Twitter was built on the concept of simplicity, so that leaves a lot of flexibility and variation in just how you can use Twitter to promote your company, yourself, or just your personal life. We receive a lot of questions on using Twitter, so I thought I would outline the steps we take with Twitter for clients here at Talk, and have taken ourselves in many cases (though you may see some variations as we’re always experimenting with new methods to get the best results).

Step 1. Before you start tweeting, let’s focus on setting up your twitter profile. This means taking the time not only to upload an avatar, but to also create stronger branding on your Twitter profile page via creating an Extended Profile. You should also define your purpose for twittering. What are your objectives?

Step 2. The Twitter Landing Page (TLP) is a unique page you create on your website that greets those users who come specifically from Twitter. Once you’ve created your TLP, you can begin using it by pointing your Homepage URL on your twitter profile to your TLP.

How to build followers on Twitter

I think it’s very important to manage your Tweets (or have someone manage them), especially as you work on building followers. You want to make sure you’ve got a good reply to tweet ratio, meaning if someone were to look at your last 10 tweets that they’re going to see an @reply to someone in there. Think of your Last 10 (L10) the same as it is in sports. It’s your recent activity or track record. Your L10 shows you’re a human, and there to interact, not just add to all the noise that’s already on there.

Step 3. Seeding your new Twitter account is important. I use Twellow as it’s a well organized Twitter Directory. It works great in conjunction with Mr. Tweet if you Twellow users first, then run Mr. Tweet to help you find more followers based on your Twellow results. Twellow is one of my first steps in seeding a new twitter account. Seeding your account helps with social proofing.

Step 4. Finding more relevant followers. Use Mr. Tweet. This is one of my favorite tools, Mr. Tweet gives you suggestions on who you should be following based on your current followers and twitter habits. It also gives you a means of finding followers without past activity which helps for seeding new twitter accounts you can utilize .

Step 5. Relevant auto-following with Twollow. Twollow allows you to auto follow those that tweet a particular keyword you enter (For example: Your company name). This is another resource for building up followers on Twitter. This can be a great tool if you spend some time researching those keywords that most apply to your business or topic on Twitter. The more specific you can be with your keywords, the higher potential you have to make a connection with someone who is interested in what you have to say (which is really what you want).

Experimental Step 6. Pruning your twitter followers. Not all your followers are going to remain active, and Twitoria helps to define those that haven’t been. You can discover what followers haven’t tweeted within the time frame you specify. I say this is experimental because using Twitoria requires a fair deal of account micro-management. As it stands, and I could be wrong, the only reason I see using Twitoria is if there is a drop in the follower or follow-back percentage for people who are above a certain follower threshold (eg: more than 1,000 followers). If there isn’t (and if anyone has done some studies, please let me know!) then there’s not much point in pruning your followers besides personal reasons.

Let’s get tweeting.

Step 7. Scheduling tweets and more. A tool any good Twitterer should be using is TweetLater as it lets you send out messages while you’re away. TweetLater also has other functionality, such as Auto-DM (though I would encourage you to proceed in that area with great caution- we traditionally don’t set this up). TweetLater works well for planning promotional campaigns, or organizing messages across different social media properties.

Step 8. Short urls that count. There are a lot of URL shorteners, but the one that is by far the best is Bit.ly. It provides the proper redirects (301) for SEO, it provides tracking, it’s low on domain character usage (giving me more space to send messages), it doesn’t have a framebar, and it has venture capital funding so it’s unlikely it’s going anywhere. There’s a great article by Danny Sullivan that provides a detailed analysis of all the different URL shorteners and which one is best (Bit.ly).

Step 9. Twittering outside of your browser. The Twitter website is a good way to Twitter, but we like to do things in great ways at Talk, plus we’re not always in our browser, so we use Tweet Deck both to organize and send out our Tweets. Tweet Deck, in my opinion, is the best client for twitter, allowing you to group followers, search, and a lot more. They also recently added in support for Facebook Updates (very cool!).

Step 10. Tracking tweet conversations that matter to you. This is an important part of being part of the conversation and keeping up on trends, so much so that Yahoo! recently released a neat application that does tracking called Sideline. Sideline is like TweetDeck in that it runs off of Adobe’s AIR platform, so you aren’t constricted to your browser. It being new, we’re still integrating it into our process.

Step 11. Keeping on the up and up of Twitter trends with Twist. Twist is a great trend analysis tool that can be used in conjunction with sideline, or to help with the keyword research mentioned before that helps with using Twollow. An example on using it would be observing that “LOST” has a spike every Wednesday night (when the show airs). If you create a follow strategy to start a relationship with some of those individuals, you can create an opportunity to connect, and you also know the best time to market to them. Eg: Maybe you should time your Tweets for after LOST (similar to airing new TV shows after the prime time)?

If you have any tools you think should be a part of the list, let us know!

*For discloser, this is an adapted version of a similar post on my personal blog.