Keep your Tweet 120 characters or less.

Keeping your Tweets shorter than 120 characters makes it easier for followers to Retweet, and will help to increase the number of Retweets you get.

More Retweets means;

• more people see you tweets
• more followers
• and more search engine love

If you don’t keep under 120 characters, your prospective Retweeters will need to edit your tweet to fit in the critical RT acknowledgement “RT @yourtwitterhandle” before they share your tweet with their followers.

If you can keep your tweet really short, your prospective Retweeter won’t need to edit your tweet to make it fit the 140 character limit, and you can even give them room to add a hashtag or a comment.

Twitter Follower Mosaic by joelaz, on Flickr

Tweet More Often

The more regularly you tweet, the more opportunities there are for prospective followers to discover your content. While this can be a more time consuming way to get more followers, keeping a consistent output will assist.

Tweet More Specifically For Your Market

Whether someone chooses to follow you on Twitter is often a question of value. How valuable is your stream of tweets to them?

Providing unique actionable content (your own or curated content) that addresses the pains and concerns of your target market will garner you not only more followers, but followers who are more likely to be ideal customers.

Add A Link To Your Email Signature

We all send email everyday, and at the bottom of our email is often the most under utilised piece of media that we create. Add a link or twitter icon in your email signature and watch your follower count grow.

Get Noticed By The Heavy Hitters

Identify the leaders in your niche or market using simple search tools like http://search.twitter.com.

Type in keywords from your niche and find the people that are tweeting regularly on the subject and particularly those that are being retweeted often.

For example if your niche was Hair Dressing you might search for terms like Dandruff Treatment, Natural Hair Treatments, Hair Styling Tools. Once you have identified the heavy hitters in your niche, follow them, create a list and add them to it, retweet their best tweets ask questions and start a conversation.

Bonus Tip: Use the Google Wonder Wheel Tool to find important keywords in your niche.

Get Listed

There are a range of Twitter Directories online, get listed in them is just another way to be discovered. Three good ones to start with are Twellow, Wefollow and Twibs.

Bonus Tip: Carefully choose the keywords and categories attached to your profile. Look for any heavy hitters or leaders in your niche and see what categories and keywords they use.

Tweet Less Specifically For Your Market

It’s possible to be too focussed on business content. Mix things up with an inspirational quote, a ironic statement, one liner joke (only appropriate jokes) to show a little more personality. People want to connect with other people so more personality means more followers.

Participate In Bigger Conversations

Most industries or niches have hashtags or topics that a high volume of people are discussing on Twitter. Or at the very least there are active discussions in topics related to your niche or industry. For example in many western countries the #masterchef, #americanidol and #bigbrother are used to discuss popular TV shows.

Find these conversations and participate.

If there is not a good hashtag for your niche why not start one. Become the founder of the feast and host the most valuable conversations in your niche.

Bonus Tip: Use a tool like Twubs to aggregate and promote the key hastags in you niche. If no one has registered hashtags for you niche yet, be a real market leader and claim them.

Remember you don’t need to be the smartest or most experienced person in your niche to host the most important conversation.

What are your tips to get more Twitter Followers, we’d love to hear what works for you in the comments below?

The Tweetbot website is here.
The Tweetbot listing in iTunes is here.

Video originally posted at Ed Dale’s blog

Twitter is a wonderful tool for Thought Leadership, for connecting with allied professionals, and taking the pulse of the market. However let’s not forget that it’s also very useful for prospecting for Leads and making Sales.

This evening I stumbled across this helpful account of using Twitter to prospect and sell on Copyblogger.

How to use Twitter to land more clients

After content marketing, the second most successful way that I land clients is through Twitter. Here’s how I do it:

Step One I click into the search box in my Hootsuite dashboard (you can do the same thing in the Twitter console).

Step Two I search for phrases that match the services I offer, then I comb through the results and find tweets that match people looking for my services.

Step Three Finally, I click through to the blogs from tweets that match my criteria and do one of three things: 1) Leave a comment 2) Submit a message through the contact form 3) Send an e-mail if an address is listed.

That’s all I do.

It’s so successful that I’ve landed more clients this way than through content marketing alone.

Granted, having meaningful content increases the chances that these clients will sign on the dotted line (or click through to Paypal), so content still reigns as king.

Full blog post at Copyblogger

To be fair the author of this post Joseph Wesley Putnam goes on to explain there this system is not a silver bullet and takes work. However, it’s fair to say that prospects who are asking buying questions on Twitter are fairly warm, and being helpful and polite can certainly lead to doing business if not now, in the future.

Action Step

If you’re not already using a Hootsuite or a similar Twitter Dashboard head over to search.twitter.com and try typing in some terms that prospects might use if they were asking buying questions. You may need to experiment with a few terms until you find genuine enquiries without too much noise or few to no results. If you’re already using Hootsuite or similar try some prospect searching.

The Golden Rule for Twitter Leads And Sales

Remember this is a conversation between two human beings not a digital spearfishing event. Be helpful, humble and position yourself as a trusted source not a $2 spruker with a tinny megaphone (you don’t want to be that guy).

Liz Harmon is CEO of HarmonTampa PR and is well know for the Twitter or PR tips she regularly shares like this little gem.

#PR Tip: Reach more, increase influence. Connect with tweeple in your/your clients’ industries using Twellow: http://ow.ly/56um9 #HTPR

original tweet

Following on from yesterday’s post Twitter; How To Use Lists For Market Leadership today we share a tool that automates the creation of smart Twitter Lists Formulists.

Create Twitter Lists For Many Purposes

Formulists has an array of tools that automatically create Twitter Lists based on a range of different criteria. For example you can ask Formulists to identify who are your Twitter friends most influential followers and add them to a list for you to review and follow at your leisure.

Or you this is killer, you can ask Formulists to create a list of experts on a particular subject, e.g. people who tweet regulalry about solar hot water systems, or french furniture polishing, or breeding daschunds whatever keywords terms are important in your industry. Perfect if you want to follow the Market Leadership through Twitter Lists formula from the last post.

Formulists has 18 separate tools to help you create and manage your Twitter lists, the tools are categorised 5 ways;

• Organise Your Network
• Expand Your Network
• Track Followers
• Strengthen Social Ties
• Customise Existing Lists

Getting Started With Formulists

Getting started with Formulists is a simple as logging into Twitter, visiting Formulists and with one click linking your accounts. Then simply choose the type of list you wish to create or manage.

Action Step

If you’re not already carving it up with Formulists, why not head over there right now and have Formulists start creating some expert lists right now for your top 3 areas of interest in your market or niche. This tip alone will improve the quality of information you getting via Twitter

Using Twitter Lists For Market Leadership on Twitpic

In late 2009 Twitter added an awesome new feature called Lists. It allows users to create lists of other account whether they follow those accounts or not. Twitter Lists are a powerful business tool for 4 big reasons;

• Improving the quality of your Twitter reading experience. Rather than consuming a feed that has a mishmash of content you can group high quality twitter feeds into subject specific groups and read from them rather than the firehose.

• Getting found. Twitter lists often rank high in search results so create lists around keywords in your industry or niche and give your prospects another way to discover you.

• Showing Leadership. If you were to host a conference for your industry or niche and having the world’s greatest experts speaking do you think people would perceive you as an Industry Leader? Create a list of experts in your niche will a) give you great information about what’s hot in your industry, and b) if you promote the list to others its akin to hosting a conference.

• Providing Value to others in your niche. If your prospects discover your Twitter Lists and find them full of useful info they are going to see you as being on top of new developments and they are going to be grateful.

How To Use Twitter Lists

To create a Twitter list, simply log into your Twitter Account.

Find the account you wish to add to a list, click the dropdown menu beside their account name and click “Add to list”.

If you don’t already have a list already created to add this account to just select “Create a list” and create one.

All your lists can be found at http://twitter.com/your-username/lists e.g. http://twitter.com/BizTweetTips/lists

Creating A Twitter List on Twititpic

For more help on creating your lists check out Twitter’s own How To Use Twitter Lists Tutorial

Hot Tweet Tip

A quick way to create high quality lists is to find existing lists in your area of interest and cherry pick account to add to your own lists.

How To Use Lists For Market Leadership

• Create Public Lists for the main keywords in your niche. e.g. if you niche is Plumbing Supplies you might create lists like Plumbers Sydney, Plumbers Melbourne, Plumbers Brisbane, then Plumbing Supplies Wholesale, Bathroom Taps Manufactures, Vanity Unit, etc.

• Create Private Lists with your competitors Twitter Accounts. This way you can dip in quickly and see what they are up to.

• Add your Twitter account to expert lists. e.g. if you are a budding Children’s Book Illustrator create a list of the world’s most sought after illustrators and add your account to that list. You will be see as an expert by association and it may help you in become known by other leaders in the industry.

• Create a list of allied services that your prospects might find useful. e.g. if you’re a Hairdresser your prospects might appreciate a list of shampoo makers, nail studios, shoe shops, fashion designers, etc.

• Market your lists. Our Biz Tweet Tips lists are a tremendous resource, we share them through our websites, ebooks, email, newsletters, etc. Sharing your lists is another way to add value to your prospects and colleagues.

Action Step

BizTweetTips are only helpful if you act on them if you haven’t created a list who not create one right now? If you have lists why not share your list right now?If you found this useful please tweet this article or share it on Facebook or Share it LinkedIn

Dave Kerpen shared some awesome tips from Big Brands using Twitter for Business if you like these check out the full post on Mashable.

Have fun

Don’t be afraid to say sorry.

Showcase the people behind your brand

Bring your brand’s personality to lie with multimedia (photos, videos, audios)

Contests and special offers drive excitement about your brand. (best done with tasteful moderation)

Authentically engage with celebrities. If done correctly it can give you access to a large audience

Find active twitter hastags to participate in. Consider starting and hosting Twitter chats that position you as a leader in your niche or industry.

Drawn From: 9 Lessons From Successful Brands on Twitter on Mashable