Twitter, the micro blogging and social networking platform, started a thoughtful approach to monetization!

Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, posted information on Twitter’s new advertising service: “Promoted Tweets”.

Yes, it was posted on their Twitter Blog.

As per the blog post, Promoted Tweets will be the promotional messages that brands can post on Twitter.

These 140 character twitter messages will be labelled as ‘promoted’ but look like normal tweets posted by other users on the site.

Users will be able to reply, forward, retweet and select these messages as favourites.

The first phase of the new Promoted Tweets platform starts with a handful of innovative twitter advertising partners that include Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, Starbucks, and Virgin America.

I personally like Twitter Commercial Ads FREE (just let the users promote their products in their tweets).

What do YOU think?

Please give YOUR comments below (and get a back link!).

Fred Lotgering
LotCon Biz Solutions
Twitter Marketing Products.

There’s a problem with the Big Follow strategy, though. Why the “Big Follow” Strategy doesn’t work?

If you want people to see your Tweets on Twitter, you gotta have followers. Obviously, that can drive a person to commit himself or herself to building up the biggest follower base possible as quickly as possible.

One of the most popular techniques to get those followers in place is to start following others. There’s a tendency out there in Twitterland for those who’ve been followed to follow in return. That generous reciprocity can make it easy to build a follower list that will really turn heads.

That’s why following as many people as you can without setting off the “you’re probably a spammer or a bot” alarm is such a popular technique for new Twitter marketers.

Yes, you get the followers. The problem is that you get a bunch of followers who aren’t really interested in anything you’re saying. They followed out of kindness, ignorance or because they’re not really a human being an they’re programmed to follow when followed.

When it comes time to market to that motley crew, you can guess just how effective it is. It’s like cold-calling the first set of numbers in the phone book or emailing random addresses. It’s not targeted and It doesn’t convert.

You best bet is to focus on building a truly interested and targeted social network. The results will be a lot better than what you get with the “big follow” technique. Read more in our Twitter book: Twitter Marketing Secrets

There are two ways to approach Twitter from an Internet marketing standpoint. You can either try to figure out how to really get involved and to parlay that into improved business or you can try to find the shortcuts and secrets that will dump a pile of cash in your lap overnight.

Here’s the scoop. The people trying for a quick score aren’t making money.

The only way to really use Twitter to your advantage is to use it the “right” way. You need to be a real user an a legitimate member of your (and others’) social networks. You need to contribute and you need to interact. If you’re there looking for a quick buck, everyone will smell you coming from a mile away and they’ll lock down their wallets before you get near.

Let’s say it again to make it clear: Real users make more money with Twitter.

That’s ugly news for the get-rich-quick crowd, but it’s great news for marketers with enough perspective and understanding to recognize a good thing when it’s staring them in the eyes.

Have you figured out how you can really use Twitter? Do you understand how that usage can lead to real business improvements? If you still have questions, you need to learn more about Twitter. Otherwise, you’re wasting your time. Look for the resources available on this page.

If you use Twitter on the web by itself there’s already a lot of things that you can do to promote your business. However there are several other ways that you can enhance your Twitter experience. After reading this article, you’ll learn of 3 ways that you can enhance your Twitter experience.

1. Use Twitter in combination with other networking sites

This is absolutely critical. That is why it is listed first. You should never put all your eggs in the same basket. What if something happens to Twitter? What if it’s down for maintenance? What if there are just too many tweeps on at once and you keep seeing the fail whale (that’s what happens when you can’t load twiter)? There is a service called tweetake, which allows you to download your followers, favorites, tweets, dms, everything you need to talk to your Twitter family outside of Twitter. I suggest you download this file from tweetake daily. Another thing you should do is invite your friends to join you on Facebook or LinkedIn. I recommend putting your Facebook profile on your Twitter page as your website. That way when people follow you on Twitter, they’ll go right to your Facebook page and follow you there too. Find an email address for your Twitter posse so you can send emails to them. Don’t send them commercial messages unless they sign up for your email list. That’s considered spam. You can send them messages that you’d send to your friends. It’s great to email your Twitter friends information that will help them with their business. They’ll be extremely grateful to you for sending them wondeful information and it will seem more personal because you sent it right to them instead of blasting it to the whole Twitterverse!

2. Use Twitter +twitwall to market your telecalls.

Twitwall is an excellent service to use to market your telecalls. Every Twitter user gets a twitwall. You’d use your twitwall when you have things that are more than 140 characters to post. You can use your twitwall to promote your telecalls very easily. You’d just post the relevant information to the twitwall and then retweet it. Important: Be sure to include the words please retweet in the headline when you post information about your telecall. Even though twitwall makes it easy for people to retweet your information, they won’t do it unless you tell them to most of the time.

3. Twitter + Hashtag + Tweetchat = PARTY!

Another great way to get people talking about you and your business is to hold a Twitter party! Twitter parties are very easy to set up. All you have to do is create a hashtag for your party. Basically a hashtag acts a tracker for your party. Once you decide on a hashtag, next pick a date and a time. Then start telling everyone that’s in your Twitter family about your party and ask them to retweet the information for you. On the day of the party you can use tweetchat to follow everything everyone is saying about the party. Tweetchat is awesome because once you go to the website and log in, it automatically inserts the hashtag and tells you how many characters you have left to tweet with. It also allows you to momentarily stop the chat within the chat room so you can scroll back and see what was said before you enter the room. It’s important to both participate in and throw Twitter parties because it’s a great way to get the word out about your business and you can meet new people that are interested in the same things that you are interested in.

Twitter is a great tool to use to drive traffic to your website. These things that I’ve mentioned will only improve the amount and quality of the traffic you get to your website.

Multimedia files (audio, video, pictures) can be a great way to get people to come to your website.
You can use Twitter to get people to look at or listen to the multimedia files you have created. After you read this article you will know of 3 ways that you can use Twitter to promote your multimedia creations.

1. You can use Twitter to promote your videos.
Many people use YouTube as a way to share their video files. It’s great that you’ve created a useful video and put it up on YouTube, but how are you going to get people to actually watch the video? Well it’s pretty simple. Just get in the habit of posting a tweet to your followers every time you post a new video to your YouTube channel. You can do the same thing if you use sites other than YouTube to host your video. Another strategy would be to tell your Twitter followers about the video before you create the video. This creates anticipation in the minds of your Twitter followers. They’ll be looking forward to your video and be more likely to watch the video. One other thing…Don’t make the video too long. People on Twitter have very short attentions spans. Many tweeps don’t like to be away from the tweet stream very long because they are afraid they’ll miss something. Your video should be no longer than 5 minutes. Besides, if you try to go longer than that, you might make a mistake and have to redo the video.

2. Got a podcast? Great!
After you’ve taken the time to create useful content, you want people to actually listen to your podcast, right? A great way to that is to just post a tweet to your followers when you’re about to record the podcast and then another tweet when the podcast is ready for them to download it. Another way to get traffic to your podcast is to interview someone that is really popular on Twitter. When you’re looking for someone to interview, don’t just look at the number of followers that person has. Be sure to pay attention to the number of people that person is following back. Look at how often that person engages with their Twitter family. It will do you no good to interview someone that doesn’t talk to their Twitter posse. Once you’ve interviewed this person do the same thing you do with your other podcast episodes. Let everyone know it’s available!

3. Got photos? Use twitpic!
Twitpic is an awesome way to share your photos with your Twitter posse. If your Twitter friend is in the picture be sure to tag them in the picture. This way they’ll be sure to look at the picture. They might even retweet it for their followers to see!

Using video and audio can dramatically increase the number of visitors to your site and the number of people that sign up to your newsletter list. Be sure that you sprinkle in enough personal messages in between sharing your multimedia files so people won’t label you a spammer. That is one label we can do without.

Success!
Fred
P.S. Did you get your Twitter Freebies Friday e-mail? No? Don’t miss all these freebies! Better subscribe! Do it here!

Every once in awhile, even the best Twitter users around find themselves losing followers. People just drop away, without explanation. Sometimes, it’s easy to track the reason why. If you lose several followers every time you make a highly-charged political Tweet (not usually a good idea, by the way), it doesn’t require a genius to figure out what’s happening.

Sometimes, though, you’ll lose a follower (or several) for no apparent reason. Just to make you feel a little better when that happens, here a few potential explanations.

Sometimes, Twitter cleans house and they cancel “bad accounts”. You may have several followers who weren’t really interested in being part of the Twittersphere. We’re talking about spam accounts and robot accounts. You can see a follower reduction because of that house-cleaning.

There are other cases when you’ll lose followers simply because the person who had been keeping tabs on you comes to the realization that you’re not supplying him or her with what they need. That may very well be because they chose to follow you without first understanding what you were all about. Don’t take it personally. You can’t be everything to everyone.

Those are two potential reasons why you might see a drop in followers even if you’re handling your account the right way. Shedding a few followers can be a completely normal happening, unrelated to anything you may have Tweeted.

I know we all like to focus on Twitter because of its simplicity. However, it is important to use Twitter in combination with other social networking sites. You want to be able to connect with your Twitter friends should something bad happen and the site go down, right? Here are three sites that you can use in conjunction with Twitter to market your business.

1. Twitter + Utterli = Stay connected with your tweeps when you are away from a computer.

Utterli is an utterly awesome tool in my opinion. You don’t have to have fancy equipment to post to Twitter if you have utterli. Utterli has a feature that allows you to record audio posts right from your phone. This can come in really handy if you are attending a tweetup and you want to let your tweeps know that you are at the designated location. Utterli also cross posts to a lot of different networks too. The neat thing about utterli’s cross posting feature is your friends don’t even have to join utterli for you to talk to them. It’s nice if they do join you on utterli. This way if Twitter is down for whatever reason, you can still get in touch with that person.

2. Another good tool to use in conjunction with Twitter is skype. Skype is a service that allows you to make phone calls from your computer. You can also use skype to chat. Skype is great when you and a tweep are holding a conversation that requires more than 140 characters to do it justice. Skype is also good to use if you are discussing something private that you really don’t want the whole Twitterverse to know about.

3. You can also use Facebook in conjunction with Twitter. It’s important to connect with your Twitter friends on Facebook because some people are more comfortable with Facebook than they are with Twitter. Facebook also allows you to build a deeper one on one connection with your Twitter friends because they have all of those applications and games. A whole different article could be written about all of the different Facebook applications and how they can help your business. That’s beyond the scope of this article. Just be sure to invite your Twitter friends to friend you on Facebook (hey I didn’t make it up, they did) and you’ll have an additional way to contact them.

4. Twitter in and of itself is an excellent place to network and grow your business. However, it is important not to get too comfortable on any one social networking site. You don’t want your business to sit at a standstill because someone decided to close down your favorite social media site

There are different ways to get Twitter followers. You can follow everyone and their house pets yourself, hoping that enough of them will reciprocate to boost your follower total through the stratosphere.

You can make a concerted effort to promote your Twitter URL at every turn, hoping to find new followers from the population that visits your website or blog.

There’s another way to do it. The third route, by the way, is the one that works the best.

If you Tweet quality, you’ll get followers. Good followers. The kind who want to listen to what you say and who are willing to follow your advice.

When you’re Tweeting the “good stuff”, people notice. They re-Tweet you. They recommend you. They respond to you. And every time one those things happens, more people become aware of you and the fact that you’re doing something special on Twitter.

Want to get a nice big collection of rabid followers who can actually produce results? Start bringing your “A” game to the Twittersphere. When your dropping great Tweets, people will find you. There’s a magnetic thing about quality that makes it happen. Every time.

If you’re just getting started with Twitter, you might want to use the buddy system to get a handle on how things work.  Instead of jumping in all by yourself, find a friend or two to join up with you.

Here’s why.  Instead of experimenting with other people and going through the inevitable trial and error process in a way that could reflect poorly on you or inconvenience other users, you’ll be able to play with Twitter by constructing your own little “newbie network”, insulated from the rest of the Twittersphere.

Don’t worry, this isn’t a long-term situation.  You’ll probably get the hang of things on the first day.  Having someone else with whom to test out Twitter will make things that easy.

You don’t need to go this route, of course.  You can hop right into Twitter and get started. Chances are, it will work out great for you, too.  However, if you’re a little nervous about learning the ropes, bring a buddy with you!

Interacting with people online is a wonderful way to get started networking.  Eventually you will want to meet some of your new found friends in person so they can become your In Real Life or (IRL) friends.  People are more likely to do business with or joint ventures with you once they have met you in person and see that you are a real person and you act the same way offline as you do online.  Here are some tools to help you find people in your local area to follow.

You can use hashtags.org to find people in your geographical area to follow.

Just type in your city or state and you will see all of the tweeple that are located in or talking about things related to your city or state.

Another service you can use to find people located near you with is tweets.ws.

Tweets.ws is very simple to use.  Just click on choose your own news topic and type in your state. I tried using my city and state but I didn’t find anything that way.  Once you type in your state you will see everyone who is in your state or talking about things of interest to your state.

Another great tool to use to find tweeps in your area is Twittermass.

All you do with this site is to go to the website and login with the same username and password that you use to log in to Twitter.  Once you’ve logged in you’ll have to click on the tab that says Create. Then click on manual follow for best results. Type in your City and State.  The website will generate a list of tweeple in your city and state and then you can follow them.

Citytweets is another wonderful tool to help you find tweeps in your local area.

Now if you live in a suburb you may need to use the next biggest city to find people near you.  It looks like that site is still growing.

Twitter is a wonderful way to meet new people.  Be sure to follow people local to your area so you can meet them in person.  Be on the lookout for tweetups on your area.  Basically, a tweetup is a combination of the word meet-up and Twitter or a bunch of tweeple in the same geographic area that meet-up and network.  Tweetups are great tools to add to your arsenal of Twitter tools. Be sure to take pictures and videos. This will prove that you were at the tweetup.  When you meet people in person you deepen the relationships that you have on Twitter.  That’s what it’s all about after all, right?