Twitter – To Me It’s Garbage, but I Guess I’m a Minority
Hello, Mark Schwartz here, And I can’t believe I am writing about Twitter. 
Twitter is a very popular micro-blog social site, where its users set up profiles about themselves and then network with others.
It is very similar to Facebook. People “subscribe” to your profile, and then receive an update from you every time you make a post to your profile. Imagine, if you are selling something, how nice it would be to automatically notify everyone at once about a new product! Well that seems to be the basic allure for most people. It seems that 90% of all the tweets I receive are nothing but sales pitches.
My personal opinion of Twitter is that it’s nothing but a big SPAM festival. But, there are many people that swear buy it so it deserves mentioning. I hate to say it, but I really only use Twitter to help me build my Blog and Social Networking Spider Web. I have little use for all the Spam i get.
Here are a few things about Twitter that may be interesting….. You probably already have a twitter account, but I suggest using a twitter name that says who you are or what you do. Many social media experts suggest not doing this and using your own name so that you don’t seem like you are out to sell something. However, I have found that having a name that includes my profession, allows me to be found by more people doing their own searches. I have gotten many of my followers because of my name alone ( I have six Twitter accounts with differing names and purposes).
I have never minded if someone has a professional profile as long as they are not trying to sell me. I quickly unfollow anyone who is sending out updates that are constant sales pitches. Some people spend days following interesting links and even smiling at someone’s every tweet. Personally, I don’t have time to read someone’s tweet that their dog just ate their kid’s breakfast, etc.
If you are an active Twitter user, load your tweets so that others can find you easily. One way I have found to do this is to be sure to add at least one tweet a day with hashtags for your key words. If you are tweeting about social networking, put #socialnetworking at the end. If you are tweeting about an event, put that there with a tag. When other people search those key words, your words will come up.
Here are a few Twitter related tools that I use. Again, I am not a big Twitter user, but these are kind of cool.
1. Social Oomph – Let’s you schedule tweets across all your Twitter accounts, send Direct Messages to all your followers. Vastly improve your productivity on Twitter. The f*ree version is what I use and here is a link => http://www.socialoomph.com/86849.html
2. Twitbacks – Let’s you create free Twitter backgrounds in less than 2 minutes. (Well that’s what their website says, but you know how it goes – it takes me longer than 2 minutes). You can help to brand yourself on Twitter by creating your very own Twitter background. Here’s the link => http://twitbacks.com
3. Twellow – Twellow is a directory of public Twitter accounts, with hundreds of categories and search features to help you find people who matter to you. You can set yourself up in their directory and hopefully people will find you. Here’s the link => http://www.twellow.com/
Of course there are many, many more Twitter tools. Do a search on Twitter Tools and you’ll find a zillion of them.
P.S. Twitter uses nofollow links so you will not get any SEO juice or backlinks from tweeting.
