Twitter has quickly become one of the most popular social networks. Its has revolutionized the way we communicate with like-minded people in ways we never could have predicted. Unfortunately, the notion of having ‘followers’ is lost on many people. Today we are going to look at practical ways to build lasting business relationships on this network.

Twitter Follower Count Is Not Important

The original purpose of ‘follower-count’ was to give Twitter users a quick and simple way to gauge their audience. It allows you to see how many people you are following, and how many people are following you back. Unfortunately, something terrible happened. People learned how to game the system to inflate their follower-counts.

Users started taking advantage of auto-follow services to rapidly form false relationships. The basic idea is: if you follow someone, they will auto-follow you back as long as you continue to follow them. This works for a while, as long as both participants maintain a reasonable number of relationships.

Unfortunately, both parties repeat this process until they are following so many people that they cannot reasonably keep up. Everybody is in it solely to get their own message out. Its like entering a stadium packed with shouting people, in an attempt to have your message heard.

Participants Are Not Fooling Anyone But Themselves

Now, clearly people that use this tactic feel their is some motivation for doing so. Here are two potential reasons why they may think this strategy pays off. First, they may think Twitter is just all about the numbers. If they get thousands of followers, maybe a few will actually listen to what they have to say. Second, they may think that having a high follower count acts a social proof to make them appear important. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth.

People that use Twitter to form real business relationships can instantly spot this phony behavior. These are people that actually want to network, and would make excellent business contacts. However, they instantly lose all respect for auto-followers when they spot their follow-stats.

In other words, the people make the best business contacts ignore users engaging in this behavior. Nothing screams networking-amateur louder than someone trying to take advantage the system for personal gain. And, in a world where respect is hard to come by, this is a big reputation killer.

How To Build Real Twitter Relationships

If you want to build relationships with like-minded people, you need to focus on quality over quantity. Ignore your follower stats for a while, and focus on connecting with people that share your business goals. You may not have a massive audience, but you will have greater influence within your network of true followers.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Rick_Kettner

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Today, Twitter is one of the most powerful social networking website which is used by the internet marketers to build credibility and get instant traffic to their websites. If you have not yet included Twitter in your marketing plan, then I strongly recommend you doing it right now to get the best results out of your marketing efforts.

Here are my 5 powerful tips to get the most out of your Twitter marketing efforts:

1. Choose your networking partners very carefully

Only network with the relevant people from your industry like your business associates, competitors, and peers. You don’t have to accept every person who wants to follow you on Twitter if you don’t share similar interests. Instead, choose your networking partners carefully and look for people who work within your particular niche. Then, make sure to follow their progress, look for their advice, and of course, give some of your input as well to build your credibility.

2. Use Twitterfeed to maximize the potential of Twitter

Make sure to use Twitterfeed to help people in your network stay updated. Twitterfeed is basically the website’s response to an RSS feed, and it is one of the great way to automatically keep your network partners updated without them checking your page. It also allows things to be updated on their own, so you are not required to spend extra time telling everyone you have an update; it is all done for you.

3. Flash your Twitter profile wherever possible

Make sure to display your Twitter profile on your website, business cards, and in email signatures. Remind people in every possible way that you are on Twitter. You may get a snapshot of the home page of your Twitter profile and then display it on your actual website. Include the Twitter profile URL in your email signatures and if you like you can even get this print on your business card.

4. Include a video plug-in on your Twitter page

To make things little more exciting you may incorporate a video into your Twitter page. There are many people who do not know that now Twitter allows multimedia additions, so please feel free to include video plug-ins on your Twitter profile page. This will build your credibility in your niche and people would like to follow your postings more closely if you have video included in your profile.

5. Host different contests and events for your followers

Host different contests, surveys and events for your followers to keep them interested and engaged in your tweets. You may want to host a giveaway event on Twitter for your followers only. Freebies are always a guarantee of getting new followers and this will build your credibility in your niche.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Puneet_Kumar_Singhal

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To your success!

Bek Davis

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On my quest to better understand Twitter, I found this article.

Twitter is one of the social media. It is pretty much a blog combined with a chat room, so, basically, it allows you a platform to get your ideas out before a group of people in real time.

Before we get into the meat of my article, I want so share something amusing that happened as I was writing it: As I was dictating the title of my article, my dictation software spat out this sentence instead: “how to use torture as a marketing tool”

Back on topic: It might be helpful to briefly discuss how Twitter works: It is sort of like a walkie talkie in that only people who have switched on to your channel (by following you) can receive your messages. In the same way, you will only receive messages from those people whose channel you have switched on (by following them.)

So, the first order of business, after you join, is to start adding people to your followers list. You will then be switched into their channel and be able to receive their messages.

Who should you follow? Anyone who is interested in your niche. So if you are promoting a make money offer, you should follow people who are interested in making money. If you are promoting a dog training book or technique, then people interested in dogs would be appropriate. Use the “find people” tool at the top right of your screen when you are logged into your Twitter account and type in keywords related to your niche. You will then pull up a list of Twitter accounts tagged with those keywords. Pick one or two accounts as a “base” account out of that list and start following people who are following that account.

I should insert a word of caution here: Twitter does have a follower limit: you may follow no more than 2000 at a time until 2000 or more people are following you. After that point, you may follow an additional number of people no greater than 110% of the number of people following you.

Accordingly, you should be careful about whom you follow. Don’t feel the need to follow someone just because they’re following you. You want followers who will actually read your tweets, and are not just following you to increase their follower count.

Once people start following you, you will be able to send them messages. What should you “tweet” about? Well there’s no hard and fast rule here, other than you should always aim to send no more than one promotional message for every three messages that you send out. The reason for this is that you want to give your followers a reason to keep following you, and constant promotional messages (like one after the other, all day long) is probably the fastest way to get “unfollowed” really quickly.

If used judiciously, Twitter can be a great marketing resource. You can use it to build a list of followers highly interested in what you have to say. That, in Internet marketing terms, is like having money in the bank.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Kathy_McGraw

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I invite you and your friends to come along for the ride with me.

– Bek Davis

Follow me:  http://twitter.com/bekdavis

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When you type “free website” or “free web design” into Google you will be presented with thousands of results and nearly as many businesses offering to take you step-by-step through creating your first website for FREE!

This sounds great, but is there a catch?

A couple of months ago I decided I wanted to improve my existing website to make it a bit more 21st century. I am a graphic designer and had previously designed my own websites using Dreamweaver, but didn’t know how to make them dynamic. They were static sites that just sat there collecting dust. I wanted a website that would be found in the search engines and ultimately, used to make me money!

So I Googled “free website” out of curiosity and I couldn’t believe what I saw. Dynamic, state-of-the-art websites – absolutely FREE! So without delay I immediately signed up and began building my FREE website. Unfortunately I discovered several problems which completely took the wind out of my sails.

Here are the problems…

I wanted to use my existing domain name I already had, but I soon discovered this was not going to be possible with the free website companies. Their domain names looked something like this: yourdomain.freewebsitecompany.com

Now for your new business to start off on the right foot you have to ask yourself, would I be happy with that domain name to represent my new business. Would I like it printed on my business cards, sign written on my vans or advertised on the web itself!?

The problem is these free “click and build” website companies are not offering a free domain name or web hosting, there are only giving you a sub-domain of their company. So to most people finding your new website will see the other company name alongside yours. And because its a sub-domain it looks as if you are linked to that company in some way. Now I don’t now about you, but I don’t want to be seen in this way. I want my own real domain on my own servers with complete control.

Let’s talk about the hosting now, since I touched on it in the previous paragraph. So as well as a bad domain name you will also get a bad hosting deal. All of your text and images you add to your website, as you build it, are stored on a server on the World Wide Web, not on your computer. So you are totally in the hands of these FWC’s.

The problem with the FWC’s is they will offer “limited” disk space and bandwidth, hoping you will upgrade to one of their paid web hosting packages. Another common problem is the use of advertising banners and links on your website to advertise the FWC’s services. Again this is messy and confusing to your site visitors. They are left unclear to who you really are and who you are working for and so suspicion is raised.

The third big problem, and this may well be the biggest of all, is you do not have access to your files, images or database. Everything you build over the years of having your website is owned by someone else. So what happens a few months or even years down the line when you decide you want to move your website to another hosting company, or to your own web hosting servers. You don’t have access to your files and the FWC will either charge you a fee to move your files to another hosting company or tell you it can’t be done. Is this really the best foundation on which to start your new business?

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Mike_German

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