With only 140 characters at a time, you can make millions…

Twitter. Why is it that Twitter is only 140 characters by the way? Well, because many cell phones can only text 140 characters, that’s why! Why is it that cell phones are limited to only 140 characters for texts? Because the message piggybacks on signals already being sent by the phone and it costs the cell phone company NOTHING AT ALL to send the text message! So the phone companies are charging us or per month for something that is absolutely free for them. Smart… infuriating, but smart.

Now then, back to business. How do I capitalize on the vast popularity of Twitter and get the millions of daily Twitter users to give me their cold hard cash? How can I monetize Twitter??

You don’t!

Monetizing means to make money directly from something with affiliate links, or adwords ads etc. Take a look around on the Twitter.com site; even Twitter themselves have yet to monetize the site!

If you are a new Twitter user, you will need to learn some of the Twitter basics regarding how things work and what it is you are seeing in your messages.

First off go to www.twitter.com and sign up for an account. I suggest using your company name, website name or your real name as your Twitter account name. Don’t make it something that may be offensive, hard to remember or unprofessional if you are doing this for your business.

- You are allowed to have multiple Twitter accounts but it can be difficult enough to manage one properly so there’s no need for more?
– Upload a small image, preferably a small photo of you or your company logo. Now you’re ready to get tweeting!

Next, you need to know a little about how Twitter works and what you will be seeing in your tweet stream. Most of the tweets you will see are two different types of usless information; 1) Spam and 2) Random meaningless tweets by strangers and “Goodnight Twitter” messages. (Don’t waste people’s time by posting “Goodnight Twitter”… please!!)

The information you are honestly interested in seeing will not appear in your tweet stream! The information that you do see will be every update by every person that you follow. Imagine following 2,000 people like I do, or 10,000 or 20,000… how can you possibly follow all those people?

YOU CAN’T.

You’re on Twitter to get your message across, to speak to your audience, and to respond to only those messages that are actually sent to you and are not spam, but a human that is interested in speaking to you. And, in a nutshell, twitter.com is absolutely WORTHLESS when doing this!

Now if you follow me, don’t get me wrong; I’m not discounting you as a person or uninterested in what you may have to say, but I can’t possibly be that involved with the thousands of people I would like to reach on a daily basis regarding camera repair. Twitter is so powerful that if I could afford to have one person do Twitter full time I would probably do it.

I use Twitter every day, and I see almost every person that tweets about a broken digital camera or digital camera repair. I can’t possibly message them all, and when I try to, I think they think I’m just spamming. I would advise you to not do more than what you can comfortably handle. You are here to build relationships, not to sell.

Ok now, in your tweet stream you will see messages with different symbols, abbreviations and crazy looking links.

- The most common symbols you will see are @… (a message sent to the person after the symbol so that it shows up in their tweet stream) and the # (a subject like #photography that is searchable)
– Some of the most common abbreviations are TT (Trending Topic: something that is mentioned in many different tweets right now), DM (Direct Message: sent only to you, nobody else can see it), RT (ReTweet: somebody else posted this first and I can ReTweet it letting others know I think it’s good) and FML… I’ll leave it to you to find out what FML stands for.
– The crazy looking links have been shortened so that they take up less space. They look odd, and yes they can take you to any site without your knowledge so you must trust the person that posts it. You only have 140 characters remember, so shortened URL’s are a must.

If you want to seriously use Twitter then you will need software like Tweetdeck from www.tweetdeck.com, it’s fantastic. Twitter is completely useless for any sort of business purpose if you try and use it through Twitter.com. Personally, I never go to the Twitter website, there’s no reason to!

Download and install Tweetdeck, configure it and get it running. You will see a column for anytime you are mentioned (@ symbol before your name) and Direct Messaged (DM). Beyond these two, you can add new columns for custom searches that are automatically updated and lets you see exactly what people are saying all over the world on Twitter at all times!!

Maybe you have a dog training business online; create a search column for ‘dog training’ and you will see every single message every person tweets with the words ‘dog’ and ‘training’ in any order of the tweet. They won’t always be about ‘dog training’, (I’ve been in training for scuba diving testing… that darn dog is barking again) but most will. Now figure out other combinations of keyword keywords r search phrases… ‘dog training’ won’t give you any results for ‘training dogs’ for example, but ‘dogs training’ will. Hope this makes sense!