But once you’ve made the connections and have the attention of those that have decided to follow you, what now? How can you add value to their Twitter experience and keep them engaged and listening? Here are some tips that just may help keep them from losing interest and leaving.

• Tweet Regularly: Tweeting on a daily basis is always a good idea. Make it a habit like checking your email everyday. People who haven’t heard anything in awhile will tend to get bored and unfollow people, moving onto greener pastures.

• Quality Over Quantity: I know, I know. We just said to tweet regularly and often. But before you send your 100th tweet for the day, take a minute to evaluate the content of the tweet. Sure your mom might find it very interesting to know that you ‘Just downed my fourth soy mocha espresso macchiato for the day,’ but will anyone else? Make sure the information you’re sending out is useful and interesting to the majority of your followers.

• Separate Personal and Business Accounts: You may want to consider setting up separate business and personal accounts. You don’t want your personal views reflecting negatively on your professional image. It’s easy to lose followers with just one tweet.

• Be Engaging: Reach out and get to know your followers. We all like to feel that we’re more than just some pixels on a followers list. Use Twitter to help build relationships and establish communication.

• You’re More Than Just a Link: With millions of people using Twitter everyday, it’s important to make yourself stand out from the stream. Don’t just post or retweet links. Keep it interesting and provide your thoughts and insight on the subject matter.

• Keep It Real: Don’t lose sight of who you are in the process. Don’t be afraid to just be yourself and don’t try to be something you’re not. People will appreciate you more for it.

Follow these tips and you’ll be on your way to building a loyal and lasting Twitter following!

And now that we have your attention, why not follow us on Twitter?

Many of our “100th Tweet thoughts” are still true today, and we’ve added some tools to make our Tweeting even better:

• Our main focus with Twitter remains keeping up with the Search Marketing community and their blogs, re-tweeting information and linking to posts that will help keep our clients updated on digital (and traditional) marketing trends.
• Each day, we highlight our five most recent Tweets on our website home page, ensuring constantly updated content for visitors to the site.
• We track our favorite blogs in Google Reader as the primary source of our Tweet material.
• Each time we update our blog, a Tweet goes out to notify our followers.
• Our tweets are used to update our status on our Facebook page.
• We use TweetDeck for desktop as a personal real-time browser to update our status and to follow the Twitter stream of lists, hash tags and friends.
• We registered g-3.me to use as our Custom Short Domain, then mapped that URL to bit.ly pro. This allows all of our Group 3 Solutions Tweets to be branded with the g-3.me shortened URL.
• Each week or so, we compile our messages into a Tweet roundup blog post.

Has our Tweeting been a game changer for us? Not really. But it has allowed us to improve our knowledge of the real-time information network as we assist our healthcare vertical clients in their social efforts and introduce business-to-business clients to how they can enhance their marketing program with social networking.

Where is real-time information networking heading? Let’s take a look at what is happening in the ever-changing field, and what others are saying.

• Real-Time Search. We think Twitter, and other services like it, will continue to have an impact on search engine marketing, with real-time search results becoming increasingly important in the future. Danny Sullivan, the authority on SEO industry reporting, took an early look at Google’s real-time efforts. Here’s Google’s page on the topic, and Bing has information here.
• Social Media Marketing. As marketers seek to tap into the 120 million or so Twitter users (as of July 2010), new advertising companies are being formed, small agencies are expanding their offerings, and larger ones are buying these smaller firms or establishing their own social marketing divisions. “Ad spending on social networks worldwide is expected to rise 14% this year (2010) to $2.5 billion,” according to research firm eMarketer. “Although social media represents only a fraction of the $55 billion online-ad market, it is one of the fastest-growing segments,” reports the Wall Street Journal.
• Multimedia. ReadWriteWeb reports that Twitter may soon be displaying images and video inline, perhaps “betting that 140 characters just isn’t enough anymore.”
• Real-Time Advertising. Is Twitter best for public relations, or will the new advertising platform be better for ROI? Mashable suggests keeping in mind the affinity already built with Twitter as you consider going to Sponsored Tweets or other advertising opportunities on the service.
• Competition. Location-Based Social Networks (LBSN) such as Foursquare may vie for marketers dollars with Twitter. “The time for marketers to get involved with LBSNs is coming,” Forrester says.

So … a lot has changed while other aspects have stayed the same between our 100th and 1000th Tweets. What will change as we work toward 2000 Tweets? Follow us on Twitter to find out!

“I’m … sitting … on … the … patio,” tweets the dad to tweak his son.

“I know you’re sitting on the patio …”

This exchange in the Verizon Wireless commercial at right personifies our own early skepticism about Twitter. From a business standpoint, we thought, does anyone care if we’re sitting on the patio, or eating soup at the deli, or completing any of life’s other simple tasks?

But 500 tweets or so later, are we starting to see the value in Twitter? We’ve blogged before about our journey … here and here. To be sure, we still don’t know (like most marketers) exactly how the microblogger is going to monetize its platform and thus ensure long-term stability (though recent agreements with Google and Bing highlight the possibilities). Likewise, we don’t know for sure how we or our clients will capitalize on the audience.

We are, however, starting to see the light. So what changed our minds? Here are a few thoughts from others, and a few of the ways we are finding value in Twitter.

• The More the Merrier. As more people are turned on to Twitter, innovators will find ways to bring buyers and sellers together. “Like the telephone, fax or e-mail, I believe the value of Twitter grows with its user-base,” writes Frank Strong. If the buyers are there, the sellers will be as well.
• “All the Kids are Doing It.” Marketers are having great success conversing with their customers via Facebook, which started out on college campuses a few years ago. Of course, simply launching a Facebook page is no guarantee of social media success for any company. But Facebook is proving that what works on campus can have potential for business. Today, college professors are seeing the value in Twitter. For example, at Purdue, they’re using Twitter to “backchannel during class,” says Mashable, “allowing students to comment on the class as it proceeds.” It seems that Twitter could likely continue to follow Facebook from campus to the mainstream.
• Twitter Is Easy. Though it is a little worrisome to him in that he likes to blog, Jeff Jarvis says he is “twittering more and blogging less. Twitter satisfies my desire to share.” As people get used to condensing their thoughts into 140 characters, more of them are likely to take up tweeting.
• News Aggregation. We share the son’s view from the Verizon ad: We don’t care that you’re on the patio. But professionals we follow are great sources of interesting information about the various industries we track. And we ourselves serve as aggregators, posting daily tweets about Search Engine Marketing, offline advertising and Kansas City happenings. Those tweets are then shared on our blog (we use Twitter Widget Pro) and on the news section of our home page, keeping our followers informed and our website supplied with fresh daily headlines. Then, on a weekly basis, we compile those tweets into a Tweet Roundup and post it on our blog.

So go ahead, get off the patio. Create a Twitter account, post some tweets … and please feel free to follow Group 3 Solutions while you’re at it!

Twitter Widget Pro

More and more companies are using microblogging services like Twitter to keep in touch with their target audiences. So surely there must be a way to integrate your Twitter feed with your WordPress blog, right? Right! Meet Twitter Widget Pro. This little gem adds a widget item to your blog that you can then effortlessly add to the sidebar of any widget-enabled theme. Just add the widget to a sidebar (Appearance > Widgets) tell the widget the name of your Twitter account (no password required), set a few options and you’re golden. The widget is even smart enough to know if Twitter is unavailable and can display a message instead of just sitting there trying to load forever. And with heavily burdened Web 2.0 sites like Twitter occasionally having outages, you really have to love some good old-fashioned fault tolerance. As a bonus, the widget’s HTML output is heavily laden with CSS selectors so your web guys can style it however you need (if necessary).

Check out the Twitter Widget Pro plugin home page for more information or to download it yourself. As usual, don’t forget to donate to the author!

Next time we’ll cover Wordbook, a great tool to help add your blog posts to your Facebook stream.

So, one hundred tweets later, we thought we’d share what we’ve learned. (Note: For our 100th tweet, we’re pointing our 140-character post to this blog entry about our 100th tweet. Hope we don’t get caught in an infinite loop somewhere!)

By the way, we’re not the only ones just catching on to Twitter. Though it has been around since 2006, Twitter’s recent growth has been phenomenal. In June 2009, Sysomos reported that 72.5% of Twitter users had joined the service in the past five months. That’s a pretty big wave.

Here’s a few of the ways we’re using Twitter:

• We’re joining the discussion on Twitter by following about 25 blogs and commenting, re-tweeting and linking to posts that will help our clients in their traditional and digital marketing efforts.
• We’re highlighting our tweets on the home page of our newly launched site, Group 3 Solutions. This is an efficient way to update our home page on a daily basis.
• Each time we update our blog, a tweet goes out to notify our followers.
• Our tweets are used to update our status on our Facebook page.
• We’re using tools like the ones listed in this Wall Street Journal article to help enhance our Twitter experience.
• We’re using the URL shortener bit.ly to include links in our posts and to track how often the links are followed.

Hey, why not follow us on Twitter?

• 21% (One Fifth) of Twitter accounts are empty placeholders.
• Nearly 94% of all Twitter accounts have less than 100 followers.
• Half of all Twitter users are not “active.”
• A small minority creates most of the activity.
• The cities with the biggest Twitter populations are New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, San Francisco, and Boston.

Check out Rohit’s great breakdown here.

Twitter and other social media are like going to a cocktail party … I expect to talk to lots of people, care about what some of them have to say, filter a lot of personal stuff that doesn’t affect me while looking interested (how rude!), and come away – if not inebriated – with a few nuggets of great information, some great new contacts, and an idea or two out of the social interaction we have in a group that size. This dynamic – and EVERY networking event you’ve ever attended – is very similar to consistent use of social media in a targeted fashion. Assuming you accept the premise that the cocktail party is like using Twitter…would you skip the cocktail party with your colleagues and new people you don’t know, because some of what you might hear is irrelevant to you? Aren’t the pieces of good information, “intel”, and new contacts worth the filtering you have to do? I personally believe it is, so will choose to close this blog entry and go tweet about it.

Great analogy, Rob. Now I’m gonna go Tweet about it. Wait, I’m not Tweeting yet. Is @twitterrockstar still available?