Do you know these 5 must-know Twitter tricks?

You might be a Twitter officiando or a newbie still getting your feet wet. Whichever end of the tweeting spectrum you sit, I bet you’ll find something of interest in this week’s guest post from Jonny Lis.

There are lots of social media sites you can use to stage a promotional campaign for your business, but if you want a platform that’s doesn’t weigh you down with lots of text, then Twitter is the right fit for you.

If you need some more reasons to join this global networking portal, check out these statistics:

• 175 million tweets were sent from the site each day in 2012.
• 32% of those who use the Internet are on the platform.
• 1 million accounts were added to the domain every day in 2012.
• 50% of its users interact with the network through mobile devices.
• 34% of marketers have generated leads through the website.

Based on this data, you can see why this tool is an important part of your social media optimisation strategy. But in order to use Twitter to your advantage, you need to know how to maximise its use.

#5 Get organised with lists

This is one way to manage your Twitter followers and those you follow, but you also need to choose how you organise these wisely. Why? There is a limit imposed on the number of lists that you can create. Currently, that stands at 20. Also, you can only add 500 members to one list.

Apart from grouping your contacts, you can also use this feature to monitor your competition. In fact, you can add them to a private list (which only you can see). In addition, you do not even need to follow them when you put them there.

Another reason for organising lists is that your followers have access to all your public lists. So aside from being a source of information for you, these can also serve the same purpose for them.

#4 Find relevant information through saved searches

If you want to keep track of a certain event, hashtag, or term, then you can save that search term for easier monitoring. However, you also need to note that you can only have 25 saved searches in your account at any one moment.

#3 Harness the power of search features

There are regular Twitter search options and there are those that are advanced. With the latter, you can do searches like the following:

• hot OR cold – These return tweets containing either of the two words or both.
• funny filter:links – These give back content that have the word “funny” and links to URLs
• seo source:twitterfeed – These provide results with the word “seo” in the content that were entered through Twitterfeed.

The search options provided above are just a few of what you can do on Twitter. If you want to learn more, you can check Twitter’s page on “How to Use Advanced Twitter Search”

#2 Take advantage of hashtags

This is another way to gather information from Twitter. You can use hashtags to find new people or accounts to follow or participate in existing conversations.

Aside from that, you can even use hashtags to create your own discussions. Let’s say you are launching a new product. You can craft a specific hashtag for this and encourage your followers to use it when they tweet.

#1 Use tools to help you out

You might be tracking several search terms at once. Plus you also need to monitor your mentions and direct messages. How can you manage all these effectively?

The answer is simple: Twitter applications. There are several available for free on the Net, and these include Tweetdeck, Seesmic, and Hootsuite. Each has its own features designed to meet different needs.

Final thoughts

The above-mentioned are just a few of the ways you can use the Twitter for your business needs. Other strategies that you can employ include retweeting and following back. However, the five techniques listed above serve as a good starting point when you want to optimise your Twitter account.

Over to you, do you have anything to add to the list? Or do you have any experiences using the features mentioned above? Feel free to share your thoughts.