‘Twitter is a great tool to get your target audience discover you, your blog and the value your blog creates. It helps establish a link between you and your audience in a non-threatening way and can be a great part of your online blog branding and marketing strategy.’ Marko

I thought that was very well put. Here’s a few tips I’ve picked up in the last couple of months working with Twitter. If you haven’t already tried them, I hope you’ll find them useful.

1. Add your name to Twitter directories. Two good directories are Twellow and Just Tweet It. Find the categories that best suit what you tweet about and add yourself there. You can also look in those categories for people to follow.

2. Find people to follow. I use Twubble and Twannabe for this. Twubble checks who your followers are following and picks out people who you may want to follow yourself. Twannabe checks who your nominated Twitter ‘hero’ is following and you are not so you can add them as followers.

3. Follow some of the big names. Follow people like Darren Rowse, Jim Connolly and Chris Brogan. You will probably pick up followers on the back of following these big guns and you may also find they have interesting tweets.

4. Find local people to follow. Use TwitterLocal to find people in your area worth following.

5. Follow these people for tech news. If you’re interested in tech updates, cool websites and applications, follow these: @makeuseof, @guardiantech, @Net_Feed, @Neo_Win. Also @techwatching but this one has frequent updates.

6. Longer tweets. The killer feature of Twitter for me is the 140 character limit. This means your tweet has to be concise. It also means that you can scan tweets from your followers and quickly get the drift. However, if you occasionally need to tweet more that 140 characters, use TwitBlogs or TwitterMail.

7. Post pictures. Use Twitpic to share pictures linked to your tweets.

8. Use TweetDeck or Tweetree as your Twitter client. Both these have advantages over the Twitter website for viewing your tweets, direct messages, etc. The big plus of TweetDeck is that you can define groups of people who are most important to you so you don’t miss any tweets amidst the twitter noise. Be careful not to close the group column though as you will then have to redefine that group when you next reopen TweetDeck. You’ll also have to install Adobe Air to use it. Tweetree is probably my favourite client at the moment. Its key advantages are first you can see photos on Twitpic or Flickr or videos on YouTube directly in the client. Second, shortened links in tweets are shown in full form so you can decide whether to follow that link or not. It doesn’t do groups yet like TweetDeck but I believe that’s in the pipeline from looking at the feedback tab on the Tweetree site.

9. Use BigTweet to tweet direct from a website. If you want to tweet about a good website you’ve found, you can do it directly from BigTweet. You can tweet up to 240 characters with this. It even shortens the website URL.

10. Subscribe to TwiTip. TwiTip is one of the best websites for learning how to use Twitter more effectively. Well worth subscribing to in your RSS reader.

11. Easily change your twitter background. You can improve the background on your Twitter profile and show links to your other social networks using Twitbacks or MyTweetSpace.

12. Check your twitter grade at TwitterGrader. I’ve just made the top 50 in Scotland! You can check anyone’s grade here.

13. Put a twitter counter on your blog sidebar. Go to TwitterCounter and get a Twitter counter badge to add to your sidebar.

14. Put your latest tweets on your blog sidebar. Use TwitStamp to generate a cool image showing your Twitter details and latest tweet in your blog sidebar. Or use the Twitter for WordPress plugin to display your latest tweets on your blog.

15. Build your community. If you follow these tips, they should help you build a good community on Twitter. You don’t have to follow back everyone that follows you. If someone follows you, take a close look at their profile and see if their content is of interest to you. If it’s too far from what interests you, you don’t have to follow them. If they unfollow you because you haven’t followed them, indeed if anyone unfollows you, don’t worry about it. This is all about building communities of friends who want to read your tweets, who you can ask questions of, and who you want to hear from. It’s not really about numbers in my opinion.

I hope you find these tips useful. If there’s any tip or tool you’ve discovered and find essential that I haven’t mentioned, please drop a comment below. Also if you like this post, please share it on Delicious, Digg it, Stumble it or even tweet about it. You can use the ShareThis link just below this post. If you find this post useful, you could also help by linking to it in on your own blog. You can follow me on twitter at @techandlife. Finally, why not subscribe to our RSS feed to have all our posts sent directly to your news reader.

Photo credit: swanksalot