Twitter, are you taking advantage yet?

I’m sure you are well aware of Twitter by now.  If you are not, perhaps you should crawl out of the hole in the crowd and begin checking out the latest fad on the Internet!  People are absolutely obsessed with Twitter right now.  There are a million sites out there on how to make money on Twitter, how to find followers on Twitter, etc…

Over the past two months I have been receiving some traffic from Twitter.  Nothing major, just a few visits a day here and there, so it never really caught my attention.  At work, my boss wants to jump on the band wagon with Twitter and check it out and see what we can do.  Being a web development firm it’s important to be able to develop in the various API’s for the hot trends, e.g. iPhone, Blackberry, Facebook, Twitter, etc…

So, I began looking into it a bit more.  I signed up for my blog; you can follow me here if you like: http://twitter.com/endyourif

I’ve been partaking quite frequently in the “Twitter Train’s” and finding people who are interested in the articles my blog publishes.  Over the course of this past weekend, I now have around 500 followers.  In the several days that I’ve been using it, I’ve been posting my past articles on my Twitter account linking to my blog.

The response so far has been pretty decent.  What was quite irregular traffic from Twitter is now turning into traffic that is actually hitting the radar and getting noticed.  In fact, over the past two days, Twitter has been my number one referrer of traffic!

At this point, it is still a bit early to judge whether the traffic will turn into repeat readers, but it at least is another excellent avenue to adventure down and see what it turns into.

The question now is how do I get Twitter followers?  There are several ways.  I will cover the following ways: Twitter Trains, searching for people, and promoting your Twitter page

Twitter Trains are websites that are full of people also looking for followers.  The idea behind it is quite simple; you follow a bunch of people.  Once you’ve followed those people, your account is appended to the end of the list.  When new people come to look to join the train, they follow you and get appended to the end of the list and you move up a spot.  These are obviously not the best people to have in your following because there is no targeting.  However, if you can gain large numbers and a small percentage of them are interested, it is still a gain of new users with minimal effort.

Searching for people is exactly what it says.  You enter keywords that match the content you post on Twitter and you follow those people.  In turn, you hope that these people will follow you back.  This solution is a bit better than the train approach, because ideally people are following you back because they’ve checked out your account and find your content interesting.  In this approach, a small percentage of the people you add will follow you back; however, this is much more targeted users because they are actually interested in your content.

Promoting your Twitter page, again this one is pretty obvious.  Place a link on your website to follow you on Twitter.  Add it to your email signature, forum signature, etc…  Like the approach above, only a small percentage of people will follow you on Twitter, but the people that do will be a much more targeted audience.

Join Twitter now and start gathering your followers.  In a short matter of time, you will come to see the viable business solutions that Twitter actually offers.