Top 10 Twitter tips and tricks

Below is a listing of our top 10 favourite Twitter
tips and tricks. These tips will help make your
Twitter experience more enjoyable and can help
increase your followers.
Customise
Change your profile picture. Use a picture of
yourself to make it seem more personalised if
this is your personal Twitter account.
Utilise as much of the 160-character limit
Twitter BIO space allows. Include keywords your
followers or potential followers may be
searching for.
Create your own background image. However,
do not make the image too much like an ad or
sales pitch. The background image must be less
than 800k and we recommend a size of
1600x1200 for a large image or smaller if you
plan on tiling the image or just having it on the
left-hand side. Finally, keep in mind that smaller
resolutions and monitor sizes will hide much of
the background.
Third-party tools
Take advantage of the hundreds of different third-
party online tools and services that enhance your
Twitter experience. Below are a few of our
favourites.
TwitPic - Take advantage of TwitPic to post
pictures on your tweets. If you want to post
pictures while away from the computer, use the
Twitterific app.
Qwitter - Great service that sends an e-mail
any time someone unsubscribes from your
Twitter profile and mentions a possible Twitter
post you made that may have caused them to
leave.
Manageflitter - Fantastic site for managing
your followers and getting an easy to read
overview of people not following you back, quiet
users, and inactive users.
WeFollow - Great website that allows you to add
yourself to a listing of Twitter users by tags you
find interesting.
SocialOomph - Another great service with a
collection of free Twitter tools including the
ability to schedule when a tweets gets posted.
Tweetbeat - An excellent site that takes the
trending topics on Twitter and gives you a
clearer explanation of present and past trending
topics.
TwitterMeme - Another great location to find
the hottest links on Twitter.
Twitter Grader - Great service that grades any
Twitter account and gives you additional details
and ranking information.
Twitter Fan Wiki Apps - Finally, this wiki has
a listing of several hundred different Twitter
applications and tools for users wanting more.
Use Twitter search
Take full advantage of the Twitter search tool.
Below are just a few tips that can help improve
your search capabilities on Twitter.
Search for your website or blog URL and see if
others are mentioning your page.
Search for anything near you by adding
near:"city state". For example, typing
near:"Salt lake city Utah" club would return
current tweets that have happened in Salt Lake
City, Utah with the keyword club in them.
Find people who you may enjoy following by
searching for keywords that interested you.
If you do not want tweets with links add ? -
filter:links at the end of your search query.
Need more options, use the Advanced Twitter
search.
Any time you get excellent results click the
"Save this search" button to save that search.
These searches can then be found under "Saved
Searches" on the right-hand part of your profile
on the old Twitter interface or under the
"Searches" tab next to your timeline on the new
Twitter interface.
Followers
Engage followers.
Do not follow too many people. No one is going
to follow someone who is following thousands
of people but only has 10 followers.
Retweet interesting posts.
Retweet and participate in conversations with
people with a lot of followers.
Realize it is impossible for anyone to read every
tweet.
When first joining do not follow hundreds of
people, doing this may mark you as a bot.
Create useful and
interesting tweets
Try making all your tweets informative, useful,
or funny.
Do not post mundane posts, e.g. eating a bowl
of cereal.
Add hastags to your tweets. For example, if your
tweet is about computers, consider adding
#computer in the tweet.
Tweet frequently. No one is going to follow
someone they do not know who has not tweeted
in months. Try at the very least to tweet a few
times a week or daily if you can manage.
Do not whine or complain. Everyone will
unfollow anyone who constantly whines or
complains.
Try making your valuable tweets during the
times people will most likely see them.
Keep some space available in your tweet in
case someone retweets your post.
Use special characters in your tweets.
Know the lingo
Know the Twitter lingo, these are just a few
examples: @reply, Direct Message (DM), Follower,
Hashtag, Retweet (RT), Trending Topics, and
Tweet. See the Twitter description for a full listing
of Twitter terms and Lingo and related terms.
Follow the masters
Following a few of the masters of Twitter and
Social Networking will give you an understanding
of how to tweet better, posts to RT, and
inspiration for tweets of your own. Below are the
top ten Twitters we recommend following.
@GuyKawasaki
@Scobleizer
@jimohib
@briansolis
@tonyrobbins
@kevinrose
@timoreilly
@donttrythis
@zappos
@brainpicker
Twitaholic - A full listing of the top users on
Twitter based on Followers. This is a terrific
service to find and follow the top users and
possibly incorporate some of the ideas they are
doing on their account.
Tip: Many of the first few hundred people are
celebrities on Twitaholic, if they do not interest
you skip the first page.
Create and use lists
Twitter lists are an excellent method of filtering
filter through the people you follow. To create a
list, click the Lists link and then Create a list.
After creating a list visit the persons profile page
you wish to add and click the list icon, as shown
in the picture to the right. Our Computers and
Tech list is an example of a public list we created.
Go Mobile
Apple iPhones, Blackberry phones, Android
phones, Windows phone 7 phones, and most of
the other smart phones have Twitter applications.
Take full advantage of these applications. For
users who do not have smart phones Twitter also
has extensive support for SMS, which can send
tweets over a text message.
Advertise
Mention your Twitter page as many places as
you can, e.g. your business card, e-mail
signatures, web page, blog, Facebook, etc.
Create a tweet button or at least your Twitter
name on your pages, similar to the below
examples.

Sent from @jimohib....Follow on twitter.