’ attention.

Second, it makes it clear what the post is about, which helps people to qualify whether they are interested in the post.

By this stage, anyone who has heard about Follow Friday and wants to know more about it will continue reading.

Third, it incorporates the #followfriday hash tag. This helps to categorize the tweet as information that’s directly related to the subject of Follow Friday. It will also help people to find this message if they look for “#FollowFriday” using Twitter search.

The second section “Watch n share (video)”, which acts as a sub-headline by providing more information, achieves two things;

First, it builds on the interest already generated, by telling people what to expect…a video.

Second, it provides a call to action. It asks people to watch the video and then share it with their friends and Twitter followers.

The final section “>> http://cli.gs/qmeHR5 PLZ RT” consists of three parts;

First, the two arrows help to separate the headline from the rest of the message and draw attention to the link.

Second, the link is shortened using the service at http://cli.gs/ Pierre, the creator of Cligs has been a good friend to the Twitter Power Team and his amazing service allows us to shorten the website address (the real link consists of 84 characters) and track the number of clicks that the links receives.

Third, “PLZ RT” is a shortened form of “Please Retweet”. This call to action helps encourage people to share the link with their followers.

Share #FollowFriday Video Here >> RETWEET

Tweet Number 2: 4,500+ Clicks

SHAQUILLE IS REAL - 50 Cent, Britney Spears Have Twitter Ghostwriters >> http://cli.gs/n5R6X2 Plz RT

Although this message has only been retweeted 7 times, it has generated overt 4500 clickthroughs to the MTV website.

The first section “SHAQUILLE IS REAL” is a short, powerful statement. Shaquille is known all over the world and he’s one of the top 100 Twitter users, so that is a great way to attract attention. The use of capital letters also helps to get the headline noticed and make it stand out from the rest of the tweet.

The tone of these three words also leads people to think “If he’s real, who isn’t?”, which sets up the next section.

The second section, “50 Cent, Britney Spears Have Twitter Ghostwriters” provides the pay off. Shock, horror, some celebrities, who are top Twitter users, don’t actually manage their own account.

So, well known celebrities + a topic that generates strong opinions among other Twitter users = Massive interest and drawing power.

The third section “>> http://cli.gs/n5R6X2 Plz RT” closely resembles the previous tweet, apart from the destination of the link.

Share “SHAQUILLE IS REAL” Post Here >> RETWEET

Tweet Number 3: 3,200+ Clicks

The Funniest 404 Page Ever (or most depressed…lol) >> http://cli.gs/Za5Dmv Plz RT

The first section “The Funniest 404 Page Ever (or most depressed…lol)” is short and direct. It tells people exactly what to expect, but builds up the intrigue at the same time.

The section in parenthesis helps to show the character of the post, while the LOL (laughing out loud) adds an element of familiarity to the message. It helps to bridge the gap between the writer and the reader, making the post appear friendly and less formal.

The final section “>> http://cli.gs/Za5Dmv Plz RT” once again follows the tried and tested formula. The arrows, link and call to action helped to generate 34 Retweets of this message, which is impressive given that fewer people know about 404 pages than 50 cent or Britney.

Share “The Funniest 404 Page Ever” Here >> RETWEET

These three tweets have generated a total of over 14,000 clicks

The Recurring Themes of These Successful Tweets Are:

One: Make it clear what your message is about.

Two: Make it clear what they can expect from clicking on the link

Three: Provide an element of intrigue.

Four: Provide a call to action that will encourage them to check out the link and share it with their friends and Twitter followers.

It goes without saying that you should only recommend links and resources that provide value to your followers, otherwise it will lower your reputation and reduce the number of people who will click through on links that you post in the future.

One final thing to bear in mind when constructing your tweets - If possible, keep your tweets under 120 characters in length.

This makes it easy for people to add RT followed by their username and stay within the 140 character limit without having to alter your original message. This one simple consideration will make a great difference to the number of times that people retweet your messages.

Ultimately, the repeated practice of creating your Tweets, the discipline of sticking to the point and learning how to persuade in 140 characters will transform your copywriting skills. And as the skill is transferable, the ability to craft emails, classified ads, sales letters and advertising campaigns will help to transform your business.

Have your copywriting skills improved since you started using Twitter? Have any of your tweets gone viral and been retweeted hundreds or even thousands of times? If you have any Twitter copywriting tips or interesting Twitter stories we’d love to hear about them.