7 Ways to Improve Your Twitter Connections

There has been a wrong idea circulating among people that "Twitter is not for Everyone" which is completely irrelevant to how Twitter is designed to work. I would say that Twitter is an amazing medium of cut short messages, instant news platform and if used properly, it could become a very well platform for marketing/ advertising your product or a brand per se. 

 Do you think that way too ? If yes, read through the below 7 points to see how you can leverage your twitter account to make good connections and advertising your brand.

Start Following Back :- 

Now who wouldn't like a million followers to their account . Wouldn't you ? This has to be the first and foremost work that needs to be set right to get your twitter account and your connections upto the mark, unless you are already a brand that has established its worth on twitter.

If someone's following you, that clearly means that they are showing their interest to see what you have in store and eventually expecting you to follow back too. Now you may tweet all the things that you are doing good and a lot of other things, but they'd like you to follow back as well. If you're not doing that, its most likely you will end up loosing that one follower from your account which is the same with all the followers over the course.

There are users who tend to "DM- Direct Message" you to follow them back and its normal and there are users who would expect you to do the favour of following them back without asking for it. It is for you to decide whether the follower you just gained is worth following back or not. There's another post that talks about interacting with your peer users on Twitter efficiently.

ShoutOut and Engage in Conversations :-

I think this is powerful if you'd want to stay on course with your followers to actually make them feel that you're worth having a conversation. #SO is one of the many twitter tags that users find commonly being used to make a shoutout to your peer follower/following users.

Use the hashtags wisely. Now you don't want to spam your follower with too many hashtags that makes the conversation irrelevant in most of the cases.

 Call out names and start engaging in conversations that will make them feel special and next time they will look forward to your tweets. Now this may not seem like a wise idea if you already have a million of followers to your account but still could be considered doing this once in a while to keep up the interaction factor going forward.

 Its time for you to decide what you should be doing now to make your twitter connections awesome and interactive.

Usage of GIFs :-

Let me tell you this, gif images works all the time. It's attractive and catches the eye on spot and people would want to retweet, start a conversation over your tweet.

 Just a random search for "gif" on twitter gives the below link where you can see for yourself the number of retweets and favorites and replies to the tweets with gif images. That proves it now, doesn't it ?

  https://twitter.com/search?q=gif&src=typd

Ask for Opinions :-

Asking doesn't make you any less than the other person who doesn't, the fact that it only makes you a better person and makes you approachable. Ask for Opinions in the form of tweets. Fellow Twitter users would be happy to reply back to your tweets if that interests them.

Convey a message, or a help if needed, all you have to do is ask and that your twitter herd listens and you might not know, you will have your solution one tweet away.

 Coming to the point, asking for opinions, thoughts, helps improve your connection on twitter.

Use Polling Feature :- 

Polling Feature on Twitter is one of the ways to improve your twitter connections. There are a lot of scenarios where you wanted to choose an option from a group of options and you can actually ask it out on Twitter suggesting your connections to choose one for you.

 This will actually improve your perspective on seeing things in a different way and you can even start tweeting back to your twitter users with the feedback that will create a whole new conversation altogether.

Tweet Back :-

As far as Twitter connections is considered, its not one way. Meaning, you have to often tweet back to your other fellow followers, followings tweet and start engaging yourself in a conversation.

This will give you an option to be seen over a wide list of people, your followers/followings followers and improve your connections along the way.

Share Quotes :-

I have found this as one effective way to improve connections, infact it works all the time. Sharing Quotes as a tweet get more considered than a normal tweet like "What a crazy day! ".

The Retweets that you get and the views on your quotes will automatically improve your connections with quality followers overtime.

 Now that I've shared all the 7 ways that I myself use frequently, we have come to the end of this post.

 Let me know if I've missed out any of your favorite ways and also how is it working out for you in the comments.

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How to Find the Number of Connections on LinkedIn

Being a professional in any niche, it has become a mandatory to have a linkedin profile and its even more important if you are into entrepreneurship or a social media strategist.

LinkedIn has become a part of  any person that is into his way out on building an online profile. Linkedin has not just become an online profile maker instead it has emerged as a job searching platform as well where you can just find out the company profiles and get an idea of the people who work on those companies.

Building up a professional profile is not just filling up your portfolio, the projects you've done so far and the companies you've worked with. The main asset of having a linkedin profile is in building connections that might/will help you in any near future.

You see, connections in linkedin are as valuable as it seems. Connecting with people may get you leads to your next going to be successful business, or sometimes some of your connections will endorse you with new technologies that you know already, some can help you with recommendations.

While building up your business/personal profile, you obivously need to have a lot of connections both you know personally and virtually on the internet.

Connections are important and you'll realize when you're in need of someone in your connection professionally available someday.

There's one thing in linkedin that I feel a little bit typical that when you get a huge number of connections that you actually lost count, that's when the need for this arises.

You'd wanna look at your connections count and you have no clue how to find the number of connections in your linkedin account.

Don't worry., I've been there and  this post will help you find your number of connections in simple 2 steps.

Step 1:  

Goto the "Connections" at the top menu in your linkedin profile. Once you click, you'll be redirected to your connections list page where you can view the connections in your profile.

Step 2 : 

You'll find a "Settings" icon on the connections page which you should click to find out the number of connections to your linkedin profile.

This will be the url for the page where you'll see the number of connections.

https://www.linkedin.com/contacts/manage_sources/

There you go., you got your number of connections to your linkedin profile.

You can also click "Refresh" button if you wanna check the up to date connections number.

That's it., You got your connections number.

Check out my linkedin profile and lets get connected. ;)

vickythegme - LinkedIn

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LongerTwits - A Simple Web App To Tweet More Than 140 Characters

Checkout my app at http://longertwits.vickythegme.com

Yay!!
I released my first app online which is currently serving as a sub domain on my personal blog vickythegme. I happen to read about twitter api past these days and got pretty much interested to it that I wanted to build an app on my own.

The first idea that I got is to bring up an app that would let users follow and unfollow (a simple twitter management tool similar to JustUnfollow, Unfollowers.me etc.,).

 By the time I got into it and been working on the app, I got another idea why not create a simple app and releasing it and wait for the user response so that I could carry the workings for the unfollow app behind the hood. (I still have the idea of developing an unfollow app as well.)

So, the simple app that I am talking about is none other than Longertwits – http://longertwits.vickythegme.com which is most inspired by Amit Agarwal’s talltweets.

I used to use talltweets back then to tweet if I need to send more than 140 characters and some day decided why not write a similar app on my own.

Once I started, I felt pretty good that I made an app (with some errors though ;) ), I started to work on the reducing the errors that could possibly happen and let the users use it as well.

So, here I’m sharing my first twitter app. – Longertwits.

So the thing that is different about the other apps is that I happen to manage 3 types of tweeting options like Tweet as Text, Tweet as Link, Tweet as Image

I could see so many apps that use these features and not one of them having all the three.!


With respect to that, I added these 3 options to tweet  to your twitter account.

Tweet as Text :

This option lets you tweet your message in the form of text. If an user types a tweet message that is more than 140 characters, the app splits the first 140 characters and sends it first and then sends the next 140 characters and so on.

Tweet as Link :

Tweet as Link option lets you tweet a text message which is more than 140 characters as link. This means that the tweet is sent with a link such that it shows some first 40-60 characters and add a link to the tweet that is saved in our db.

This option could be very useful if someone wants to mock up an essay of something or an announcement or anything that will relate to the limit.

Tweet as Image : 

Tweet as Image is one option that is mostly inspired with the idea of talltweets which I wanted to make it available to longertwits app as well.

This option lets you to send the tweet text in the form of an image.

The Images above are the old design with bootstrap 2 and I will be changing the app with the new bootstrap 3 design real soon.

Conclusion : 

I could not say anything more than just ask you to try out this simple app Longertwits  and do let me know your feedback below in here as comments or you can ping me up on twitter -@vickythegme or anywhere you feel convenient.

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Search List of Twitter Apps with Twi5

Usage of Twitter has been increasingly growing its rate these years with the Bloggers and Social Media Strategists understanding the value of it.

You might not have seen much impact of twitter on bloggers and other internet promoters earlier and it is may be because of the power of social media in the field of SEO and Marketing.

Search Engines (clearly I want to refer to Google) have made it possible for the marketers to know the value of twitter and other social medias.

If you're a serious internet user or to be specific, a serious twitter freak, you must know the relatives of twitter (not really), but related to it and making it use better.

How cool it would be if you can find the information about all the twitter tools in just one place.?

You may have found this information on Wikipedia- List of Twitter Services and Applications, but still I have a better place in my mind to search for.

Here's a little description of one place where you'll find most of the interesting third party twitter applications.

You may know about it earlier and if not let me tell you, it is Twi5

Twi5 

Twi5 Logo - http://www.twi5.com/twitlogo-create-twitter-like-logo-for-free/5145/

Twi5.com, page by Nischal Shetty- Founder of JustUnfollow, is one place to search for most of the twitter tools online. Twi5 has a big list of vast range of tools to help you with twitter easy access and management. You could find most of the applications that are quite familiar with you and some you might not heard about it too.

And trust me, I haven't heard of most of the twitter resources until I looked into it.

To get your twitter app profiled in the site, you have to Submit your App and follow the details shown in the page.

There are so many apps that are related to some of the biggest social media names that you use already (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Orkut ) and it has the list of mobile apps related to those social medias.

You'll find it interesting to know about these apps and may be try out some.

Now let me know something that you find interesting about it at the comments.

Image Credit : Flickr

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4 Tools to Tweet Longer Than 140 Characters

Twitter Users are increasing more and more day to day. When you start using twitter frequently you may want to use something that ll make it easy for you to tweet at times when you can't be online all the time.

 There comes the usage of twitter management tools which will help you manage your twitter accounts (even multiple accounts too with some cents spent). But then you want something that will let you tweet more than the tweet characters limit which is obviously 140 as you know it.

Basically, twitter is designed as a Short Messaging Service (SMS) and you can't blame for what it is. There are many third party tools, that make use of the twitter's API facility and are created to fullfil your reason to tweet longer tweets more than 140 characters.

 With that in mind, I am going to share some of the 4 tools that will let you tweet more than 140 characters.

Talltweets :

This is the one that comes to my mind when I first think about tweeting longer sentences more than the character limit. You may know it obviously, the make of this application., Yes, you guessed it., Amit Agarwal, a professional blogger from India. This tool is a simple one with you can tweet more than 140 characters in two forms.

1. Tweet as text which will split the full lengthy tweet into chunks of tweets that apply the tweet character limit.
2. Or tweet as an image which will create an image of the tweet message and send it to twitter as one media tweet which looks good by the way.

Twitlonger :

Twitlonger is one tweeting tool which attaches a link to your tweet and let the users view your tweet on twitlonger site.

Also you can reply to the tweet that you sent or any tweet that is sent from the site.

Twishort :

Twishort is another one tweeting tool where you can tweet longer than 140 characters with a link attached to your tweet. The users can view the full lengthy tweet when they click the link which will take you to view the lengthy tweet in your account at twishort.

One different feature other than the above tools is that it has also a facility to reply to any specifc tweet. All you have to do it to copy and paste the twitter url link for the tweet that  you wanna reply to.

You may also would like to use their twiage - an app to calculate the your twitter age. :)

JumboTweet : 

Jumbotweets is another platform to tweet longer than 140 characters to your twitter account.

This works the similar way as the other tools,. tweets the lengthy messages with a link attached to it at the end of each tweet.

It is used as a microblogging platform service where you tweet with a link and the users can view the full tweet in its website.

P.S : A new service from us LongerTwits has come out to tweet longer than 140 characters and more.

Currently we've Tweet as Text facility where your tweets are split into chunks of 120 characters each and sent to twitter.

Tweet as Image facility will let you tweet your lengthy messages in an image format. (Inspired by TallTweets).

Tweet as Link will let you tweet your messages by attaching a link at the end of your tweet which links to your complete text in our site.

Soon, we'll provide the option to save and collect your tweets (last 3200 tweets).

Stay Tuned with our posts and let us know your feedback in the comments.

Photo Credit : Creative Tools - Flickr

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How To Use Twitter Analytics Efficiently

If you're running a business or a weblog, you sure must've tried twitter, atleast would've created an account and tweeted some tweets that are related to your business promotion. If you have noted something on Twitter later days, more people on the web are making use of a business profile. It is comparatively growing as equal to Facebook these days where people starting to use Facebook for their personal preferences. People become more conservative on Facebook that they want to keep things to themselves.

This post will help you to use twitter analytics as if you've used it before.

As you know Facebook has already its graph analytics based on the posts like, share and number of clicks, Twitter has released its analytics functionality which is not much reached to all the people over the world, but still people are making use of it. You might see the Analytics at the Settings drop down at the top of the navigation bar. Sometimes you might see Ad Analytics at the place where you want to see the analytics.

You should be aware that you can only use twitter analytics if you're a publisher or developer or advertiser.

To be a publisher, you can easily create twitter cards which is explained down below.

To be an advertiser, you've to apply for the ads which is possibly a paid one.

To be a developer, all you've to do is to have an account at twitter developers site and should have atleast one app created with it. 

 Anyway it shows the number of retweets, favorites, as wel as number of clicks any url can get when shared.

Using Twitter Analytics:

Twitter Analytics can be used to its best for your business. And this post will help you know the needed. We use url shorteners that provide click analytics to know how many times the url is being clicked in a tweet.

But on Facebook, there is no need to shorten the url because there's no limitation in number of characters to be used. And this is what it makes special about Twitter.

 With the twitter analytics, you can see how many times the url is being clicked in a tweet for both shortened urls as well as the original ones. The below image shows the number of clicks and retweets, favorites for a set of tweets that are shortened.

Here is another image below that shows the number of clicks, retweets, favorites for a set of tweets that are not shortened which is that I always shorten the url so that I could save some space for the retweeters to mention people or add words to the tweet. Twitter analytics also provides you the overall analytic graph of your tweets per month and its most retweeted, favorited tweets etc., It will help you know what kind of words that work more on twitter and can optimize your tweets to reach more people.

Using Ad Analytics:

Ads Analytics are not applicable unless you pay for it to get your tweets promoted to more number of people. Still if you have ads enabled to your profile, then you'll see the number of clickbacks the url gets per day or week or month.

Follower Analytics: 

Twitter also lets you get the whole analytics of your followers lists as well as your followings.

You can view the best of your followers analytics here at twitter analytics itself. Twitter shows a graph analytic of your followers per month which is useful to analyze the growth of your business profile.

There are also other applications such as Topsy,  Hootsuite etc., that provide you twitter analytics based on your data once you sign in with your twitter account.

Card Analytics:

You can also get the analytics of your twitter cards here.

For the card analytics to work, you've to create one for your website. Inside the twitter card analytics, you'll find the URL clicks, Install Attempts and number of Retweets your tweet with the card gets.

Get your twitter card in just some clicks selecting which type of card suits your business.

 And add the code to your blog for it to work when you share a tweet with your followers.

Validate your card, make sure the card are enabled in your domain. Check for validation at twitter itself or else you can make use of the twitter card validator.

Remember you can access to your twitter analytics only if you're a publisher or advertiser or developer.

That means you can access the data if you've any twitter card enabled to your website as well.

Export Your Data:

The Export Your Data facility allows you download the analytics data and let you view the data offline.

The data will let you calculate your growth on that particular month of the year.

The export facility is only for twitter card data.

Conclusion:

Twitter analytics are useful and it is recommended one for the users who are using third party applications as well, because there might be some limitations with the twitter api that other applications can't happen to provide you with which twitter can provide you with all your data completely.

Try out the latest twitter analytics and let me know your thoughts about it..!!

Photo Credit: Flickr

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5 Tips to Send URL via DM - Twitter

You may all probably wondering why people send URL links via DM right after you follow them. Is it a spam link or is it their real blog or website's address? You just don't know how to find it and then you end up unfollowing them or just letting it go and never reply or talk to them about it.

This post will provide you some tips to send urls in a DM on Twitter.

 Now lets see about the two things that can happen when sending a url with a DM message from the tweeters.

Traffic?

Is that the reason you're sending DM to the people who follow you and only want to get to know you? Or do you think it is the way of telling the people that you're onto something ?

Anyway, it can be either directly or indirectly, still the best thing is you're doing it for the growth of your business. How are you going to increase your traffic just by sending your url link with the DM?

 When you send out a DM to an unknown person who just followed you will likely to click on the url if send any which is a good gesture provided you don't spam them.

 The urls are sent only to let people know you more and your interests, profession. Let me guess, when I send an url to you , what would you do?

 Will you click it? Obviously not., only if you want to know about me and find something interesting and informative on my url with some trust that I don't spam you. It has become a common practice to use url shortners while sending links in tweets, DMs just to make use of those 140 characters somewhere else. This is an advantage to the spammer bots, or spammer profiles which send spam urls shortened by most used url shortners like bit.ly, goo.gl etc., You might have noticed that the DM urls lesser these days as twitter is cleaning out the process of sending unknown urls.

Spam?

Do you think all the DM messages are spam? Fine. I agree with you that there are spams spreading through DM more than never before, but still there are other small scale marketers, bloggers, artists etc., who would try to power up their business through twitter taking advantage of the DM. There are hundreds of thousands of profiles on twitter that are spambots, still finding out a follower sending a url link via DM spam or not is something that we need to work on. Of course, you would assume an unknown url as a spam and it is been common these days. I always use to click on the urls that I feel as legit. You can sense the url even if it is shortened with any url shortners. Down here are some tips that would help you to send URLs via Direct Messages without being misidentified as spams.

Twitter Blocks URL :

Twitter has blocked sending of urls in DM messages keeping in mind to avoid spams flowing all over. You can't just send any url in a DM now and most importantly it doesn't allow URL Shortners. If you really want to send URLs in DM messages here are some tips.

Never Use URL Shortners:

As it is been said above, there are many url shortners that would let you shorten your url so that you can make use of the characters on Twitter. This makes your url invisible to others which is a problem to your followers because they might take it a spam sometimes unless you're some kind of a big deal in your industry. So, while sending any url link to your followers, make sure you add your full url to let them visit and know you. Even though it works earlier, now you can't send any shortened url. This actually goes opposite when sending tweets because you should allow your the tweeters to RT or add some characters with your tweet.

Add the url at your profile:

You have to let people know that the url that you're sending is not a spam link. For this to happen, you should add your website or blog url at your profile. When a user sees a DM from you, they ll first see your profile to make sure you're not a bot or any spammer personality. And when they see the same url that you have sent them through DM, there's a chance of people knowing it is a legit link.

DM the tweet link :

You can send a DM with the link of a tweet that has your blog or website url so that people will understand and might throw a visit to your blog. Some people might think it as just another link and it goes both ways.

Send as a plain text :

Twitter doesn't block all the urls that are being sent via DM. You can still send links to your social networking profiles in a DM. But there are other links that it can't recognize as spam or not, will not be sent. But you can still send the message as a plain text such that

You can visit my blog at techlanes .com

just adding a space or something that seperates the com or org or net from your domain name. But still there are chances that you can be neglected by some twitter users who feel lazy to copy and paste your link to their browser. :D

You know what is right!!

Yeah. Just think yourself as a user and you're getting a DM with a url. Most of the times your guess is right. You can differentiate the spam urls and other urls. Likewise, you know how you should send a DM without making an impression that it is a spam. Yes. 

Using url shortners will give you the analytics, number of clicks on that particular url. You can add a tweet with the shortened url and then send the tweet link to your followers to read and know about it.

Conclusion:

Sending URLs privately via DM can go both ways. You may get traffic , you may also get blocked and unfollowed. You can't expect everyone to think your link as a legit one. Still, you can make a try to let them click on it with your potential customers(readers). 

 I use automated tools to send out DMs and I only send DM messages to follow or add me friend to my social media profiles since those DMs wouldn't be blocked for sure. You can just test out if that url is sent via DM with some other profile to make sure you can use it automated bacause if that specific url is not sent, it will also block your whole DM message.

Photo Credit: Paul Downey -Flickr

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Reasons For Your Twitter Account Spamming

Twitter Users are getting spammed so easily these days. Twitter is still a secure network where marketing of products and brands are still going on the other hand. What made you feel that twitter is insecure for you to run your social profile?

I am a regular user of twitter and I tweet 4-5 tweets daily even when I am not online just with the help of the auto tweeting tools which are scheduled to tweet at times. Its not a sin to use auto tweeting tools or in other words, twitter management tools. Twitter only considers those profiles that tweets spam urls or that tweets twice or three times continously.

If to be said, I am used to asked to rest my twitter password once in two weeks these days saying my twitter is compromised. I realized that its because I have been authorizing new and unknown applications that might have spammed my twitter.

Twitter guys are working on this condition since the increase in usage of twitter by marketers and brands and medias. They always send you an instant mail to change or reset password once they find anything spammy going on with your profile.

Now lets see why your account is getting spammed easily.

Spamming DM's:

It is an obvious one. And you know it. I am going to tell you why that is happening with your profile. Direct Messages are sent only to those people who follow you and you follow them. Anyone can send you a DM if there's a mutual following. Its not an etiquette to send someon url links privately via DMs and nobody's gonna click on that.

 You'll never click on someone's link at least not before you know them. And such, you should never expect them to click on the url link in their DM anyway.

Of course I agree you are doing it to promote your business. If you are doing it, then do it right.

Make your url visible at your profile page. Send the business blog or website link that is shown in your profile just to let them know you own it. Don't send direct messages with shortened urls which is nowadays a common spamming method spreading on twitter.

Unknown URL Clicks:

Clicking on the url happens all the time. It does happen even more with tweets. You can differentiate the spammy urls and other urls which you want to click. Mostly we click at the unknown links that tempt us. It is not a bad thing that we only click at those urls. But there are some third party unknown applications that will make the users to tweet automatically with their links many times making it a spammy url.

Most likely you'll click 1 link among 100 many unknown links you see everyday and that's all it takes for the spammers to run your profile .

Following Spam Profiles:

Following spam profiles happens to everyone who follow for a follow(#f4f). It is common that you don't see it coming.

This occurs mostly when you follow everyone who follow you and you become the victim of someone who's doing it for years. I am not asking you to stop following people who follow you. What I want you to do is to have a code while following back the profiles that follow you. You can find easily whether a profile is a spam or fake just by spending a minute watching its profile and reading its tweets.

Tweeting Spams:

Ofcourse you won't tweet spams with your knowledge. Tweeting spams happens when somebody takes over access to your profile. This not only means that you've been compromised but also your priority to suspension. Sometimes when you use any third party tools that will gain you followers, they have the control over your tweets and they can read and write messages which is an easy gateway for spammers to tweet any sort of spams on your profile.

This doesn't stop there. They tweet spams from your profile and you don't even know it. You'll know when you get blocked and suspended by somebody or twitter itself because of spamming. There are still people who take things seriously and block you for spamming activities. This has more influence on the list to get suspended on twitter.

I have experienced such incidents with my twitter twice when some users replied to a DM which is a spam message sent from my profile. I came to know when some nice people in my followers list informed me about this activity and the best part is I couldn't see the spam message myself.

These are just some of the ways which your account is spammed and there are many other ways which I haven't seen with my account but it happens.

Conclusion:

The worst thing that could happen about spamming is that you'll get tired of using it as I have seen many users stop using it. But once you start liking to use it, you'll get the best out of twitter to run your business online.

Seems like I have written what I wanted to tell and would really appreciate what you think by comments.

Happy Tweeting!!!

Photo Credit: Flickr

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4 Simple Tips To Increase Your Twitter Followers

Twitter allows you to follow people and let others follow you too. Twitter is one of the top social networking website for promoting business. One cannot simple get followers as soon as he signs up for it. There are thousands of third party applications that will let you get more followers automatically. But the actual scenario changes once you get spammed using these applications.

In this post, I am going to tell you how to get more followers without using any third party applications but with your total effort in less hours per day.

I am gonna make you stop wonder about what I'm going to say with some minute details in twitter following strategy.

Read down continously to know more details about the secret to make more followers on your twitter profile.

Lets assume you just created your twitter profile now and wanting to get more followers.

All you know about twitter is that you tweet and nobody cares what you tweet exactly. That's not just true completely. You don't have to listen completely to what people talk about in twitter unless you're interested.

Okay..!! Its time I stop going further AWOL from the topic and start telling you the steps that you should follow to get more followers.

Now lets make a list of interests in things in real life that you'd wanna tweet. And then start tweeting some then and there. That doesn't costs you more than 20 minutes a day.

Tweeting Rules:

I am gonna keep it short and simple for you.

1. Tweet 5-10 tweets a day to show you're around.
2. Tweet General quotes as you like.
3. Tweet your topics that interests you.
4. Tweet not more that 2-3 links a day from your own blog. If you just started using twitter, you might not want to create a look of spammy profile with a lot of links. 
5. Tweet anything that you'd want to tweet that make your profile seem lively on the road.

That's it. You're done with the tweeting rules. Now let me tell you the main part of gathering like minded crowd.

Follow Like Minded Ones:

Just to match with the heading of the step, I have to tell you follow to get more followers.

You don't have to worry about the followers if you're some kind of celebrity in your niche.  If you're not, then you'd have to work on it manually.

You can find the follow suggestions at the left side of your twitter. Follow people who are interested in following back. That would open your connections widely. You may notice the followers of your followers will start following you.. Follow the ones that you'd wanna make a connection with.

The next thing you see is people following you everyday. Follow 50-100 people a day for a steady process in your follower's growth.

That's been said, would take not more than 30 minutes to follow and follow back tweepies. Never stop following people because they're the ones you're gonna share your posts and tweets with.

Never Opt for Third Party Apps:

Yes. Never go for third party apps. When I say third party apps, I clearly wanted to mean the apps that say will get you more followers. If you're concentrating mostly to run your profile as business, then you should know that you've to build your followers that interests you and your tweets. I have personally used such third party apps at the start and spammed myself. Make sure you follow people on your own to avoid getting suspended.

There are differences that when you use a tool to manage your tweets and a tool that says will increase your followers list. Managing your twitter account would also need your nerdy work inside to set the things such as auto-follow etc., that would be a time slayer. But when you follow regardlessly with any tool will only get you followers that may lead to your suspension or spamming inside your twitter.

Use Inbuilt Twitter Functionalities:

I am talking about the "Who To Follow Suggestions" at the left side of your twitter. It is an effective one for you to raise your followers list. When you follow people on your niche, twitter tailors the follow suggestions based on your latest following's bio as such if you follow more writers profiles recently, the suggestion will show people who are writers. 

You can also use the search at the top to search for your niche tweeters. Searching for keywords like #bloggers will show you people who have tweeted with #bloggers recently and you can decide to follow (whether to make a connection with them or not).

By selecting the "People" at the left side of the search will give you suggestions  based on your keyword.

You can make use of these functionalities to follow and get followed. I am sure this will not take more than an hour to follow 50 people a day. 

Getting mentioned from your followers with hashtags like #FF, #TGIF, etc., once in a while will also help you gain some followers. 

Conclusion: 

All those above are some simple and small things that you should make use to increase your followers list. What makes more interesting and fun is that how you connect with them once in a while to maintain the relation. Tweet them every once and make your followers hear what you say (tweet).

Now that you've finished reading , share the love with your friends.

Image Credit: Flickr- Shawn Campbell

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How to BackUp Your Tweets With Twitter Archive

Are you a continous tweeter who doesn't care about how much you tweet a day? And all of a sudden your tweets reaches thousands and more and then you start wondering what was your first tweet and find no way to recover what you've tweeted all these days?

Twitter shows your tweets in your stream based on number of tweets and weeks. That means, if you've more tweets in a week it takes time to load all your tweets in your timeline which would make older tweets disappear from your timeline.

Well, believe it or not, most of us would have tried and so did I. I've have my time searching for archiving my tweets via various third party twitter applications. Twitter guys released in their blog that there is an inbuilt Twitter Archive facility to archive all your tweets.

It is also said that the facility is rolling out slowly and is available to only in some users as of Dec 2012 and hope its available to you as well.

Here are the steps to follow to download your twitter archive.

Step 1:

Go to Settings page where you'll find something as "Your Twitter Archive" as in the image below.

If you don't find the "Request Your Archive" button as in the image above, then unfortunately it is not rolled out there yet.

Step 2:

Click on the "Request Your Archive" button and you'll receive an alert message as shown in the image below.

Step 3:

You'll receive an email from twitter along with a link to download your twitter archive within minutes.

When you click the link, it will redirect you to the download page like the image above, where you can download your twitter archive.

Also view the tools that will help you manage your tweets.

Image Credit: SmartPhotoStock

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6 SEO Tips To Improve Your Blog Traffic

Blogging can be fun when your hardwork pays off. Its not those old times that you've to do all the work by yourself and wait for the result. Its the time that you automate everything on the handes of plugins and softwares and then wait for the result. Its all made easy with the technologies and it is what we call as SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

If you play smart by knowing what the search engines want and react to it efficiently, you might see your blog gaining more traffic on the way of blogging.

Search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo etc., and its search algorithms work efficiently based on the blog's performance and its content. Google's search algorithm Penguin 2.0 filters fresh and updated content to the top searches and avoids spammy keywords. A lot has been changed since the rolling out of Penguin update.

Here are some 6 SEO tips to improve your blog traffic.

Fresh and Updated Content:

If you have been searching every other blogs that write about the tips for improving blog traffic, you might be familiar with the sentence 'Content is King'. I found a beautiful infographics about 'Content is King' on visual.ly which explains everything . This is the first tip that every blogger will give for other bloggers. Yes, Offcourse Content is King. Currently considering the update of Google's search algorithm at the end of may this year (2013) , you might have had spam changes with the traffic in your blog rankings and page views. It is mainly because of the freshness of the blog and its frequent updation of the pages.

Penguin Update filters the pages that are currently updated and the latest results are shown.

Keywords Search:

Searching for the most used keywords is very easy when you've Google Webmaster, Adwords Tool. Search for keywords with the most impressions on your niche and try to use it in your posts where it suits. You can use those keywords anywhere in your blog. Also keep in mind that more usage of the same keywords or keywords that doesn't suit the content are considered spammy.

Check for the keywords all by yourself via Google trends and you can find its correlation factor based on the months or years. This is neccessary to know what the readers are looking for. You're to act like one and know what keywords you will google for something that you need in your niche.

About Page and Meta Tags:

 Meta tags are real useful SEO functioned tags. Even though it is not much of a SEO technique, it draws users to click to your link or page. This is where you give your blog description and the search engine lists your blog based on the description information. Without a proper description, it is difficult for search engines to index your blog among millions of blogs.

<head><meta name="description" content="You can write your blog description here"></head>

About Page plays a substitute role for the meta tags and let the search engines index and ranks your blog among million other blogs on your niche.

Guest Blogging:

Guest blogging is a very good opportunity to lead your traffic to a new level and self-recognition in the field of blogging (your niche). Moreover, you'll find your connections grow in a mass media of like minded professionals and gather more readers to your blog and more followers to your social media profiles too.

You also need to avoid these mistakes while Guest blogging in other blogs.

Backlinking:

Backlinking is the linking back to your blog from anywhere on the internet. For example, you have a social media profile on Twitter and you add your blog to your twitter account and that makes you a  backlink from twitter to your blog. Backlinking can be achieved in many ways. 

When you guest blog on other blogs, you'll get a backlink to your blog.

Commenting on other blogs will let you add a backlink to your blog as easy as that provided you don't spam!!.

Participating in communities, forums etc., and answering questions with solutions as well as backlinking to your blog.

Social Media Presence:

Self-Promotion is the best word to put in here that explains everything that we share our blog posts via social media profiles. Social Media Presence is very important for the blog traffic. In other words for business, self-promoting can be called with respect as 'Branding'. There's no point in feeling shy or guilty of promoting your blog.

This is what we do best and this is what social medias are for. To improve your blog traffic and to get more recognition for your online business, it is necessary to keep your presence in social media and share with your followers frequently.

To make it work efficient, your blog must need atleast one social media profile in every networks. It creates a name that will automatically let people think of it as a brand. If you don't have any seperate pages on social networks for your blog, better you link your personal profiles to your blog from where you share your posts. This will increase your referral traffic to a whole new level.

 With constant sharing and live on social profiles, you will gather more followers and readers to your blog as well.

Conclusion:

Blogging will be a whole new experience if you start to make it SEO friendly. You'll experience a change in your blog traffic no matter  its referral or direct or organic. Keep in mind that you write for humans and not for search engines and at the same time you're making it SEO friendly too with proper content and strategies.

Now that I have finished this post, please leave your thoughts on this post through comments and share the love.

Image Credit: Flickr- Mark Fischer

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10 Tips to Improve Interaction On Twitter

Source: Wikimedia

Interaction is a very important business acumen.Without a significant amount of Interaction with your social media profile lists, running a business online is much difficult. Engaging with your social profile followers and friends will help a lot to improve your business in terms of growth, name and money. It won't seem bad when it comes to self-promoting your business or product. As and through the growth of your brand or business, you'll need a lot of interaction with the fellow members and followers. Twitter can be helpful for any business to gain more followers worldwide and will grow your business fair enough.

Any business say blogging, products or brand will possibly need a fair amount of engagement with the crowd at the start which is a part of Marketing Strategy. 

     In this post, We are gonna see 10 simple tips to maintain a decent interaction on Twitter. Interaction on Twitter is very important for business. Twitter is said to be an effective micro-blogging platform and it has increased 40% of its crowd since 2012. Marketing brands or any business (SMB's) etc., are running wild on Twitter currently. For a business to run viral on Twitter, the major thing needed is Interaction. Only tweeting 10 tweets per hour will not make the business run sharp. As you know, Nobody cares what you tweet unless it has something they want. So, you are gonna have to make people want what you have. And thats the part of Marketing Strategy. The main component needed for this strategy is Interaction. Letting people know you have what they want will automatically attract the customers. Here are 10 tips to maintain a decent interaction on Twitter for business to reach more people (followers).

1. Continous Tweeting:

Lets start with tweeting. I didn't say tweeting more is a problem. Tweeting more can be a problem if nobody listens to what you tweet. It could be of no use when you tweet continously and everything goes in vain. Gather your crowd and tweet frequently based on your niche.

2. Filter Fellow Tweeps:

You have to filter your followers based on who actually listens to you (tweets). Its simple. People who retweets, favorites, mentions you a while are those who actually listens to your tweets. You will know eventually when you start engaging with your followers.

3. Start Talking:

Yes. You have to take the initative if nobody's willing. Its your business to run and you're gonna have to move your ass first. Start interacting with the fellow crowd and let them know you're concerning them. While Mentioning them, make sure you're referring to them and make them get interested in your tweets. This will automatically increase your business exposure.

4. Use HashTags:

This is actually one of the main strategy for interacting wide. As you know with hashtags, your tweets reaches more people than just your followers.  Mention your tweets with not more than 2 hashtags as because it seems spammy when more hashtags are used within those 140 characters. Mention your crowd tweeps with hashtags like #FF, #TGIF, #RT etc., just to get their attention as well as the attention of the other people on twitter as well.

5.  Retweet, Favorite:

What are these for? Retweet your followers tweets to let them know you're interested in making an interactive session with them. RTs can be done in two different ways. As you know you can click the Retweet button to do it or you can also quote the person's name and tweet him with his original tweet. Its better to RT their tweet by mentioning it as a seperate tweet rather than just Retweeting them.

6. Praise the Retweets:

Tweeting continously will make your twitter account look fresh and lively. Of course, it may bring lot of Retweets and favorites for your tweets.The one thing you could do to make your engagement with the tweeps is praising the Retweets like mentioning the @person and thanking him for the Retweet and let the flow go on.

7. Add to Lists:

 Add your favorite people on Twitter to your lists. Its easy to find who are your favorite ones. Those who retweet, favorite and engage with you the most on twitter are your favorite ones who listens to your tweets. Keep them groomed and stay engaged with them often to let them know you concern for them.

Actually you can use the 4th tip here. ie; tweet them often with #hashtags listed above.

8. DM Only if Needed.:

No matter what you do try to engage with the fellow tweeps, there is always some kinda privacy for each and every one of them. DMs with links are mostly considered spams these days because of the third party applications that we use over to gain followers that will lead to loose followers as well. So, as far as DM is concerned, use it only for secure purposes and avoid spammy links via DMs.

9. Tweet Quotes Often:

Tweeting is fun when you've something interesting is going on which you wanna share with your followers and getting engaged in several 140 character conversations. More often tweeting Quotes will make your account get followed by many people as well as get yourself into interacting with the others. When you open your profile and you see all your promotional tweets for your business and you'll feel drowsy and bored. Tweeting Quotes often will help your account look refreshing and yourself too.

10. An Awesome Twitter Bio:

It should have been on the top on the list if the Post Title is "Tips To Gain More Followers". Your Twitter Bio also takes part in getting yourself more engaged with your followers. You may find it funny though, but it is your Trademark to let the twitterers know who you are and what you do. Twitter Bio ranges according to the business industry which you are into. You should have an attractive bio on your Profile which will make your followers interested in you and start engaging on their own to your tweets.

Conclusion: 

Now that I have finished with the 10 Tips, I am waiting to hear how you could make use of your interaction on Twitter for your business and your experiences in engaging with your twitter tweeps.

Image Credit: Wikimedia

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5 Steps to Make Great Social Content [INFOGRAPHIC]

          To Make a Great Content which is worth spending  time on reading, all you need is some time to think and gather content for your ideas. You need to be relevant on writing about such topic and should not go AWOL.

          I wrote about How to write Quality Content in 3 Steps last month and I just wanted to include an infographic on to my blog about creating great content in a simple way.

          I was hunting on the internet for hours  about this topic and I finally got a perfect Infographic which I literally found on Pinterest pinned by dr4ward that was originally posted on Lindon East. I really can't say more to it as this infographic tells everything that you wanna know about writing an awesome content worth reading.

Having a big idea about a topic and digging about the Internet Market for right customers and right time to post  is the key for a great content. Sharing is a different key factor where you have to do promote all the time and make use of everything you can.

Here's to you the infographic on 5 Steps to Make Great Content.

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How to Use Pinterest Effectively To Gain More Traffic

Pinterest - a platform of Infographics and a media of pictures that rock the Internet World these days. Just like other platforms StumbleUpon, Instagram etc., it started as something and is now one of the top  social media. It is a social networking platform to enhance your social engagement with other fellow networkers.
Pinterest was first started in early 2010's and has got an amazing response from the users (mostly bloggers and SMB's) all over the world. And now it is listed as one of the top bookmarking tools by EbizMBA as of June 2013. As you know it as an infographic platform, you can  share (Pin It) images other than infographics too. Large amount of traffic can be produced to your blog or your business if it is used efficiently. Here in this post, I'll tell you some techniques to make it work for you and your business efficiently.

Just Like Other Social Networks:

Remember Pinterest is a social networking platform too.It also stands 4th in top social networking sites by EbizMBA.  First of all, don't think Pinterest is strange and uneasy to use. It is just like other social networks. Let me tell you how it differs from other social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

 Facebook->Pinterest:

• Sharing (Share) -> Pinning (Pin It)

• Like ->Like

• Pages -> Boards

• Friends -> Followers

• Comment -> Comment

Twitter -> Pinterest:

•  Tweet -> Pin It

• Retweet -> Pin It

• Favorite -> Like

• Reply To -> Comment a description

• Followers -> Followers

• Following -> Following

• Lists -> Boards

Considering all the above controversies, it can be said as Pinterest is a combo of everything. Lets get into the things that you could make a fine use of it .

Pin It- The Top Notch:

Pin It- button is what makes the Pinterest works. When you pin it, it comes to your board(if board is already created). If you have no boards already, you need to create one and start pinning you images. The Board name should be exactly related to your blog's function. You may create as many boards as you like. For example: If your blog's niche is Social Media Marketing, then you may create your board like Social Media Marketing or Social Media Blogging or Social Media Infographics ( if you pin infographic images) based on your Genre. Use the Pin It button in your blog for the readers to pin your posts on their accounts too. The main thing to notice while pinning your posts is don't pin all your posts at a time. Pin only such posts that you believe could make the users view it on your website. If it's an infographic image, Pin It without any second thought coz it always costs you some visits.

Search On The Floor:

Search On Pinterest

  Search is an effective option to find what exactly you're looking for. You may find a common search on the top left side of your Pinterest Account. Pinterest allows you to search for keywords even if you don't have any account associated with it. That means you don't need an account to search for keywords. For example:, You search with the keyword Social Media Blogging. It shows a list of results and the results changes everytime you search again with the same keyword. It is updating its search as soon as a new entry is posted with the same keyword. This is the benefit of search option in Pinterest. You'll be getting new and fresh results everytime you search with the keyword. And you can also find the keywords that are mostly listed on the search results. This will help you analyze the keywords and use them when you pin your own posts. Remember the search is based on the title of the pin and  make sure you have the most searched keywords on your title to get listed on the search results.

Writing a Description:

Write a Mind Blowing Description

  Description is another main part of Pinning a Post to Pinterest. Only the title of a post is not enough to pin your image on Pinterest. Description is a must to pin your post. It has to be powerful enough to tempt anyone to read the full blog post. Lets say,  You're searching with a keyword. A list of results are displayed based on your search. So, what'll you do? You open a pin and view the image, first you'll see whether it has a description or not, just to get a vague idea  what the pinned image is about. If you don't see any description, you'll move forward to another pin. Well, If the description is nice and clear to understand, you'll read the full post on their blog. Likewise, every user will expect a description for any pin so that they could get an idea of what the pinned image is about. A description should be good enough that it should tempt the viewers to read the full post on your blog. It should describe the theme of the post that you're going to Pin It. Here are some tips to write a powerful description for Pinning an image.

• Understand the whole theme of your post and write a sentence that covers the theme.
• Write not more than one or two lines.
• Don't copy the same lines from your post.
• Finish your description line with a question or suggestion that tempt the reader to read your full post.

Here comes the Interaction:

Finally, it all comes to interaction. After everything you have done, interact with other Pinners very often to show off what you've pinned. Interact with the people related to your Genre, like, comment on their pins, repin their pins on your boards. Let them know what you're pinning. When the title and description are better even without a good image to pin, people would love to read the full post on your blog.

Conclusion:

With all the above, I guess I covered some techniques to use Pinterest effectively to gain traffic. Now, do post your ideas and suggestions below too for all the readers out there.

 Photo credit: ddatch54 via photopin cc

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