On your “Home”, “Discover” and “search” pages of your Twitter account you’ll find a column on the left hand side called “Trends”. This is a powerful feature on Twitter and a great way to find out about popular topics being talked about on the social media site.

Here’s some of the frequently asked questions about Twitter trends and how they work:

What are trends?

Trends are emerging popular topics of discussion on Twitter.

Trends are determined by an algorithm. The trends that you see on your list are personalized for you based on your location and who you follow.

Yes you can. Just select a different trends location by clicking on “change” at the top of your trends list. You can select from the countries listed or opt for “worldwide”.

The # sign, also known as a hashtag, is a way of highlighting a keyword or phrase that relates to the topic of your post so that people can follow the conversation in search.

When you click on a trending word on your trends sidebar you will be taken to the Twitter search results for that trend and be able to follow all the tweets that include that keyword or hashtag.

All you need to do to participate in a trend is to include the exact word or phrase (including the hashtag if used) from the topic on your trends list.

Twitter has a list of rules for what they deem suitable and unsuitable trend tweeting behaviour.

Here’s a run down of their rules for trending:

• No adding topics or hashtags to an unrelated tweet in an attempt to gain attention in search.

• No repeated tweeting of the same topic or hashtag without adding value to the conversation in an attempt to get the topic to trend.

• No tweeting about each trend in order to drive traffic to your profile, especially when mixed with advertising.

• No listing trends in combination with a request to be followed.

• No tweeting about a trend and posting a misleading link to something unrelated.

Abuse of these rules could lead to twitter suspending your account.

It’s good idea to customise your Twitter profile so that it sets you apart from the millions of other Twitter accounts and can really make a difference in whether people decide to follow you or not.

click on “settings” located in the dropdown menu on the top right of your navigation bar. Click on the tab “Design” and select a premade theme by clicking on it. When you’re done just click “save changes” at the bottom of the page.

Yes you can upload your own background image and customise the sidebar and font colours for your Twitter profile. On the Design tab scroll down to the customise your own section and click on choose file. Select the image you wish to use from your computer. Make sure it’s a suitable size as you can’t stretch images to fit and it will be displayed as the size you upload. Choose a background colour to show behind the image in case your file doesn’t cover the whole screen. Next select a colour for links and save your changes. Your design will now be live on your profile.

Must be under 800K. The format must be either GIF, JPEG or PNG. Animated GIF files are not supported.

To change your avatar click on “edit your profile” button located at the top of your Twitter page on the right. “Picture” is the first section. Click on “choose file” and upload your chosen image from your computer. When your done, scroll down and click “save changes”.

You can add your website url by going to “Edit your profile” and under “web” type your website url. Click “save changes2 at the bottom of the page and your website link will show up on your profile.

You have an allowance of up to 160 characters for your bio and should use it to give other tweeters an idea of who you are and your interests. To optimise your bio to show up well in search results you should include keywords related to yourself and your content.

Remember, the right profile design can turn strangers into followers. make sure your Twitter profile is optimised to attract new followers and drive traffic to your website.

Twitter is a great place to track trending topics and keep up with major events and big stories as they occur. When an increasing number of people tweet about a topic it inevitably ends up on the Twitter trends lists. There’s a lot more to tracking Twitter trends than just the list you find on the home, discover and search pages of your twitter profile though.

The internet offers a wide selection of web applications that can help you track twitter trends and popular hashtags and understand what is popular at any given time and even what was popular in past.

Here’s a few ways to track Twitter trends:

• Twitter Search This is Twitter’s official search and probably the simpliest way to see trends.

• Monitter Just type a search term in the box and it will automatically bring up a list of the most recent tweets containing those terms or click on the “trending” link to load columns with current twitter trends in them.

• Hashtags This site let’s you search for trending hashtags. Either enter your own term in the box or click on one of the terms from their lists (which are separated into categories for easy navigation).

• Tweetmeme A great site for finding the most popular links on Twitter.

• TweetingTrends This tweet account updates with a tweet every time a new trend enters the top 10.

• Twithority Another tweet account that updates you on Twitter trends based on time and “authority”.

• Twitterfall search by term, location or follow a group of specific people.

These are just a few of the applications available for tracking Twitter trends. A quick search on the internet will come up a lot more options for you making it easy to find a system that works for you.

Your profile is the first impression other people get of you on Twitter and can make a big difference in whether they decide to follow you. It’s therefore a good idea to customise your Twitter profile so that it sets you apart from the millions of other Twitter accounts.

Here’s a few ways you can personalise your Twitter profile:

1. Use Twitters built in features for personalising your profile design.

• Insert your own website url

• Include a bio

• Upload an avatar for your profile picture

• Select a different theme or use a plain coloured background of your choose from Twitters design tab to personalise your profile background.

2. Upload a picture a your twitter background. You can personalise your background by selecting a photo from your computer to use. The only restrictions are that the picture must be smaller than 800K and should be either GIF, JPG or PNG format

3. Enhance your profile with an optimise background. The internet is full of sites that specialise in offering backgrounds for twitter profiles.

Here’s a few that offer both free and custom backgrounds:

• Twitter gallery

• Tweet Style

• Twitr Backgrounds

4. Build your own twitter background using an editing software. By using Adobe illustrator or Photoshop or another program like GIMP or even Microsoft Paint you can create your own personalised background for your Twitter profile. As before, make sure your picture is under 800K in size.

Whether you’re using Twitter as a professional or personal tool having a personalised profile will add some identity to it.

What is twitter?

Twitter is a social media network where you can post status updates of up to 140 characters known as tweets. These posts then show on your profile, the newsfeed of fellow tweeters that follow you and in twitter search.

How do I find people to follow?

You can invite your connections to follow you via email, import your connection from other networks or search for people to follow by their name, username or keywords. Twitter also suggests people with similar interests to you that you might want to follow.

How do I know who is following me?

You can set your email preferences so that you are notified via email every time you get a new follower. You can also check under the ‘Followers’ tab where you will find a list of all the people following you.

What are @replies?

@replies are when you direct your tweet to a specific person by using @ followed by the username of the person. When you click the reply button on someone else’s tweet it will show as an @reply.

What are direct messages?

Direct messages, or DM as they are also known, are private messages between twitter users. These messages don’t show up in your newsfeeds and so won’t be visible to the public. You can only send messages to people that follow you.

What a retweet?

This is basically when you share someone else’s tweet. You are ‘retweeting’ their content. You can do this either by clicking the retweet button directly on the other persons tweet or by placing RT in the status update. You can also retweet using third party applications but these may show up differently on your newsfeed as the tweets are not considered official retweet by twitter.

What are hashtags?

Hashtags are the # symbol followed by a keyword and are used to categorise tweets. Hashtags make it easy for particular topics to show up in Twitter search.

For more FAQ’s check out the Twitter help centre.

Although these offers to buy Twitter followers might seem like the perfect solution to instant marketing success they are in reality just a spammy tactic and can in fact damage your online reputation.

Twitter isn’t a race to get the most followers. It’s about quality over quantity. Twitter isn’t about how many followers you have, but how many you interact with. It’s therefore much better to slowly grow an organic following over time than to buy an instant community of dud accounts.

Although some companies will make promises that each follower will be a real person the truth is that most will be fake ‘robot’ accounts and therefore the only benefit buying twitter followers gives you is a statistic. When people check out your followers and see just a group of faceless eggs it’s a dead give away that the majority of you followers are fake accounts and will quickly turn away genuine people and discourage them from following your account.

Twitter also looks badly on accounts of aggressive users and so using what they class as spammy tactics to draw attention to your profile could in fact result in your account being suspended. If everyone buys large numbers of followers it will diminish the value and credibility of the social network as a whole and make it impossible to see who has real influence on the platform. You can find out more about what Twitter deems ‘best practices’ here.

Put the ‘social’ in your social media strategy and don’t waste time and money on buying Twitter followers.

This sudden boom in businesses supplying ‘buy twitter followers’ services has become a significantly growing trend and has turned into an underground economy on the social media giant. You can easily buy Twitter followers via one of the numerous websites or even on eBay.

Twitter is the ideal platform for reaching out to a large, international audience and having a large number of followers will make you appear popular and worth following. The more followers you have the higher the chances of your content going viral.

Buying Twitter followers on the surface might seem like the perfect solution to instant success on the social network and at an average of just $18 for 1000 followers appears to be a cost effective marketing strategy but it can in fact damage your online reputation.

Whilst some companies pledge genuine followers, and a percentage of the accounts may well be real people, for the most part your new followers will be fake ‘robot’ accounts. Although having a large number of followers show on your account does have advantages as soon as people see that the masses are in fact a sea of faceless eggs will kill your credibility.

So why is the business of buying twitter followers blooming? Building a large organic following takes time and effort. Businesses want instant results and therefore opt to pay out in order to have an immediate community of followers.

Authentication is not required when buying twitter followers and so anyone can purchase followers for any account.

It is against Twitter’s ‘Terms Of Service’ to buy followers and they have been campaigning against these fakes accounts for some time as the practice of buying followers will over time diminish the value and credibility of the social network as a whole. Using such businesses to draw attention to your profile could in fact result in your account being suspended.

Given the rapid growth of these businesses Twitter will need to invent some drastic measures if they are going to be able to control this abuse of the platform. ]]> http://twitterbuff.com/the-blooming-business-of-buying-twitter-followers/feed/ 0 http://twitterbuff.com/the-5-best-tricks-to-get-twitter-followers/ http://twitterbuff.com/the-5-best-tricks-to-get-twitter-followers/#comments Fri, 27 Jul 2012 20:12:09 +0000 Robert Corby http://twitterbuff.com/?p=84 The 5 Best Tricks to Get Twitter Followers

For most Twitter users the want to get more Twitter followers is always in their minds whether it is more exposure to their individual message or for more practical reasons like more business opportunities. There are many ways to get Twitter followers from mass-following tools to more organic ways of increasing your Twitter followers. For this article we’ll be talking about the 5 best tricks to get Twitter followers organically. When we say “organically” what we mean is following certain die-hard Twitter practices to encourage more Twitter users to follow you.

1. Encourage Followers to ReTweet Your Tweets – One of the best ways to get Twitter followers is to encourage your followers to reTweet your messages. This allows your message and @username to find its way into completely different markets and social demographics than it might have otherwise.

2. Link Your Twitter Account to Everything – Link your Twitter account using the handy Twitter Counter to all of your online activities such as your Facebook page, LinkedIn, email signature, website, blog, InstaGram, Digg and more. By doing this you can spread your message to the farthest reaches of the internet so that you can get more Twitter followers than ever before and find out your Twitter statistics with the free service.

3. Use Tweko to Rebroadcast Your Message – Tweko is a nifty little tool that allows you to selectively rebroadcast your Tweets so that your message can be heard more. Because not everyone is on Twitter when you initially Tweet your messages, it is important to rebroadcast them at least one more time during peak user times to make sure that the highest amount of people see your Tweet.

4. Include Pictures to Capture Attention – Tweets with pictures are far more likely to be reTweeted because they just beg to be looked at and shared, making them a great way to get Twitter followers. The more pictures you include, the more your Tweets will be rebroadcasted, allowing for more people to see your Twitter message and begin following you.

5. Make #Hash Tags Your Best Friend and Get Involved in #Hash Tag Memes – #Hash tags are another great way to get Twitter followers because you are marking your Tweets with searchable tags so that Twitter users can find your Tweet messages more easily. #Hash tag memes are another valuable tool for getting followers and you can get in on the fun by going to the Twitter Search page where you can find the most popular Twitter trends at the moment. Find a topic that interests you or is in relation to your Twitter messages and jump in on the conversations.

There are as many junk and spammy twitterers as there are in email, crawling the internet and in snail mail. Following them, even by error, will not help your cause. Your followers can see who you follow, as well as the number, and it could deter some people from reading your posts, or checking out your website rather than what you intended.

The best way to pick who to follow, and hope they follow you back is to do the old-fashioned due diligence and select them as a human being, not by any speedy applications. Set apart a time of every day, to search and follow by selection. You will do better with a lower quantity of high quality followers than thousands of spammy followers who will mess up your intent.

Good practices on Twitter that will help your business, cause or promotion and bring you quality followers: