Personalize Your Twitter Page!

Twitter is one the best new communications tools for marketers.  It gives you a great opportunity to share news, and updates with your followers very quickly, and to share links to guide your followers to your offerings.  Twitter gives your followers a way to communicate back to you, and for you to learn what your market really wants, all in 140 character snippets of text.  Twitter is amazingly effective in creating conversations with your market, and is the primary communications tool of many marketers.  Becoming a leader of the conversation in your niche within Twitter can bring you amazing leads, traffic, and sales.

1. Prepare a background image for your Twitter profile. The images must be smaller than 800k. GIF, JPG, PNG.
2. Logon to your Twitter account and click “Settings” on the top of your Twitter page.
   
3. On the tab that appears, click “Design“.
   
4. Notice that there are some available skins which ready to be used. But you can also create your own personal background by uploading your background image. To do it, scroll to the bottom of the page and click “Change Background Image” button. Click “Browse” to find your background image on your computer. Check the “tile background” if you want to tiled your background. (repeating image)
   
5. Click “Change Design Colors” button if you like to change the background, text, links, sidebar or sidebar border color.
   
6. Just click “Save Changes” when you are done with your setting.
7. Kudos! You just get your new personalized Twitter page.

Creating your Twitter identity to show your personality through your messages and your unique Twitter profile, will help you move into a leadership role within your market.  Become the person people remember, by having a great looking, informative profile on Twitter.

Adding Retweet Button to Your Blog Posts

Twitter has become a big part of most bloggers promotion efforts, and is a key way to keep in contact with their followers. Twitter becomes even more powerful, for our blog promotion, and communications, when our readers retweet our blog posts, spreading the word about our blog wider and deeper through the market. The time when our readers are most excited about our post is the moment they have just finished reading it, and this is the exact moment we’d like them to tweet about our article. Most of our followers are not going to think about tweeting or take the time to open Twitter, login, type in a message about our post, and send it. If we want to have our readers help us by tweeting about our blog, we need to make it easy and immediate for them.

Once again, a Wordpress plugin can come to our rescue. If you use the Tweetmeme Button Plugin for Wordpress, you will add a Twitter ReTweet button for every post in your blog, including both new posts, and all of your past posts. The ReTweet button even has a cool counter, showing how many times it has been used to tweet about your blog post.

When your user click the Twitter Retweet button, it takes them to their Twitter login page, once they login, the plugin has automatically inserted the RT @yourblogname and the title of your blog post. All the reader needs to do is push send and the tweet is on its way. You can’t make it much easier for your followers.

If you’d like to start having your readers promote your blog, you can install the Tweetmeme Button plugin by following these steps:

1. Logon to your Wordpress administration page.
2. Click the tiny arrow on Plugin tabs and click “Add New”
   
3. Put “Tweetmeme” on the search field, and hit the “Search Plugins” button. Once the search result appear, click “Install” on “TweetMeme Button” plugin.
   
4. Click “Install Now” on the plugin description window.
   
5. Once the installation has complete, click “Activate Plugin“.
   
6. The new tab will appear on your Wordpress administration page. Click it to visit the plugin setting. You could modify how the button is shown on this page.
   
7. The TweetMeme button will appear on each of your blog post and ready to be used.
   

Moving the button location is not as easy as I’d like to see. If you want to move the button from the left hand side to the right hand side of your blog posts, you would need to modify the code in your theme. It works great on the left hand side for most themes, I usually leave it there.

Install the plugin today, and give your readers a quick and easy way to Tweet about your blog, it is a great way to increase your readership without additional work on your part.

How To Use Twitter to Update Your Facebook Status

Every internet marketer faces one big challenge, leveraging your time on the important social media sites.  To keep in contact with your followers, it seems like you are always bouncing back and forth between the two giants of social sites, Facebook and Twitter.

Many times the message you send on Twitter is the same message you want to share on Facebook.  So you login to Twitter, type your message, and update your status.  Then it is off to Facebook, login, then retype the same message and update your status.  I’m sure your time is as valuable to you, as mine is to me, and retyping or even the “cut and paste” of the same message is frustrating.

Luckily for all of us marketers, there is a good solution to this problem.  You can use Twitter to update your Facebook status by using the Twitter app for Facebook.  By adding this app, you can login to your Twitter account through the application in Facebook.  When you post your update, it uses Twitter to update Facebook status, and updates your Twitter status, simultaneously.  That makes for nice time savings, and makes me feel much more efficient.

The easiest way to add the Twitter application for Facebook, so Twitter can update your Facebook status, is by searching for Twitter on Facebook, you’ll find the application on the first page of your search.  Make sure you choose the option to allow Twitter to update Facebook, or you’ll end up only updating Twitter.

To have this feature on your Facebook account, do this following steps :

1. login to Facebook, and click ‘Applications’ on bottom-left of your screen.
2. click ‘Browse More Applications’

   

3. type ’selective twitter status’ on search box and click the application

   

4. click ‘Go to Application’
5. type your Twitter username and click Save

   

6. click ‘Allow’ then click ‘Allow Publishing’ to continue the process
7. That’s it..! Any tweets you post that end with #fb should now update your Facebook status.

If you want to remove this feature, just click ‘Applications’ as you did on step #1, then click ‘Edit Applications’ and click ‘X’ on right side of ‘Selective Twitter Status’. You won’t be able to update your Facebook status from Twitter again after removing it.

There are some negatives with this approach.  First, it is a one way process.  Only Twitter can update Facebook, you cannot send a message directly in Facebook and have it update your Twitter status.  Secondly, since we are stuck with Twitter for the dual updates, we are limited to only 140 characters.  I’m not sure about you, but many times I want a message longer than 140 characters.  This leaves me with using Facebook for my longer messages, so for some updates I still have to do the two sites differently.

Using Twitter to update Facebook status using the Twitter App for Facebook is just one way you can leverage your time, and efforts in your social media marketing.