The obvious professional reason for using Twitter is networking. When you’ve got a large number of followers, it becomes a platform to – once in a while – communicate about your product. I read some blogs for tips and tricks.

I assume that you know what Twitter is. If you don’t, there are many places to read about it, for instance the ‘Newbies Guide to Twitter’ by Chris Brogan. Otherwise please visit Twitter.

Chris Garrett wrote in ‘A Quick Introduction to Twitter for Bloggers’, that he gets a lot of enjoyment and a reasonable amount of professional benefit from the service. ‘You just have to know how …’ He’s a fan of the service: ‘It is putting me in touch with people I would otherwise have never met and giving me early news that would have passed me by. For all its faults you should definitely at least try it, especially if you are a blogger.’

Quotes
I liked these quotes on Chris Garrett’s blog:

• ‘Twitter is only as good as your network. Add lots of people, build it up, and the rest will follow’, by duncanriley.
• ‘While I am hardly connected to the Dutch blogosphere by my blog I am connected to aprox 99% of its bloggers by Twitter’, by silvertje.
• ‘It allows me to see people’s communication style, content preferences and even values. It’s not what people say as much as how and what’, by ConversationAge.

Get an audience
But how do you get people to follow you? Some tips that I read, mainly from Dan Zarrella’s ‘10 Ways Twitter Can Boost Your Social News Profile’ are:
- Matching usernames and avatars on different profiles
- Link to your Twitter account from all your social profiles
- Add your Twitter URL in your email signature
- Ask readers of your blog to follow you
- Follow your followers back

So, please follow our Twitter updates: Aaron, Arne , Joost .

Listen
This is something that I found interesting. By Brian Solis wrote ‘Twitter is a Conversation Hub, But It’s Only One of Many’, in which he states: ‘Twitter is incredible tool for also listening. Outside of the inane updates, spam, or self promotion, which I choose to not follow, I learn about news, trends, important conversations, and new ideas. It’s fast, dynamic, and can be incredibly influential.’

Engage
‘For networking, engage people in conversation. Ask interesting questions and you will get back interesting answers. Do not be afraid to reply to a question posed by someone else. The worst that can happen is they do not reply. Do not always blame the user, the system does drop a lot of messages and people mis-spell names.’ Thanks Chris Garrett.

Two more tips
These are just two more practical tips:
- Hook up your blog feed, so every post you make goes to Twitter as a URL
- By all means, be true and keep it fun for everyone!

I look forward trying this and to reading your comments.