Twitter is one of the most popular social sites at the moment, and if you don’t already use it, you should consider doing so, because it’s a great tool for making new relationships, and even for making money.
The main purpose of Twitter is very simple. You have 140 characters to tell the world the answer of this simple question: What are you doing right now. This message is called a tweet.
But instead of letting people in on boring details of your life (drinking a glass of water, watching a ball game on TV, etc.) you can use Twitter for teaser headlines, communicate with people and get traffic.
Twitter is free and very easy to use. You can do it directly from your browser, or use desktop programs to make it easier to write a tweet or to read what other people write.
Since Twitter is so popular and easy to use, it is also widely used for Internet Marketing, and here comes the big question: How do you use it for IM? Is there a right way and a wrong way? Or is one way just better than the other?
Automatic Tweets, many followers, many messages
Some seem to think that plenty is better. They get a lot of followers and send these followers a lot of messages.
These messages can contain links to their own sites and blogs, or links to affiliate products they want to sell.
Some people react to these messages by buying things or just by visiting the blogs/sites, or by ignoring the message or by unfollowing.
Manual Tweets, few followers, few messages
On the other site, there are twitterers who believe in personal messages. They only follow people with interesting tweets, so they don’t have that many followers themselves, since there seems to be a strong relationship between the two parties (when somebody follow, many people choose to follow back).
They don’t send out that many messages, and even though they send link to their own blog posts, they also send links to other interesting articles, and they only occasionally send out affiliate links.
They answer the messages from their followers, and they read most of the messages from the people they follow.
This group of twitters seem to think that few, but close followers are better than many indifferent followers.
Which way is the better?
As you might have guessed, I belong to the latter group myself. I know that John from the Rhodes Brothers does too, since I have been following him for a long time, and since he just released a great infoproduct about how to use Twitter: the 1 to 1 Twitter. (Which is a great product, by the way!)
But I guess the question is just as academic as how to write to a maling list: To send lots of sales messages? Or lots of content? Or a combination?
If you use Twitter in one of these ways or the other, please write a comment to this blog post and tell me, what works for you.