It was in March 2008 that I had joined Twitter. I never knew Twitter will explode the way it did in the 7-8 months that followed, so I was almost inactive until the end of 2008. It was in the middle of March 2009, that I realized what was happening and jumped into the bandwagon. I regret that I was late into it. Nevertheless, I am still satisfied at the fact that I was not left out.

Twitter and twittering is never too late. Even if you are the latest to join the phenomenon, you will still gain from it, such is the power of Twitter. All that you need to do is the right things. Do not waste unnecessary energy and time at Twitter. Rather, follow a proven and established method and you will see the results.

But, what is the proven and established method that I am talking about?

This blog was oriented towards helping people know about Twitter. My objective with this blog was to create awareness about this extremely powerful 140 character tool and in expressing the ways in which it could help you make the most of the Internet.

There are quite a few tools that I spoke to you about, many of which were automated tweeting and following tools. You might have noticed the term “automated” in the above sentence.

Why do we need automation at Twitter?

Twitter is vast. It is about following, getting followed and tweeting and reading tweets. Spending a lot of time at Twitter could prove a disaster to your business or, other online activities. Hence it is important to ensure that you spend minimal time at Twitter, yet get the maximum results. This is basically what Twitter API has helped achieve.

When I started I had a dismal following of about 10-12 followers. I kept trying hard and spent quite a good amount of time trying to get followed but with zero results.

Check out below statistics from Twitter Counter -

I had just a little above 4,000 followers in the month of September, which grew to almost 6,500 followers in the month of November. Unfortunately I am unable to show you the stats prior to this. My follower count grew from a mere 1,300 followers in July to 4,000 in September. One aspect that you need to bear in mind is the fact that these are all targetted followers based on specific keywords focused on a niche that I do business in. Today I earn about $0.63 per follower per month, that too with minimal work and effort.

Wondering how all this was possible?

Automation – is the answer. It is a few tools that automate the entire process of tweeting and acquiring followers that has helped me get this.

Let’s talk a bit about these tools -

Tweetadder – This has been my favorite tool. The things that this tool does is un-imaginable. There is no other tool out there that can even match half of what Tweetadder does. Some of the things that it does is -

• Increase Twitter and Site Traffic to your event, charity, service, business, band, or website.
• Find Like Minded Twitter Followers in Seconds
• Auto Follow up to 1000 Targeted Profiles per Day
• Get up to 500 new twitter followers per day per profile
• Multiple Accounts, Unlimited Twitter Profiles & Chaining
• Automate Twitter Posts, Scheduled Tweets, Stay active without actually being active
• Automate Scheduled Direct Messages
• Auto Unfollow, VIP Safe List
• Best Twitter Search, including Global Location and Multi Language Searches
• Set it and Forget It! Runs Daily, Automatically

What I achieved was just a minimalist use of this tool. Had I used it to the fullest potential, my follower count would have gone out of the roof.

Tweetadder, at the price that it is available at, can recoup your cost in just under a week.

You can order the software from Tweeting Tips here.

Auto Follow Script – This is yet another script that runs quitely on your computer and adds targetted followers to your Twitter account. It is extremely user-friendly and is very easy to use. I often run it and forget it and it keeps adding followers to my account. Two of my twitter profiles that I had started about less than a month back already have more than 3,000 followers in it and I am now monetizing it.

A few features of this script are as follows -

• Unfollowed users are flagged so that you do not re-follow them.
• Ability to unfollow anyone that does not follow you back.
• Auto Follow Twitter Users — Fully Control Twitter following with Max # of follows per day.
• Auto Unfollow — Unfollow users who do not follow back within a set time frame.
• Random Time Delay Settings — You choose what time intervals between follows, unfollows.
• Steal followers from other users.

If you are worried if these activities are unethical and could ban you from Twitter, then trust me you are absolutely wrong. All of these are ethical and within the TOS of Twitter.

You can order Auto Follow Script here.

There could be many other tools that could do these things for you, but I found that these two were the most economical and easiest tools available. If you know about any other tools, do not forget to mention about them in the comments below.

Twitter is about following like-minded people.

That is right! But the irony of the story is that it is not how Twitter is interpreted by most of the Twitterers. Today, Twitter is about showing off, the count of followers that you have and since there is a follower-to-following ratios that Twitter employs, twitterers know that they have to have followers and followings as well.

It is here that the race for generating more number of followers have started. And this race has turned ugly now. People blindly follow others and they in turn return the favor by following. There is no more a common interest between the followed and the follower.

Most of the application that you see today are targetting this objective and hence there is no relevance to the kind of people being followed. All applications focus on only one thing – that is generate followers.

But there is this service called as “Twollo” with a difference. Twollo is different in the sense that it identifies common interests that you have with other Twitterers and then helps you follow them.

What is “Twollo”?

Twollo is different. Twollo is an ajax based application that helps you identify Twitterers with common interests as you and then put an auto-follow instruction so that you do not have to manually keep following people with the same interests.

All you have to do is login to Twollo with you Twitter username password. Then you can setup key-terms that signify your interests – like marketing, article writing etc. You can also set a limit to the maximum number of people you want to follow. This is very important because mass following can be considered as spamming by Twitter and your accounts may be blocked. Twollo will then work in the background for you. It will identify such Twitterers who share common interests based on the key-terms that you have set and automatically follow them, thus increasing your presence on Twitter.

You might be wondering if this is a sales-pitch.

Don’t worry, it isn’t one.

Twollo doesn’t cost anything. It is a free service, though it has an upgrade available for a charge. But its free service is more than useful and you will not have to upgrade to use any of the above said features.

Then what are your waiting for? Just logon to Twollo and start making your presence felt all over the internet.

P.S. Twollo stores your Twitter information for it to work in the background.

Don’t forget to post your comment about the tool here. Also follow me in case you liked this post. You may even subscribe to my RSS feeds here.

What has a game got to do with Twitter?

This was the thought I had when I first heard about this application that was based on Twitter.

But like all other curious Twitter users, digging the internet for applications functioning on the Twitter API, I too, decided that I would check this out.

I signed up at SNODS and became a SNODS agent. Check out my badge here on the left.

Nice name indeed. SNODS standing for “Social Networks Online Defense Squad”. You tend to feel a bit more respectable with that kind of a department name.

The site is interesting and can bind you to it, once you start off. The basic objective of the game is to capture Twitterers. You earn a salary on a per hourly basis. The more people you capture the more your salary becomes. With the increase in salary, you can train more guards, buy more buildings which in turn will help you train even more guards, hold your captured Twitterers in “Solitary Confinement” and many more such things.

Each Twitterer has been given a rank basedo n the number of followers that they have. The more the followers, the better their rank and consequently the more salary per hour you will earn if your capture them.

The game is very interesting and can be a time-pass when you have some time to relax.

I keep looking out for such interesting things which can relieve me of my work-pressure at least for some time and SNODS proved to be a worthy discovery.

You might want to check out SNODS here.

Don’t forget to post your comments on what you think about SNODS.

How are you adding new followers to your Twitter account?

Twitter is now the talk of the town. Every internet marketer or, internet surfer has something to say about Twitter. You presence on Twitter is now counted by the number of followers you have on Twitter. But are you able to add enough followers? Is the follower count a status symbol? If yes, then where are you on it?

The easiest way to get followers on Twitter is by asking them to follow you in case they liked your profile and your contribution. This obviously means publicizing you profile. How will you do this?

The answer is “Twitter buttons”. There are a range and variety of Twitter buttons available on the internet, which you can use on your blogs or, websites. If you are running a blog on the WordPress platform, it is very simple. Just copy and paste the code into a text widget for your sidebar. In case you are not on WordPress, then you need to copy and paste the code into the HTML of your webpage, which is also not very difficult. But all that you need to ensure is that your button is at a place where it is visible to your visitors.

Here is a list of such buttons available on the internet -

My Buttons – There are two different buttons that I use on my blogs and which I like very much.

This is a design I like the most and looks sobre and cool. I do not know who was the creator of this design ( in case you know it, do let me know so that I can credit it to them)

Just right-click and save the button in case you wish to use this. Else you may just copy and paste the code below:

(<a href=”http://www.twitter.com/your_twitter_name><img title=”twitter_follow_me” src=”http://www.tweetingtip.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/twitter_follow_me_small.png” alt=”twitter_follow_me” width=”179″ height=”78″ border=”0″ /></a>)

This design is one that I created with a bit of idea from here and there. But I love this design, more so because there a bit of my hard word put into it.

You may use this design as you wish. (A bit of credit to me will be good). You can just save the image and upload it to your server or use the code below:

(<a href=”http://www.twitter.com/your_twitter_name><img title=”twitterfollow” src=”http://www.tweetingtip.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/twitterfollow4a.gif” alt=”twitterfollow” width=”200″ height=”125″ border=”0″ /></a>)

Web Design by mts – They have about 10 different Twitter follow me icons to offer.  Though the website is Non-English, you would not face any difficulty in understanding the download rules.

Twit Buttons – My personal favorite because they have a variety of buttons to offer. It is extremely easy to use the buttons because all you have to do is copy and paste  the html code provided.

My Social Buttons – This is another place where you can find some innovative and beatiful “Twitter follow me” buttons. Though the buttons are only a few, it is different and looks cool.

Randa Clay buttons – This website offers a collection of about 18 buttons which is again very simple and professional. Nice instructions as well.

Siah Designs – Josiah Jost has a list of very good and useful Twitter buttons. There is also an option of personalization for a small fee.

Vincent Abry buttons – It is a collection of 31 Twitter buttons and the collection is very good and different from the normal buttons.

Go ahead, and add one of these buttons on your blog and add followers to your Twitter account.

In the next post we will be discussing the basic rules of following and rejecting.

Is it courteous to block somebody at Twitter?

I asked this question many time a couple of day back, when I saw a couple of my followers, who I too was following (as a courteous approach in a social network, you do that) started spamming me with their tweets.

What are the rules of a social networking site like that of Twitter? Are there some basic guidelines of courteous behavior? What should be your approach towards people who have no regards to you?

Social Networks like that of Facebook and Twitter have their very specific guidelines. They say that they would not tolerate spam and spamming. They also say that every individual joining the network has to have the minimum courtesy to at least respect the privacy of the other person. But how far are these guidelines and rule followed? Are Twitter and such other networks monitoring the behavior of their users?

Indeed, Twitter is monitoring the behavior. I have seen quite a few account getting blocked because of such spamming and Twitter has been very strict at it. But with the surge in the users of Twitter in the past couple of months, when Twitters servers could not bear the load, wouldn’t it be unrealistic to expect Twitter to continually play Police to such behaviors?

It is for this reason that such social networks give you the option of “Blocking” and “Reporting” people. As a good citizen of such network sites we are expected to act wisely by blocking such spammers and reporting about them to the sites. But we are so engrossed in our activities that we forget the basic expectations from us and tend to then complain about the lack of restrictions at such sites.

It is indeed, “COURTEOUS” to block a spammer or, a person who does not know how to respect the rules.

All it takes is to press one button named “BLOCK”. Do it whenever required.

Photograph courtesy Oddball27

Are you tweeting? Wrong question, ain’t it?

Who is it that is not aware of Twitter today? Twitter is a global phenomenon and even Barack Obama is tweeting and has huge followers at Twitter.

So when such renowned personalities are using Twitter and are making their presence felt at Twitter, why should you and I stay away from it?

But what is the purpose of Twitter? Why would you and I want to use it? What are the benefits of using Twitter?

There are a lot of such questions which has the same number of answers most of which are unconvincing and a lot of the rest close to convincing but are yet far from the goal of convincing you and me. Just type in “Twitter” in Google and you would find millions of websites with close to a million of different information about this global phenomenon in 14o words. Then what is the purpose of another website, rather a blog called as “Tweeting Tips”?

It is just because I thought there was quite a bit that I could write about Twitter and I also felt that down the line there would a lot that you can contribute about Twitter. There is no other purpose to it.

Also, just wanted to mention that I had actually bought the “Thesis” theme and wanted to experiment with it. I had a domain name called “Tweetingtip.com” and I felt that this was where I could do all the experimentation.

Just Kidding!!!

Let’s TWEET together.

Tweet…Tweet…Tweet.