Currently we are in the process of learning how to use Twitter so we can make new friends, broaden out sphere of influence and blow our own horn, in order to be more successful.

Since I am no authority on Twitter, I’m going to turn to stand in tech evangelist, entrepreneur and Twitter guru Guy Kawasakit to tell you which tools to use and how to use them.

In Looking for Mr. Goodtweet: How to Pick Up Followers on Twitter, Kawasaki provides……

“Tip 8: Use the right tools. At the end of the day, you either have many followers or you don’t. A good effort doesn’t count, so you might as well use the right tools to make picking up followers as easy as possible. Here’s what I use:Here’s what I use:

1. SocialToo. SocialToo provides a service that automatically follows everyone that you do. It also enables you to send them a nice welcome message. If you heed my advice to follow everyone who follows you, it’s indispensable. It can also inform you when someone has stopped following you too.
2. Twitthat. This is a Firefox button that you install by dragging onto your toolbar. You click on the button, and it grabs the link of the page you’re reading and creates a tweet with from the link. By default, it quotes the existing headline, but you already know you should blow that out.You can also create custom “actions”—meaning a snippet of text to precede your tweets. I made my custom action the simplest possible: “-”. I wish that a custom action wasn’t required, that the editing area was larger, and that Twitthat displayed a character count, but how can I complain about something that’s free and indispensable?
   

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   Update: check out a product called Adjix. It works like Twitthat plus it doesn’t require a custom action, the editing area is large, and it displays the character count. It also shows how many people clicked on each link.

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3. TweetDeck. TweetDeck is an Adobe Air application that front ends Twitter. You can open multiple panes on it with specialized purposes like displaying your direct messages and custom searches. These custom searches enable you to create a “dashboard” to Twitter.
   

   TweetDeck is what I use for custom searches. I have a pane with this custom search (brackets not included): [Guykawasaki OR Alltop OR “Guy Kawasaki” -Alltop.com]. This finds all instances where people mention “Guykawasaki” as well as my own tweets because they are from “@guykawasaki” and “Alltop” plus it removes all tweets with “Alltop.com” (Notice that there’s a minus sign before “Alltop.com” and you must capitalize the “OR”.). I remove tweets containing “Alltop.com” because hundreds of people evangelize Alltop news posts by using this Twitterfeed (see below).

   You can also do custom searches like this at the Twitter site by clicking here, but the TweetDeck interface is much prettier.

4. Twellow. Twellow is a site that categorizes people according to their interests by monitoring their public messages. Its categories include accounting, advertising, marketing, real estate, and science. You can use it to find people who are interested in the same topics you are. Here is an example of the people in the beer category (Courtesy of @ducttape).
5. Twittelator Pro. This can provide the same custom search results as TweetDeck, so I use it whenever I’m not on my MacBook.

6. Posterous. Don’t click on the link. Instead, send an email to post@posterous.com with a photo, video, or audio clip attached. Posterous will create a blog for you and post the photo, video, or audio. You can even include the HTML embed snippet from video sites like YouTube, and Posterous will embed the player. Your subject line becomes the headline of the posting, and the body of the email becomes the posting itself. Then set your Posterous blog to automatically post to your Twitter account, and voila!, you have pictures, video, and audio in your tweets. This is how I tweeted the showerhead picture from the Singapore Airlines lounge. The Posterous FAQ explains it all. An alternative for posting pictures is TwitPic. It is also quite easy to use to tweet pictures, and it is integrated with TweetDeck.
7. Twitterfeed. This website enables you to automatically post RSS feeds as tweets. I use it, for example, to automatically post all Truemors posts as if they were tweets from me. When you really trust a site’s feeds, I recommend that you incorporate Twitterfeed to reduce the burden of manually finding good content.”

I’m usually an “early adopter“.  I’m pretty much at the front of the line for new technology, cool gadgets, new forms of automation and new platforms.  But I’ve been slow to get up to speed on Twitter and I see that is a big mistake. Twitter is changing the world of marketing ourselves as we know it. Twitter is where it’s at and we all better get there soon.

I’m planning a crash course for myself on how to use Twitter most effectively to leverage the task of getting  known far and wide in the blogosphere with a ripple effect into the real world.

So let’s learn a little more about Twitter, shall we?

Guy Kawasaki is a tech evangelist and way ahead of you and me, probably, in being an early adopter of effective technology. Kawasaki, as we’ve noted, is sold on Twitter and has a lot to say about it.

In Kawasaki’s blog How to Change the World: MediaOnTwitter , he says: “Came across a very useful wiki called MediaOnTwitter. This wiki contains the a list of the reporters, journalists, and bloggers on Twitter. You can use this wiki in two ways:

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