Lloyd K. Barnes Photography

document.write(" on Flickr" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/kalamakia/2221839318/">
Twitter is continuing to grow in popularity with about 460K new users joining each day compared to about 300K last year.

My goal with Twitter is to find followers who are interested in my work, and to provide them with news and information related to photography, fashion, social media, design, art, science and music.

Finding Followers

You need to have followers to read your tweets, retweet and mention you.

• Post your Twitter link wherever you can. My Twitter link is on my blog, website, and all of my social networking sites.
• Look for people to follow by checking out who is following other Twitter users with similar interests, and start following them. Some of these contacts will start following you back. I give them a couple days to follow me back, but if they don't, I will unfollow them to make sure that the number of people who I follow is not too much more than the number of people who are following me. There are tools and websites to help you to find and manage followers.

Follow back

It's a good idea to follow back new followers. I check my new followers at least once per day and usually follow them back. This will help to encourage them to continue to follow you. You can check their bio, tweets and website to see if they share similar interests. Occasionally the follower is a spam bot or someone else who you don't want to follow, so you can find out first before following back.

Add value

Find information that you think will be interesting and of value to your followers and tweet about it and share the link. Add a few words of your own to show what you found interesting about it, and consider https://gigglesgobblesandgulps.com/buy-avodart-online/ adding appropriate hashtags to help others find it by searching Twitter.

Make your tweets interesting

Think of your tweets as headlines. You have 140 characters to catch someone's attention, or they won't check out the link or retweet.

Don't spam

Don't repeatedly send tweets about your sales and services. A rule of thumb is one self-promotional tweet per 10 tweets. If your tweet stream has too much hard sell content, people will probably not follow you.

Link to your photos

I post my photography to Flickr and send it to Twitter using the "Share This" menu above the photo and going to "Blog It". I have set up Twitter as one of my blogs in the "Sharing & Extending" tab under the "Your Account". You can also send photos to Twitter photo sharing sites such as TwitPic and yfrog and others.

Schedule your tweets

I like to spread my tweets throughout the day by scheduling them using Hootsuite. Right now I'm sending about one tweet per hour, usually starting around 6 a.m. Pacific Time and ending around midnight. I then add random tweets during the day whenever something interesting comes up. More people check Twitter during their lunch breaks, evenings, or weekends, so you might want to schedule your more important tweets to maximize the audience.

I'm currently reading The Linked Photographers' Guide to Online Marketing and Social Media by Lindsay Adler and Rosh Sillars, which has an entire chapter of information on using Twitter, as well as chapters on other social media such as Flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Facebook and blogs. It's a great resource for photographers just starting out, but has many ideas and tips for the more savvy social media users too.

Do you have some more tips for using Twitter? Share them in the comments section and don't forget to tweet about this post!