My favorite use of twitter is to monitor keywords. For example, I watch for the word “composting” to join in composting conversations. People ask questions and I get a chance to answer them. That is a great way to engage in the conversation. The followers will come as you progress and they will be quality followers. One key is to talk about what you are interested in — watch and engage in the conversation around those topics.
Oh, and I don’t do twitter all day. In a normal day, I’ll check it 2-4 times. This usually takes A LOT less than 10 minutes each time and I have multiple twitter accounts that are active:
- I logon with Seesmic, Seesmic is a great tool to watch multiple streams for multiple accounts.
- Check for @mentions and respond.
- Then I look at 3-5 streams of keywords and only glance through the last 100-200 tweets for each keyword.
- If something catches my interest I’ll join the conversation.
For advertising (or promoting), I tried an experiment on Black Friday. I tweeted specials for most of the day with affiliate links. This was from an account that was clearly intended for this purpose. I didn’t offend anyone and actually made about 70 dollars that day. I may make more of an effort next year on the big sales days and plan for them instead of winging it like this year.
Bottom line, it is for networking…it is for advertising…it is for seeing what people are saying about your products or business. It is basically what you make it to be.
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