Feeding Blog Feeds to Twitter

Are you looking for a way to plug some RSS feeds into your stream? Tired of manually doing all the work? Twitterfeed is a neat tool that can automate the process for you. Simply add a feed to your account, give it a name, and let Twitterfeed do the rest. This tool can check for new feed postings every 30 minutes to once a day. You can pick and choose amongst numerous URL shortening options, add a prefix or post suffix for tweets to get the past tweet possible. This way you can make it look less spammy and automated. [...]

10 Ways Bloggers can do with Twitter

Twitter is a fun and useful way to promote your blog and drive traffic to it. While it might seem that micro-blogging through Twitter might just be a fun thing to do, you can actually use Twitter to grow your blog. Remember, building relationships is a key part of growing your blog, and Twitter is an excellent tool for building relationships.

Take a look at the suggestions below for how you can use Twitter to drive traffic to your blog.

1. Drive Traffic
Twitter has a viral marketing effect to it wherein your tweets could spread quickly across the Twitter community if they are interesting. For example, if you're hosting a blog contest or launching a new feature on your blog, send a tweet to let your followers know. Chances are they'll spread the word as well. As word gets out, more and more people will visit your blog to check out what all the hype is about.

2. Network with Like-Minded People
Twitter is set up inherently to act as a networking tool. People "follow" users whose tweets they enjoy or interest them. As such, you'll be able to connect with like-minded people by using Twitter which could lead to more traffic to your blog and much more.

3. Make Business Contacts
Just as Twitter is a great networking tool for finding like-minded people, it's also very effective with connecting users with business contacts. Whether you're looking to hire someone to help you with your blog or business (or both), looking for a new job, or just looking to bounce ideas off your business peers, Twitter can help.

4. Establish Yourself as an Expert
Twitter can help support your efforts to establish yourself as an expert in your field or blogging niche to the online community. By communicating through tweets about subject-matter you're knowledgeable in, answering questions via tweets, and searching out new contacts, your efforts to be viewed as an expert (which gives your blog greater credibility and appeal) will grow.

5. Get Ideas for Blog Posts
If you're having a dry spell in terms of coming up with post ideas, Twitter can help get your creative juices flowing. Read and send some tweets and see what people are talking about. Something you read is apt to spark a post idea or two to get you through a temporary state of blogger's block.

6. Ask Questions
Just as you might use Twitter to establish yourself as an expert in your field, other people use it for the same reason. Don't be afraid to ask questions. You just might learn something new and find new bloggers and users to connect with!

7. Provide Live Coverage
If you're attending a conference or meeting that you'd like to share, you can send multiple tweets real-time to share the information you learn then expound on your tweets with blog posts.

8. Ask for Diggs, Stumbles and Other Promotional Help
Twitter is a great place to ask your followers to Digg or Stumble your blog posts. You could also ask other users to blog about your post with a link back to it or spread the word to their own Twitter followers to drive more traffic to your blog.

9. Accuracy and Fact Checker
Imagine you're writing a blog post about a recent event but don't know how to spell the names of the people involved in the event. Send a tweet to get the information you need, and while you're at it, give your followers a heads up about your upcoming blog post.

10. Find and Share Resources
Need a quote, interview or guest post? Want to offer your services as a source? Send a tweet!


An article written by Susan Gunelius for About.com

source
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Creative Ways to Use Twitter

From my previous post, I've discussed that Twitter can be used as a recruitment tool.

Here are some other ways you can use Twitter particularly in supporting your marketing and branding efforts:

* Press releases: you can keep your audience up to date with your brand’s latest developments by posting links to your press releases.
* Time-sensitive special offers: you can use Twitter to promote items on sale, or special fares, like some airlines are already doing.
* Post event updates: if you go to a conference or trade show, you can tweet about the latest developments.
* News updates: Twitter can be a good medium to post news items of interest to your customers.
* Disaster Relief: Organizations such as the Red Cross are using twitter to post updates on their efforts to help during natural disasters and emergencies.
* Daily schedules: musicians, politicians and other traveling acts are using Twitter to post news about their appearances, schedules, etc.
* Links to interesting web pages: You can use Twitter as a social bookmarking service, like Delicious or Stumbleupon.
* New blog posts announcements: You can post a tweet every time you update your blog. True, you can also achieve this through RSS, but Twitter gives you yet another avenue to reach people that otherwise wouldn’t have had access to your RSS feed.
* Blog widget: you can install Twitter on your blog’s sidebar to show your latest tweets and give your blog a more interactive feel.
* Real estate listings: real estate agents can use Twitter to post links to new listings.
* Promotions: if you have a “deal of the day”, “daily lunch special” or any other recurring, time-sensitive promotion you can announce it in Twitter.
* Recruitment tool: many companies have filled positions with people they found through Twitter.
* Personal branding: by drafting a compelling personal profile, posting brief insights on topics related to your field, and by nurturing your network of followers, over time your Twitter account can turn into a strong personal branding signal.

Another beauty of Twitter is that’s it’s very easy to post. You can do so from Twitter’s website, by IM and even by sending text messages from your phone. source
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Twitterific Application : What are you doing?

According to Wikepedia, Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read other users' updates known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts which are displayed on the user's profile page and delivered to other users who have subscribed to them (known as followers).

Once you've signed in, the Twitter site immediately prompts you with a question in bold type: "What are you doing?" Below, there's a blinking cursor and a blank white space where you have 140 characters with which to answer. That's basically it.

Is twitter the next big thing in online social networking? We'll see... But more or less it has the potential. Twitter application invades not only computers but other communication device as well. In fact a lot of application can be linked with twitter (more of this on the next posts).

I joined twitter a month ago and so far, I admit, I have not maximize it yet as much as I want to. How about you? Join the next big thing now. Please see sidebar to register or click here.
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