Twitter Tutorial

This is our fifth post in our blog and social media tutorial series. This tutorial is about Twitter, the "micro-blogging" platform that has become quite popular in the past few months.

Twitter’s “micro-blogging” interface is perfect for transmitting tips, quick thoughts, updates and links. When you have something quick that you want to tell or show people, try messaging it through Twitter.

You can sign up for Twitter at: www.twitter.com.

Sign up under your own name or a catchy name which means something to your business. Be sure to capture your name while it's still available!

Next, fill out your personal profile. Here you can add your location, your website and a short bio about yourself. You can also upload a photo of yourself and pick a background design from Twitter's design templates. If you prefer, you can download your own custom design template.

Then Twitter will ask to search your email addresses to find people you know who are already on Twitter or who you might like to invite to sign up to Twitter. You should encourage your followers to sign up for a twitter account so they can get updated news and offers in a timely manner. Once you have connected with people on your own list, you can also search for like minded people on Twitter and follow them. It is an acceptable practice to follow people you do not know and often, once you follow them, they will also follow you.

Try searching for keywords that are important to your business, like self help or fitness and you will find other people who mention these keywords in their posts. You can search for keywords through Twitter search.

Now, it's time to post. Actually, it's better to post a few "tweets" before you follow people you don't know so they can see a sample of what you are going to post. There are quite a few spammers on Twitter so people are starting to get suspicious of people who don't have a lot of details filled out in their profile or people who post the same thing over and over.

To post on Twitter follow the instructions below:

1. Log into your account at: http://twitter.com/
2. Type in “What you’re doing” in 140 characters or less, and you’re all set.

Twitter is a great place to let people know what you’re up to. You can tell your followers what you’re working on, what you’ve just completed, or offer a link to your website or iAmplify product page.

One great thing to remember is that you can paste your affiliate links directly into your Twitter post, and they will be tracked through the iAmplify Affiliate Program. Follow the directions on how to pull your affiliate tracking link from your affiliate text link html code in our WordPress Tutorial. You can shorten your links by using a tinyurl service. This is especially helpful since you can only use 140 characters when posting.

Check out this "Ultimate Guide to Everything Twitter" to get more in-depth details about using Twitter.

Here's another great post about finding followers on Twitter:
http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2008/11/looking-for-m-1.html

This post is a case study on how Twitter drives sales:
http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/02/twitter-drives-traffic-sales-a.html

And don't forget to follow us on twitter @iAmplify!