Why Use Twitter and How?

There are many reasons to use Twitter; meeting friends, share a chat, market a business, drive traffic to your website, get inspiration or get a pulse on what the world talks about, just to name a few. It is a very social media tool.

I joined Twitter as an experiment. I wanted to see how social media could expand in my world beyond Facebook. I didn't really know what I was doing and really only played with it.

Then I decided to take some Twitter training which was offered to me through CCPro. I learned a whole new world to Twitter that I didn't even think I would have discovered if I hadn't utilized the free training offered.

After signing up an account, how do you start? I wrote down my interests, especially the ones I wrote briefly in my bio. Then I went in "Find People" and looked up those interests as a subject. For example, Photography, Photo Gurus, Pet Photographers....

Other examples; Social Media, Internet Marketers, Travel Experts, Book Enthusiasts.....

Carefully read each bio of the Twitters that pop up and follow each if they fit your interests. Remember to start training yourself early to follow the 20% rule of following and followers. This rule becomes important as soon as your each 200 following. The rule states that once you have reached 200 following you may not let your followers fall below 20%. For example, if you have 2001 followers you must at least have 1801 followers before you can keep following.

Now how is this done? Make sure who you follow are following you. If a following is not a follower - unfollow. If you do not have the Twitter following you then your tweets are not getting to that person and a relationship is not building between the two of you. That's a wasted tweet. So make sure your tweets are being recycled by always following those that follow you and unfollow those that don't.

There are a few ways to keep on top of your following/follower ratio. Google this question to find them all listed. But a couple I know of are:

My Tweeple

Social OOmph - previously known as Tweeter Later

We'll talk more later about how to manually keep our ratio intact and how to manage tweets.