The 2 titans in viral  marketing are currently Facebook and Twitter even though Twitter only has a fraction of the number of users of Facebook. At the time of this writing, Twitter has around 3 million users, compared to 200 million for Facebook, but all the buzz is about Twitter.

Being a user of both online viral marketing services, I can certainly see why Twitter trounces Facebook in many ways, but will it be able to knockout the champion? Let’s start by taking a look at some advantages of Twitter over Facebook.

5 Twitter Advantages:

1. Easy to get followers

2. Easy to follow people, no permission required, and few rules and restrictions.

3. Very simple and quick, maximum 140 characters per ?tweet?

4. Allows aliases

5. Searchable, with full profile views

Now let’s take a look at some areas where Facebook has an advantage:

1. Fan page feature

2. Better support for multi-media, although this is improving in Twitter

3. Creates trust

4. Very viral

5. Event page feature

Overall, Facebook is a lot more complex than Twitter. And it’s much more cumbersome and restrictive to get friends on Facebook. Friends must approve you and if you are not a friend, you can’t see a person’s full profile.

Facebook also has some archaic restrictions on adding friends. There is a friend threshold, and if you go over the limit Facebook will disable your ability to add friends for an unspecified amount of time. And they also don’t publish the threshold so it’s a guessing game.

And if you violate their mysterious rules and restrictions too many times, Facebook will disable your account permanently and you will have to start all over with a new account and 0 friends. I know several people that have had this happen after growing their friend lists to a few thousand friends. And they weren’t even told what they did wrong. Ouch! I’m doing my best to avoid this.

I have personally violated the “mysterious adding friend threshold”. When I got slapped by Facebook for this I was not able to add any new friends for over a week. I significantly reduced the number of friends I was inviting each day and still got a nasty email threatening from them.

If you want to get started in viral marketing check out twitter for it’s ease of use, short messages, and lack of prohibitive rules and restrictions. The main thing, I’ve found that it’s a lot of fun and you can learn a lot from people posting interesting info!

And now I would like to invite you to claim your Free Access to “15 Ways To Grow Your Business Online”. Just click here to send me a blank email and you’ll start receiving valuable information that can help you get more traffic to your website or blog and make more money from your visitors.

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TweetLater.com Anyone?

No doubt that Twitter is one of the most effective tools an affiliate marketer or an online business marketer can have. If you are a new online marketer and you have no idea what we are talking about here, let us break down the sentence above even further.

Twitter is a social networking website that allows users to post details about themselves in 140 characters or more. Your details that you micro-post are seen by those who follow your tweets. Twitter can be used by a marketer’s advantage through the following:

It allows a marketer to advertise his or her goods and services in a personal level.
It promotes traffic.

Just post your website link in your tweet and ask your followers to visit this so that they can [insert whatever hook you have in your business].
For up and running affiliate sites, you can ask for feedback on what your Twitter friends think about your site.

You get to know what is the latest niche or topic in Twitter-land real time, with no cost. You can use this information to boost traffic to your site.
Look for talents where you can outsource your work to.

Now, there is a particular tool connected to Twitter called TweetLater.com. Using TweetLater.com to your advantage will be most advantageous to an affiliate marketer to ensure constant posting without having to hire someone to post for you and without having to chain yourself to your laptop.

TweetLater.com is a tool that will allow you to continuously post tweets even if you are not in front of your PC, without typing the tweet on your mobile or on your PDA. Use TweetLater.com to post your tweets for you throughout the day. Its like making postdated tweets for future posting.

If you are excited to go about doing this, here are the steps.

Go to TweetLater.com and click on register
Importantly, use your Twitter account details in your registration.
After registration, log in TweetLater.com using your Twitter username and password.
Click the button that looks like a pencil which will allow you to edit your account. You can choose to have an automatic welcome message to your new followers and other actions you want for TweetLater.com to do for you.
To make post dated tweets, click on the link that says Scheduled Tweets and plug in the details of your scheduled tweets.

As a marketer, you have to acknowledge the power of reaching out to your audience.

So the more constantly and the more personally that you reach out to them, the more they will gravitate towards your business. Having a TweetLater.com account to ensure that your audience will regularly be reminded of you is a good idea to familiarize your audience more and more about your business. In this fast paced world where everything is instant, from coffee to mashed potatoes, if you spend even just a week away from the audiences, you and your business will already be slipping away from your audience consciousness. With TweetLater.com, you will avoid this unfortunate occurrence as you take a quick vacation from your marketing tasks

To find out lots more tips on how to market your busines son Twitter and use specific techniques to make money on Twitter, go to Check it out here

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Have an online community is must for online business. Without strong community, it can hard for you to sell anything. However, community building is not as easy as we thought. You have to work us to build it.

There is couple way to build online community. And twitter is the fast way to start it if you like to start your own online community. Twitter can give you head to head information for everyone who follows your twitter.

For start, you have to follow couple of people. Yes, you have followed them first. Maybe for start you must follow at least 50 people. Then, make sure you add your twitter in your blog. It can make you closer with your visitor. They can feel save with you because they know you and they know what you do.

To add twitter in your blog is very easy. You only have to http://twitter.com/badges/. Choose which badges that you want to add. I love HTML & JavaScript Badge. It is full customized. In the bottom of your twitter, you can add your twitter page.

Well, the end part of twitter building community, you have always update your twitter. As long as you online, keep update it. It only few word. I know you can do it easily. However, if your community has built already, you can start to promote your business. However keep it like recommendation not promotion.

At the end part of this article, if you like to follow my twitter, you can free follow me on http://twitter.com/qzoners. Well, keep update with my next article. Hope you like it. And please leave me a comment for better article.

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Are you following 2,000 people on Twitter yet? And how many are following you? More than 2,000? Or maybe far fewer… and if it is fewer, you may have reached the dreaded Follow Ceiling.

In the good old days of Twitter (if something as relatively young as this can be said to have ‘good old days’) there were no follow limits. You could just follow as many people as you felt like following — regardless of how many people followed you.

As Twitter has become more popular, this has changed. They have had to set some limits on how many people you can follow. One such limit is the 2,000 followed rule.

I quote from the Twitter Support area:

We do not limit the number of people who can follow you, but we have put limits in place to stop people from aggressively following others. Everyone is allowed to follow 2,000 people. After that, follow limits are based on the number of people who are following you.

Can You Only Follow 2,000 Tweeple?

Well, not exactly. What it does mean, however, is that once you are following 2,000 people, you have to start balancing the number of people you follow, based on how many follow you.

One way to do this balancing act is to unfollow people until the number of your followers more closely aligns with the number of people you are following.

How Do You Know Whom You Should Unfollow?

One rule of thumb is that you might stop following people who are not contributing regularly on the Twitter stream. Or whose Tweets are not all that interesting to you.

Another consideration might be that you could unfollow people who do not follow you back.

However, remember that there are many market leaders and up-and-comers whose Tweets are well worth following for the value they offer, but they don’t follow many people themselves. You’ll probably want to continue to follow them.

How Can You Find Out Those You Follow but Who Aren’t Following You?

Well, you can log in to your Twitter account and, on your home page, click on ‘View All’ under the pictures of people you are following. You will now see everyone you are following, and if they follow you back, you will see a ‘Direct message’ text link under their Twitter name. If there is no ‘Direct message’ text link, then they don’t follow you.

To stop following anyone in your list (whether they follow you or not), just click the ‘remove’ link on the right. You’ll have to do this one person at a time, but you can do it all from this page.

Add More Organization to Your Follow/Follower Management

If you want to save some time and have this information better organized for you, a really easy website to use is http://dossy.org/twitter/karma to help make this process even easier.

When you log in to this site, you are required to give your Twitter login information and an account is created under your Twitter login. Once you create your account, you can check the following with a click of the ‘Whack!’ button:

==> A list of those who are following you, but you are not following them back.

==> A list of those whom you are following who are also following you.

==> A list of those you are following, but who are not following you back.

It’s these last two groups you will want to inspect for people to unfollow if you need to balance your ‘following’ and ‘followers’ lists.

The most useful group for these purposes is the one show by the setting ‘Showing ==> Only Following’ — this will give you a list of just those whom you are following, but who are not following you.

You can now move quickly through that list, clicking the boxes to select those names you want to unfollow. If there are a bunch of people you want to stop following in this group, scroll to the bottom of the page and ‘Check All.’ Then unclick the relatively fewer names you don’t want to unfollow.

Lastly, scroll down and click on the ‘Bulk Unfollow’ button. And, like magic, you have unfollowed a bunch of people who weren’t following you back, and you have made your Following/Follower list more balanced.

You can also use this to select those who are following you, but you aren’t following them. Then click each one you want to follow to select them (or use ‘Check All’) and scroll down and click ‘Bulk Follow’ to follow them all.

Manage the Tweeple you follow carefully when you get close to following 2,000, and you can break through that Follow Limit with ease!

Why are so many people using Twitter? Why would more 3 million people visit this website? Why are so many technology companies taking advantage of it?

This is really two questions: First, What is Twitter? And second, how do people use it? Here’s a short list of the top benefits of using Twitter.

These updates or tweets known as Twitter, provides the users the benefits to the users for sharing the messages,status updates, what they are doing to anyone who has decided to follow each tweet and really connect with the people who follow them. The members can get these updates through the twitter website, an RSS feed, text message, email, numerous applications including other blogging, social media websites and more.

Twitter: What’s the Big Attraction? (or as my Sig-O says, “Why on earth would total strangers care what you’re up to?”)

Networking: A great way to meet people. If you are in a business with a niche market, you can discover new people that have similar interests to yours.

Marketing: It’s not just about big companies like Dell, Comcast, etc. It’s about connecting with your audience and having a real presence on Twitter. I find that I get business by just having that more personal face to my company on Twitter, and engaging the community.

Stream of Information: I seem to be getting breaking news and information on Twitter before most news sources. A great example was when the last earthquake hit the Bay Area. It was all over Twitter a good 10 minutes before CNN had it as breaking news.

It’s great! People from all over the planet use Twitter. You can always find someone who shares your interests and wants to chat.

If you haven’t checked out Twitter you should absolutely take a look.  It’s a very simple, straightforward site. There are many ways to “cross post” which means typing a single status message and have it show up in other social networking sites (not to mention any names).

In this article I want to share my experience with Twitter.

I love to explore new fields and I was wondering how good is the social marketing that people are trying to do. I read a book with tips on how you can improve your twitter experience and how easy it is to drive traffic to your site with a short post of 140 characters.

In the book there was an example how the author get 20-30 visits to his site from just one post when he has about 1000 followers. OK… I started to think – if I have 3k followers then I can have 100 visitors to my site with just one post.
Sounds great, right?

And here comes the experiment… I’m web developer and I thought I should try making a tool that is twitter-related. Obviously when I try to pull traffic from twitter I should make a tool or share information that is targeted to these users.

So I made a small tool where you enter your twitter details and it displays a map of your twitter followers. It is a visual representation of the locations of the user’s followers.
In this tool I used the twitter API to pull the list of followers and then I put pins on Google map (this is the tool: http://friendloc.webily.com/).

It is free tool and I don’t have anything put on this page to generate leads or any attempts for monetization of the traffic. It is just an experiment for now… so… let’s see the results.
I have more than 2k followers on twitter and I posted 2 updates about this tool. I made these posts in the most active time on twitter. Actually this is what I supposed is the most active time – the evenings in USA, because most of my followers are Americans.

From these 2 posts I have total of 12 visitors to the site. Not a great result, but I suppose it can be improved if I’m more active on twitter. You see… you need to establish connection with your followers and bring really valuable (and mostly free) information. And you should chat with them more actively. I love twitter and I find really great information and resources from the post of the twitters I follow. When I love the posting I try to thank the poster and build a relationship… I discuss the resource shared with him and this is a kind of becoming friend with this particular user.

If you make lot of friends there probably your results will be better.

So try to give valuable information, try to interact more with your followers and you’re on the right path to drive targeted traffic to your site.

And just a quick comparison with the other traffic sources I used:
Digg – 30 visitors in a month;
ViralNetworks (post in the forum) – 20 visits in a month;
LinkedIn (news posting in 2 groups with about 1 mln members) – 18 visits in 2 days;
StumbleUpon – 10 visits in 1 week;
Facebook (I have less than 200 friends there) – 7 visits in a month.

I think LinkedIn performs best from these social sites I tried.

Total of 133 unique visitors in a month.  Not a great result, but for the time spent (1 hour to build the tool and 10-15 minutes to post on the social sites) I think it is not bad. If you write an article in 10 minutes and drive this traffic it is great. 10 articles in a month and you have 1000 visitors. If you manage to monetize this traffic then… this is the way to make money on the internet.

Hope you find my experiment and the results useful.

Thanks for reading and wish you luck!

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When I first heard about Twitter–a tool for instantly broadcasting the stream-of-consciousness minutiae of your life to the world–I was pretty sure it was a cross between a complete waste of time and navel gazing on crack.
Turns out I was right.

A quick peek at the most recent posts–called “tweets”–include information on what people are having for breakfast, laptop woes and depressed thoughts over last night’s home team loss. (Plus a bunch of foreign-language tweets that may range from the ridiculous to the sublime and back again.)

Twitter users–often called Tweeple (or worse) can update their status using 140 characters or less, the aforementioned “tweet.” If you join Twitter you can “follow” other tweeple, which causes their updates to appear on your home page. In turn, they can follow you as well, a form of permission-based marketing. You can also converse with them through Twitter, but always in 140 characters or less.
It’s kind of like an IT haiku.

Within this expanding base of exhibitionist navel gazers are a growing number of people who are using Twitter for business. And I’m not just talking about aggressive Web marketers who tweet every blog post they make and create links to all their online activities.

Rather, there are professionals who are using Twitter as a communications tool. (Imagine that!) Here’s how you can use Twitter for business:

Followindustry leaders who post links to important resources and influence conversations.
Post questions for quick answers and answer others’ questions to establish your credibility and expertise.
Keep up on the buzz in your industry.
Network with like-minded people.

To find these interesting tweeple in the midst of all that noise, you can use the Twitter search box that will search matches in others’ profiles, but not on individual tweets. Here are a couple of 3rd party tools that allow for more advanced searches:

Who Should I Follow?: Finds and suggests like-minded people based on your tweets.
Summize: Allows you to search tweets for keywords and offers lots of customization tools.

The more people who follow you on Twitter, the more influence and networking opportunities you have. Thus, it makes sense to try and build a following. Here are some ideas on getting others to follow you:

Follow them. There’s an almost kneejerk reaction to follow people who follow you.
Post some good tweets right before following someone else. I find that if someone follows me and they only tweet abouthow hungry or tired they are, I don’t follow them back. The same goes for people who haven’t tweeted in a while.
Reply to people you are following, especially if they’re not yet following you.That’s a good way to engage someone and get them to follow you, even if they didn’t follow you immediately. Remember, though, some people have thousands of followers, and may not be able to respond to every reply.

While the rules and guidelines of Twitter etiquette are still evolving, guidelines from other social media sites can used:

Treat others with respect
Participate in the community
Do more than promote your own agenda.

Professionals and consultants have had the most impact at Twitter; most businesses are still trying to figure out how to use Twitter as a communications tool. If you’re not a one-person shop, here are a few ideas to help get your creative juices flowing:

A restaurant tweets their daily specials
A ticket agency tweets about-to-expire tickets
A realtor tweets new homes on the market
A chamber of commerce tweets local events and promotions.

For more ideas, or just to engage me in conversation, I invite you to follow me at Twitter. I promise not to tell you what I had for lunch.
Unless it’s really good.

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If you haven’t heard of Twitter you should. I know Twitter is popular on the west coast, but haven’t reach mainstream yet.

But the reasons why Twitter will be the next big thing is the same reasons why anything becomes popular.

Here’s the top 5 reasons.

1) It is easy to use. Nothing complicated ever became popular. At least not until it became easy to use.

Twitter is very easy to use. All you basically have to do is, tell it “What You Are Doing?”

2) Texting is very popular. Are you around young people? Young people barely use the phone anymore.

Cell phones are so, 2000….

These days the mobile communication of choice is texting.

The same reasons why texting is popular so will twitter. Twitter is basically the online version of texting.

3) Highly adaptable. Why is RSS so popular? Because of it’s simple context and it’s adaptability.

These days RSS is used for everything. From Podcasts, to newsfeeds… to video feeds, to friend feeds.

To stream flickr pictures, web blogs and everything in between. It is very adaptable.

This is the same reason Twitter will be popular. It could be used for anything. It is very simple, therefore it could be used for multiple purposes.

4) People are nosy… Yes, people always what to know what other people are doing.

There are people who go on AIM (aol instant messenger) just to read people’s “Away Messages”.

That’s right, they go onto a communication platform, not to communicate, but to just read what other people are doing.

Twitter is basically AIM away messages… it’s what people want, stripped of the non-essential stuff.

5) Twitter will connect people. A weird phenomenon on Twitter is, special groups dedicated to a particular purpose forming on Twitter.

People join the group, and follow one another.

These days when one works in lonely cubicles or home offices, it’s nice to connect to other people.

There are at least a dozen reasons why your company should twitter. I’m going to focus on five of those here, and hopefully open the doors to further discussion in the near future.

Reason #1: Immediacy
Think of the benefits of immediate access to your target audience and customers. Announce product recalls and avoid lawsuits. Answer customer questions on the spot. Engage with non-followers who mention your product, company, or competitors. Reward followers with incentives. Announce sales and links to quarterly earnings. Immediacy gives you to reach your audience now.

Examples:

Last minute push to complete a fundraiser Traffic updates Leaking info about the upcoming release of a new product Posting links to your latest article or press release Answering customer questions so quick, they feel valued as a customer.

Reason #2: Influence
Hundreds, possibly thousands, of people are asking themselves and others for recommendations on products and services. Every second of the day, someone is using Twitter to ask for recommendations. How much easier can it get to build your customer base? Be there to answer their questions and make a winning first impression.

Example Questions Being Twittered Right Now:

“What’s the best joint pain reliever medicine?” ” What’s the best place to grab a drink around pike place market?” “What’s the best book you’ve most recently read?” “What’s the best airline website you’ve ever used?” “What’s the best mobile broadband in Ingerland?” ” What’s the best Twitter app for the iPhone right now?” “What’s the best ad service for a blog do you reckon? Or is adsense still great?” “What’s the software product that can best be described as “Powerpoint on Steriods”? Not web based software”

As you can see, anything goes. People just want information. They want recommendations. Someone who has used the product or service can offer their experience. Think about that. There are some creative solutions and approaches there.

Reason #3: Reputation
In the 21st Century, you don’t have days to respond to a negative story about your company. You may not even have hours. Twitter provides an immediacy of information unprecedented in the history of the world.

Example: While in Dallas a few weeks back, I heard about the earthquake in the San Francisco Bay Area thirty minutes before most people right next door in Los Angeles. Geographic proximity as an influencing factor is now irrelevant to the equation of immediacy. As long as someone twitters it somewhere in the world, you can catch the latest news within seconds.

The downside to this immediacy is the lighting fast spread of negative news. Rumors of bankruptcy, scandal, or defective products hit the wire and thousands of people are sharing the news with their friends before you’ve ever heard a word. If it’s newsworthy, it’s going to be twittered. If you’re not monitoring Twitter and presenting your company’s face and position to the world there, your company is vulnerable to viral attack.

Reason #4: Exposure
While there are no guarantees that someone you follow on Twitter will reciprocate and follow you back, following a person or organization is like a notification of existence. It says, “Here I am! Check me out and see if I’m worth following back.” Each user is typically notified via email of each new follower, thus giving them an opportunity to review new followers and possibly reciprocate the follow.

By searching Twitter for users within a specific geographic area or by the topics of their conversations, any organization can cherry-pick their friends based on common goals or interests. This is the easiest method of increasing exposure I’ve ever heard of.

Reason #5: Traffic
Your company has a website. And you want people to visit it, if not purchase something or contact you through it. With Twitter, you can increase traffic to your site simply by engaging others.

Methods for Increasing Traffic:

Answer other people’s questions Poll for opinions Post links to your newest articles Announce sales Recommend other Twitter users to your audience, thereby engendering appreciation

Revenge of the Twiticons – Sam and Mikaela must face a global battle against rampant Twitter Icons. Please comment, rate, and subscribe. Be sure to tweet this video! www.vprincess.com Starring wastetimechasing Cars as Sam www.youtube.com shanedawsontv as Ex-FBI Agent www.youtube.com venetianprincess (me) as Mikaela Written, Edited, Directed, and Special FX By me www.youtube.com www.twitter.com Music by Steve Goldstein www.myspace.com and proscore Royalty Free Software Music Software