If you have a follow – follow back twitter following plan then you already know that you get spam. This spam can fill up your Direct Message (DM) area on twitter. I have missed real DM’s because I receive hundreds of the DM’s spams a day.

Most of the DM spams are Auto DM’s sent when you follow someone. That has been discussed as a do not do for twitter. The rest are annoying games and bots created for twitter.

To avoid this spam you could go in to your DM area on twitter and individually delete each spam. That could be time consuming so I use a script that automatically removes DM spam.

Since using this and testing it with other large users we have been able to reclaim our DM area.

The script works with multiple accounts so if you have more then one account you can keep all of them clean. You can enter in keywords to be filtered out like “Mafia” or “Spy” which will be removed from your DM’s using the script.

If you think you don’t need this script now you will eventually as spam is on the rise on twitter.

*All purchases of this script will be donated to Blogathon today.

This post was not sponsored for Blogathon.

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Although social media is done online through sites like facebook, twitter and youtube there are times when you should really put a face to the user name. The human interaction adds to the knowing that person online as you can now picture them saying it. It also adds a bit of yes that person is a real person.

When twitter people get together it is called a tweetup.

If there has not been a tweetup in your area then it is not that difficult to setup one.

There are various sites to organize a tweetup here is a few…

• tweetup.ca
• EventBrite
• tweetup.org
• twtvite.com

You can even create a Facebook group and event for your twitter event.

Be sure to find a venue that is appropriate to your area and age group. The location should have wifi access as you will find that people will want to tweet at the event.

After being to a few tweetups I would suggest a quite place where there is space. I have found tweetups at loud bars to be counter productive and frustrating. If you want to get to know someone think of it like a first date and pick an appropriate location.

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If you do not have a blog you should get one ASAP. The most effective means of growing a community around your site or business is to have a blog. Each time you post on your blog you can then send traffic from twitter to that post. As blogs are not limited to 140 characters you can convey more complex and details in a blog post. Don’t spend to much time thinking about it you can get a free WordPress blog at wordpress.com. If you don’t have one go sign up for one now. Later on you can of course migrate to your own hosted WordPress blog but to get started a free one is a great way to start.

Now that you have a blog or you already had a blog you can hook it in to your twitter account.

To do that you will use another free service at twitterfeed.com. There are various plugins to publish posts but I find these not to be very reliable.

Sign up for a free account at twitterfeed.com and grab your RSS feed from your blog. If your not sure what that is you will see an orange logo appear in the address bar of your browser when your on your blog. Click on it and that will give you your RSS feed that you will then paste in to your twitterfeed.com account.

Once you have set all the features up you want in twitterfeed.com your blog will be hooked in to twitter and everytime you post something to your blog it will display in your twitter.

This post was not sponsored for Blogathon.

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As a busy person there are ways to semi automate your posts with twitter. If you can not dedicate a few minutes a day to twitter then block off a good 30 minutes per week to use a service like tweetlater.com or twaitter.com to map out several tweets for the week. I like twaitter because you can create recurring tweets if you plan on tweeting the same thing over and over again.

First, sign up for an account – it’s free and it’s easy. Make sure you get the time zone correct as you’ll be scheduling Tweets by time in a minute.

Once you’re in, you need to Add Your Account. After adding your account, you can add your Tweets.

Now if you automate there is a possiblity that you will not be there to have a conversation with people. So I do not suggest you automate to much as you may end  up missing people. There is some content that might work better then others for scheduling so test with this to see what will work best for your followers.

This post was not sponsored for Blogathon.

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When most people hear the phrase Keywords they think of SEO. On twitter people are constantly talking about things that are possibly related to your business. To find these people you will need to make a list of those keywords you commonly associate with your business.

For example for web hosting a keyword might be “recommend hosting” or “site is down”.

You can do a search for these keywords on the twitter site…

http://search.twitter.com

or alternatively you could open a new Search column in Tweetdeck if you are using it.

Try doing a search on some of the keywords and see if you can limit them to be more specific. Avoid being to generic as it will create more noise for yourself later.

Now you can go through and follow and respond to these people on twitter using the site or Tweetdeck.

NOTE: I do not suggest trying to sell them instead I would suggest providing advice as you are a expert in your field.

If you are using Tweetdeck you can leave the search column open and you will be notified anytime someone uses those keywords. You can have multiple columns for each search term or you can put them all in one using…

keywords 1 OR keywords 2 OR keywords 3

Where keywords would be your business keywords that are associated with your business.

If your not using Tweetdeck you can have your keywords emailed to you daily using a free service like http://www.tweetscan.com/. If you like RSS feeds instead you can also do a search at http://search.twitter.com/ and save the result as an RSS feed into your RSS reader.

This post was sponsored by Joyce Cherrier for Blogathon. Joyce is a Health and Fitness Coach who can help you get into shape. A healthy body means a healthy mind. You should check out her site.

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One of the tests I did while on twitter was to see the effect of changing my avatar frequently (every day) would have on followers and interaction with people.

Here is some of the creative avatars I had still using the company logo…

The results were interesting. My main avatar that I use gets the most responses to questions. So for consistency people will get use to looking for you avatar. On the flip side I found that changing the avatar over and over brought more traffic and comments on how much they liked the avatar.

I have been asked how do I make all these changes. It is all done in Photoshop using various tricks. If your not very comfortable with using it there are graphic designers for a few bucks that will help you make some variations on your avatar.

If your using a picture of yourself see if you can just put on a different hat each day or make a funny pose each day. Your avatar is not rocket science so don’t feel trapped to using just the one you started using.

This post was sponsored by Jeannette Duguay for Blogathon. Jeannette is a web developer who could help you with making a custom avatar she is also co-owner of techie networking site Tazzu. You should check out her site.

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