On the 6th day of Christmas JCK rolled the dice and gave me amazing Twitter advice

Are you 1 of the 90% of people that are not fully utilising everything Twitter can offer, or 1 of the 10% that actually get it and are actually making it work for you. Well with now over 140 million people on Twitter, it still remains one of the Social Media platforms that can really reap rewards for you if you start using it with a goal in mind.

To my mind Twitter is all about creating your own community and enabling conversations and that should be your most important goal, even if those conversations are taken offline or on to another medium a lot of them can be started on Twitter if you spend some time growing your audience and facilitating that conversation.

One of the questions that we get asked the most isn’t ‘what is a hashtag’ but more ‘ how do I get an audience – where do I go to find people’

There used to be a lot of tools in this area, but one by one they are disappearing fast, but there are still some strong players out there that we continue to use. Our advice is that you spend a bit of time on these sites so that you can slowly extend your community with people that will engage with you, so in no particular order

Wefollow is a directory of interests, so you can follow people that are interested in a particular subject, this can be really useful if you are selling to a certain prospect that you know is interested in something specific that you cater to.

Twellow is another directory where you can search for Twitter users in a certain geographic area.

Tweepz is fantastic, it will actually search on peoples bio’s for you so again if you are selling to a particular sector or location this is a fantastic tool

Justtweetit again is a directory of Tweeters organised by categories.

Once you have spent some time growing your audience, at certain times you may want to cull a few to keep yourself within the 10% ratio of followers V following. The tool that will enable you to start this process is

FriendorFollow – This is a great tool for finding out who isn’t following you back. This is where you can start to see who isn’t following you, you can perhaps start a conversation with them or cull them!

Part of your Social Media time should be spent in creating your community, after all, you’re spending time creating great content, don’t you want to tweet it out to an extended, engaged audience?