Twittering Tips to Build Your MLM & Network Marketing Business

Happy New Year to all of you! I got a bit distracted by all the holiday festivities. But I'm back in gear and ready to move this Basic Guide to Thoroughbred MLM and Network Marketing along briskly this year.

In social media, it really is all about building your relationships with others. And Twitter is a great place to start. It's your billboard - a great vehicle by which you can attract people to you and direct them to other sites and, most importantly, to your blog.

I found a great general resource that has helped me get started on Twitter. It's Joel Comm's book, Twitter Power - How to Dominate Your Market One Tweet at a Time, published by John Wiley & Sons in 2009. You can purchase it on Amazon.com (new or used) for under $20, some used versions are around $10 (it retails for about $30+ in bookstores). I strongly recommend it.

As you get started, remember that your goal is to be a quality Tweeter. So use your own name and brand yourself. Set your profile and background up with careful thought - and make sure you have your key link there (your blog or website). Start tweeting with real, personal information about you - you can tweet about your location, what you like to do, food that you like (recipes are great), childhood memories, dreams and goals, pets, music/art/movies/books/politics. Find things about which people are talking and get involved (a good site to use to see what is attracting the most interest is popurls.com). Most important, be yourself and talk back to the people with whom you connect - that's key to relationship building.

Finding targeted people to follow is important and it's easy to do (but keep in mind that you shouldn't follow more than 50 people a day to start and then keep your additions to 10% of the number of your followers each day - Twitter will shut you down if it thinks you are spamming). You can do a general search on Twitter, for example, on mlm, or network marketing, or any area of interest to you. Click on the tweeters who come up and follow them - most people you follow will automatically follow you back. Also, when you follow people, you can see who else is following them and add those people as well.

And start to retweet other people's tweets that you find interesting or informative - that's hugely important because you can get many people to retweet your crucial messages to their followers (it's sort of reciprocal) - it's an incredibly effective way to expand your own reach.

You'll want to be able to shorten and your links on Twitter because of the 140 character limitation to all tweets. Bud.url (open a free account) is a simple tool that will enable you to shorten your links - there are many others that you can also use that also track clicks. Twitpwr.com is one which Joel Comm cites because it not only shortens urls, tracks all clicks and also ranks accounts according to their power. Twittergrader.com is another site I like because I can see my ranking readily.

And you'll want Tweetdeck (to group tweets and followers by subject) and Social Oomph (formerly TweetLater), which allows you to set up automatic follows to people who follow you and to schedule your tweets in advance. One word of caution on Social Oomph, Twitter has discontinued allowing recurring tweets, so all of your scheduled tweets need to be original.

You can get a bit lost wending your way through all the stuff on Twitter, which is why I recommend Joel Comm's book as a starting point. It's got a ton of detail and you can work through it steadily and easily.