To Online Guide

At the time of writing this article, I am pretty much a complete Twitter novice. I have about 3 followers, and I’ve made 3 introductory Tweets. However, I am not a complete internet marketing novice, and I can see the potential Twitter has to help build my business.

But in order to build a business, don’t you need a lot of followers? And from what I can make out, getting Twitter followers is a time consuming business. You basically have 3 options.

Option 1 – Broadcast your Twitter page to your public following. This is why celebs and internet ‘gurus’ can rack up a massive number of followers in a short period of time. They basically tell the world, “Hey, I’ve got a Twitter page, check it out”. And because they have such a large public following, they can put together a massive number of followers on Twitter easily. I don’t have this luxury.

Option 2 – Spend a couple of ours making tweets (tweeting) every day. If you are an active tweeter (twitterer? I’m not up on all the Twitter lingo yet!) then it stands to reason that more people will stumble across your page, and eventually you’ll build a following. Unfortunately, I don’t have a couple of spare hour per day to do this.

Option 3 - Manually follow and unfollow twitter users. From what I can gather, every time you follow somebody on Twitter, there is about a 1 in 4 chance that they will follow you back. So you’d need to follow about 4000 people to get your following up to 1000, right? But there are two problems with this.

The first problem is that new Twitter members are only allowed to follow a maximum of 1000 people. Once you get to 1000 followers yourself you can then follow approximately 10% more than are following you. Get it?

The second is that finding and adding people on Twitter is a time consuming process. It’s not a difficult task, but time consuming. Who has hours per day to manually add followers, and then manually remove people that don’t follow you back? I don’t.

This task can be outsourced, but this is a cost you shouldn’t have to bear. Especially if you are trying to build a small business on a relatively tight budget.

This is where Twitter Auto Follow Software comes in. This clever little piece of software will go out and actually find Twitter users for you. And then it will start to follow them too.

To make matters even better, you can actually ask the software to remove all the people you are following that aren’t following you back. This leaves you free to target new twitter followers.

The true beauty of this twitter auto follow software is that it is completely set and forget. That means that you can ask it to help you get more Twitter followers, and then go off and walk the dog, go out for dinner, hit the gym, or my favourite: go to bed!

I’ve seen the potential this software has to save me, and loads of other twitter users, a whole bunch of time when building a massive Twitter following. So that is why I decided to put it to the test in my “The 0 to 1000 Twitter Followers in 5 Days Challenge”.

I’ll be broadcasting it on YouTube over the next couple of days so why not see how I get on. Hopefully I’ll be able to give you lots of great tips as I go.

Security, the hottest thing on the internet. No, you can’t put your passwords into a safe box or keep them with the CIA. When it comes to social networking and connecting your accounts to other accounts, security is able to become compromised. What if that “Get Money for Tweeting!” site stole your information and got your Twitter account? What if that password was the same as your Facebook? Your PayPal? Well, they probably are going to get those too. That is why you need to keep your information safe.

One way to keep your information safe is to keep it secure. Twitter rolled out an update to support OAuth not too long ago; OAuth is a way to never, ever give out your password. When a web application wants to get access to your account, they don’t want your password or your secure information, all they want is just an access token. You don’t even have to login here, or there, or anywhere except Twitter. That way, they don’t have your password, and if they are abusing your account, you can deny access anytime.

Another way to keep your information safe is to always use a virus scanner. Malware, Trojans, and anything can get into your computer; you want to keep them out. They’re like those stalkers that watch your every move; when you enter a password, they jump right on it, and take your account! You don’t want that to happen. You may be thinking Virus Scanners cost lots of money. Actually, they don’t. There are plenty of free scanners, along with online scanners; try AVG or Kaspersky or Avast.

Being safe is a major thing to keep in mind when signing up for web applications, and being secure is what you want to be. Keep your information safe and secure by using only OAuth enabled applications and always using a virus scanner.

MatSpy

Steps on How to Add a Twitter Icon to Your Facebook Fan Page

Adding the Twitter icon to your page is a great way to cross-promote your presence on other Social Media websites.

1. The Resource for where to find a great Twitter icon is listed at the end of this article. They have a huge list of different icons you can use.
2. Put in your user name (this will automatically update the HTML code in the boxes)
3. Pick your desired icon by highlighting and copying the HTML code it gives you (make sure it shows justactnatual in the code as every once in awhile it won’t update properly)
4. Go to your FaceBook Fan Page – at the very bottom, left side of the screen you should see the “applications” button – click that and then search STATIC FBML
5. When STATIC FBML comes up click “add to page” – it should bring up a pop-up that gives you a choice of what page to add to (personal, fanpage, etc) – Click your fanpage
6. It should then bring you to a box to edit the FBML – this is where you paste in the code you copied from Step #3
7. Save
8. At your home page of your FanPage you will see a tab above your wall that says “Boxes”
9. Click on “Boxes” – You should see your Follow me on Twitter on that page and in the right hand corner of the Follow me on Twitter you should see a pencil
10. click the pencililWhen you click the pencil you should see the option to “Move to Wall Tab” – select that
11. It should now be on the left sidebar of your FanPage

Resource to pick your Twitter icon: www.twittericon.com

If you have any problems you can also visit my blog post or YouTube channel as I also have a video on how to do this for the more visual people.