What I learned about Twitter in the first 30 days?

Twitter has been around since July of 2006, however, I had no interest in joining twitter until this year. I thought twitter was a huge chat board and never thought of it as a great way to market my brand through social media. I created my twitter account when I created my hubpage account. I started off tweeting my hubs and I didn't invest much time into learning how to effectively use this great tool.

Over the last month, I will tell you what I have learn about twitter and how I use it to help my marketing techniques.

Building a list of followers is very important, as they will help you with your social media marketing efforts. The best way to gain followers it to use the who to follow feature, this will link you to people that you already follow and have an interest in the same types of blogs, products, and markets that you are enjoying.

As you begin to follow people, it is important that you post useful, contextual tweets. Take the time to connect with your followers and gain their trust. Your followers don't want to see only spam tweets come from your account. After all who likes a bunch of spam.

Follow your followers. You will see a use for this later on during my discussion. Twitter isn't just a one way street. The only followers that I don't follow are those who constantly create spam content on twitter.

Join in on conversations that are happening in your twitter feed. This is the best way to find friends. These friends are potential people who can assist you with your marketing goals and may eventually help spread your brand to their followers. Reputation is very important on twitter.

Another way to gain followers, is to post your twitter account information on your blogs and other social media networking applications. This will give your readers a chance to find out new information about your brand through your tweets.

I found that I gained more followers if I was willing to go the extra mile to retweet someone's post. I begun actively engaging with users and retweeting tweets that I think my followers might enjoy. I spent the last thirty days on twitter, learning how to become an effective marketer on twitter.

At first I was pretty quite, and actively watched what the users that I followed were doing. Some of my followers would hold useful conversations, other's would post news, links to blogs, videos, and even pinterest. Tweeting is a simple way to share useful information to a wide variety of people.

There are groups of successful online entrepreneurs online and many often hang out on twitter. Many of them are willing to share tips with their followers. The groups are groups of men and women who want to share in your success, they are there to help give you the confidence to succeed at your goals.

I have found several groups of other mother's who are successful bloggers and I just started networking with these wonderful groups. I try to interact with them on a daily basis and I have even looked at their blogs.

Social media is very new to me and I am having to learn how to use it to my advantage. I know that social media and word of mouth is the best form of public advertising and many companies are switching to this type of marketing.

Hashtags are an important part of twitter and were designed to help twitter keep up with topics that are currently trending. Hashtags are characterized by the # sign and then the name of the group/sponsor/ect. For example, breastfeeding has several different hash tags that are used to post information about breastfeeding too, they are: #breastfeeding, #bfing, and #bfcafe. You will have to discover which hash tags are important for your topic or topics that you enjoy following or posting on.

You are probably wondering, how you can have a party on a fast moving board like twitter? I thought the same thing when I first saw that some of the people that I was following were hosting a twitter party. The party will use a #hashtag so that you can join a group of people who are all discussing the same topic. To join a party, open up the tweet and click on the hashtag. This will take you to another screen and will only display tweets that are assigned the hashtag.

During the parties, they will often times give you an opportunity to win prizes for answering a series of questions, often pertaining to a product that you use or a service. To be eligible for a prize, most parties have an RSVP list, which can be found in the initial invite tweet. I have found that most party's are open to anyone and anyone can RSVP to it. Once the party starts, the more often you comment or tweet about the topic in the party, you will be entered to win one of the giveaways, but you have to add the hashtag to each post.

I have attended a few twitter parties and haven't won a prize yet. My very first twitter party, I had no clue that you needed to RSVP in order to be considered for a prize. I think I learned this during my third or fourth twitter party. Twitter parties are another great way to meet new followers as you learn about new products or services.

I have learned a ton of information so far on twitter over the last 30 days. I am continually learning how to improve my marketing techniques and learn more about social media. I hope that my hub has been informative and helpful.

Please follow me on twitter at @upliftingfam