Basics of Building Your Twitter Profile
Let’s take a step back to some basics today. By now, you should be well on your way in building your twitter profile. I am going to review some basics that you need to be sure you have covered in your twitter account.
Establishing An Identity
First and foremost, I hope you are using your online “brand” as your twitter username. For example, ploked.com has the twitter username “ploked“. This helps to establish brand and relationship of a site with a twitter account. If you are not using a name that can identify with your site, business, or identity, I suggest changing your username to suit this.
Do you still have the a basic or default twitter background for your profile? If so, you do need to take a few minutes and invest some time in creating something that stands out from other tweeps. While the Ploked profile is not an award winning layout by any means, it does show that atleast I tried to do something with it. There are plenty of free resources to help you easily pimp out your twitter profile. A few sources of note are:
- http://www.twitterbacks.com/
- http://twitterpatterns.com/
- http://www.twittergallery.com/index.html
- http://tweetstyle.com/
If you still can’t find a theme you are looking for, find a site that lets you download the layout photoshop file and use your kick ass photoshop skills to pimp it out to your liking.
No profile would be complete without changing the default twitter avatar. I suggest if you are a business to use your logo, while if you are an individual to use an actual picture of yourself. This helps others put a face with a name so to speak.
I recommend editing your profile to include information about yourself or business. For example, if you have a website, be sure to list the URL in your Twitter account so that followers can check out your site and what you are about. Provide a location for yourself or business in your profile as well as a name if you choose to.
Find Targeted Followers
What good is your pimped out profile if you don’t have any followers? Not only followers, but targeted followers. Face it, if your twitter profile is built to promote your new dog training ebook, you don’t want to build a list of followers interested in stuff like rock climbing….unless they have a dog (wink).
So what is the best way to find followers who are interested in what you have to offer? Easy, head on over to the twitter search! Then type in keywords or phrases relating to your profiles interests. Browse the results and view any potential candidates who you feel are worthy of following.
Be careful not to follow to many people at once since it could trigger flags at twitter. Typically, I like to target no more than 100 people to follow a day if time permits. Some people will add you right away, while others in a day or two, and others may never add you. While I have been bad about this lately, I try to remove people not following me back when I can.
There are a few sites that help you determine who is and isn’t following you which come in handy. Some sites of note are:
- http://friendorfollow.com/
- http://useqwitter.com/
- http://dossy.org/twitter/karma/
- http://twitterless.com/
There you have it, a few fundamentals of building the perfect twitter account. In our next blog post, we will take a look at how to pimp out your profile/tweets by integrating it with your wordpress blog as well as how to promote your content on twitter.
Do you have a suggestion that I may have not included in the basics of building a twitter profile? If so, let me hear about it!
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Hey check this out: Basics of Building Your Twitter Profile http://tinyurl.com/dfucjg (via Twittley.com) (via @ploked)
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Plug In To Social Me Basics of Building Your Twitter Profile: Let’s take a step back t.. http://tinyurl.com/dfucjg
Basics of Building Your Twitter Profile: Let’s take a step back to some basics today. By now, you should .. http://tinyurl.com/dfucjg
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this was helpful. thank you
no problem, glad you found it helpful
Very nice post! I can't seem to stop reading it so much it is nice!
glad you liked it…if you have any other topics you would like to see covered, please let me know.
RT @tweetmeme Basics of Building Your Twitter Profile | ploked.com http://tinyurl.com/dfucjg . Brilliant for us newbies!
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Thank you so much for sharing your helpful suggestions. I also appreciate the various links to improve my twitter home page. Once again, thank you.
Regards,
Malcolm Hudson
Search is good, but some tools should not be overlooked.
http://twellow.com gives you hierarchical slice n dice search and at the same time shows the "hits" in your arena of interest from the MOST FOLLOWERS down to the least – very powerful way to "go for the jugular" if you want the biggest bang for the buck in your follower base.
DON'T overlook FORUMS for finding followers! Increasingly (the Warrior Forum is a great example of this), Forum software is adding Twitter and the other social networks to forum member profiles, right alongside their Inst Msg handles – so when you see someone who is posting something USEFUL and they, oh, I don't know, can PUT TWO WORDS TOGETHER in a coherent sentence (woo hoo!), you can simply click the icon and BAM! There you are on their Twitter page! Very powerful way to add followers, as you can IMMEDIATELY @message them as to HOW you found them (the forum thread) and change the game on your "followback conversion" to about 95%
I think it is important to spend a bit of time on improving your profile as suggested, so people see you are serious and have made an effort. It is also a great opportunity to make yourself stand out.
Another good resource for a twitter background is http://www.twitbacks.com.
Great stuff. Having already done all of this, however, makes it minimally useful for me
RT @ploked Basics of Building Your Twitter Profile | ploked.com http://tinyurl.com/dfucjg