Twitter is not primarily about marketing or selling products. But the huge success of Twitter has made it a viable marketing platform. By targeting people interested in your niche, you can create your own market for your products. But building up a large number of followers on Twitter can be a time consuming task. Fortunately, most of this can be automated.
If you are using Twitter for marketing purposes, you need to manage your followers efficiently. Most people use Twitter Karma for this. The main feature of Twitter Karma is following and un-following users in bulk. This saves you a lot of time, compared with if you would have to manually un-follow users one at a time. Note that if you are using Internet Explorer you may have some problem with Twitter Karma. Some of the features, that work fine with the other browsers, do not work with Internet Explorer.
You need to tweet frequently but this will take a lot of time, especially if you have more than one Twitter account. Tweet Later is one of the best ways to solve this problem. Tweet Later has a lot of functions and you can choose between the basic version, which is free, or the professional version, for which you pay a monthly fee. The free version is good enough for most people and it lets you manage multiple Twitter accounts. A useful feature of Tweet Later is the possibility of automatically follow the users that follow you. Once you activate this function, you will automatically start following your new followers but your old followers are not affected by this. Tweet Later also allows you to automatically un-follow users that un-follow you. This has some advantages and some disadvantages. Many prefer to use Twitter Karma to manage their followers rather than Tweet Later.
The best feature of Tweet Later is the ability to schedule your tweets. This is a lifesaver if you have more than one Twitter account. Since no one wants to talk with computers, people want to communicate with people, do not overdo your automation of Twitter. If you set up automatic replies for everything, your followers will quickly realize that they are not communicating with a real person. And a lot of them will stop following you. Despite all tools, you need to allocate time to be online and tweet. Try to be online when most of your followers are online and participate in the discussions.
You can use Google Alerts to find fresh information to give to your followers. But Google Alerts can also be used to keep track of what people say about you, or rather your Twitter username, on their blogs. Just set up an alert for your username, with the commercial at-sign as the first character. The TweetBeep utility can be used to keep track of Twitter conversations about you or your products.
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For further information about how to make money with Twitter, go to
http://www.money-with-twitter.com
