For those of you that do not know twitter is a micro blogging site where you get only 140 characters per post. Because your posts are so short, this makes it quick and easy to post more often (something I should do).

You can have as many twitter accounts as you have email address, I use two accounts at the moment and have had more in the past. I tend to open a new account when I want to try out a new program or strategy. Once you have an account go to settings, here you can decide how much info you show people, name, location, bio and you can also display a link to your website.

Ok before you start to look for followers, I would recommend that you do a few posts to let people know what you hope to bring to the community. Now using the find people tool and type in photo or art and you will get a list of people that have used that tag, I have followed a few artists but I am more interested in the people that follow the artists (possible buyers). I try to follow people and not companies, I look at their profile and click on any links they have to see what they might be selling, this may be a little slow for growing my following but I feel that the vetting will give me a better quality of followers.

Some of the people I stay away from are the obvious like the porn, MLM and get rich quick pushers but also look out for people that post every few minuets of every day, they are auto accounts a bit like auto email responders, set up and forgotten about. Do not use the many programs out there that say they will get you followers. They have two levels paid (VIP) and unpaid (free to join). The free to join accounts you have to follow every VIP and 20+ free accounts and they (the program / site) gets to post in your account with you having no control over what links they put in! The VIP accounts you get many followers that are after lots of followers at no cost or effort.

Each day I follow 10 to 20 people I then look to see who is new following me, if I have not followed them first I look at their profile and follow them if they fit my guide lines (do as you would have done unto you). I then look at the people I followed 3 or 4 days ago and if any of them have not started to follow me then I stop following them. Over time this has resulted in more people following me than I follow (only by a small margin at the moment) but I believe this adds too the perception of the quality of my posts.

So you are new on twitter or you do not have the time to build up your following should you still use it as a marketing tool? Well yes, in your posts you can use the # followed by followfriday, photo, art and so on that will put your post in a group that many people will see. When I had less than 30 followers I posted a link too Mike Finley’s image “red poppy” with the tag #photo, it was picked up by DailyImage who then posted it too his 12,000+ followers and became one of my followers (Grrr one of Mike’s and not mine), so even if you only have a few followers you can still get you massage out to a lot of people.

Because I am a member of this group I get to link to many other peoples website so that it does not look like I am only pushing my stuff. Also using the @ symbol when giving information to other people on RB via twitter creates a situation where people are naturally inquisitive go to look at the other side of the conversation (profile of the other person).

Please add your own tips and tricks or what you have found to work or not so that we can all benefit.

Martin