Twitter is the latest social media craze so I thought I would hop onto the crazy train and check it out what all the buzz was. Some people swear by it while others feel it’s a huge time sink. There’s a lot of views about Twitter and it’s interesting to hear out both sides.

I have to admit I agree with both sides. I know that sounds completely stupid. How in the world can you agree with both sides?

Before we get too far I need to lay down a base understanding of Twitter for everyone. Beyond the known that twitter is about posting 140 characters stating what you’re doing, it really is an excellent tool to let people know you as a person. Wait… let’s review that. ALL social media’s purpose for human-to-human interaction with the personality and humanity of you and/or your brand. (I really need to get into this on a different blog post.)

If you’re going onto social media for the sole purpose of selling something, then good luck. You’ll be treated like a leper in a crowded street in the dark ages.

In short: the secret to my Twitter sucess is a 70/30 breakdown. 70% of the time it’s me talking and 30% of the time my agenda. Other days it’s an 80/20 or 90/10 or 60/40. The point is that each day it needs to be different and interesting with you as the main focus.

You are the secret ingredient, because there is no one like you and there will never be another of you. A lot of businesses are afraid of letting people see the “person” side of the business. They error too much on the side of presenting the professional side of the business. Really we could call this the boring side of the business. It lacks personaility, pizazz, humor, and… you.

Let’s face it, business is not business without people. That goes both ways. People don’t buy products they buy people. No matter how good your business is without you there will be no goods or services sold or bought.

Alright… so how does one really get 1,000 followers in a week or so?

I used Tweet Later (tweetlater.com) to schedule out messages. I never put them out on even times. Looks too fake.

I also tweeted a lot of quotes and articles that I found interesting to me and those who follow me.

What always boosted my followers were political articles and especially articles on how to gain more twitter followers or twitter tools. With Politics though you need to remain neutral as much as possible, unless you’re audience is your preferred political view point or you just like to stir up the pot for the heck of it.

Sharing articles on how to gain twitter followers is always a hot topic.

Using TweetLater I set my account to auto follow and went through and followed people that were tweeting on things that I wanted to target.

Those people typically have their account set to auto follow. You’ll gain a lot of followers and for a while your following to followers ratio will be lopsided.

I also would follow those who have more than 10,000 followers and they are not a spammer. The person needs to be a real, living, breathing, interacting human. I would follow their followers and also reply to their posts creating conversation. After all, if you can’t talk to the people you are following then what’s the point of following them?

TweetLater also has a setting that lets you auto unfollow those who unfollow you. Very handy!

Next I went through my list and used a tool to unfollow all those who were not following me back. That usually will only dump about 1/3 of your followings which will them bring you down to a healthy following-to-followers ratio.

VERY IMPORTANT: if you find someone that is very interesting and they are not following you and they have a healthy community do not unfollow them. Interact with them because this is where you will get the most organic followers you could ever ask for.

Once I hit about 300 followers it started to grow. after about 500 followers I was gaining almost 130 new followers a day.

I hope that helps you out. Leave a comment and I’ll be sure to add any more information that you need.

In closing Twitter’s main and just about only purpose is to connect people with people and let them share their life as 140 characters at a time. If you deviate too far from this path it could become a huge time sink. You’re agenda should be connecting with people and getting to know your audience to build a long and meaningful relationship with them. Not to promote your next hottest product or service.

Tags: twitter
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If you are in sales or marketing, you have probably come across this concept: “Facts tell and stories sell”.  Why is this true?  Before the written word, prehistoric peoples used stories, or what anthropologists call oral traditions, to pass down vital knowledge and information.  The knowledge and information in these stories was detrimental to the survival of these peoples.  Along with moral lessons, these stories contain facts: How and where to hunt game, when and where to plant crops, when to harvest crops, etc… Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: facts, Marketing, sales, stories
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Every excellent brand out there has a signature. Branding really is a simple complicated matter. Yeah that doesn’t make much sense, let me explain. Branding is simple in it’s concept but at times its complicated in its execution. Defining your brand can be hard, confusing, and down right challenging. We need to break branding down into is parts to understand it fully.
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Tags: Branding
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Author’s Note: Branding 101 will be a series of posts helping you to understand what branding is and how to create powerful branding within your company.

Branding for most is known as a really well designed logo. Whenever I’m speaking to a group of business owners and the question of branding is brought up most think of it as a logo, some colors placed together in an orderly fashion, or tagline. What most people are missing is that this is only the result of good or bad branding.

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Tags: Branding, branding 101, jocks, nerds, sales, sales funnel
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We’re in it deep. The bad times of the economy that is. Unemployment is up, job layoffs are becoming more and more of a common headline, and percentages are going down like a big boulder dropped into the water when it comes to corporate earnings. On every news channel all we here about are negative headlines of doom on the horizon as if America along with the world will never survive this economic melt down.

The people running the news channels want to tell you as a business there is no hope. I say tell them to shut up because what I’m going to share will open your eyes up as a business owner. What most business owners do not realize is that even though during the great depression unemployment was up and economy was looking like it was dead, there was a rise of millionaires. In fact so much so that during the great depression more millionaires came out of that era than any other era before and after that. Yes you heard me correctly! When all hell broke loose and the economy looked like it was dying there was a huge growth of people who were prospering.

How come this was happening? Value, vanity, and necessity.

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Tags: Branding, branding 101
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Our brand new website is up and running after many drafts of design. Over here at Veloce Media we have some great plans to roll out product services for small businesses, offer top talent media and marketing solutions all while planning our very first large scale software to launched in the next year. All we can say is it will be everything we have wanted in an integrated marketing platform.

For all of you out there that are new take the time to say hello.

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