I was late to the
Twitter game and I’m glad I finally got into it. The
MonetizeBlog Twitter
account has steadily been growing and I’ve been trying to find new ways
to get more subscribers, and that has led me to write this post.
Besides having chiclets, banners, buttons and other on page methods of
getting people to your
Twitter account there hasn’t been much options outside of that for attracting attention.
Twitter Search Engines:
There are a number of
Twitter
search engines out there and they are a great way to find people that
are interested in the same topics as you. You can either search for
your favorite bloggers, or search for the top keywords around your
niche and subscribe to all those people. Keeping this up will
encourage them to follow you back.
Search.Twitter.com- the original search provided by
Twitter
lets you search for people and topics easily. If you click on the
advanced search button you’ll get a nice set of search features that
rival Google’s advanced search. You not only search by name and topic,
but you can also search by location, date, language and if the post
includes a url link.
TwitterTroll.com- a real time
Twitter
search engine that indexes popular people and topics and is all about
finding like minded people. As of today their are only 58706
Twitter
users indexed in the search engine, and the crawl rate has been set to
low a lot lately. I imagine this app is starting to take its toll on
the server.
Twellow.com- is not only a
Twitter search engine, but it is also a directory for people broken down by category. It is pretty much a web directory for
Twitter users and you can find more
Twitter directories like this down the post a bit. This site is great for finding like minded people in your niche or industry.
Twidentify.com- this is a search engine for
Twitter
users that get retweeted the most. This is great for finding like
minded people because you can see others discussion topics you’re into,
and that includes their opinions.
Twithority.com- is an authority based
Twitter search engine for finding the most popular people on the site. The site kind of makes a mini magazine based on the content on
Twitter
and popular users tweets get displayed on the main page. Twithority
also tracks the hottest trends based on searches so you can get an idea
of what to blog about, or retweet.
Twitter Alerts:
Twitter
alerts are a great way of keeping up on topics being tweeted and give
you a chance to find more people in your niche. They act the same way as
google alerts which are great for the same reason in the blogosphere.
There have been a few sites for this popping up lately so it must be
catching on.
Twilert.com- is an easy interface to get alerts for a topic when it hits the tweet street. Just put in your
Twitter details and keywords to watch and you’ll get updated via email when someone talks about a topic you’ve requested to watch.
Tweetbeep.com- has been down since the end of December, but it still ranks number 1 on google for
Twitter
Alerts. I’m not sure when it will be back up, but when it does it’s
worth checking out because it worked well. Nice slick interface and the
alerting system always worked up until now.
TwitterAlerts.com-
this site is a really simple sign up and track your keywords app that
has been around almost the lonest. All you need to give them is the
email to send the alerts to, your username and password.
Twitter Forums:
Twitter forums have been popping up all over the place and it is a great way to not only interact with other
Twitter users, but its a great way to show off your account and attract new readers. I never would have suspected forums for
Twitter would take off and so far it seems that I’m right. All the forums listed below are very inactive, but only time will tell.
TwitTown.com- is the largest forum for all your
Twitter
addicts out there and only has a few active posts going on. This site
used to be hosted under the domain Twitterforums.com but decided to
move for some reason. There are only a couple hundred users.
Twitplace.com- has only 13 members and is decently new so I don’t know what to say as of yet. Since
Twitter is pretty much a large unorganized chat forum it must be hard to get something like this going.
Tweetbars.com-
is not a forum but fits under the topic at hand. TweetBars lets you
easily implement your tweets into your Email, Website and in your forum
signature. It is basically
Twitter meets Forum Signatures as they’ve coined it already on their website. Interesting little app to play with in my opinion.
Twitter Directories:
I have noticed a few
Twitter
user directories popping up and they are getting quite populated
already. I imagine we’ll see more so I hope I can remember to keep
updating this post. If anyone has anything I missed be sure to contact
me or leave a note in the comments.
Twitdir.com- is the premier
Twitter
directory and unfortunately was down for maintenance at the time of
writing. It features a directory broken down by interest so it makes
finding
Twitter users really easy. Be sure to add yourself into the mix and approval normally takes 1-5 days.
Twellow.com- is one I already mentioned under
Twitter search engines, but it is also a directory for users. You can submit your
Twitter
account and once it is loaded up you can confirm the listing by
entering in your password. Another bonus is that the URL you have listed
in your
Twitter profile gets listed here as well, but it’s do follow! Check out the
Linkbuildr profile on Twellow.
TwitterPassion.com – is another less SEO friendly
Twitter user and topic directory that has a good amount of people listed, including celebrities. You can
submit your link and although it is not auto approved, should only takes a few days to get listed in the directory.
JustTweetIt.com- is one of the newer
Twitter
directories on the block and has a huge user base already. I’ve added
myself to the SEO/Internet Marketing category and I really like how the
listings are displayed. Submission was auto approved and the link to
your
Twitter account is do follow, but any links you put in your description are no follow.
I hope this helps some of you grow your
Twitter
accounts because they can be a great place to leverage sales, get
traffic and make some new friends. Again I’ll mention to contact me or
post in the comments anything I missed that would be a great addition
to this post. I would also like to hear how some of you snagged a lot
of
Twitter subscribers.
