Advanced Twitter Tips

Now that you're all set up, let's get into some advanced Tweeting tips and applications that can really power your Twitter usage up.

Twitter Backgrounds
We discussed earlier about setting up your Twitter background so that it didn't just look like the default Twitter page. Leaving it like that shows a lack of care on your part. You need to distinguish yourself from the crowd and that attracts more followers, or at the very least impresses people with your professionalism.
Now if you're a bit of a Photoshop whiz, then you can do your own background, full of bells and whistles and load it up to your Twitter profile. But if you're not, or you just want to save time, then there are some sites out there that will do them for you automagically. To find these sites, the best thing to do is to simply Google “twitter backgrounds” and you will find quite a few sites offering this service for free.
My personal favorite is Twitbacs at http://www.twitbacks.com/ where you can get some great backgrounds.
However, that said, if you want to do your own fiddling in Photoshop, you can get some great layouts in PSD format from http://www.twitterbacks.com/

SocialToo
SocialToo at http://www.socialtoo.com is a useful automated tool for Twitter. At Social Too, you can set your account up to do some autopilot things for you.
First of all, you can set SocialToo up to automatically follow everyone who follows you. This can take the drudgery out of checking all your new followers and then going and adding them to your own list in order to reciprocate.
You can also set up SocialToo to send an automatic Direct Message to people who follow you. Don't do it! Automatic Direct Messages are absolutely hated by most of the Twitter community, particularly experienced users because they can pick them a mile off. It's a sterile and rude way of starting out a relationship with new followers.
The backlash against this has largely been caused because many newbies, and some old hands too, were setting up an auto Direct Message that basically said, “Hello, thanks for following me. Now go and visit my sales page at http://..... “. I'm sure you get the picture. I can't think of any worse way to start a relationship with a new follower on Twitter. In any sort of business, you build relationships before you try and sell someone something and this is even more relevant in the social media space.
SocialToo will also provide you with an email every day of all your new followers and those that have unfollowed you as well.
Another function of SocialToo is that it will automatically unfollow anyone who unfollows you. Personally I don't think this is a bad thing. If people aren't interested in you any longer, then are you really interested in them? If you really want to keep the updates from someone, just go and follow them back when you see their name on your unfollows email each day.

TweetLater
Tweetlater at http://www.tweetlater.com is a fantastic tool to use with Twitter. It allows you to schedule tweets for various times of the day. So how can this be of use to you?
Well you need to remember that the Twitter audience is constantly changing and the tweetstream occurs quite fast. The more people someone follows, the greater the number of tweets appearing and they won't read them all, I promise you. It just isn't possible. By using Tweetlater, you have a much greater chance of catching people's attention throughout the day and in different time zones.
Let's say you have written a post on your blog and you want to drive some traffic there. Rather than tweeting the link and subject once, you can do it every hour for 24 hours if you like using Tweetlater. I'm sure you can see the power of this in terms of driving traffic or getting noticed.
There is a free and a professional version of Tweetlater. Start out with the free version and then if you need it, upgrade to the professional version when you are ready.

Twitterfeed
Twitterfeed at http://www.twitterfeed.com is also a very handy tool. It is far more secure to log into than the other sites I have mentioned as it uses Open ID which is a bit of a pain. However, it is worth persisting with in the absence of an alternative tool.
What Twitterfeed does is that you can set up your blog to feed directly via RSS to your Twitter account. So every time you make a blog post, it gets tweeted automatically on your behalf. You can use this in conjunction with Tweetlater with the first post coming through Twitterfeed and then subsequent ones at times you specify via Tweetlater.

SplitTweet
SplitTweet at http://splitweet.com is a great tool if you have a number of accounts on Twitter. Rather than switching between them from time to time in order to Tweet, you can set an account up her for free and bring all of your accounts under the one roof.
Splitweet will display the Twitter feed from all your accounts at once, or you can turn individual accounts off and on. When actually tweeting, you can pick an account to tweet to, or you can do a broadcast message across all your accounts at once.
Some very flash technology this and very useful for handling multiple accounts.

Twitdom
Twitdom at http://twitdom.com would have to be the greatest site relating to Twitter. It is a repository for all Twitter related applications and it is just absolutely amazing what there is in there.
At the time of writing, Twitdom had nearly 500 Twitter related applications in its database. Quite amazing when you think about it that there has been so many third party applications written and is a pretty powerful indication as to the value of Twitter. It also indicates the confidence of the market in that Twitter will become very much the mainstream.

Friendfeed
Friendfeed at http://www.friendfeed.com is an automating tool you can use in conjunction with Twitter. Friendfeed is a bit of a hub if you like where you can set up links to all your other accounts. Friendfeed collects information from those accounts and publishes it in your Friendfeed feed.
Although Friendfeed is a topic almost in itself, I mention it here particularly because of it's ability to link your Twitter and Facebook accounts among others. If you have a Facebook account and you link it and your Twitter accounts in Friendfeed, then what will happen is that all your posts in Twitter will be posted on your wall at Facebook. It means you are running two social media accounts via one and saves you time.

Your Twitter Karma
Your Twitter Karma at http://dossy.org/twitter/karma/ is a really useful site for having a look at your followers and who you are following. It's great for managing your account from a followers/following perspective.
Unfortunately it doesn't seem to load a fair few times and can be unreliable, but when it is working it's great. It shows you all you all the people you are following and all those that are following you. Underneath each avatar it tells you if you are following them and if they are following you. You can also sort by people that you are following who aren't following you back. This is great for management as you can decide whether or not to unfollow them.
By checking the boxes, you can actually do a bulk unfollow of a heap of people at once as opposed to going to every individual Twitter account and clicking on “unfollow”.
You can also list those that might only be following you and decide if you want to follow them back. Again, this can be done in a bulk manner.