Whether you are a beginner, an intermediate, or an advanced user of Twitter.com there are so many ways to increase your Twitter effectiveness that you can always stand to learn a little more. The concerns each group has can differ.

• Twitter Beginners may feel isolated, confused, or unnoticed.
• Intermediate users (who know how to make their way around the social networking site) still will want to know how to increase their influence or network better.
  
• Finally, those people that start to generate so many users they're having trouble keeping up with them all, the advanced users, need to learn ways to multitask in ways that keep the same level of interaction and growth they had when they weren't as popular and had more time.

So, with that in mind, let's go over different steps each group can take to increase their effectiveness on Twitter and reach the goals each group has in mind.

Remember, Twitter is like a giant, non-stop, party
that you step into at full swing,
and unless you are proactive and join in the fun,
you're likely to end up a wall flower.

Yes, new tweeps, there ARE celebrities on twitter. Yes, there are real ones. There are also a LOT of fakes. For the full list as complete as I can get it on musicians and celebrities on twitter, check my page here. It's updated weekly.

1. Brand From The Start - Create your account with a name that quickly identifies who you are or what you do. The key to using Twitter effectively is to create an online brand of YOU as a unique and valuable product that everyone must follow.
2. Link To Yourself - Use the settings main menu to add a link to an outside URL on the “More Info URL” box. This is where people can learn even more about you or your business.
3. Be Sociable - Invite some of your friends, using the email finders under the Find People main menu. It will allow you to invite people from your address books within Yahoo!, AOL, Hotmail, Google, and MSN email providers.
4. Rub Elbows - Check out who is following those friends and see if there are more mutual friends you can follow. Watch for fakes. There's a good guide for example to spotting real from celebrity twitter fakes here.
   
5. Engage People - Stay in contact with people who follow you by sending a “thank you for following” direct message and signaling how you hope to engage them in the future.
6. Chat 'Em Up – You wouldn't go to a party and refuse to talk? So, open up and start to converse with people, catching their attention with the @ sign before their screen names in your tweet, which is the proper way to address a user or application on Twitter.
7. Be Short And Tweet – You will be limited to 140 characters “tweets,” the term for answering the status question: “What are you doing?” So, when you add an entry try to keep it short, even shorter than 140 characters will encourage people to “retweet” it.
8. Re-Tweet – If you have nothing interesting to say, you can always repeat something someone else has said by putting a capital RT in the first part of the message and then copying and pasting the entire original tweet. This is like applause for other people's good tweets and can help the message to go viral.
9. Don't Be The Party Bore – Like any social networking site, you don't get kudos for spamming the airwaves and trying to hog attention. Avoid this behavior and limit your tweets or people will quickly unfollow you.
10. Focus On Value – Add value to conversations through links, retweets, engaging conversation, humor, adding interesting questions and commentary. Be authentic and genuine, and always seek to provide more value than you receive to generate interest in your twitter stream.

1. Shrink URLs – Use an outside application like http://www.tinyurl.com to help you shorten large URLs into smaller ones. It will increase the chances of being re-tweeted.
2. Determine Your Market Niche – At some point, after the novelty has worn off, you're going to wonder what the point of your interaction is, and if you're in business, it should be to get exposure for your market niche. So, you can either start marketing to one that you want to explore, or you can see what your followers find interesting and offer that niche.
3. Search For Like-Minded Folks – By now, you are thinking there is no way you can follow threads, like a normal group, but there are outside tools that can help you find people in your demographics. Use TwitDir to locate people who are interested in particular topics and categories, and then follow them too. MrTweet can recommend new suggestions for who to follow too.
   
4. Get Picky – When you had fewer people following and weren't sure what Twitter was all about, all new followers were a thrill. Once you start to become more focused, you have to take a more proactive approach to network with people who can enhance your life, while you also enhance their lives too. If you are following people who aren't following you, seriously think about the value they provide and whether you should drop them. TwitterKarma is a good application to help you sort out who is a mutual friend, and who is someone you are just following. It also has a bulk unfollow option. Tweepler enables you to easily manage who to follow and who to not.
   
5. Schedule Your Tweets When Away – There is a nice little application called @Tweetlater that you can follow and sign up for to schedule your tweets when you aren't there. That way, even if you're busy some days, you maintain a good Internet presence and people see your name more often and follow.
6. Sniff Out Big Themes – Most tweets aren't indexed by Google, so you can't search them there. However, Twitter offers a search engine at http://search.twitter.com where you can find not only all about your threads, but also about major themes going on in Twitterland.
7. Explore Hash Tags – The hash tag is this symbol: #. It is used before an abbreviation to tag certain tweets so they can be more easily followed in the Twitter search engine. Observe which tags are being used for what, and use them in your own tweets too.
8. Join In #FollowFriday – Want a great way to meet new people? Just log in Friday and you will see people posting recommendations of their favorites and tagging them with #FollowFriday. Use the Twitter search engine to get as many of those tweets as you want and start to follow some more interesting people!
9. Generate Connections – It's not enough to just get followers, you have to move them off Twitter if you want to get more intimate connections. So, offer a way for them to email you, subscribe to a teleseminar or your website, so that you then have an email address. Should Twitter or your account disappear, you still have managed to build a great contact list.
10. Back Up Your Twitter Account – Okay, this one is for the paranoid, but better safe than sorry. There is Twittersafe, an application that allows you to backup your Twitter account should something funky happen and your followers get wiped out electronically, through no fault of your own.

1. Use Tools To Manage Followers – Start to find out about tools that can help you manage the large influx of followers, like TweetDeck (which I use) and Twhirl. Otherwise, if you continue to do things manually, your performance will start to suffer and you will limit the number of people who follow you. I also like Tweepler to manage new followers and decide whether to follow them back or not.  But my favourite of all is Tweep - you have to pay but it's very worth it!
   
2. Check Out The Competition – Okay, now it's getting serious and you are competing successfully. So, check out the competition and see what they may be doing right. A great place to see people who are doing well on Twitter is the website Twinfluence.com. They separate three types of power users, those with social capital, those with reach and those with velocity.
   
3. Who's Hogging The Limelight – People who are going viral the most are hogging the limelight. These are people's whose tweets have been re-tweeting across Twitterland in spectacular fashion. If you want to know who they are, check out Retweetist.com.
4. Toot Your Own Horn – If you've gotten this far, you're allowed to toot your own horn! You must be doing something right and people want to know more and more about you. That means adding links to other activities you are promoting, other sites you engage in, and anything of interest to you. Make sure you provide links in your tweets so people can follow you all over the web. You can gain and ask for recommendations with MrTweet, which is one I like.
   
5. Link To Your Mobile Phone – Give updates via mobile phone so that all your followers can stay as updated on your comings and goings as possible, even when you're not seated in front of a computer.
6. Partner With Others – Is someone having a teleseminar and wants volunteers? A little bit of your time can give you the appearance of an expert and help to keep your followers enthused and listening.
7. Cross Post To Other Sites – Not only will Twhirl help you manage users, but it can also help you to cross post your tweets to other social networking sites, impacting a larger, and larger audience. So, if you want to cross post some of your tweets to Facebook or Friendfeed, add applications that will help you do that automatically. Install the twitter widget on any blogs or website you own, so your latest tweets display there too.
   
8. Take Time To Welcome Newbies – Some people who get very successful focus only on the people in their inner circle, while ignoring a great opportunity to make a favorable impression with newbies who start Twitter and need a helping hand. You never know how big someone will get, and just because they only have a few 100 followers does not mean it's not worth your time to continue to interact with them. Remember, you were once a newbie too. I always try to send EVERYONE a personal message, and if I miss anyone out it's accidental! But then again, I recommend following interesting people in a dark and deathly vacuum once, so I can see the importance of making that little personal contact.
   
9. Automate Follow Backs – As more and more people are signing up to your Twitter feed, you are going to have trouble sending out a personal message to each one. So, it's better to automate that process with something like Tweetlater and then send personal notes as you have more time to maintain the connection.
10. Create Your Own Application – Right now, people are just engaging Twitter and discovering it's many uses. If you can show your innovation by creating an application that serves a market need, you are guaranteed a large following and maybe some bucks in the future. So, keep an eye out for opportunities to ride the Twitter wave and be a Twitter entrepreneur that gets in on the bottom floor.

There are a number of other hubs about twitter such as http://hubpages.com/jamos/hub/Using-Twitter-to-Your-Advantage

You can find me on twitter here: JulieAnnAmos

A lot of the information in this page was brought to my attention by ClaireMoylan, who is a mine of information and welcomes new followers too! I owe her thanks for all her twitter help. Without her I'd be a twerp.  She's worth following.

by Julie-Ann Amos, professional writer, and owner of international writing agency www.ExquisiteWriting.com

Why not create your own HubPages? It's fun and you can make revenue from Adsense and other revenue streams on your pages. JOIN HUBPAGES NOW - SIMPLY CLICK HERE...  (or contact me to write one for you!)

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