Beyond the Basics of Your Twitter Profile
Yesterday I explained the basics of building your twitter profile. For some reason if you have not read it yet, please take a minute to glance over it so you can see where we left off.
Now that you have decked out your profile with a custom background, updated your profile settings and began following other tweeps, it’s time to manage your profile efficiently and effectively. While I am not going to go into every tip & trick there is, I am going to focus on a few that can ultimately enhance your followers experience while helping you establish tweet cred among your followers.
Plug It In
One of the most popular blogging platforms is wordpress. It is used by millions of people for various purposes. In fact, it is the same software that is being used to power ploked. There are many great things about wordpress, such as the vast amount of plugins available to sync up your twitter account with your wordpress site. Below, I will outline some nice plugins I have found useful to help manage my twitter account.
Probably one of my favorite plugins is the “WordTwit” plugin. Basically, this plugin uses the Twitter API to automatically publish any blog post you create on your wordpress powered site to your twitter account. This plugin also changes your url to use the tinyurl link structure in order to reduce the amount of characters in your tweet. I find this plugin very useful in keeping followers updated on the latest blog posts on ploked. This plugin helps to keep your Twitter account updated with your latest blog posts.
Another great plugin is “TweetMeMe“. This plugin inserts an icon into your blog post on your wordpress powered site. Just scroll up to the top of this blog post to see it in action. In fact, feel free to click on it to try it out. This plugin keeps track of how many times the blog post has been retweeted on twitter. It helps to encourage visitors an easy way to tweet your posts they find relevant with just one click.
The “TweetThis” plugin is another plugin I use to entice the retweeting of blog posts. This plugin gives you a few options (graphically) on how to display this plugin within your blog posts. An example this in action will be found at the end of this blog post under the various social bookmarking graphics.
Finally, I recommend the “Twitter Counter” widget. This widget essentially displays which twitter users just visited your site. You can easily customize the color scheme and size that it fits into your site where you would like it to. An example of this widget in action can be found in the sidebar to the right.
One non-wordpress plugin I would like to mention is “TwitterFeed“. TwitterFeed allows you to add RSS content from any source to your Twitter profile automatically at intervals you set. This tool is great for adding relevant content to your Twitter followers hands free. These tweets can help stir up more conversation between you and your followers.
Just these few plugins can help your blog become automated into Twitter as well as provide opportunities for visitors to tweet and retweet your posts. I suggest taking a few minutes to install a few (or all) of these plugins and give them a try at tying your blog and twitter account together.
Keep in mind these automation tips mentioned should not be abused and you should still interact with your followers on a daily basis if possible. Showing that your account is not a “bot” is a key factor in establishing your credibility and identity among the twitterverse.
Don’t Be a Beggar
So you spent some time setting up your blog, syncing it up with Twitter, and just wrote a really kick ass blog post you want to share. By now you probably spent some time following some tweeps and met some great people so far. Don’t get the urge to be a beggar in order to gain retweets from your list.
Remember, with the plugins/methods listed above, your blog post has already appeared as a tweet in your account. If your blog post is really worth retweeting it will happen by those who think it is worthy. There is no need to blast your Twitter followers with direct messages begging for them to retweet your stuff. Becoming a constant beggar is almost a sure fire way lose followers very quickly. I am not saying you shouldn’t ask certain followers for retweets, but if you do, be sure to do it in moderation. You don’t want to ruin your tweet cred you have established.
Get to Work
There you have…sort of. While this just scrapes the surface of what is possible, this should give you a great starting point to establishing yourself and your identity in Twitter in an efficient and fluid manner. Don’t just brush off this blog post by saying, “yeah, this could work.” You need to stop procrastinating and put things into action.
Do you have other techniques I should try or should mention here on ploked? If so, I would like to hear what works or does not work for you.
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