Twitter has had a big hand in popularizing social networking on the mainstream forefront, and the microblogging platform gets plenty of use from high profile players in the world of media, sports, and entertainment. This doesn’t even count the millions of regular Joes who use the service to talk about everything from video game scores to unfortunate incidents at their local supermarket.

Unfortunately, it may be tempting to follow any request for the sake of building a larger audience, but if you’re trying to promote a consulting business and you’re connected with users who tweet about sports and partying, those followers are serving very little benefit to your cause.

Successful Twitter marketing starts with having a target audience that has a strong interest in your niche. Think quality over quantity when it comes to Twitter followers, and here are five methods and services to help you find the right ones for your list:

1. Twitter Search
The best place to start with finding relevant followers is within Twitter itself. Twitter’s internal search feature has improved significantly since its early days, and now it provides an easier way to locate potential connections. Twitter’s search tool lets you find people by email address, first name and last name, and this makes it quite useful for hooking up with people you already know will enhance your network of followers.

2. Promote Your Twitter Profile
One of the easiest ways to find relevant Twitter followers is to simply promote your profile. To do that, publish links to your profile everywhere you possibly can. These places include your website, blog, email campaigns, Facebook fan page, and even forum posts. Couple these links with a compelling call to action for people who share your interest, and you’ll build a relevant following in no time.

3. JustTweetIt
A lot of what makes Twitter great is not the actual service, but all the third-party applications designed to support the platform. The growing number of user-built directories such as JustTweetIt are a perfect example of this. JustTweetIt helps you find relevant followers by simply submitting your profile and interests. Once your details are entered in the system, Twitter users can potentially run across you by browsing through a variety of categories, and follow if they find you interesting.

4. Twellow
Many hail Twellow as the internal search component Twitter should have developed for its own site. Often called the Twitter Yellow Pages, it is perhaps one of the best directories of its kind. Twellow offers tons of public profiles that can be found through hundreds of categories and a broad range of search features. It also has a built-in feature known as Twellowhood, an exclusive directory that lets users find local individuals and brands to follow, which can be very   advantageous if you are executing a regional marketing strategy.

5. Study the Competition
What’s a great way to find relevant followers? Analyzing going through your competitor’s follow list. Tools such as Tweepi and TwitterCounter are available to help you discover the competition’s most influential followers, how quickly they are building their network, and much more. This is valuable information indeed, but it should never be abused. Instead of spamming the competitor’s connections in hopes of stealing them, focus on ways to connect and build genuine relationships with them.

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Contel Bradford is an experienced freelance writer, eBook author, and a frequent contributor to Benchmark Email’s email marketing blog.

Twitter recently launched a new feature called "Who to Follow" where they display a list of suggestions of people you should be following on Twitter based on certain algorithms. Though this feature could be handy once in a while, it is always in your face whenever you visit the twitter web interface.

Now the problem here is that Twitter does not provide users with an option to disable the suggestions list, and you will have to either use a browser extension or Greasemonkey script to disable the "Who to follow" suggestions box on the Twitter web interface.

Google Chrome users have a choice with two different extensions which will allow you to disable/hide or move the "Who To Follow" suggestions box. The Hide Twitter suggestions extension completely removes the suggestions box, whereas the Hide Twitter suggestions PLUS extension will move the box to the bottom of the sidebar so that it is not in your face every time.

If you are a Firefox, Opera or Internet Explorer you can use a user style to hide the "Who to Follow" suggestions box in Twitter. To do that, open this link in the browser you are using and choose the options provided to you. If you are using Firefox or Internet Explorer you might need to install additional software or add-ons for your respective browser in order to use the User Style.

That’s it, till Twitter provides a way to disable the "Who To Follow" suggestions, you could use this trick to hide it from your web interface.

Guest post by Colleen Carteaux

Twitter is actually a lot like an ultra-micro blog, where short messages are published from your IM, cell phone, or from the web. There is very much a social element to Twitter, since you can add friends and read messages and updates from each other. Marketing on Twitter is effective, since you can use it as a publishing tool, either privately or publicly.

Twitter can also give your business the experience of ideas, feedback, events, news and opinions that is fragmented, allowing you to follow many different users. You can enter into the conversations being held between multiple users. Twitter is also an effective tool for pushing out messages actively that will use the attention they generate from other users. It’s an excellent forum for self-promotion and marketing.

Twitter will allow you to communicate within your social networks, and give you a chance to sell them on your product or service, or to learn of other people who might be interested in your company. It’s all about what is known as ambient intimacy, which involves being able to keep in touch with people on a regular basis, and with a level of intimacy that you normally don’t have access to.

Many people consider the Twitter talk as noise, but others have found a great marketing value in the so-called noiseof Twitter. It gives you a chance to know people closely, and to expand the number of people you can market to. Twitter is also valuable as a marketing tool, since you can pick up on the goal of attracting attention to your product or service. You can monitor the way people of influence feel or think, and also be able to get inside their zone of attention.

When it comes to your business, Twitter is a new channel which can connect current and potential customers with your products and services. It will allow you to infiltrate deeply the lifestyles of those people who are interested in your business, to help build loyalty to your company’s brand.

Twitter can additionally be used to generate traffic, on its most basic level. Links that you place within profiles and your conversations can bring visitors to your web site, and this is very useful if you can pitch your best to those who influence, and early adopters. You won’t always be able to reach your specific target audience, since Twitter users are made up of the most web-savvy individuals. Thus, it can be difficult to target a subset of the Twitter demographic, in order to determine their level of interest in your brand.

There isn’t a chance to literally advertise on Twitter, like you may be able to do on Facebook. In marketing with Twitter, you will find an engagement that goes two ways, from those who market, to the Twitter audience. This is often viewed as a good thing.

Twitter is not difficult for most people to use, so anyone can pick up on it. It may become a distraction for you, if you spend a large amount of time there, because you may find it a pleasant way to pass time. Keep focused on presenting and promoting your brand, and your products and services, and invest your time spent on Twitter wisely, rather than in the pleasant alternative of non-business-related conversation.

Twitter Lists has received widespread acclaim since its launch. Millions of lists have already been created and the number will only continue to increase. Lists are one of the best ways to make sense of all the noise. However, if you happen to follow hundreds and thousands of users, then grouping them into meaningful lists can become a herculean task. Conversationlist is a free service which is trying to make things easier for tweeps like you.

Conversationlist dubs itself as a conversational approach to Twitter lists. The concept behind this service is really simple the people you engage in conversations with are most likely to be the people you are interested in. Once you authorize conversationlist, it will create a new list (called conversationlist) and automatically add any username you mention in your tweets. The lists are rebuilt daily and contain a maximum of 25 tweeps at any point of time. The ones you stop having conversation with are automatically removed.

Techie Buzz Verdict

Conversationlist is a good idea. However, in its current state, it may be too simplistic to be really useful. There is no way to increase the 25 user per list limit. You can’t disable auto-deletion of usernames from the list or adjust the duration of inactivity after which a username will be deleted.

Whether you find conversationlist useful or not will actually depend on your Twitter usage pattern. People who enjoy engaging in conversation with like-minded, interesting tweeps should find this useful. For others, it may be of little use. If you fall in the later camp, you can also check out Favstar.fm’s list builder, which automatically builds lists based on your favorite tweets. Do let us know what you think about conversationlist. Did you find it useful?

Techie Buzz Rating: 2.5/5 (Average)

[ Visit conversationlist ]

via TechCrunch

Twitter is amazing. Twitter gives you the best news instantly. There are over 90 million search results for the term Does God Twitter? All said and done Twitter is really getting very popular very fast and is growing tremendously.

But what are Twitter etiquettes? There are none officially, but thanks to PC World, we now have a list of things to avoid with twitter.

The list includes several guidelines including how not to keep twittering Good Morning Twitterverse, avoid twittering while you are drunk, avoiding tweeting of live TV shows among other things.

So go ahead and improve your twitter etiquette ,visit Top 13 Twitter Don’ts by PC World. Oh and if you are on twitter don’t forget to follow me @keithdsouza and our friendly updater bot @techiebuzzer to get regular updates to your twitter account.