Are You Utilizing Twitter the Right Way? 01/19/2012

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Do you use Twitter in your book promotion and name branding? If you aren’t utilizing this awesome resource—you definitely should jump on the bandwagon and get ready for the ride. 

I opened my Twitter profile last year and linked it to my Facebook Page so that all of my status updates from Facebook get posted to Twitter—as well as my daily blog posts. It wasn’t until this week that I’ve been doing more research and reading various articles on how to use Twitter the right way.

One thing I have been doing was following other Twitter profiles, and I have gotten followers in return. I reached a certain amount of followers and remained stagnant for a while—I would lose some followers, and gain more; but always remained at that stagnated number. Until this week…that’s when I began to put productive tools to work.

I’m sure this is a no-brainer for many people, but it’s been an exciting discovery for me. I learned that when you tweet about a topic, you should use the hashtag (#) to mark those keywords or topics in your tweet. I found out that Twitter originally created the hashtag as a way to sift tweets into various categories. You can insert the hastags anywhere in the tweet. If people click on those tags, all the tweets in that specific category are shown. When you use the hastags, your tweets are more easily available for others to locate—thus leading to possible new followers and people reading your tweeted content.

You use the “@” symbol in front of usernames if you are referring to a person with a profile on Twitter—and if you want to retweet something someone said, you use an “RT” (for retweeted) and use the “@” symbol plus the username and copy the tweet. This allows you to retweet something that you found interesting or profound or whatever it meant to you and you also are giving credit where credit is due.

Here’s an example of a tweet I posted where I utilized a hashtag and the “@” symbol:

Watched premiere of #RealNews @theblaze...great news show, loved the               discussion style format. Will continue to watch!

You can Follow my tweets on Twitter
Now, of course none of these are new ideas about utilizing Twitter—however, if you are like me--sometimes a slow learner with new technology—then this is a whole new territory for you. I feel like a kid who has just found a bowl of his or her favorite candy. I’m excited to continue to explore Twitter and utilize it as a great tool for social networking—book / name brand promotion—and a venue for the greatest right (and privilege of all)…FREE speech and the ability to vocalize my opinions. Speaking of opinions, I’d love to hear yours.

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