1) Set Up. Customization is the key to pulling people in. Of course, putting a picture up is important. People usually don't follow people without pictures for fear of that person constantly spamming them. Another useful way of gaining attention is by including a logo or slogan. With Twitter growing by the day, being able to stand out in a crowd is vital.

2) Who to follow. Twitter allows you to find people to follow based on your interests. First and foremost, when choosing who you're going to follow, make sure those individuals regularly update respective feeds and aren't just casual users. When starting out, it's easy to want to follow as many random people as possible hoping they'll follow you back. However, sticking to a specific audience in the beginning can prove more beneficial.

3) Gaining followers. Unlike on Facebook, where you 'friend' people, wait for them to accept it, and watch you friend list grow, in order to keep up with people on Twitter you have to follow them and get them to follow you. This can at first seem like a daunting process, but it gets easier once you understand the 'give and take' nature of the following process. Of course in order to gain followers, you have to be the follower first. Making use of Twitter's tools and meeting people outside of the social network sphere will definitely gain you those followers.

4) Communicating. The most important part of Twitter and any social network is, of course, communicating, especially communicating effectively. On Twitter, learning how to use hashtags is crucial. For example, if tweeting about social media, you would simply use the two words in a regular sentence but type it as #socialmedia. Doing this makes your tweets easier to find. When tweeting, don't overdo it. Updating every two minutes about the same thing is basically the same as spamming. Your goal is to refresh people, not annoy them.

5) Automating. Keeping up with all the tweets, hashtags, RT's, even trending topics can seem like quite a load to keep track of. This is also a reason why many real estate agents are turned off at the notion of using a social networking site to find potential clients. Thankfully, there are ways to applications such as EasyTweets, Tweetbacks, and Twitterfon that allow you to automate specific tasks. If you want to be alerted of people using certain keywords, these are the applications to go with.

6) Sharing Pictures. Twitpic is a useful means of posting pictures, such as local listings, directly from your phone onto Twitter. Use Tinyurl.com when linking to make your URL's shorter.

Remember who your target audience is and be sure to thank the ones who retweet and mention your products.

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