Twitter is the Biggest Game in Social Media

Twitter is More than a social media platform, it is an important marketing tool which can greatly increase your business marketing and customer engagement. I consider Twitter a game and I play it everyday on my phone. How do I know if I'm winning? By the number of mentions and retweets my messages generate, and the number of followers I earn every day.

I have been using Twitter off and on since 2010 and until last year I didn't take it seriously. I was one of those people who didn't quite understand how Twitter could work for me and why I should use it as a powerful business marketing tool. If you want to learn how to increase your followers with an end goal of increase your website views this is for you.

The information below is not for the casual Twitter user, but for the advanced social media individual who wants to increase views, click thrus, and visibility to various website channels including your blog, webstore, CafePress, photography page, Squidoo pages, you name it if you want more visibility and engagement in your online world use Twitter. If you're intimidated don't be, it's kinda hard to make a mistake, if you do it's often forgotten the next day.

By following a few steps, and using a few online tools you can organically increase your followers.

Twitter works, plain and simple. I have been blogging on 3QuartersToday Wordpress blog for almost three years, it's a personal account about photography and in three years I have about 500 blog postings. My average views were between 50-75 per day and I was doing no social media promotion other than Pinterest every now and then. In January 2014 I decided to automate and create a few Twitter campaigns on my more interesting and popular articles. You can see what happened in the graph above.

I can tell you what Twitter is, how it works, and why I use Twitter.

But if you should care about Twitter, that's up to you.

Twitter is a free internet social media platform that allows you to send and broadcast short messages. How short? A sentence limited to 140 characters. Yup, that's short. I've learned to shorten my sentences, remove extraneous words, sometimes even punctuation to achieve brevity.

A message is called a tweet and anyone in Twitter can read it. Do they? Probably not, most likely it gets lost in the millions of tweets sent each day. But if you use certain strategies and Twitter tips you can increase the chances of your messages being read and engaging in conversation.

What? You don't want to have conversations? Don't have anything to say to people? Maybe Twitter isn't for you,...but wait consider the following.

If your answer is yes then you should be using Twitter. 140 characters don't seem like much but you can say a lot in just one sentence. Think about it, business managers use a 2 minute elevator pitch to describe their companies, you can promote a product, a service, a benefit in just one sentence, or a question.

Then send them to your website, blog, or store to learn the rest of the story.

1. Do You Have a Business? If you have a brick and mortar store (a walk in business)>Twitter is a great way to follow people in your area and send targeted messages to your customers and future customers. Restaurants can have a "flash" sale for an hour and send out the message via Twitter
2. Do you Blog?Do you want more visitors and readers to your blog? Then you want to use Twitter. Remember some people can earn money from their blog through AdWords, affliate links and promoting their business, so it's worth the time to drive views to your blog.

   Google and other search engines like to see traffic and search engines like to see people staying on a site for longer than a couple of seconds. If you write interesting information about what you sell, or promote then you will be rewarded for higher rankings in the search engines.

3. DoSell Online?If you have an online store you want to attract customers to your site, not just people, but customers, targeted customers. Twitter allows you to build a group of niche customers who are interested in what you have to sell.

Twitter originated as a phone messaging application and it is ideally suited for use on a hand held device or phone.

There are several phone apps to help manage your Twitter account, but I prefer the Android official Twitter app myself. It's simple, clean and easy to use.

Instead of playing games on my phone like Candy Crush I play Twitter. I set my own rules, such as if I get 100 followers in a day I win, or if I get 1000 new followers in a month I win.

I am working on my phone, I'm building my Twitter network, which results in more click referrals to my CafePress store and blogs. This results in more sales, which results in more income. That's how I work from my phone.

1. Decide: who you want to attract as an audience, who are your buyers, are they gardeners, musicians, artists, teachers. You don't want to follow everyone on Twitter, and you don't want everyone to follow you. I have three accounts @3Quarters2Day @3QuartersImages for my photography group (no politics) and @petsncritters for you guessed it, pets and animals.

2. Fill out your entire Twitter profile:, use all the characters allowed, use hashtags in your description to describe the groups you follow. People who follow those hashtags will find you and follow, you want to attract advanced active Twitter users

3. Use the Search tool: save your industry searches for quick and easy future use

4. Create Lists to categorize groups of people into industry niches (magazines, news, RT Fanclub, qoutes)

5. Search and save: save popular hashtags you use often that reflect your Twitter community (#photography, #Lightroom)

6. Retweet generously and often:, RT while watching TV, it's easy to do between commercials, takes little time or thought. Retweet popular messages, then....

6. Follow: yes follow people who have retweeted the message you just retweeted.

7. Unfollow: people who are not active on Twitter should be unfollowed, they clog up your statistics and misrepresent your Twitter ratio. You want to build an active community of Twitter users. I use to unfollow inactive accounts and unfollow people who have unfollowed me.

How to Follow in Twitter

A. Don't follow too many people in a 15 minute period Twitter will block you

B. Alternate your Twitter following cycle with retweeting

C. Find a popular account, follow the first 10 people on their account who have followed them

D. Follow people who have retweeted a tweet you like (these people are active and more likely to follow back)

E. Use a Follow app on your phone, I use "justfollow" it will trickle your follow requests to Twitter and not throw you into Twitter jail.

F. If you have time, follow people who have about a 1:1 ratio of followers to following, that indicates they follow back

I sometimes have over 500 people in my Copy Followers which will may take Twitter four days to follow, but that's ok I don't have to think about it and it saves me time to reply to my mentions. It's all about prioritizing, I would rather spend my "live" twitter time responding directly to people who answer a question, ask a question, or respond to my tweet than typing tweets by hand.

How this Twitter strategy works in practice:

I search (on my Android Twitter app) for my favorite hashtag #marines I find a tweet within the top 5 that has 606 retweets, I first retweet, then I click the twitterbird to follow the first 25-50 tweeters. Then I go back to the next message in the feed I like, retweet, and follow another large group.

Do you want people to take notice of you on Twitter? Then you have to tweet often. There are millions of tweets everyday and your few messages a day are like a needle in a haystack. The chances of your one tweet about your latest article on "World War II Facts" is going to get lost in the shuffle.

But you have a regular job during the day, you can't be on Twitter all day long, so how can you post messages when they are most likely to be read? Use a Twitter management platform to automate your tweets. There are many programs which are free, some are free for one account, some limit the number of tweets per day, and others charge a small monthly fee for usage. I currently use Hootsuite and SocialOomph to automate my tweets.

Not only do I schedule my tweets but I also "SPIN" my messages. Spinning tweets is rewriting the same message in many different ways, in different voices, changing the context, making it into a question or rewording a tweet to direct the readers attention. Social Oomph is the only Twitter platform I have found which allows you to custom spin and schedule tweets.

This does not mean you automate and ignore. You will not gain followers, you will not win friends or influence people.

I have tried this experiment just to see what would happen. My @3QuartersImages account stayed at 50 followers for over four months, when I started actually "managing" my account with RTs, active following, and responding to people it grew from 50 followers to 1,000 followers in a week and 2,000 in a month. That is WINNING at Twitter!

My general tweeting rules which have worked

1. Don't tweet same exact tweet more than 2 times per day.

2. Use a Twitter platform such as SocialOomph to spin twitter campaigns

3. Post on popular hashtags trending days ie: #MilitaryMonday #PhotoFriday #ThrowbackThursday #FoodieFriday

4. Schedule trending topics to start and stop between certain dates and increase their frequency as the event nears. For example you may want to start tweeting Christmas messages (#xmas #holidays) in early November once or twice a day, but in the middle of December increase it to every 3 hours. Remember your tweets are spun and in queue so the same content won't appear in the same day.

5. Turn off your scheduled tweets during a national emergency or crisis to avoid being insensitive.

I cannot stress this enough, if you are going to schedule tweets there is nothing more insensitive than tweeting funny quotes or jokes during the Boston Bomber incident or Hurricane Katrina. Find the pause all tweets menu button and know where it is so it's easily accessed.

The easiest way to win on Twitter is to Retweet or RT, retweeting is when you pass along news a message or comments someone else has posted and you think it's good enough to share.

This wins you followers, people appreciate when you RT their tweets as it passes their link onto their followers and so forth and so forth. To target tweets worth RTing go to your saved searches in my case its #USMC and retweet one of the top messages. If you are using Hootsuite you can edit your retweest to gradually drip throughout the day so you are not retweeting twenty messages in a row.

Just in this month I have over 1,100 tweets of mine that have been retweeted. That is A LOT! But that is a lot of tweeting also, which I don't do manually, I let SocialOomph schedule for me.

The innocent hashtag or # number symbol is the biggest key to the Twitter game. It is the Twitter filter or search engine in a sense and groups conversations by topic. For example if you just want to read about Justin Biebers you could enter the following search tags and read about just him, no one else. Try it I dare you, here are a few to get you started #ILoveJustinBieberBecause or #JustinBieber or maybe you don't like the teen star train wreck. I don't blame you, but his fans are all over Twitter.

How I Use Hashtags

I use hashtags to target my interest groups, for example on my main account #3Quarters2Day I have curated followers who are, for the most part, a conservative, military, patriot, and Marine audience.

These website resources are tools to help evaluate your social media effectiveness through the use of hashtags. Hashtags are used not only in Twitter, but Instagram, Pinterest, and even in Facebook. If you are engaged in any type of social media you need to learn how to use hashtags effectively.

Until I found these touch screen gloves I had to take my gloves off to text or tweet during the winter, or even answer the phone. What a hassle. I wouldn't be without these now.

Smart phone such as Androids and tablets are wonderful inventions, but now when wearing gloves in the car during the winter. These iPhone or texting gloves will work with any phone. The entire glove is woven with silver threads to conduct the necessary touch element to answer your phone.

Place your Best Twitter Followers in a List

So you've decided to follow a lot of people on Twitter, good for you. Now you've gone to your home page and there are hundreds if not thousands of updates. There is no way you're going to read them all. At this point many people give up, they don't see much point in Twitter, it's noisy, time consuming, and doesn't make sense.

This is where Lists become important. It is the organizational must have in your Twitter toolbox and how to organize people and into various message centers. Still confused? Bear with me.

A Twitter list can be public, or private containing only your personal friends, or maybe a point a view you don't want to share with anyone else publicly. You can subscribe to other people's lists they create and they can subscribe to yours.

For example here are some idea of common lists:

News = add your favorite TV, radio stations, newspaper, or news anchor and you get their updates in one stream. I actually get all my news on Twitter just by visiting my news lists.

Celebrities = Kardashians, (why you would want to follow them, I don't know) TMZ, and one of my favorites @BonesonFox and @TheEllenShow (Ellen is really funny and mastered social media)

Local Tweets = want to connect and find out what is happening in your local area, from your hometown, place people in your "local tweets" list. I have a special Omaha Peeps list

School = this is more applicable to high schoolers and people in college, but creating a school list will let you stay informed and in the loop with people in your school.

Friends = not everyone on Twitter is your friend, I would bet you have only met a handful, if that many people you are following on Twitter. So to make Twitter intimate, create a Friends list and only your close personal friends tweets will show up on your phone.

Occasionally, when I see an article faltering and getting fewer views, I will create a three day campaign where I will automate and spin messages specifically for that topic. This never fails to increase my views and rankings, if I do it the right way.

I check my hashtags, create curiosity in my tweet, sometimes ask a question, and then schedule it to post every 3-4 hours for 3-5 days. Then is goes back into the regular queue where it will appear maybe once a week. As you can see during a Twitter campaign, Twitter accounts for 90% of my referrals.

Analyzing your twitter account for peak times when your followers tweet is important. You want to reach your audience when they are active and can see your tweets.