To Tweet or Not to Tweet ~ I Confess My Twitter Sins and Answer this Age Old Question

by Julia D. Stege, MFA
@MagicalMarketer

It's Twitter's birthday. The social network is three years old today. At 8 million strong, Twitter is a force to be reckoned with in the online marketing community. It's getting to the point where you cannot afford to ignore the little bird any longer.

I am going to come clean with you. The past few months I haven't really been on Twitter at all. I was pinging posts from ping.fm to all my social networks and not logging on to see what was up in the twitterverse. I was kind of blocked, a one way tweeter without the bandwith to watch all those disjointed conversations streaming past my screen.

I was in love with Facebook anyway.

Even though they're often lumped together, Twitter is a totally other universe from Facebook, and I was grooving on the Facebook friendly. On Facebook you get to see great pictures and tag each other in pics and notes and easily see what's up with each other in a variety of forums, catch up with old friends, and play fun games, that in addition to all the cool marketing tools you can use on Facebook. It's not called 'crackbook' for nothing! It is addicting. I read on Mari Smith's blog that the average Facebook member spends 20 minutes a day on the network. That's a lot of time for a website which translates into a captive audience like none we have ever seen.

But back to Twitter. As I said, I was a one way tweeter. I only sent out messages and didn't read the ones coming in. Looking back on it, I'd have to say it was poor networking etiquette. I don't just go to a networking lunch and say my pitch without listening to and responding to other people, and the social networks are just an extension of the live networks I attend. OK, I'll forgive myself, now that I know better.

You see a couple of things happened to change everything. First, my RL (real life) buddy, Karen Clark (@funfelt), told me she has over 3,000 Twitter followers she's attracted by RT (re-tweeting) other folks' tweets and being an all around tweeterific gal! I'm intregued, but don't know who to RT!

Then I got a VA (Virtual Assistant = Sherene Alexis Curley @VASherene ) who introduced me to a boatload of Twitter apps and explained some basics to me, the most important of which was 1) how to magically unfollow everyone in my list who wasn't following me, and 2) learning what the hey a #hashtag is so I can find and follow simpatico friends.

Now I'm in #Hashtag Heaven!

I knew that a tag was a way to mark a topic with a keyword, but I didn't realize that you could follow and contribute to specific Twitter conversations using #hashtags. First I followed @hashtag on twitter, then I visited hashtags.org and put in a search for various phrases, like #loa (law of attraction) and #fb (facebook) to see not only what people are saying about these topics, but who's saying them. This is a way to find and follow and then RT the most eloquent tweeters in the topics I'm passionate about.

This is great because now I can tweet on topic, and I can click to follow folks based on our common interests and build a more authentic network of like minded people. What a relief. Now I just spent 3 hours on Twitter to commemorate Twitter's 3rd birthday and I'm feeling the love!

So my answer to the title of this post is a resounding YES. I have been reborn as a tweeter. Follow me at http://www.graphicgirlz.com/magicalmarketer and I'll tweet you to heaven too.

WANT TO USE THIS ARTICLE IN YOUR EZINE OR WEB SITE? You can, as long as you include this complete blurb with it: Magical Marketer Julia D. Stege, MFA helps people attract their perfect customers with a unique combination of Law of Attraction, wildly attractive logos and websites, and smart Internet marketing techniques. If you're ready to start attracting your perfect customers now, get Julia's free Magical Marketing Toolkit at http://www.magicalmarketingtoolkit.com See Julia's Law of Attraction Marketing Blog at http://magicalmarketing.blogspot.com