One unique feature of MarketMeSuite is that it lets you “brand your tweets.”

These customizable links go out in every tweet you send through MarketMeSuite. In turn, all these Twitter-links get noticed by Google.

And the more of these backlinks you have, the more important Google thinks your website is.

All that adds up to your site making it to Google’s first page that much faster!

A NEW article provides a checklist for using Twitter and Facebook for Google SEO purposes. This expert on search engine marketing suggests, among other things, that “tweets can influence [Google] rankings (possibly) more than links!”

She reminds readers to use URL shoteners that create a “301 redirect” with your link, so you won’t lose any of the precious “link juice” that points searchers (and Google) to your page.

Luckily, MarketMeSuite has three URL shorteners built right in, so its easy to use the one of your choice: TinyUrl, Is.Gd or Bit.ly. All three of these URL shorteners will give you that all-important “301 redirect link” you need.

“The Social Media Marketer’s SEO Check List” also has helpful illustrations along with useful, practical advice. One to bookmark!

Here are three new articles from Terametric.com about advances in measuring Twitter ROI:

• “3 Simple Twitter Marketing Rules That Will Increase your ROI”

Kyle Lacy, Principal of MindFrame and author of the book, “Twitter Marketing for Dummies”and Terametric webinar panelist on “How to Measure and Maximize Twitter marketing ROI,”shared the ratio for effective balance of Twitter conversation, marketing, and sharing for social media.

These were:

Share your content, share partner content and share industry content evenly.

• “2 Reasons Why Twitter Marketing ROI is More Difficult to Measure than Facebook Marketing ROI”

Companies use Facebook and Twitter for marketing and customer engagement. However, the ability to measure and maximize marketing return on investment, ROI, may differ across platforms. We’ve heard that compared to Twitter, Facebook is easier for marketers to understand the financial return on investment of a social media campaign.

For those firms that are committed to building community engagement on all social media platforms, here are two critical reasons why it may be hard to calculate ROI on Twitter…

• “3 Reasons Why SMBS Fail to Achieve Positive ROI with Twitter Marketing”

Those 3 reasons?

“Under-estimating the required time and resources for Twitter marketing; Missing or very little Twitter marketing strategy; No Twitter campaign optimization”

However, I switched to a premium app last year and highly recommend it. I tried using TweetDeck, but because so many other people use it, too (after all: it’s free!) I just couldn’t rely on it. If you monitor conversations on Twitter, you’ll see complaints about TweetDeck every day.

(And HootSuite has already launched a paid premium version of their service; paid services are the way of the future if these developers ever hope to make a return on their investments.)

Anyway, MarketMeSuite has just released some user stats, to give you an idea of how popular it is getting:

“The subscription-only service, which enables subscribers to manage their marketing campaigns on Twitter and Facebook from an intuitive desktop application, has seen growth top 500% in the last 6 months and is currently growing by 30% month on month.

“MarketMeSuite also reports an 85% renewal rate for monthly subscribers.”

The NEW Version 3.0 of this Twitter dashboard will be released later this month.

Here’s a preview:

Previously, for example, I shared a case study here about how to use Twitter as part of a political or public policy campaign.

Which politicians were the winners and losers on Twitter in 2010?

According to Twitter reputation management experts Klout.com:

“When it comes to influence in 2010, Las Vegas and U.S. Sen. Harry Reid had it.

“The city and the Senate majority leader made separate top 10 social media lists put together by a California-based company called Klout, which analyzed Twitter feeds from last year. (…)

“Reid came in No. 7 on the top 10 list of most influential politicians who were the topic of tweets.

“President Barack Obama topped the list, with Sarah Palin right behind him at No. 2. (…)

“‘We actually weigh how influential the person is who made that tweet,’ said [Klout.com] CEO Joe Fernandez. ‘One tweet mention by Oprah Winfrey has much more impact than somebody tweeted by me.'”

Because, among other things, Oprah Winfrey quite simply has a lot of followers — and contrary to what some Twitter “gurus” will tell you, the sheer number of Twitter followers you have does matter.

Of course, Twitter has also been used to create political mischief.

During the 2010 mayoral campaign of 2010, a staffer set up a fake Twitter account and engaged in some successful if sneaky spin control:

“When the Ford camp learned the [Toronto] Star possessed the recording of a potentially damaging telephone conversation in which the candidate promised to find OxyContin for constituent Dieter Doneit-Henderson, Deputy Communications Officer Fraser Macdonald jumped into gear — and invented a person, Karen Philby (a.k.a. @QueensQuayKaren), a [rival candidate] George Smitherman supporter who spouted political views on Twitter. While Philby (whose last name, shared with a Cold War spy, might have tipped off her purpose in life) quickly achieved her intended goal — securing the Ford campaign its own copy of the conversation from Doneit-Henderson—she continued to post tasteful barbs directed at the other candidates…”

Speaking of mischief, a fake Twitter account is giving Andrew Cuomo’s staff a lot of grief:

“Nicholas M. Fahrenkopf, a PhD student at University of Albany, said he went to Cuomo’s official website over the weekend, which featured links to his Flickr, Facebook and Twitter profiles. However, when Fahrenkopf clicked on @NYGovernor he found that the profile had not yet been created. ‘So I signed up, grabbed some images from the Web site and started following people,’ he said. And even though his initial bio raised some eyebrows (‘First elected Governor of the State of New York since the Luv Guv. @shellysilver calls me Mario’s Kid. I live with @sandrashm and like classic cars’) people believed him.

“Cuomo’s office said they had decided on @NYGovCuomo but had accidentally left the wrong link on the website. The link is now changed, but Fahrenkoph’s site is doing nearly as well, with 509 followers compared to Cuomo’s 601.”

“DJs, promoters, label reps and ‘professional party people’ from the Netherlands have persuaded Dutch airline KLM to add an extra flight to its roster.

“In a new twist on crowd-buying, the initiators of Fly2Miami made a bet with KLM on Twitter to organize a non-stop flight from Amsterdam to Miami.

“If Fly2Miami could get 351 seats reserved before December 6th, KLM would add a flight to its schedule on 21 March 2011, specifically for people attending the Ultra Music Festival and related parties.

“The initiative was prompted by a Dutch filmmaker tweeting about the lack of a direct flight from Amsterdam to Miami, a query that the airline’s Twitter team rapidly responded to with a wager.

“Exceeding everyone’s expectations, the flight was fully booked within five hours.

“‘We can rightly call it a first — the first time KLM will deploy an aircraft following a request on Twitter’, said Martijn van der Zee, vice president of e-commerce at KLM. ‘Social media are becoming more and more important to KLM to offer information and service to our customers.'”

These creative, dynamic crowd sourcing efforts are the way of the future.

Everybody wins, from end users to suppliers, and it all happens quickly, with minimal effort and friction.

As we’ve noted before, Twitter is a great crowd sourcing tool for ticket sales, and urgent, time-limited, locale-based projects/businesses.

This is expecially true if you use the geo-targeting features of a Twitter application client like MarketMeSuite, that makes it super easy to find people on Twitter based on where they are, their interests and other factors.

MarketMeSuite is great for running geo-targeted marketing, promotion and lobbying campaigns.

MarketMeSuite is my favorite Twitter client and social media account manager.

MarketMeSuite is the smart alternative to similar apps like TweetDeck. MarketMeSuite has lots of great features, and just one of these lets you find Twitter users in a particular area.

This is great for small businesses trying to generate buzz, and revenue, in their area.

For example, this feature is ideal for theatre owners and concert promoters, restaurants, real estate agents — the possibilities are endless.

Keep reading for a special VERY limited time offer from MarketMeSuite.

But first, here’s one of Tammy Fennel’s case studies about how to use MarketMeSuite for geo-targeting and local marketing:

“…what IS geo and niche-targeting?

“In basis, it is a clever algorithm which will find users near you who are talking about keywords associated with your geo-target marketing campaign. Let’s look at two people who are using it right now.

“Abi Bond  is the event manager who runs social media conferences all over the world through influencepeople.com. She has completed successful events in New York, London, and Paris. When it came time to selling tickets, Abi found geo-targetting to be invaluable. First, she set up the niche. She asked herself, “Who am I looking to connect with?”

“When she realized the answer was social media managers, larger companies looking to expand their social media monitoring, and advertisers for the event, she set up searches for the keywords and phrases most relevant. To enhance her results, she geo-targeted to within 200 miles of the event, knowing that most people will be willing to buy a ticket will want to drive.

“Abi Bond says: ‘How do you get social media and PR people into a room in Boston?  Only MarketMeSuite has enabled me to do that. For events, which are very location specific, 90% of our attendees come within 100 miles of that location.'”

Now, here’s the special offer:

From the 29th to the 31st of December, MarketMeSuite is running a special LIFETIME option to purchase their application for only $89!

This is the cheapest I’ve ever seen it, so when I inquired more, I found out that this is a ‘Pre-Launch Special.’

They are releasing their fabulous version 3 of their application in early January, so they wanted to get the word out and add to their thousands of thrilled users.

(I’m one! In fact, I’m a lifetime user, and MarketMeSuite has paid for itself since I first bought it last year.)

So, here’s the inside scoop:

The special will run from 8AM ET December 29, 2010 to midnight on December 31st.

During this period you can grab MarketMeSuite at only $89 — one time only, for life, no annual subscription renewals — and this is where it gets exciting. It includes lifetime upgrades! So you get version 3 and beyond!

Here’s just some of what you can expect from Version 3:

* Improved Reply Campaigns
You can geo-target and only connect with people who are relevant to you and your local marketing efforts, like we’ve been talking about in this post.

* Branding on Facebook
MarketMeSuite is the only Twitter client that let’s you “brand” your tweets. Now, everyone has always asked tham for branding on Facebook but it’s not entirely possible with the way their system works. But, MarketMeSuite found a way to have a signature, with a link, inserted into every single comment you do on Facebook.

So,  CLICK HERE to purchase MarketMeSuite at this ONE-TIME price.

It starts December 29, 2010, 8am EST (possibly a bit before), and goes until December 31st, midnight.

PS: MarketMeSuite is ALSO making there annual membership option $49 instead of $59! That offer is only good for the same limited time.

Act now or you’ll miss out on a great price on the best Twitter and Facebook account management software available today.

In an embarrassing development, some users who consider themselves internet savvy were hardest hit in late 2010:

Readers of Gizmodo, Lifehacker and other Gawker Media sites may be among the savviest on the Web, but the most common password for logging into those sites is embarrassingly easy to guess: “123456.” So is the runner-up: “password.

Choosing and managing safe, secure passwords seems like a pain, but it is easier than you might think.

Christopher S. Penn offers some timely tips:

“For example, if the password you want to use is CheeseBurgers!, then create CheeseBurgers!Banking as a password for financial services, CheeseBurgers!Social for networks like Facebook and Twitter, CheeseBurgers!Email for mail services, etc. You’ll still mentally have “one” password but it won’t work for everything. (the added length is also a minor increase to security since longer passwords are harder to guess) If another Gawker media incident happens where millions of passwords and email addresses are stolen, perhaps only your CheeseBurgers!Blogging password will need to be changed.”

I have an even better idea: check out 1Password.

1Password generates new, secure passwords for you in seconds. If you want to be extra safe, choose a password over 13 characters long that contains not only letters and numbers but symbols too, like *, #, and $

I don’t have to remember these complicated passwords. 1Password does it for me.

Then 1Password saves that password along with all your other ones. When you need to log in again, you just click the 1Password bookmarklet on your browser tab, and it fills in your log in information. It even hits the “Enter” button!

1Password automatically backs up your passwords. If your computer crashes, or you need to access your log in information remotely, 1Password keeps them all safe and easy to get to. And it works on Mac, PC, iPad or iPhones.

1Password has saved my life a few times! Highly recommended for anyone finally convinced they need to be more careful about choosing and using secure passwords.

Today they announced that they’re bringing it back, for a very limited time.

I bought a Lifetime membership to MarketMeSuite a long time ago.

I switched to MarketMeSuite after using its free rival, TweetDeck; unfortunately, TweetDeck kept crashing on me during the World Cup, with Twitter traffic was at a high. I use Twitter for business, and literally can’t afford to use a Twitter client that isn’t reliable.

With everything from Black Friday to the Royal Wedding coming up, I expect users of (free) TweetDeck will experience more outages. Meanwhile, I’ll be happily staying on top of everything with MarketMeSuite.

If you’ve used HootSuite or TweetDeck, then the MarketMeSuite interface will seem very familiar to you, except it has more features.

You use it to manage your Twitter account; for instance, you can filter out all your followers into separate panes, so you can more easily read the tweets of the top, say, 20 people you follow.

Unique to all other Twitter tools, MarketMeSuite lets you “brand” your tweets — read more about this incredible feature here.

You can also use MarketMeSuite to manage RSS feeds, Facebook and Ping.fm, as well as “follows” and “unfollows.”

It also has a newly redesigned “reply campaign” function, so you can easily eavesdrop on Twitter conversations that are relevant to your business, and step in to offer help. It’s not uncommon for people to tweet “I’m looking for a good web designer.” Wouldn’t it be nice to get all those tweets in one batch, then respond accordingly?

HootSuite recently unveiled its “paid” premium service, so there’s nothing weird about paying for a Twitter client anymore. Why not buy the best one — at a one-time only price?

I use MarketMeSuite every day and can’t get along without it.

So MarketMeSuite has just announced that they are re-opening access to their $99 Lifetime option. For only pennies a day, you get the best Twitter tool around.

And there’s a 30-day money back guarantee.

Highly recommended — but act fast.

We’re all used to having statistics about our blogs and websites at our fingertips. We use these statistics to see who has linked to us, what keywords people used to find our site and lots more.

Now it looks like Twitter is getting ready to offer similar statistics for our Twitter accounts and streams.

Twitter has invited a select group of users to try out the new ‘Analytics’ feature. The feature is now in beta testing. No word on when this free tool will be available to every Twitter user.

MarketingPilgrim reports:

Measuring success on Twitter has been a problem for marketers, one they’ve solved with the use of third party programs like HootSuite. But with the hoot going to a pay model for big users, Twitter will have the upper hand with their free version that will likely have more bells and whistles.

Twitter analytics will allow you to see which of your Tweets were successful by looking at who RT’d and how often.

It will also graph mentions, follows and unfollows over a six hour period.

You’ll see it right after the “Profile” and “Messages” tabs at the top of the page.

This Directory functions a lot like the “Who to Follow” function you’ve already been using.

However, it makes it easier to search for new followers in a more targeted fashion.

Here’s more from MediaBistro’s “All Twitter” blog:

In addition to suggestions, you can also “Browse Interests”, finding new people to follow based on the topics that they tweet about. For example, clicking on “Technology” brings me to a list of 60 suggested accounts that are tech-based, including Bill Gates, Kevin Rose, and BBCClick.

The Directory tab also gives you the option to find Twitter accounts that you are already connected with on Gmail, LinkedIn, Yahoo, and Hotmail/Messenger.

At some accounts, the Directory has different names, like “Find People,” — but it works the same way.

The Directory tab is an experiment over at Twitter. If it proves popular and functional, look for the Directory tab to remain a permanent part of the Twitter menu.

However, the other day I did notice that some TweetAdder functions — especially the precious “Followers Of A User” function — weren’t working. I didn’t even get an error message; they just sat there, not working.

As you may know, one of the tried and true ways to get more followers on Twitter is to check out the followers of someone else on Twitter. Ideally, that “someone else” is a person in your field, and whose interests and specialties overlap with yours.

When you “follow their followers,” those followers are more likely to follow you back. After all, you both already have common interests.

So this week, I tried to use “Followers of a User” to find out who was following a particularly popular and influential person in my field who’d just joined Twitter.

I was so excited — the “Followers of a User” function in TweetAdder would automatically gather all her followers into a list, then with the click of a button, I’d follow them a few at a time. That way, I’d grow my follower lists automatically. That’s what TweetAdder is for!

But this week, that function just stopped working.

I contacted TweetAdder support and they got right back to me. The cause of the problem was a simple one:

“New Twitter.” You’ve noticed by now that your main Twitter account page has a new look. I’d changed all my Twitter accounts over to “new Twitter,” to see what it was like.

(Not that I spend much time over there — I manage all my Twitter accounts using MarketMeSuite.)

TweetAdder support suggested that I switch from “new Twitter” back to the original version, the try using “Followers of a User” again.

Sure enough, it worked! Now I’ve got that precious list of that person’s followers, I’m following them a few at a time, every day automatically using TweetAdder — and a lot of them are following me back. TweetAdder to the rescue again!

The other tip I want to share is a quickie:

I picked this up from the Twitter feed for MarketMeSuite, the Twitter account management client I mentioned just now.

MarketMeSuite is a lot like TweetDeck, except it has way more features. Today I learned about another difference between the two Twitter clients.

Both of these software apps let you schedule tweets to go out automatically. This is great to keep your Twitter feed constantly active and updated, and for reaching followers in different time zones.

However, I found out today that while MarketMeSuite sends out all your scheduled tweets even if your computer is turned off, TweetDeck doesn’t work that way! Incredibly, TweetDeck’s scheduling function only works if your computer is on and you are signed into TweetDeck.

What good is that?

For the millionth time, once again I’m so glad I switched from TweetDeck to MarketMeSuite.

From the very beginning, newbies on Twitter were advised by experts and gurus never to pay to get followers, either through buying “lists” or through any other dubious method.

Today, however, Twitter is letting a select few users start paying for followers. Sort of.

Here’s part of Twitter’s official announcement about “Promoted Accounts”:

“We’re launching Promoted Accounts as part of “Suggestions for You”, which suggests accounts that people don’t currently follow and may find interesting. Promoted Accounts helps introduce an even wider variety of accounts people may enjoy.

“”Promoted Accounts are suggested based on a user’s public list of whom they follow. When an advertiser promotes an account, Twitter’s algorithm looks at that account’s followers and determines other accounts that those users tend to follow. If a user follows some of those accounts, but not the advertiser’s account, then Twitter may recommend the advertiser’s Promoted Account to that user. For example, a lot of people who follow several gaming-related accounts also follow @xbox. If someone follows gaming-related accounts, but not @xbox, Twitter may recommend @xbox to that person.”

Only a handful of select sponsor accounts, like @xbox, are part of the Promoted Accounts program right now. These specially marked accounts will show up in your “Suggestions for You,” starting this week.

Twitter has lots of other news in this latest announcement at their official blog. Check it out.

(And no, not everybody is happy about this either, as you can see from this headline…)

The folks at MarketMeSuite got an email from an enthusiastic user. She’d used MarketMeSuite’s unique ability to let you customize the “via”link that shows up in every tweets you send out. (Usually that line says something like “via web” or “via tweetdeck”, but with MarketMeSuite, you can customize that line to link to your homepage or blog!)

Here’s a screenshot of one of letter writer Julia Hutchins’ tweets:

As you can see, that underlined “via” line is a hyperlink that takes people to her site about American history.

Now, obviously this is good for traffic (and good for sales, too!).

However, there is another reason to use MarketMeSuite to “brand” your tweets this way. As Julia explains via email:

“I’m noticing a lot of my tweet statuses that have my website address embedded are showing up in my google webmaster tools links.  Pretty exciting!  My website is showing 21,000 backlinks, and I’m seeing a ton of my ‘branded’ tweets there!  MarketMeSuite may not only make taking care of three twitter accounts easy, it also may be really boosting my backlinks!”

You see, Google likes Twitter a lot, and picks up everybody’s tweets as part of the information it gathers all over the web.

And the biggest thing Google looks for when deciding how important your website is, is how many other people link to it. That is, how many “backlinks” that website has.

You can see where this is going…

With just a few minutes of “set it and forget it” work using the special features only available with MarketMeSuite, you can start getting thousands of backlinks to your site in the easiest way I can think of. Just use MarketMeSuite to customize your “via” line and you’ll build up backlinks quickly, using Twitter.

It’s worked for me:

I have a number of Twitter accounts and used MarketMeSuite to give them all a unique branded “via” line. Each hyperlinked “via” line links to a different site or blog I run. Sure enough, Google Webmaster Tools tells me each site has thousands of backlinks, and a huge number of those came from using this backlink building tactic.

One of my sites is only a few months old, but already has more than 7000 backlinks — and is #11 on Google for its keyword phrase.

(Hint: obviously use your keyword phrase in your branded “via” line. Google looks at this “anchor” text in every link to help sort out your site’s position in the search engine rankings, too.)

Read more HERE about how to use MarketMeSuite to brand your “via” links in your tweets, and build backlinks using Twitter.

Check Out MarketMeTweet!

I’ve used MarketMeSuite to manage multiple Twitter accounts (my own and my clients’.)

I’m not exaggerating when I say that I can’t live without it.

MarketMeSuite has features no other Twitter client application has, especially the free ones like TweetDeck, which are less robust or versatile.

Today MarketMeSuite announced a NEW lower price structure:

• Monthly: almost free at $5.99 a month
• Yearly: $59 a year (14 day money back guarantee)
• Lifetime: $99 one-time (30 day money back guarantee)

After trying out MarketMeSuite, I came to rely on it. So I purchased a Lifetime license, which paid for itself quickly in terms of my own personal efficiency and my ability to manage my clients’ social media accounts. (MarketMeSuite lets you manage Twitter AND Facebook all from one interface!)

With each of these plans, you’ll also get a FREE WordPress blog with FREE hosting for one year, from MarketMeSuite’s sister company, BlogMe.

You can get more information about MarketMeSuite if you CLICK HERE.

On Tuesday, September 21, 2010, Twitter rolls out a new look for its often neglected home page.

Increasing numbers of Twitter fans use TweetDeck, MarketMeSuite and other third party apps to manage their Twitter accounts and other social media tools.

Next week, Twitter hopes to change that by turning their homepage into a multi-media, multi-function destination.

Here’s part of the report from Reuters:

“The company has struck deals with 15 companies, including YouTube, Ustream and Flickr, to get the rights to display their content on the site.

“Twitter founder Evan Williams noted this will help entice advertisers from movie studios for Promoted Tweets because attachments like trailers will automatically play right on the page.

“‘We’re really excited about monetization with this new design,’ said Williams. ‘This makes Twitter better and tweets better.’

“The redesigned Twitter.com has a second pane where links clicked on the left side of the page open up at the right.

“That will keep users from opening new browser windows that can take them away from Twitter, which needs to keep time on site high as possible to attract advertisers.”

One problem with MarketMeSuite is that it doesn’t have an iPad or iPhone application.

But that’s about to change.

They just revealed the screenshots for the upcoming iPad/iPhone version of their Twitter/Facebook account management software.

This new iPhone app is scheduled to be released before the end of the year.

CLICK HERE and sign up as a beta tester in the comments.

And I find it fun and satisfying to teach myself WordPress/blogging related stuff like using FileZilla to upload files to a server. But not everybody has the time, patience or inclination to do that.

I just signed up with BlogMe to put together my new resume/portfolio site (here it is.)

BlogMe gives you one (or more) WordPress blogs plus FREE hosting for a year. Too good a deal to pass up, and I really am pleased so far.

But today BlogMe announced that they’ll be offering two kinds of coaching on WordPress blogging.

This is great if you are a beginner, and/or just want to grab some tips from some expert WordPress blog users.

Here’s part of their announcement:

“It’s a series of 3 training sessions, all through the computer, in realtime, with a member of the Pie Dog Media Team. You will be able to ask questions, share your mouse, and actually customize your site with us holding your hand.

“As you’re going to be learning directly from the team of developers these are people who KNOW WordPress in and out. Before we developed our own apps we exclusively did client work, mostly on the WordPress platform.

“We have three 45 minute sessions of information for you, from customizing a header, to backing up your database, and even an entire module dedicated to ‘secrets developers know for how to get your site ranked higher.'”

CLICK HERE for more information about getting expert personal coaching on blogging using WordPress.

Every Friday, we are encouraged to send out a list of some of our favorite people on Twitter, asking others to follow them, too.

A typical Follow Friday tweet goes something like this:

“Good people to follow!! @address1 @address2 @address3 #FF”

A friend of mine on Twitter hates Follow Fridays so much that she spend much of Friday tweeting:

“Don’t bother adding me to your #FF tweets! Follow Friday is STUPID!!”

I don’ think Follow Friday is stupid, per se, but I’ve never added a new person to my followers just because I’ve noticed their names among mine in somebody’s #FF tweet. It would take me all day to check these people out.

Then again, I feel bad if I don’t participate in some way on Follow Fridays. I don’t want to hurt the feelings of the nice people who are recommending me to all their other friends.

Luckily, Twitter clients like TweetDeck and MarketMeSuite make it easy for me to take part while exuding the least amount of effort.

I always have a “Mentions” pane open in MarketMeSuite, so I can see when people are “talking” about me on Twitter.

Sure enough, on Fridays I start seeing messages with “#FF” hashtags, mentioning my @kshaidle address along with other peoples’.

When I see these messages, first I double check that I’m already following the person sending out the Follow Friday message itself.

Then I send them a Direct Message: “Thanks for the #FF!” is all you need to say.

Finally, I select the Manual RT option in MarketMeSuite. This lets me edit the person’s tweet before I pass it along to my followers.

In the preview pane, I remove my @kshaidle address. Then I select MarketMeSuite’s Send to All option, and send out the RT to all my Twitter accounts, not just the main @kshaidle one.

By doing this, I feel like I’ve paid back by the original sender by putting their name in front of my thousands of followers, who may in turn follow them.

All this takes less than a minute to do, but I feel like it fulfills my Follow Friday “obligations.”

I look like a nice person without letting Follow Friday eat into my entire day.

This is just another reason why using a Twitter client like TweetDeck or MarketMeSuite makes my life so much easier, and really lets you use Twitter to its maximum capacity.

This is a pretty good landmark, considering that:

a) my main Twitter feed links to my highly political, sometimes controversial blog, which means  from the very start, approximately 50% of the general public won’t be interested in what I have to say, and,

b) it took me a really long time to “get” Twitter.

(Actually, point “a)” isn’t all that strange. One of the paradoxes of the internet is that grabbing and holding onto a niche subject is an outstanding way to build a large following. Your mother always said, “You can’t please everyone” — and she was right.

(Filter out uninterested or downright hostile visitors and followers by being upfront about who you are. Then you can build a robust, engaged following. Just google words like “narrowcasting” and “the long tail” and see how this focus on, well, focusing has become one of the “best practices” in internet marketing and communication.)

How I reached the 7000 Twitter follower mark

So how did I reach the 7000 Twitter follower number?

Quite simply, you have to provide great information, entertain people and engage with them.

Twitter is about conversations, not (just) broadcasting.

My main Twitter account is connected with the RSS feed for my blog, by using the RSS features MarketMeSuite.

As well, I use MarketMeSuite to hook the blog, and the Twitter account, directly to Ping.FM, where I’ve opened accounts with lots of social web communities like Posterous, Google Buzz, FriendFeed and many more.

Every time I update my blog or send out a tweet, it gets automatically picked up by these dozens of social web sites. This increases the chances that I’ll be found, read and followed.

I keep MarketMeSuite open all day and monitor all my followers, a separate pane for “best friends”, direct messages, retweets, search words connected to my topic, and mentions.

It takes just a few seconds to say “Thanks for the RT!” or “Have you ever tried doing XYZ?” or “Be sure to watch XYZ program tonight!”

Little by little, this engagement has established my Twitter feed as one that will appeal to a sizable yet concentrated group of followers out there.

(It probably helps that my Twitter avatar is a giant, red letter “K” [for my first initial] right now, and that I switch it around sometimes to keep people from getting avatar “blindness.”)

Finally, I’ve used Tweet Adder to manage my follows and unfollows automatically.

A lot of people have problems with the new update, Tweet Adder 3. I haven’t experienced these issues. When Tweet Adder acts up, I simply quit and then relaunch the program. I know that sounds very “1998” but old school fixes sometimes work best!

Using Tweet Adder to automatically follow back people who follow me, and searching out potential followers who are interested in the same subjects I am, has really made a difference in my number of followers and how quickly I’ve been able to add them.

I average about 30 new followers a day to my main Twitter account.

Is that a huge number? Nope. But slow and steady growth also keeps Twitter from closing your account for being a spammer.

Your number of followers matters, no matter what some “gurus” try to tell you. A large number provides social proof of your influence and competence.

People also judge you on the number of people you follow, too. If you have a ratio that’s too far away from 1:1 followers/follows, you can look like you’re just collecting followers but don’t care about what anyone else has to say. That doesn’t make a good impression, either.

And that first impression when people first visit your Twitter profile really matters.

Since you can’t get thousands of followers instantly, start laying the foundations today, being patient and trying some of the methods that have worked for me.

The best source of information about OAuth is Twitter itself. At their official blog, they write:

“If you are like most Twitter  users, you have used use a third-party Twitter application to read or send Tweets.

“As of August 31, Twitter applications will all use OAuth, an authentication method that lets you use apps without them storing your password.

“The move to OAuth will mean increased security and a better experience. Applications won’t store your username and password, and if you change your password, applications will continue to work.

“With OAuth, you still individually approve each application before using it, and you can revoke access at any time.

“To see which applications you have authorized or to revoke access, just [log into your Twitter account, then] go to the Connections section under Settings.

“One thing to note — to continue to use your favorite applications, you should make sure you are running the latest version of the app. Otherwise, you may soon find that it doesn’t work anymore.”

Lot of third party Twitter clients and apps, like TweetDeck and MarketMeSuite, have already switched over to this new system.

If you are using any Twitter apps and clients that don’t use the OAuth security system, note that your login information is not as safe as it could be. Some of those apps will probably be shut down soon, so be sure to invest in a stable, robust “real” service instead.

Speaking of TweetDeck, however, there are messages about a TweetDeck update going around. Do not download this update — it is a scam.