Late to jump in to Twitter ? 13 Ways you can still make it big

So this post goes out to all those who have still not joined or just started with Twitter and are wondering how to make it like the biggies.

If looking at their follow numbers make you regret not joining Twitter earlier, worry not, there is still hope. Although, getting things done quickly on Twitter is not recommended, here are twenty comparably better ways that will help you make it near to what you might have really missed. Better something than nothing at all, isn’t it ?

Before starting off, a few must follow things

1. Update Number
Start tweeting good resources, valuable news, resource lists, bookmark stuff to your Twitter profile so that one who lands to your profile don’t see you blank. You must have a decent number of updates.

2. New Avatar
Let it be superman, yourself or your neighbor, but not the default avatar please. If you didn’t know they are most used by spammers. I hope you aren’t one, so..

3. Get the bio right
You may be clueless about what you do, but don’t let the world know. Blabber something around what you’d like to do at least, don’t leave it blank. Imagine you are doing a self intro in front a bunch of guys for GD, and write it down.

And now for the real stuff

1. Get help from your friends

Obviously. Find your real ‘offline’ friends on twitter and ask them to recommend you.

2. Get help from a biggie

Contact a biggie on Twitter, someone with a lot of followers, contact him via email, phone and ask him if he can help you get some traction on Twitter. May be you’ll also want to tell him some good things about his twitter profile as well. Always helps.

3. Start re-tweeting the guys you admire

Re-Tweets are like the best things you can do to catch another Tweeps attention. Normally tweeps watch re-tweets very closely and consider them as votes/token of appreciation from others. So vote for the guys whom you think you can manage to grab the attention from.

4. Focus on a topic

When you start tweeting, make sure you do every bit of this and that, however..try to stick to a topic which you are good at. Let’s say you are good at Haikus – focus on haikus shorter than 140 characters. Will help you in the long run if not now.

5. Make an awesome, never before seen twitter background

Unfortunately or fortunately, twitter doesn’t allow lot of profile customizations like MySpace. All its got is a background which you may upload as jpeg. So if you are good at designing, make one that you think will grab attention. Before jumping in to conclusions, go through lot of twitter profiles and find out as to what’s the trend. Is there something tweeps follow as a pattern while designing backgrounds, then pick it up. Will help you show off as an “been there seen it all” tweep.

6. Be ready with the surprises

Please be ready with a surprise to your new visitors. Now, assuming that you start rolling some stones and make people visit your profile often, what is it that you will offer them to remember you ? May be a striking background, or some great piece of information from your tweets that they haven’t seen anywhere else – whatever. But make sure you have a surprise, you decide what.

7. Forget the numbers, take the short cut

Now, forget about numbers and don’t make the grave mistake of showing off with your numbers. Numbers don’t mean much to many tweeps these days, its in the “value of your profile” that people will judge you. Let’s say if you’re someone who has 20k followers and doesn’t indulge in conversations with others (which can be seen from your profile, checking for @replies), people will fail to see the value in you. So don’t worry about your follower number, please.

8. Slip in to the league, get into conversations

You might already know that there are invisible groups and leagues of extraordinary gentlemen in the Twitterverse. There’s a group who will regularly converse with each other, there might be another group who might re-tweet each other often so on, so forth and so much. Identify these groups. Obviously, you have to do a lot of stalking to do this, so research well. Try to get into their conversations without offending or annoying them. If they feel like you’re alright and share the same frequency as you, they might…they just might pull you in. Good for you !

9. Be a good listener and research well

I tell you, my friend..the Twitterverse is one mad party . There are all sorts of people in there, and there’s all sorts of shit. While sieving your way through, listen well to others. Get a clue of what they are talking, what they like and most importantly, what they don’t like. Study from the conversations and try to embrace the good from it.

10. Get a custom twitter client

Here’s another secret. Hope you already know that people use twitter clients/applications to tweet. The web is always there, but you graduate to a client at one point of time. When you’re ready for it, make your own twitter client. Its not easy, believe me its not. But tweeps knowingly or unknowingly notice where from you are tweeting. You can see it in your tweets. Some tweet from Tweetdeck, some from Twhirl. So when you have your own Twitter client, brand it your website/name and stand out from the crowd. You know what I’m talking about ?

11. Get the biggies to reply to you

Okay, this was obvious. But let me tell you why this is important. Let’s say you are a pretty good twitter user, and are following a select few tweeps already. And one fine day you see that some of them are talking to this new guy around. More than three top guys are talking to the same guy. Would you notice him ? Of course you would. Heck, you’d even follow him without going to his profile. Same formula here

12. Create a dummy account to follow everyone

Let me be honest with you. If you were to listen to lot of conversations and do your research, you should be following a hell lot of people right ? So how does your profile stats look ?
Followers – 318 , Following – 3008 ?
Not good. So you want to follow all those 3008 people but doesn’t want to look like it until they are following you back right ? Go set up another twitter account and do all your following there. So you can listen to their tweets and conversations over there while doing your stuff here. Kinda shady right ? I know, I’d recommend this only for the short period of time until you get some initial traction. I assume you’re a decent chap who’ll ditch this step, once you have the desired results.

13. Participate in Live video chat sessions

If you didn’t know, some rich tweeps out there have cams. So they go to this site called Ustream and start blabbering about things they did today, their favourite colors, movies and stuff..on video of course. And there’d also be a bunch of guys listening to them. Sometimes in the hope of getting their replies, sometimes just because they didn’t have cams. So what do you do ? Jump in, follow them to Ustream. There’s usually a chat box, so login there with your twitter id and keep asking them silly questions. At your 11th cam session, you might get the guy to follow you and befriend you. No guarantees, but hey just try it.

Photo courtesy – D3 San Francisco

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