I wanted to put together an article about twitter with regards to maximizing it’s full potential for marketing and promoting.

If you don’t know who’s not following you, then you may be missing out on potential sales or even new readers.

I’ve started using a program named Manage Filter. What this program allows you to do is manage who’s not following you and who your following. They have sorting options based on tons of criteria such as, Image or no Image, Who’s following you, Who’s not following you back and more. (more…)

Alright I’m really excited about another weekly edition of our Follow Five Friday’s, if you have noticed I changed the name. Initially it was Five Follow Friday and I find it doesn’t slip off the tongue so well.

What I like to if your new to this article is keep track of the most interesting people I find and meet on twitter. I link you to their latest article and their twitter account. If you feel their content is something that will interest you simply go ahead and follow them.

If you enjoy them, like their blog or want to engage with new bloggers make sure to check them out these lists will always be of amazing and great quality. Thanks to everyone who re tweets and ads me back as a friend. I hope to see you all joining Blog Engage soon and submitting your new articles.
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When I first started using twitter I was a big supporter of the Tweetmeme button. I actually used it far before I changed to the Twitter Retweet button.

But after about 1.5 years Twitter made a huge change to their own Retweet button that made me switch.

For example, right now I’m on @Lisa Petrilli Blog and I’m about to Retweet her latest article named,

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To me it’s easy to think of all aspects when marketing and promoting online. The small things others forget are important to me and I want to share some of these basic twitter tips right now.

I know this will help many people so enjoy and share if you feel it’s something that can help others you know trying hard to market and promote.

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I’ve decided I’m going to start writing another Friday article sharing all the cool and unique people I find, re-tweet and follow on twitter.

This will not be your traditional follow Friday but it does kind of seem like it seeing it’s Friday and I’m suggesting people you should be following lol.

These are bloggers from all over the world that somehow grabbed my attention over the other 500 people I followed throughout the week. They either had great blogs, amazing content or simply outstanding personalities.

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1000 USD 2011 Best Guest Blogger Contest Article Approved

Social media enthusiast like you and me love to find new tools to increase engagement on our favorite social networks. Keeping on top of current events and trends on sites like Twitter and Facebook is also a great way to conduct research for our blog posts. Here are a few of my favorite tools to help curate content, sort through the noise, and focus our attention on the information and the users that are critical to the success of our blogs.

Twylah – In essence, Twylah is like your personal Facebook Fan Page only it’s for your Twitter stream. Pretty sweet right? Use Twylah to monitor your own behavior on Twitter. Your Twylah page will list the topics you Tweet about most often and this way you can ensure that you sculpt your stream with keyword rich Tweets for maximum SEO benefits. I spoke with the founder of Twylah, Eric Kim last week about what’s coming next. He said to be on the lookout in the coming weeks like analytics and he’s very hopeful we’ll soon have the capability to monetize our Twylah Fan Pages. Check out this video introduction to Twylah that I recorded for you and learn how to send a “Power Tweet”:

Pluggio – You’ll enjoy using Pluggio because of the user friendly interface and the plethora of functions you can access for Twitter account management. Pluggio can suggest new users to follow based on your preferred keywords and after using Pluggio for a few days, it will also suggest users to unfollow. On the right hand side of the interface, you’ll find over 20 short videos describing how to use each feature. Pick the feature you like and watch a 1 or 2 minute tutorial before you start your desired task. Scheduling tweets provides even more options than the popular Bufferapp allowing you to schedule different tweet times for every day of the week. You can authorize Facebook, LinkedIn and a host of other services via Ping.fm and discover new content by monitoring select RSS feeds.

Summify – signup for Summify alerts covering your Twitter, Facebook and Google RSS feeds and an email will show up in your inbox everyday with the top 10 stories from across these networks. It’s a great time saver and you can survive in a nice little “social media bubble” by reading and Tweeting exclusively from the list of posts in your Summify alerts for a few days if necessary. You can easily tweak the content in your Summify alerts and tailor them to your needs. Just, give the Thumbs down to bury any news sources you no longer have interest in.

Social Mention – is another email alert service that “monitors 80+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google, etc.” BONUS TIP: Go to “Tools” and get a content rich sidebar widget from Social Mention with a scrolling search bar based on any topic you choose.

StumbleUpon – This may come as a surprise, because most people might not think of StumbleUpon as a Twitter app, but when you take a deeper look you’ll see how it works. Connect your Twitter account to StumbleUpon and take advantage of their custom URL shortener – Su.pr. Share stories on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn directly from the SU toolbar. On Twitter, links are shortened with a cutomized Su.pr link. Log in to to the Su.pr website to discover the number of likes and other Stumblers who retweeted your content!

Continue to Monitor Social Media Engagement

Check out these other tools to help you monitor engagement and evaluate your effectiveness at getting your message across:

EdgeRankChecker.com - shows you the Edgerank score of your Facebook Page

Klout -rates influence on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn and recently added a gaming aspect by allowing users to award each other a +K on topics they Tweet

PeerIndex – looks at authority and reputation across the 3 major networks

TwentyFeet – makes you aware of changes in engagement you might otherwise miss and integrates YouTube, bit.ly, and MySpace alongside the big 3

Paper.li - our favorite Twitter daily newspaper now incorporates Facebook searches too

Twilerts – track specific topics and emails you at given intervals

Google Alerts enhanced with YoLink – you already know about Google alerts but take them a step further by adding Yolink for a much more comprehensive report

Have you tried any of these yet? Pick at least one of them and take advantage of the wealth of information they provide. Just wait and see and in no time at all, you’ll have everything you need to become a social media research Ninja for your blog.

If you, like me, love twitter and want to use it to drive traffic to your blog you’ll probably have already come across a few ‘twitter schemes’ from google or youtube that didn’t go according to plan, maybe you even got your account suspended for speed-following.

Worry no longer, I have a twitter-friendly legit method of gaining thousands of twitter followers every week simply by finding an a certain type of twitter followers and pairing that information with a some great twitter clients.

If this sounds to good to be true, don’t worry – your going to have too put in some effort. But the ratio is still great 1 hour / 300-500 followers. But in reality you’ll be getting more as that ratio is targeted at relatively new twitter users (50 followers or so.)

What do you think, sounding good? let’s get started then. First we’re going to get rid of any non-follow-backers (I call them excess-tweeters.) For that we are going to use Tweepi.com.

Tweepi is a very simple twitter client that allows you to mass-unfollow (sort of – it’s slightly different though) and also find other twitter users to follow.

Let’s get started…

Log In Via The Twitter API

You don’t need to sign up to Tweepi – you just have to hit the login button in the top right hand side of Tweepi.

Flush Excess Tweeters

Go to the Flush Tab and it will tell you how many people your following who aren’t following you back.

Below that there should be a box saying something along the lines of ‘tweet this to get an extra 20 tweeples per page’ – this is a must. Go to the bottom of the page and tweet it.

Now let’s get started with the flushing.

Go to the table and click on the first user in the list.

Then go to the bottom of the table, hold Shift and click on the last user and you’ll see the whole table light up in yellow.

Then just hit the unflollow button at (either the top or) the bottom right. Repete this on every page of people who don’t follow back.

Follow Only The Best

Head over to the follow tab.

Now we need to find some influential tweeters in your niche.

Type in your niche area into Twitter Search and copy the name of the first tweeter. Then copy and paste it inter Tweepi and hit the Login Authentication button.

Then a table (you’ll notice in the same format as the Flush page) will load with a list of people and lots of data on them, for us to use this data to it’s advantage go to the options box at the top right (above table.)

Click on the Speed Mode to uncheck it. The page should reload and allow you to select Higher followers to following ratio on the Preset Targets in details.

Now that all of the followers are in order we can find the best followers that tend to follow back much, much more often than not.

That ratio is any followers:

Within 90% – 100% followers to following ratio

Last tweeted between 1 sec and 24 hrs

That’s it! so follow everyone on the page with those specifications. Repeat this throughout around 50 pages. The next day you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the amount of followers you will have received.

Take note of the occasional stunt in the loading bar that tells you that twitter doesn’t approve of you following that many people at once (Don’t worry though, it’s usually only a minute.)

Flush again after 24hrs and repeat the process.

I was doing some tweeting yesterday for some of our members here in the community and some articles I wanted to tweet but ended up passing on.

It’s hard to determine what I’m going to tweet or not tweet seeing I have so many member articles to choose from.

In today’s article I thought I would discuss the main reasons why I decide to tweet or not to tweet a members article.

Let’s face the facts this doesn’t only apply to me. I safely assume many other bloggers think the exact same way.

Way to many ads: The number one reason I don’t retweet an article is the fact that it has way to many ads. In fact I won’t even retweet an article that has an add in the wrong placement.

Pop ups: This can be in the form of ads or a newsletter. I’m not a fan of any type of pop up. In fact I have gone as far to boycott any websites or blogs that have pop ups. I’m definitely not going to send other twitter followers into a newsletter subscription pop up.

No tweetmeme button: I’m a huge fan of tweetmeme I like the set up and trust the software. I integrate it with my twitter account and enjoy the simplicity of it. If you don’t have one or something similar I most likely will not tweet your article.

Poor quality content or design: If I see it’s a short or poor quality content article I won’t even bother tweeting it. If I enjoy the bloggers and their content I will retweet it without thinking twice. If the design is nice and clean I will tweet but if it’s poorly designed or too busy looking again I will simply skip it.

The reason why I brought this up is because today I will be tweeting many of our members articles. In fact I will only be tweeting articles that have the Blog Engage profile badge or image.

What makes you decide to tweet or not tweet an article?

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Be sure to add me as a friend, bbrian017

Subscribe to my blog as well

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Thanks,

Brian