1. Use it to create a brand image for your name or company
2. Find people with similar interests
3. Find local users
4. Discover great causes in your location
5. Give yourself exposure to people that you might not otherwise have found
6. Look up the experts and get some information
7. Use a directory for research and analysis

There ya go. There are dozens of directories for twitter – twitter list directories, twitter hubs, twitter by location and so on down the line. There really are endless reasons to use a twitter directory. What’s your reason?

We will not be posting over the holiday season – next post, January 4th, 2010. See you in the New Year. Be safe and enjoy.

Twitter is a useful tool for productivity, promotion, search and community but with a large user base that’s growing every day, I bet you never thought of a few ways Twitter can help you for Christmas.

Here’s a list of a few simple things you can do. With so many tools and profiles, I’ll let you discover those needles in a haystack and give you a few that I’ve found.

1. find your presents for a deal, perhaps using cheaptweet
2. discover last minute vacation deals
3. find or arrange great events – you can use twitvite for a simple tweetup
4. track santa at Norad
5. discover and find great Christmas recipes
6. stuck for great gift ideas – try a twitter search engine like twazzup and get realtime ideas and answers
7. share and enjoy the spirit
8. promote your favorite charity
9. find organizations in need of a volunteer
10. send a card via twitter, instead of using snail or email

It seems that life is getting more and more easy if you use the tools we are given to your advantage. Give it a try and you can continue to use these ideas for the remainder of the year.

I’d love it if you shares your Christmas twitter use in our comment thread.

1. want Christmas tips – follow @christmas on Twitter
2. want Christmas cheer – here’s a good list of fun people to follow
3. change your Twitter background & blog theme to a nice seasonal theme
4. put up a nice seasonal avatar
5. change your blog header
6. add a follow me button to your blog with a Christmas theme.
7. write some great Christmas content for your users
8. do keyword research and optimize your postings
9. use Twitter and other social media to search for users that are “looking for something” – don’t wait for your audience to come to you
10. send out some free gifts or deals to your online friends and audience
11. donate and promote a charity on your site this season – and then do it all year round
12. whether you get into the Christmas spirit or not – spread some Christmas cheer anyway

There you have it – twelve twitter twips for christmas to make your audience a little more festive.

simple siment – do one thing from this list to get in the spirit time: 5 minutes or less

keep your tweets short

If you leave people room to retweet they are more likely to do it. Things have to be easier for everyone. Think about it! You need to at least leave enough space for the characters in your user name plus 3 for the RT and space between. But…what if they want to comment too. Give them a chance to say something in return. Try it. I think you will find an increase in your retweets.

say things worth retweeting

If you just tweet fluff, nobody is going to retweet it. It reflects them too. So, take the time to think about what you tweet, blog, link to and share on the web as a standard rule of thumb. Adding a relevant #hashtag may help too. If you are retweeting something with a link, make sure it is from a reliable source.

Thinking about what you say will go a long way. While tweeting catchy titles and being clever might help, general quality content is also key. If you don’t know how create great sentences, check out the quality tweeters in your community and start to emulate the type of messages they get out. Practice will make it a habit.

retweet your community

Sounds obvious, doesn’t it? But if you don’t take the time visiting your community, checking out their websites, viewing tweets and sharing them with others they are less likely to pay attention to you. Gratitude goes a long way and relationships is what it is all about. A few simple tweets every day will help you build a reputation as a member that participates and shares.

simple siment – retweet 3 people every day this week.

Those three things will definitely increase your retweets. If you want to get retweeted more just practice them on a regular basis.

Manual Removal of Followers – this is by far my favorite and perhaps the most effective way to create a great community of followers and reduce your spam. Not only do I unfollow the users that send excessive self promotion and endless tweets manually but I also manually choose who I follow to reduce twitter spam dramatically from the onset of my relationship with a follower.

I simply go into my list of followers, once or twice a week and look through each user. The name and profile offer me a hint – if they are internet marketers with no location, no value added tweets, no URL or bio it gives me a pretty good idea.

simple siment – go into your follower list and screen all your recent followers. If you do this on a regular basis the payoff is a clean twitter stream.

Prevention is the best medicine!

Spam Cleaning Tools – there are plenty of spam cleaning tools that will help reduce though not eliminate all those spammers. If someone is a real person, they can still send you crappy tweets. Only by reading them will you be able to determine the quality.

two cents - Two tools great spam cleaners are Twerp Scan and Tweetblocker. There are many to choose from. If you have a large account it will take a while to tabulate and you will still have to manually review – nothing is perfect.

simple siments – pick a spam cleaner and run it. Go through the accounts with a low grade and mass unfollow. Only do this once you look at the account.

Report Abuse – many people don’t take the time to report abusers. Perhaps they don’t want to be a fink – which stems from school days. There is nothing wrong with making your Twitter experience a better  one – it helps your community. Twitter now has built in tools to block and report spam, which helps them determine what accounts should be banished. The downside is that users that get blocked will often set up another account and start the process again.

Without going overboard those three things along with basic common sense in looking for the warning signs of a bad follower will help you keep your spam down and remove the clutter from your community. It’s not foolproof but to reduce twitter spam takes a little bit of patience and persistence. You will thank yourself for making the effort.

After mentioning some tips and ideas to staying safe on Twitter and to keep your Twitter account safe it is only fair to discuss general safety on the web.

For the most part, people forget to do many things on the web because it changes so quickly. Many of us don’t understand all the general steps but there are some simple things that can help you remain safe when you use the internet.

While some are just common sense, they are still often forgotten. Here’s a few things worth dealing with:

1. Anti-virus software – Make sure you have an anti-virus program running on your computer. There are many free ones like AVG that provide excellent protection. Make sure you set up frequent scans – at least once a week.
2. Firewall - don’t stop at just anti-virus, learn about firewalls both software and hardware to keep your computer and files safe from attack.
3. Passwords - change them frequently. Use numbers, lower case and uppercase. Don’t have just one password for everything and don’t use auto complete. Be careful on public computers.
4. Educate Yourself – take a little bit of time every week and read up on the things that will help keep you secure. Learn about the settings and software that makes your computer and the internet – tick. Learn about scams and what smart web browsing is all about. Be especially careful with email and think about where you are surfing.
5. Update Your Operating System – you know those annoying little pop ups that say “please update your software” click here to cancel or okay. You really should have them on auto-update and you really should update your operating system files. They have security patches and lots of goodies to keep the vulnerable areas of your computer protected. Don’t let this lapse.
6. Clean Your Computer – I don’t mean a bit of dusting, though cleaning it from dust will protect it. Play with your settings. Do file clean outs optimize it. But for web safety try setting your browser to clear the cache and search history to protect from third party cookies (sites linked to the site you are looking at). You could consider searching from a proxy to remain anonymous.
7. Careful with attachments – don’t just open them. Make sure your anti-virus is scanning them so they are virus free. If you don’t have settings to do this automatically, get in the habit of doing this yourself.
8. Consider a Safer Browser – try using Mozilla, Chrome or a variety of other browsers instead of Internet Explorer which has some know security vulnerabilities and is targeted by hackers.
9. Do not just randomly share personal details on line – make sure you really are dealing with an honest and real company or business. Use common sense when giving out numbers and other information about yourself.

As you can see there is a theme in this safety that involves two things education and awareness. The internet, though a wonderful source of entertainment, resources and connectivity can be a dangerous place if you don’t learn to conquer the problems you are faced with. Remember, these problems are ever changing, so the more you educate, the easier it will be to adapt.

Don’t think things can’t happen to you – I know well known internet marketers that have had their accounts breached because they didn’t change the password. That’s minor compared to your personal safety.

1. Don’t tell people where or when you are going out – think about it. The same goes for your friends – keep them anonymous. If someone is savvy enough to find out your location and you tell them you are going away for the weekend – they could target your house for a theft for instance.
2. Hide your year of birth – this is one way that hackers can get into accounts or even look for your social security number or banking details since your date of birth is a proof of identity.
3. Consider a private account of select followers – now that’s a tight knit community that will be targeted and value added.
4. Don’t attract attention with provocative photos and comments unless you remain anonymous.
5. Restrict who you deliver your tweets to! If you only tweet certain information to the people you trust, you will be in a much more secure environment.
6. Never give out your password or account details for anything.
7. Use common sense. Verify information – be careful what you think is true. Don’t just believe everything you hear or read, check it out to keep yourself informed and safe.
8. Be careful what type of attention you attract – if you want to keep the bad guys away, show them that you are competent and not an easy target. Confidence scares away the people that you don’t want.
9. Don’t give out your specific location, address details or phone numbers to just anyone.
10. Tweet Ups – if you are going to an event arranged from Twitter, make sure it is real and verified. Make sure more than a few people are going and tell someone where and when you are going and returning. Carry your phone with you and take the correct precautions. Don’t meet in a private place, especially for the first time.

Take time to practice safety. Just like learning to look both ways before you cross the street, eventually you will figure it out and be safer. The same goes for social media and online activities – practice makes perfect. Simple changes can make a difference.

simple siment – go and check your account details at your major social media sites and profiles and remove the public information that could compromise you. Start practicing common sense with your tweeting.

Good things happen in threes, so to complete the safety theme, next week we will talk about safety on the web with some simple steps you can take to ensure your protection.

Recently there was a Twitter phising scam trying to hack users passwords with DMs. There is always a chance that someone will scam you, especially when media goes mainstream. As with anything in life and on the web you should take proper security cautions.

Phishing noun ~ fraudulent process of attempting to acquire sensitive information such as user names / numbers or passwords (i.e. banking info, email password)

Here’s what you can do to protect your Twitter Account:

1. Change your password frequently
2. Make your password hard to crack by mixing it up with upper case, lowercase and numbers
3. Don’t share your password (so many people don’t get this one)
4. Don’t let people know the year you are born
5. Don’t click on links from people you don’t know or trust (and even if you know them, consider opening a new window and typing in the link yourself.
6. Make sure your internet connection is secure – learn what you can do to make it safer.
7. Be careful about what you say online, remember – the whole world can see it if they want to.
8. Using a client, preferably a desktop client will control the ability to reach your account details.
9. Use a password protection program on your computer and change the main password frequently.
10. Backup all of your information
11. Monitor and warn other users (in a friendly way) – awareness and education goes a long way
12. Remove Friends that post suspicious links
13. Delete funny looking posts from your account to protect other people from clicking on the link too.

There you go, lucky 13 to keep your account safe. Next time we will explore keeping yourself safe on Twitter.

Rule 1 – Remove Pronouns and Articles

If you remove your The’s and I’s it is still understood. Saving characters is important.

Rule 2 – Abbreviate and use contractions

For instance with becomes w/, can not becomes can’t, one becomes 1, and becomes + – every character counts.

Rule 3 – Stick to one or two points

People like brevity and will get confused if you try to fit too much information in a tweet. Sticking to the point with just information rather than opinions will stimulate dialogue.

Rule 4 – Allow room for retweeting

As a rule of thumb, I try to leave the number of characters in my username plus 3 so people can retweet me RT @ToolsForTwits is 17 characters. If I can fit my tweets in 100 characters, people can respond and have their say with 23 characters.

Rule 5 – Use an URL shortener for links

Sounds obvious but many people don’t do this. Most Twitter Clients have a built in URL shortner but there are dozens to choose from and it only takes a couple seconds.

Rule 6 – Subject & Verb

Good sentences require a strong subject and an excellent verb. Choose wisely and use a thesaurus.

There’s a 6 pack of solid rules to create good tweets. Think shortcut, room for retweet, and ask yourself what is the point of my tweet. It will go a long way in reaching your community. You can tweet effectively with much less than 140 characters – practice will make perfect.