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How To Create a Successful Twitter Account

Twitter has become a powerful medium to promote your affiliate business, increase your online visibility and drive tons of traffic to your website. Marketing on Twitter is not difficult, but there are some tricks Twitter gurus use to keep them at the top of the tweeting chain.

Here are 10 habits of successful affiliate Twitter accounts.

Tweet, Don’t Spam

There is a big difference between tweeting and spamming. You need to post meaningful and relevant content that your subscribers are going to want to read and follow. Twitter is a social network, and if you overwhelm your readers with continuous self-promotion or other spammy tactics, no one will stop by anymore.

Establish Your Brand

Create a Twitter page that’s fun and edgy and gets people interested in you, but also delivers the message of your brand. Incorporate relevant pictures, color schemes and a link back to your site, your blog, or other social media sites. The more your fellow tweeters get to know you and the niche you represent, the more likely they will return to see what you’re tweeting.

Incorporate Follower Strategies

As with any social network, Tweeters love to be both informed and entertained. Post top rated things from Digg.com, mashable.com and http://popurls.com (the most popular content from the most popular sites). Create videos on YouTube and post links to get multidimensional with your account.

It’s been said that a successful Twitter account ratio is 35% humor, 35% personal, 20% random life stuff and/or quotes, and 10% business—even for major businesses like Nike and Apple.

Facilitate Conversation

Take polls, ask relevant questions and come up with other unique ways to get your readers to respond to you in order to better market yourself. While you may be blogging on Twitter for your own business purposes, you won’t get anywhere unless you are willing to facilitate conversations, and communicate with consumers and other businesses in the Twitter community.

Manage Your Following

You can go to http://www.search.twitter.com to see what people are tweeting about specific keywords you are targeting, and follow them. Tip: When you click on a tweeter’s “follow” and then send a quick message to that person, the follow back rate is greatly increased. People know then that you are not just out to make a sale, but to actually connect with them.

Track Your Following

The general rule of thumb of a successful Twitter account is to have more followers than you are following. TwitterBurner can track all of your click-throughs and is supported directly in TweetDeck. With TweetDeck, you can create groups, filter tweets, monitor certain subjects as well as post tweets, replies and retweets. Learn more about TweetDeck here.

Get Celebrities to Promote You

Twitter offers a service called sponsored tweets where you can pay celebrities to send out a tweet for you. Create your tweet so it doesn’t seem like an ad and that it sounds like something your celebrity would say. And be sure to lead their followers to a good blog post, a cool video, or something other of value.

Time Your Tweets

To maximize your tweet visibility, you need to post your tweets at times when your followers are actually reading. There are a number of different factors to consider such as time zones, where your Twitter followers are located, target audience, etc. Use sites such as Tweetwhen.com, whentotweet.com and Timely.is to learn more about the best time to tweet.

Repeat Your Tweets

It’s acceptable—and even encouraged—to repeat tweets in order to make sure that all of your Twitter followers see your message. Since Twitter streams are generally flooded with tweets, it’s useful to repeat your tweets (every 7-8 hours) so that your important messages aren’t getting missed—this also ties in with followers in different time zones, etc.

Use Hashtags #

Hashtags are excellent tools to mark keywords or topics in a Tweet, and are great ways to generate tons of traffic. If you send your tweet with a hashtag, anyone who does a search for that hashtag will find your tweet. Just 3 hashtags per tweet can give massive exposure to your tweet and increase your visibility.

Have you tapped into the power of Twitter to boost your affiliate business? Do you use these tricks, or others that are not listed here? Let us know in the comments below.