How to Be a Twitter Ninja

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Many marketers look at Twitter as just another platform to blast out their promotional messages. This overlooks that, at its core, Twitter is a communications mechanism to engage people in a conversation that occurs in real time as well as over time. (If you're a Twitter newbie, here are eight guidelines to get your Twitter mojo working.

While media entities and high-profile individuals have built seven figure followings and can be viewed as having created new media outlets, it's important to understand that this doesn't work for non-media entities. To achieve your business objectives requires more than chasing follower numbers. It is essential that you build your Twitter cred. You need an integrated Twitter marketing strategy.

To develop an effective marketing strategy, it's important to understand Twitter's underlying dynamics within the context of a maturing U.S. social media market. While Twitter's usage outside of the U.S. continues to grow, its U.S. unique visitors are down almost 30 percent since last September according to The Nielsen Company. Further, one out of 10 active Internet users visited Twitter last month making an average of six visits during the month. Bear in mind that these numbers don't include Twitter consumption on applications like TweetDeck and HootSuite. Obviously, the social media market in the U.S. is maturing as is content creator behavior based on Forrester's 2010 Global Social Technographics.

13 Tactics to Expand Your Influence on Twitter

Here are 13 tactics to expand your influence on Twitter.

Building your following and influence on Twitter takes time and effort. Since it's an engagement as well as a promotional medium, Twitter requires a marketing plan to achieve your business goals with a series of rather specialized ongoing tactics.

If you have additional suggestions, please include them in the comments section below.

Happy marketing,
Heidi Cohen