I am having the hardest time just getting a widget for my sidebar. And, wtf is tweet deck? Twitterator? Twhirl? I’m all TWHAT????

Lots of great info here, Lisa and I are going to dominate Twitter much sooner than we thought! haha.

I agree with the above recommendation for TweetDeck, as you get more followers, it will keep you sane.

Second, sign up with Mr. Tweet. I think he’s @MrTweet but if you do a Twitter search you’re sure to find him. He recommends people based on your network that you might enjoy following. Then, look at who THEY’RE following.

Word of caution, follow only a few at a time, until they follow back. Your Twitter ranking, should you care about such things, is better when you have an even number of followers and followed, unless your MCHammer or something.

There’s also something called #followfriday. (Do you know about the # (hashtag) phenomenon. It’s basically a search paramater embedded in your Tweet. Like, if you tweet about American Idol and then include #AI you’ll show up in the thread of people following American Idol tweets. Anyhoo, #followfriday is where people suggest other people that you might like to follow. Each Friday, I pick someone from the book world and type somehting like “If you want great book reviews, check at @reviewromance #followfriday.” You hope (though I’m still waiting) that someone tweets the followfriday crowd to follow you, but some do anyway.

1. Get Tweetdeck. You can assign people to groups, which go into a separate column. For example I have a group for “Real Friends”, so that I never miss their tweets, even if others get chatty.

2. Tweet about what you’re blogging about, interesting links you’ve found, funny thoughts, etc. I never talk about what I’m doing. Because usually what I’m doing is boring.

3. @Reply to people. Engage!

4. Tweetdeck also lets you run searches constantly, and it filters the results into another column. I do the term “writer”. So anytime someone tweets the word “writer”, it shows up in my Tweetdeck. That’s a good method, at least for me, for finding people who are tweeting about things I’m interested in and finding relevant friends.

5. If someone tweets something you like, instead of replying with “Great!” or “LOL”, retweet it. To do that, you just post: RT @theirname theirmessage. With Tweetdeck you can do this with one click. (See now why I’m loving Tweetdeck?)

6. Feel free to promote yourself, but I would keep it to 25% of your posts or less. Twitter is about connecting and sharing! So feel free to share yourselves and your work, but if that’s all you do, no one will follow!

7. You don’t have to tweet 50 times a day, but I would try for at least once a day. If nothing else, you can copy your Facebook status. I used to use a Twitter app on facebook that would update both simultaneously, but I took it off because I found it was holding me back from tweeting, because I didn’t want some silly comment to mess up my Facebook profile.

Anyway, I hope this helps!

@NixyValentine