Twitter is mainstream, since it is mainstream of course there are many marketers looking at Twitter as a spot on the internet with thousands of people to market to and to profit from. This is something that can be done with Twitter but also something that is not as easy as you may think at first blush.

Some marketers are looking at their Twitter followers as some great mailing list that they can market to a few times a day. I would love ot see numbers but I am sure that Twitter followers are nothing like a mailing list and making $100 per follower a year is just a stupid idea that is not doing anyone any good. Read on and you will see why Twitter works but is completely different than any internet marketing medium before.

Monetizing the Internet

The internet has been a great place to make money for many years. Email delivery is essentially free. marketing messages can be created and tested easily, and the people that are on the Internet tend to be affluent and able to make purchases safely and easily. Really almost anyone can put together one of perhaps dozens of strategies to make money online within a weekend.

As the internet has evolved marketers have found ways to capture visitors and then extract money from the visitors by keeping on message Twitter is not quite the same for a few reasons. [Read more...]

When you look at the sites that you go to on a daily basis or the RSS feeds that you read you may notice that the most popular bloggers are more then words on a page. no the top bloggers are real people and that reflects in everything that they write.

There is now although there probably always was an interest in people. It is often said that the most read part of newspapers is the opinions section. The reason thath this is interesting to people is becasue where in a paper you only have stories with facts in the opinion or editorials section of a paper you actually get the passion that individuals have instead.

So read through some of your favorite bloggers and see what they say and how they say it. Darren at Problogger seems to be a friendly family guy that enjoys photography. Jeremy at Shoemoney is always stirring the pot. Robert Scoble is interested in technology and gets to do a lot of photography but is still not to much of a geek so you can still stay interested in what he has to say.

John Reese gives us a great example of just opening up and saying what he thinks is right from a marketers opinion. Being on Twitter a lot of people follow John Reese and he once posted on there to watch your message, then after Mashable mocked him he retaliated and now on the eve of Traffic Secrets he has a goofy picture on Twitpics that makes him look like just another guy that we can all relate to. All of these are different aspects building an online persona.

So sure you can have opinions but it is even better to build your entire self out to the internet. What are your strengths, weaknesses, personal ticks, how do you think? What do you do? The internet is about so much more than facts, in this day it is more important to stand out by laying out who you are as a person.

Start to build yourself up and your readers will have a much better time following you because they will read from your voice instead of their own.

No one has ever considered advertising an art form (or have they?). Perhaps if you watch American Advertising Awards on television, you might begin to believe differently as advertisers across the world take television adverts into an entire new realm. Be that as it may, tweeting is used for business purposes, advertising, branding, and social networking. The real art is to do it personally and still maintain the necessary image for your company, self, or marketing campaign. Tweeters without a personality have few followers if any, because they are simply boring. You can pick up the same information from the newspaper if you want an objective tone. No, the art of good tweeting is partially injecting your personality into a quick blurb 140 characters long and making it interesting.

Tweeting as in Art – Form Follows Function

The oft quoted term “Form follows function” is brief, thought provoking and still quotable 100 years after it was made. While few remember who made the statement or what they were referencing, the words themselves remain. This exceptional example of artful tweeting came from a rather lengthy statement on architecture from Lloyd Sullivan regarding the skyscraper. The full quote was “That form ever follows function. This is the law”. Sullivan would have been an exceptional Tweeter.

Whether or not form does indeed follow function (still a matter of lively debate), compressing a thought so revolutionary for the times and insightful into a few characters, is an example of the art of Tweeting and like most oft quoted excerpts applicable to many situations. Tweeting requires succinctness, but it can’t be butchered or approached with a jackhammer. Words are by nature delicate but when crafted correctly, nearly indestructible. Tweeting as an art requires remembering who the intended audience is,; asking if they would find what you are tweeting interestin; and then compressing that revolutionary (or not so revolutionary) thought into 140 characters or less.

Tweeting Artfully – There is a Time and Place to Tweet

Who are the best Tweeters besides those who by virtue of their celebrity status, poor behavior, or royal birth are considered noteworthy? Tweeting as an art can be startling, titillating, or simply a restatement of the mundane, so it can be viewed from a new angle and appreciated; what it need not be is garish, because there is nothing else to appreciate about it. That is a rather convoluted statement, but it makes sense when considered with Tweeting. Certain well known figures have committed gaffes so garish that what they tweeted was lost beside when and where they tweeted.

A popular film celebrity can tweet almost anything and probably gain followers if they post a good photo and some juicy tidbits of their personal lives. If the intention of tweeting is to gain notoriety or keep the name in the public eye, then titillating tidbits such as “We are tweeting from bed after having a romp.” Well, there is such a thing as too much information. As for any message that follows, that does not have to do with romping and whom they were with,….that was surely lost.

If notoriety was the Tweeter’s purpose then it was fulfilled. If on the other hand the Tweeter had a message but felt it was too uninteresting to be read without some extraneous detail designed to gain notice, should not be a surprise if no one pays the message any mind. Standard practice in tweeting says that a tweet should indicate where you are tweeting from. However there are places tweeting is completely inappropriate and worse; whatever message the Tweet was intended to convey is completely lost. Tweeting from court lost a lot of points and the message for a certain well now well-known American political figure. Does anyone remember what he was tweeting before the Judge brought the hammer down on him? Almost surely not, but they do remember that he was tweeting from his own trial.

Where Not To Tweet From

Tweeting from inappropriate places can be considered disrespectful or worse. All too often clumsy tweets cause the message to be lost in the furor of when and from where the tweet was sent. Tweeting can gain a wide audience for the professional, a lot of notoriety for the social commentator and brand recognition for a company. However it should be remembered the critics are followers. A Tweeter’s followers are almost always watching, and tweeting is a two way street.

What they don’t find interesting, they don’t follow. What followers find appalling, socially unacceptable or irresponsible they protest, after all the art of tweeting is about two way communication. There is a delicate balance that must be maintained to avoid losing the message in unnecessary or unfortunate details.

Saman Rashid is an experienced writer. She has been writing website content copy for more than three years.Contact Saman directly for professional, cost effective copywriting for articles, website content, press releases and sales promotion materials on her website, MS Copywriters.