Crackers – The drier the better! Am sure you would never go shopping for a wet cracker. Then why use a twitter account the same way?

Twitter is a marketing bomb if used the right way. I have been using twitter for more than 2 years now and have been benefited only when I discovered the right way to use it.

Just like many of us I usually blindly do 2 things:

1. Blindly follow as many as suggested twitter accounts to follow.
2. Blindly tweet every single post on my blog using the retweet plugins.

I can for sure say these two are the biggest mistakes that could get your cracker wet.

The major pattern you could see on Twitter is:

• You get followed back by many if you follow them
• People subscribe to auto-follow tools to increase the follower counts
• Your Twitter dashboard is flooded with tweets if you leave it un touched for 10 minutes
• As soon as you tweet you see few new visitors from twitter landing on your website / blog

Is that what Twitter is all about – a few extra visitors, lot of blind tweets, flooded dashboards and huge chunk of followers to show off?

Now let me share what I learnt the hard way and something that could really help you benefit.

I created another twitter account and followed a different strategy that the one I used to use and many of us still use.

I had the new Ground rules this time:

• Only follow who I really wanted to
• Will try to keep the follower to following ratio unequal
• Have a straight forward profile Bio (simple words about me and what I do)
• Have a real profile pic (preferably not a graphic unless you are a huge brand)
• Respond to direct messages
• Visit / Reply to interesting tweets and if good, re-tweet.
• Meet / interact with real people and build contacts
• How this was different from my previous approach

With my old profile even though I had 8000+ followers on a retweet I used to get 120 -150 new hits on my blog posts. Then what are the 7850 followers for? Spamming you? I guess you have got the message I am trying to send across.

Here you can see my account: ( I have 991 people I follow and 1653 followers)

Take Home: Twitter is all about real people and real contacts – build them and you would be rewarded.

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