For those who see Twitter as a marketing/Information machine this is great news – what is even more important is the study from Rapleaf that states thosewho have large numbers of followers are the ones who are ‘lifted‘ the most as Twitter continues its growth.

In other words those who work hard to establish a base of followers on Twitter, grow exponentially more when Twitter grows and keeps growing.

Therefore if you want to get the  ‘free’ growth from the seeming unceasing twitter surge – keep working at building you following. Its a free ride. But growth cant go on forever.

(Of course after the “Oprah‘ surge everyone rang twitters death knell. Well every week there’s belles rung for Twitters demise. Though obviously Twitter hears no bells toll.

And its importance in all aspects of the Internet continues to rise.

And even Governments have their own Twitter manuals – see UK Gov info

Please note that 51.6 million visitors is the count at Twitters websites. (People still use that!). So not included are all the users at all the third party programs people use – Tweetdeck, Seesmic etc. So those are low numbers.Vey low.

Now as any new Internet Marketing follower knows – “The list”  is the Eldorado Gold on the Internet -and the ultimate list is your targeted loyal email list.

Normally to get a list you use Google Ad words (PPC) , buy lists (useless unless you spend big money IMHO), then there are all the paid progras that help, or purport to help. Some are amazing – such as Tellman and Shawn Casey have a great program, called List Building.com, but their gold is The Perpetual Marketing Machine in my opinion, where they use Teleseminars to build a targeted list, very fast.

Then there are all The Niche marketing programs with their Frank Kern, Ed Dale inspired versions of  “The Flycatcher” web pages or off-shoots thereof. Many extremely valuable and timely, many of course not.

(I will be going into the concept of list building and The LIST concept itself in a further post)

But as you do all this , here is this free machine that grows and grows and builds you a list. (that you can then turn into an email list, without that much effort). As it grows, so you grow.

And of course – Business being business – there are lots (ok hundred of ‘programs) and web sites to ‘teach’ you how to get followers on Twitter.

A couple of the most reputable I find are Darren Monroes program and Al Ferretii and Skeeter Hansens page.

Though there are hundred of systems -with twotter you can build it your self. Use Twollo and Tweetlater and Twitter directory’s like Twello (free programs) to find and follow people, and build your own list.

Twitter (by accident) had become an amazing tool.See – the B to B article – And every month tho is death is predicted ( or at least slow growth) – every month is grows more. Take advantage of this free list building machine. Its hot now and will be hot for a while. But nothing is forvere. Build your this list while its simple to do. And gives you a free ride.

Darren Monroe’s Twitter Member Site. Aug 18 2009

Link here

“Its not about the followers, its about the following”

As Mr Monroe has an aggressive price campaign on right now, I thought it was worth revisiting this review.

A lot of people use Twitter – duh

A lot of people use twitter as a marketing tool. And , like me, ideally, they just want to get followers as fast and as simply as possible. Which is built on the same theory of ” I want to be rich as quickly as possible and withno effort”. Well unless you have rich parents about to die, that is not how it works.

All gain requires effort. And this free tool Twitter, such a simple little device, is uncomplicated until it hits humanity – that is us. Then we being what we are, we have huge diverse reactions to tweets and what we like and what we will accept and who we follow etc etc.

Twitter is simple the Twitterverse is complex.

So to really take advantage of the Twitter as a marketing tool concept, you really do have to study what is and what isnt available and what can be done and what will not be a blind alley or an alley that suddenly Twitter slams the door on.

And twitter is getting fairly aggressive against certain tools these days (to protect its API outages I suppose)- see Mashable

And I don’t have the patience or the time to figure out every twitter tool and program and run it see if its legit etc.

But apparently Darren Monroe  and his does.His 24/7 news on what works and what doesn’t and what trends are on their way and which trends are waning – is amazing. And this is just one part of the 7 part program ( and each part has,well, parts, lots of them – so to clarify its a large all encompassing Twitter program).

There are some great programs out there apart from Darren Monroe’s,(nothing as low priced right now tho) but nothing stays so up to date and relevant. And he, Darren Monroe gets back to you if there’s a hiccup – not a support ticket, he does. How? I dont know (I think cloning is going on to be honest)

So after trying his program and using his program over the weeks and months it still hold up, and it makes your Twitter marketing sleek and fine. And on Target.

From getting started to getting good to getting expert – Mr Monroe leads you all the way

Try it – money back guarantee – and a heck of a deal right now.

PREVIOUS REVIEW

I was late to Twitter -I had it, but ignored it – I really started just a few months before the CNN- Kutcher hoopla.

But I did manage to figure out this Twitter thing was a heck of a tool, if you could finesse it properly

Now to me finesse is – TRY EVERYTHING – not always the best idea – trust me. What you should do is find someone who knows what they’re doing and follow them (the minefield approach – don’t go by yourself, follow someone, who knows)

I checked out a lot of  “teaching twitter’ sites (most came and went pretty quickly. There were as always some stand-outs – Skeeter Hansen and Al Ferretti and their sites and helpful ebooks (free BTW), were, are great – they now have a good site – Twitter Watchdog . I also liked Twitterthings – excellent free site , fantastic tips and- o wait – that’s mine – well – no wonder its good…

But one guy kept appearing in my tweet list – and he had great tweets and better links – Darren Monroe. So I put him on a list on Tweetdeck and followed him around the web as it were.

Then one day I get a tweet – “I have a new twitter site” check it out.

This was the beginning of Darren Monroes Twittermember site.

I checked it out and it had some very impressive tools for twitter, tools I hadn’t seen, or skipped over . Now I had seen some of this stuff before – but this was so directed, targeted. The more I looked the more I was impressed.

So who is Darren Monroe – so I checked him out of LinkedIn- holy smoke what a CV (hear his audio CV here)

But to be honest at first I thought ho hum another site – O yea seen that – seen that – humm not that…never thought of that…that’s what that does?….as I dug deeper,I realized this guy had put an amazing amount of detail and thought into this – this was a keeper!

What makes this site different ( and Darren has obviously put a lot of work into the site being different and truly useful from the “average’ site out there) - is :-

a) It didn’t just have a random multi page list of twitter ‘maybe’ tools. He had carefully selected what he had in that site. Twitter tools that did specific jobs that make the overall a marketing machine. By tools I mean websites – everything he suggested was free access.

and

b) The  in depth teaching with videos and audio for every single site he recommended!! Very cool. Very helpful. You think – yea I’ve used that, then you watch the training video on that tool and you see what you’ve missed – tweaks and tips. Yep this site is a keeper

c) as this  is a membership site, with monthly dues, Darren made sure there were constant updates and constant feedback on what was new in Twitter. His email updates are a wonder to behold, I’m telling you.

The site really has six key areas – from ‘Begin here” (that’s where you start you see!!) – to – ‘How to create valuable Tweets’, ‘Locating Followers to Join you’, “Social Proof”, and “Building the Following

Darren puts a lot of work into teaching targeted as opposed to random followers, because the point of the site is to teach Twitter as a marketing tool. Targeted followers produce results, random followers  are well – random

Each section has a list of the best web sites to create the thing he is teaching, plus a video and an audio teaching presentation on how to use -I mean step by step – how to use the web site or the tool.

Now this is a membership site – I think its $39 a month right now, (yes I pay membership) – although I see right now he has a deal for $59 – One Time payment – lifetime membership – one payment! (Ah thanks Darren – do I get that deal???) And unlike some, Darren tends to have time limited offers that actually only last a few days and then are gone – so check it out now. But if you miss the deal – its worth $39 a month -if you want to use Twitter as a business tool.

Now IMHO -If you just use twitter as a social tool, sign up for the cheap lifetime one payment and your done -$59 anyway – you will learn so much.

Anyway, so I signed up, just to see.

Now here’s the serendipity I find with Darren Monroe programs – he follows up! Not AWeber, not a DM – Darren follows up. I asked a few questions (cos I was dumb) and he got back to me literally within a hour. Now I know the site is accumulating hundred of followers every hour right now, I think, so he may not respond that quickly, but he will respond, and he will update.Constant cool updates.

And just for fun I have signed up for a few of his email programs also as a test – and he is prompt, current and always on time with his follow ups and up dates – a wonder to behold.( I don’t follow up that quickly-who has the time – I’m writing reviews for crying out loud!!).

If  you are looking to use Twitter as tool, a marketing business tool, you need some inside scoop, and constant info on whats happening with that tool. let me repeat then -find a good teacher.

Now  I personally recommend this site. (see I have ads for it on the side there – yes I do – because I believe in this site)

Anyway – try a few sites, a few programs – but definitely try this one. Money back guarantee – nothing to lose.Everything to gain.Everything.

O BTW also I noticed that when some of Darren’s members got caught in Twitters wide , very wide anti-spamming net – if they were legitimate users caught in some error – Darren intervened on their behalf with twitter and reset them. Now that’s cool.

Darren Monroe Twitter Member Site - http://darrenmonroe.com/twitter

What Is Hummingbird?

Hummingbird is a piece of software

that will help you build a large Twitter list by automating the following and unfollowing of Twitter users. Over the pass two weeks, I’ve used Hummingbird to add over 10,000 followers to my Twitter account, which stood at 32,856 at the time of this post. Why would you want so many Twitter followers? Because it makes you money!

Hummingbird has many features and advancements to make it far better than any other Twitter automation tools. It’s these professional level features that justify the software’s higher price tag.

It Follows and Unfollows The Way You Would Do It

The biggest advantage Hummingbird has over other Twitter automation tools is it doesn’t use the Twitter API to follow and unfollow users. Hummingbird follows and unfollow the way you would do it – by clicking the follow and unfollow button on the Twitter website. Hummingbird runs in its own IE styled web browser. The software is extremely easy to use. Watch the screen cast below to see Hummingbird in action.

It Remembers Who You Unfollow

Another really cool feature of Hummingbird is it remembers who you unfollow so you don’t follow them again. Other follow scripts don’t do this and that can get you into trouble. If you follow and unfollow users multiple times, they can report you for spamming and get your Twitter account banned.

Hummingbird also let you set up a VIP list for users who are not following you, but you wish to continue following them. Because Hummingbird unfollows right on the Twitter website by clicking the unfollow button (the way a real human would), it’s a lot more accurate than an unfollow script. It’s also safer as well since it does not make use of the Twitter API.

How To Use Hummingbird

Hummingbird is based on the principle that if you want people to follow you, you should follow them first. The best way to use Hummingbird to build a big follow list is by using Twitter search to find users in your niche. Once you find a user with a few thousand followers, use Hummingbird to follow all their followers. Then wait about 48 and unfollow the users who don’t follow you back. I explain this method in more details in my post on How I Added 5,000+ Targeted Twitter Followers In 6 days. To increase your chance of others following you back, read this post.

15% Off for Martin Gover dot Com Readers

Hummingbird sells for $197. I say it’s worth it given all the special features. Hummingbird does things that no other Twitter automation tool can. Still, $197 is a pretty high price to pay in a recession. So, Hummingbird gave me a nice coupon code to save you 15% off the price.

Purchase and enter RECESSION at checkout and the price will go to $167.45. The coupon is valid for this month only.

Click here to visit Mesiab Labs website! the home of Hummingbird

Download – use the free trial.

You can download and try Hummingbird free for 37 hours before buying. The trial is a full version with nothing disable. After 37 hours, you will have to purchase and enter a valid license key. By that time, you’ll see how great an automation tool Hummingbird is and will be happy to buy it.

When you are ready to buy – use code Recession – for 15% discount

Review from John Chow dot com

TweetDeck

• Tweet directly from TweetDeck
• Stay up to date – view all new tweets in real-time
• Use columns to create your personal dashboard
• Create Groups to easily follow friends, colleagues or
  other interest groups

• Update Facebook and follow your Facebook friends
• Follow topics in real-time with saved searches
• View @replies and direct messages and manage your
  conversations
• Never miss an important tweet with notifications

• Share your photos and videos with Twitpic and 12seconds
• And many more Twitter favourites including Stocktwits,
  Twitscoop and all the most popular URL shortening service

And its FREE

Download link http://www.tweetdeck.com/beta/

And

Hummingbird – the Deluxe Twitter Application

new – see johnchow.com review here

An application for the serious Twitter Marketer

Achieve Explosive Twitter Growth, Right Now.

I hav treid the free apps and I like them – Twitter Wack etc, but they are slow, and they don’t handle all the fine details that Hummingbird does.

Not a lot at first but as you use it more and more, and use it for true marketing – you’ll find its a standout product -worth $3000 to $400 – easily.

Download it and try it for the trial period and compare – Try it. Cant hurt

Break 2000 Followers w/ a Few Clicks
This is the first cap, piece of cake.

Reach Targeted Followers
Powerful Methods to become an Elite

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Auto, everything. + Learn how to target.

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Moderate who never gets unfollowed.ew Page 1

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Download – use the free trial.

When you are ready to buy – use code Recession – for 15% discount

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A rave from TechCrunch

Simply put, we write about Twitter so often because right now, it matters. From news organizations to movie stars, from earthquakes to fires, from Facebook to Google — everyone seems to be talking about, to or with Twitter. In an era of mass communication, it is the latest medium. And it’s fundamentally changing the ways in which people interact with others using the web. What you may view as a stupidly simple service with no real point, I view as one of the few inspirational products in bleak times.

I would argue that Twitter works so well precisely because it’s so simple. It fools some people with its “What are you doing?” question that resides at the top of the page, but Twitter can pretty much be about whatever you want it to be about. That’s why it’s an absolutely brilliant platform for so many new startups to build on top of. And those startups are really the key. They’re what are keeping Twitter so hot right now. Every day, something new launches on top of Twitter; some get coverage, some don’t. Some are silly, some are smart, some might actually work. But overall, the level of activity around the platform is amazing.

And that activity, fuels growth and feeds the system full of its most important life-blood: Information. It’s this real-time information that is Twitter’s most valuable asset. And it’s information that Twitter will soon begin mining in more interesting ways with its search product — which should be useful to a lot of people. And it should lead to even more innovation and more startups.

Stop and think for a moment about any one startup that has had such an impact on other startups. There aren’t many, and there really hasn’t been one for a while. I suppose you could throw Facebook in there, and before that obviously Google. But really, there aren’t too many companies in general that are changing the ways others do things, the way Twitter is right now.

And that’s why I think it’s worth writing about so often. It’s not just about Twitter, the product, it’s also about Twitter, the idea. And Twitter, the catalyst of change. Twitter has shaken shit up in the industry. And it’s exciting as hell when a company does that, because the chaos bred out of that almost always leads to cool new things. And “cool new things” is what technology is and always has been about.

And if you’ve been paying attention, Twitter is hardly the only thing in technology to have gotten a lot of hype and draw complaints for getting too much coverage in the past few years. We saw it with Google, we saw it with Facebook, we saw it with the iPhone and then we saw it again with the App Store. What do all of these things share in common? They all shook shit up. They were all great products, all became very popular, and all caused industry shifts. Twitter is just the latest of these. But it won’t be the last.

When that something new comes along, we’ll be on it, covering it relentlessly too. Because these things matter, because we’re passionate about them and because the vast majority of readers do care.

from Techcrunch May 9th

One of my students asked me online why I use Twitter. I replied off the top of my head.

Openness – anyone can join, and anyone can follow anyone else (unless they restrict access to friends who request access).

Immediacy it is a rolling present. You wont get the sense of Twitter if you just check in once a week. You need to hang out for minutes and hours, every day, to get in the groove.

Variety – political or technical argument, gossip, scientific info, news flashes, poetry, social arrangements, classrooms, repartee, scholarly references, bantering with friends. And I’m in control of deciding how much of each flavor I want in my flow. I don’t have to listen to noise, but filtering it out requires attention. You are responsible for whoever else’s babble you are going to direct into your awareness.

Reciprocity – people give and ask freely for information they need (this doesn’t necessarily scale or last forever, but right now its possible to tune your list – and to contribute to it and to include a high degree of reciprocation; more on this in a moment).

A channel to multiple publics - I’m a communicator and have a following that I want to grow and feed. I can get the word out about a new book or vlog post in seconds – and each of the people who follow me might also feed my memes to their own networks. I used to just paint. Now I document my painting at each stage of the process, upload pix to flickr or flicks to blip.tv, then drop a tinyurl into Twitter. Who needs a gallery or a distributor? You don’t have to be a professional writer to think about publics. Anyone who publishes a blog knows that they are not simply broadcasting to a passive audience all blog readers can comment, can link back, can criticize and analyze, and in many instances, can join the blogger in some form of collective action in the physical world.

Asymmetry – very interesting, because nobody sees the same sample of the Twitter population. Few people follow exactly the same people who follow them. There is no social obligation to follow people simply because they follow me. I tell them that I follow people who inform or amuse me, and I hope to do the same for people who follow me.

A way to meet new people – it happens every day. Connecting with people who share interests has been the most powerful social driver of the Internet since day one. I follow people I don’t know otherwise but who share enthusiasm for educational technology, DIY video, online activism. creativity, social media, journalism, Burning Man and public art, teaching and learning, compost, Catalunya, the public sphere, mass collaboration, Amsterdam – the list is as long as my list of interests. Developing the ability to know how much attention and trust to devote to someone met online is a vitally important corollary skill. Personal learning networks are not a numbers game. They are a quality game.

A window on what is happening in multiple worlds, some of which I am familiar with, and others that are new to me.

Community-forming – Twitter is not a community, but it’s an ecology in which communities can emerge. That’s where the banal chit-chat comes in: idle talk about news, weather, and sports is a kind of social glue that can adhere the networks of trust and norms of reciprocity from which community and social capital can grow.

A platform for mass collaboration: I forgive the cute name of Twestival because this online charity event has raised over a quarter of a million dollars via Twitter, funding 55 clean water projects for 17,000 people in Ethiopia, Uganda, and India. If I wanted to tweet a request, I could offer another dozen examples.

Searchability – the ability to follow searches for phrases like “swine flu” or “Howard Rheingold” in real time provides a kind of ambient information radar on topics that interest me. Twitter users developed the convention of adding a tag with a hash sign in front of it like #hashtag that enable them to label specific topics and events. When I recently participated in a live discussion onstage, we projected in real time the tweets that included a hashtag for the event, an act that blended the people in the audience together with the people on the panel in a much more interactive way than standard Q&A sessions at the end of the panel. After years as a public speaker and panelist, I found it fascinating and useful to have a window on what my previously silent audience was thinking while I was talking. You have to be sure enough about what you are saying onstage to keep from being distracted or thrown by the realtime feedback. Backchannel twitterers have been to virtually mob speakers they felt were wasting their attention.

I still hang out on Twitter (I am found there as @hrheingold), but it’s clear that many of the people I talk to about it just don’t get why anyone wastes their time doing anything with the name “tweeting.”So I tell them that to me, successful use of Twitter comes down to tuning and feeding. And by successful, I mean that I gain value – useful information, answers to questions, new friends and colleagues – and that the people who follow me gain value in the form of entertainment, useful information, and some kind of ongoing relationship with me.

To oversimplify, I think successful use of Twitter means knowing how to tune the network of people you follow, and how to feed the network of people who follow you.

You have to tune who you follow. I mix friends who I know IRL (“in real life”) and whose whereabouts and doings interest me, people who are knowledgeable about a field that interests me, people who regularly produce URLs that prove useful, extraordinary educators, the few who are wise or funny. When I became interested in video, Drupal, and educational uses of technology and student-centric teaching, I looked for people who know about those subjects, and followed them. I learned from master educators on Twitter that growing and tuning a “personal learning network” of authoritative sources and credible co-learners is one of the strategies for success in a world of digital networks.

When it comes to feeding my network, that comes down to putting out the right mixture of personal tweets (while I don’t really talk about what I had for lunch, the cycles of my garden, the plums falling from my tree, my obsession with compost and shoepainting do feature in my tweetstream), informational tidbits (when I find really great URLs, that’s when Twitter is truly a “microblog” for me to share my find), self promotion (when I post a new video to my vlog share the URL – but I do NOT automatically post everything I blog on smartmobs.com), socializing, and answering questions. It’s particularly important to respond to people who follow me and who send @hrheingold messages to my attention. I can’t always respond to every single one, but I try. I also try to be a little entertaining once in a while, when something amuses me and I think it might amuse others.

Everyone has a different mix of these elements, which is part of the charm of Twitter. My personal opinion is that I need to keep some personal element going, but not to overdo it. I am careful to not crank up the self-promotion too much. I don’t ask questions often, but when I do, I always get a huge payoff. I needed an authoritative guide to Spanish-language online publications about social media for a course I was designing to be taught at the (online) Open University of Catalunya. I got five. In five minutes.

If it isn’t fun, it won’t be useful. If you don’t put out, you don’t get back. But you have to spend some time tuning and feeding if Twitter is going to be more than an idle amusement to you and your followers (and idle amusement is a perfectly legit use of the medium).

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/rheingold/detail?blogid=108&entry_id=39948

Twitter is a marketing phenomenon.

How long will it or FriendFeed be around – who knows – but while it is take advantage of it. Check out my “Getting started Twitter page -here.

Check out all the links you need for simple, professional and marketing of and with Twitter – here: - http://tinyurl.com/qqrt2a:

So what does Twitter do? When you sign up with Twitter, you can use the service to post and receive messages to a network of contacts. Instead of sending a dozen e-mails or text messages, you send one message to your Twitter account, and the service distributes it to all your friends. Members use Twitter to organize impromptu gatherings, carry on a group conversation or just send a quick update to let people know what’s going on.

Twitter’s history is entwined with a few other Internet companies. Twitter’s founders are Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey. A few years before Twitter was born, Williams created Blogger, a popular Web journal service. Internet giant Google purchased Blogger, and Williams began to work directly for Google. Before long, he and Google employee Stone left the Internet giant to form a new company called Odeo.

Odeo is a podcasting service company. According to Williams, he didn’t have a personal interest in podcasting, and under his guidance, the company temporarily lost focus. However, one of Odeo’s products was just beginning to gather steam: Twitter, a new messaging service. Stone gave Twitter its name, comparing the short spurts of information exchange to the chirping of birds and pointing out that many ring tones sound like bird calls [source: San Francisco Chronicle].

As the service became a more important part of Odeo, Stone and Williams decided to form a new company with Twitter as the flagship product. Williams bought out Odeo and Twitter from investors, then combined the existing company and service into a new venture called Obvious Corporation. Jack Dorsey joined the team and began to develop new ways for users to interface with Twitter, including through computer applications like instant messaging and e-mail. In March 2006, Twitter split off from Obvious to become its own company, Twitter Incorporated.

in picture: -Biz Stone (left) and Jack Dorsey are co-founders of San Francisco-based Obvious, the 10-person startup behind the popular Twitter social messaging service.

How to use twitter and getting started basics – here -

link

ref: -http://computer.howstuffworks.com/twitter.htm