Recently, as you may have noticed, Twitter has introduced some quality changes that seems to range from deletion of mass accounts and the suspension of accounts that appear to contain the wrong type of tweets. For a long time we have known that Twitter is capabable and active in suspending poor accounts but more recently there seems to have been more activity by Twitter that all adds up in our opinion to make Twitter a better place.

Tougher to do business in, but a better place. It all started a few months back with Tweetlater, now known as SocialOomph rejecting the automation of identical tweets and just a few weeks ago the update of user terms and conditions in a mass email sent out to all account holders. It would now seem that this email was a kind of early warning and that failure to follow Twitter ‘Rules’ could result in an account being suspended and in the worst case deleted.

You may wonder why it would matter. It matters if you are a genuine account holder and you have tuned the account for business development – or just enjoy talking to many followers. To lose a long list of followers would be quite a loss, not to mention that the name of the account may be precious and of course, for some, a high number of followers infers bragging rights.

As can be seen by the graph below the more followers you have the more tweets people make.

So now we know the main changes and some of what affects the quality of a twitter account, what can we do? – In a phrase – tweet more often! It seems that not only should your tweets be unique but the majority should be conversational and not include any links.

The acid test to me is that your tweets should ideally be RT’d (re-tweeted: forwarded by others). I am pleased to say that on many occassions our ‘offer’ tweets, those that contain links are RT’d across the Twittersphere.

These are technical considerations but where does that leave the time poor business man who is interested in Tweeting for fun whilst building up their network. Well I am pleased to say, still in the game!

These ‘rules’ are my suggestions based on my opinion and experience. Indeed, as we concluded with SEO and Pay Per Click, we can conclude that there are certain ethics appropriate to Twitter marketing that should be employed for best practice.

Twitter account holders needing to be more inventive and creative is not such a bad thing and in my opinion should help the market place. Twitter account holders need to create more offers and tweet more often.

So to help, we have compiled a database of 2800 ideas, quotes and jokes and set up a twitter account where we will twitter one idea, joke or quote daily. You can follow us at http://www.twitter.com/dailytweetideas or simply check in for some instant inspiration.

For clients we deliver a unique set of 3 jokes, 3 quotes and one idea per day – plus bonus information – only useful to subscribers… It is possible for you to simply retweet the ideas and in the case of quotes and jokes that is all you can do. The objective however is to provide a joke, quote and an idea in order to spark your creative juices in order to lead you to use the quote, joke or idea as a stimulus to create a unique twitter blog post, standard blog post or even as I have discovered, to create video content.

Of course, quotes and jokes by definition are worth repeating and are not unique by and of themselves and simply retweeting is a possible option, but not the best one. The best outcome would be for them to work as a conversation starter that will lead to ongoing relationship building.

The intention is to ensure your twitter account is original and has varying tweets, some with links, the majority – 85% without.

The safest thing to autotweet is a quote. It is harder to autotweet a joke as jokes can have many meanings and often offend as well as entertain as a number of comedians have found out. The joke above, will no doubt offend some of the French, although not intentioned, it serves as an example that could cause some offence.

Jokes are not always good for business either. Everyone will have a different opinion on this, but in my opinion, a light hearted approach with serious intent generally works well.

With regard to tweets with links, we need to get more creative. Often I find we are limited to what we can tweet as Clients usually have a limit of ideas and offers we can tweet about.

I have created a mind map dedicated to digital product development that you can download and use as the basis for creating digital proposals to attract enquiries.

It is intended that this mind map is only available to fee paying clients, so I can’t give you all the answers here. You can sign up as a Tweetmaxi client and you will get access to this and a ton of other resource material.

Most of the ideas outlined requires clients to do nothing apart from watch their in-box and let us know how they would like the content delivered.

If you would like us to help you further with idea development please note that this is a chargeable service that we are happy to provide if you want more help.

Linkedin is a social media for business, used for connecting businesses people to help them network. Linkedin successfully facilitates the vision of its not what you know – it is who you know…

In February I was lucky enough to be invited to attend a dinner function organised by Netimperative (one of our clients) where I met Kevin Eyres here:

David White meets up with Kevin Eyres

On the day before we had met, Kevin had just launched Linkedin in Germany following a successful launch in France just last year.  The UK is the second largest user base with 9m subscribers world wide, 2m of them are in the UK, whilst India was the fastest growing region, Holland has the highest penetration with 1.2m accesses per month, reaching out to 92% of all employees…

Not bad for a company that employs 370  world wide, although not a small company any more, it is a business that supports Business.

Top tip: it is still early days, the Social Media networks are growing and expanding on your watch – it is time to open your account.

This is a question I am often asked and it is always referenced with ‘there are lots of people with different ideas’, ah how I remember the old days in the beginning of Search Engine Marketing – the answer – it is all very logical my dear Watson.

It begins with you have to be in it to win it! So this means you need to create a blog, there are two types of blogs as of writing, a blog like this (blog stems from weblog and blogging means to blog) – blogging has been around a few years now, so this is a fairly safe bet that you should do this as millions of people already have.

There are whole courses around blogging, some of which I have written.  We have a good number of blogging sites now and they all work very well – so you are reading from someone who has been there and done it – I think this is an important distinction and something you should look for when choosing someone to work with.

Now I have an admission to make, I have not posted anything for over a month – I have just had a new son, and have been doing the rounds with the in-laws, Christening etc – all good fun – but the big benefit to you is I have spent my time writing and have come up with three books, the first is registered as SearchTopTips and by its nature, it includes more detail on Social Marketing – just thought I would give you a heads up, that the book is coming… the book is coming… the book is coming…

So the first type of blog is a blog, the second type of blog is a micro blog – of which Twitter is one – open one of those as well.

Then go to Ning.com and create a private ning for your company – this is where you and all your team can post handy information about your business in private if you wish or in public – just be careful about what you say – nothing too personal or derogotory please – unless you want to get picked up by the press and potentially sued…

The next thing is Podcasting and Videocasting (sometimes called vodcasting). Now I have appeared on Podcasts and always been reluctant to do one. The reason is that I had never worked out a plan and was afraid that my production values and quality of content would be too low! Oh how I am so wrong, and yet, like you have not missed out on this phenomenon – so in this case I have not ‘done’ what I am recommending – there is always an exception to the rule. But I have appeared on one and I am a member of the british podcasting society… However I have done about 300 videos, now those I know how to do – and I have to admit I have only, after 300 of them, just worked out how to make them work… So this is why you should work with someone who has ‘done that, been there’ I am pretty sure that what I have learnt with Vodcasting will work on Podcasting – I know, I know. I still have to do that before you can hire me to help with that.

Now, I am skipping over the whole culture change thing here, although it is an absolutely vital point, I think if you go down the route of opening accounts and setting up blogs and nings and things then you will learn more and more about what to do as there are so many guides out there already – but it is covered in my book…

Moving quickly on, you next need to consider how to harness all your assets as these are the biggest things, your blog content – and I would take the route of focussing the blog and micro blog on your business – so the kind of assets we are looking for include: proposals, powerpoints, your website, direct mail that you have written, sales presentations, emails, testimonials – all your paraphenalia that already exists and then think about how you can acquire more and repurpose what you have, i.e. there is more than one way to tell the same story and if it is worth telling, tell it again… Again this really is covered in my book…

Next, once your site is built, your blog is running and your micro blogging accounts are open you start using them to build a foundation, to anounce and engage with the market place, to build your reputation and expertise, by sharing with others. The big danger here is that you must not give away the crown Jewels, you have to hold back something as this is how you make your living, but also you have to educate and demonstrate that you have the knowledge and the capability to help -as we most definitely do…

So lets look more at how you promote – well there are sites out there – Social Bookmarking sites – where you open accounts and book mark your best posts – like http://www.stumbleupon.com (now shown on Google Search Results Pages (SERPS!)). The there the crowd sourced News Aggregators – Mixx.com for instance, again open an account and you can add news releases, book reviews, or events – always read the user guidelines as if you overtly promote and ‘behave badly’ you could create a negative effect!

Now, with all that lovely content that you have produced, news, articles, videos and ahem, podcasts, you can find specific media type sites that are dedicated to distributing that kind of content – flickr for photos – youtube for videos… You set up an account and upload…

Ok, next up is the Social Media Networks… Facebook, Linkedin, Myspace… you need to open an account, set up a space for you and create a further page – for your business, in these you then upload essential content to build an initial content foundation – remember what we said about re-using your content – in these cases you will probably want to start with your foundation content and modify to suit each environment. You will see that Facebook and Linkedin offer the ability to integrate your blogs and in some cases your flickr account… You can just keep on going with this.

There is more! We are getting advanced now… Here it is: Swikis, Wikis and virtual worlds… A Wicki is a open website that allows others to modify the content – you need some experience for this and you need to keep this moving. Virtual Worlds are tougher to understand and you just need to get into these before you start committing to your marketing plan… Check this out: http://www.virtualworldsreview.com. A Swicki http://www.eurekster.com: is a custom social search portal on the topic of your choice powered by your community… With every search, vote and click, your Swicki generates more relevant results and turns into a valuable asset for you and your community. ooh!

Ok now we are in to mass marketing and simultaneous events such as webcasts and teleseminars… this is where social media tends to move on from the web and integrate with the outside world, but is still very integrated. This is extremely advanced now and this assumes that you really have all your assets and business in place – this is where you communicate live on a call or over the web – but it does extend further and for this you really need a plan – this is where sales joins up the marketing activities.

On this, here is the beginnings of a plan – just visit http://www.gotomeeting.com and and arrange a one to one, or a few to a few meetings and you can get familiar with the way it works and start to deliver some short term success and comfort with the process. The big plan revolves around the building of your sales funnel and building a sales funnel is detailed in my book Successtoptips. It will also be the subject of my next post – when I get back from Finland and have recovered from Skiing (badly).

One word of warning – do not abuse – do not spam – I have experienced first hand the power of all these ‘assets’ (I have been on the receiving end of podcasts!) and they are so valuable that they are just not worth abusing. Open each account in your own name and keep it real!

There is more to come, more you can do, even though this page is packed full of top tips and links, there is more that twitter to microblogging and each of the other subject areas has many players all of which are looking to be fed with your content!

I almost forgot, widgets, badges and RSS feeds -  these will help you market your content assets and are the subject of several other posts. I hope you like the way I have tried to bring it all together and I would love to hear of your success and your comments!

Biz Stone (31,011 followers) must be very pleased with himself, with several notable achievements under his belt including blogger.com, one his latest developments Twitter surpasses DIGG market share. 

It is not surprising really, it is like the unexpected take off of text messaging. Mobiles were not designed for it, the inventors threw it in as it cost nothing, who knew! But I think it is indicative of the human race – like sound bites – people like things that are short, to the point, punchy. Like tx twitter has its own language. I guess these are the magic ingredients that make it cool.

It is also made cool when people like Stephen Fry (63,634 followers) choose to discuss their twitter habits with Jonathon Ross – although for a while there it may have been the only way for him to get his messages out to the masses! (13,933 followers).

Check out Gordon Browns followers – it would appear that this is an account that may well be removed, but so far it seems that GB (as he is known to his friends) is not a twitterer.  Whereas http//twitter.com/davidcameron is an unofficial twtitter that is closing down, apparently following a request from The Conservatives (1,420 followers). http//twitter.com/labour looks unofficial, whilst http://twitter.com/downingstreet does not (19,665 followers) although is clearly PR. 

So, this all adds up to a successful mix, a technology that can be played, that connects, that is simple to use and to the point. No wonder it is rising past the ranks of DIGG – far more open and useful for business and entrepreneurs too. Top tip: open your account – its free and there are more and more reasons to get twittering.