Everyone is following the yellow brick road to see the Twitter of Oz lately. Twitter is the biggest thing to happen to the internet and social networking since Facebook and MySpace.

Celebs are tweeting, marketers are twittering, normal people are turning into Tweeps and it’s all going off big time. It’s great, but what is it? Well it’s something called micro blogging. It’s a short sharp blurt out no longer than 140 characters. It was original supposed to answer the question:

What are you doing right now?

It’s odd that it has taken off really because a lot of the time all you see is one half of the conversation, if you follow someone then you see the messages they put out when they tweet in general, but look at their profile and you see all their tweets even the ones they sent to someone else, however you don’t get to see the other half of the conversation. And then of course someone will ReTweet (RT) someone else’s tweet and you get another snapshot of something they were twittering about. It can be confusing at times, it’s like walking around with one eye closed, it’s odd – but you can get used to it.

With a good twitter app like TweetDeck or Twirl you can do a lot of clever things, Reply, ReTweet, Direct Message or make someone a favourite. You can group your message list, look people up and filter them out. It’s all very clever and can be addictive…. but… it’s no good without an audience.

Your audience are the people who follow you, you are part of the audience of the people you are following. And just to make it very confusing the people you follow can also follow you. Only your followers get to see your tweets but you can reply to anyone the only restriction is you can only direct message those who are following you.

Building your audience is key to your twitter success and there are many reported methods of doing it. If you google it you will find that there are a few ‘autopilot’ schemes that proclaim to get you lots of followers. Over time most of these have been exposed as using spam techniques and if they do actually attract followers they tend to be bots and of no use to you as an audience.

The safest method to use but by far the longest way of doing it is to follow other people. Decide what you want to twitter about, then start to search for topics on your chosen subject at twitter.com Then, when you have found some people you like the sound of, click the start following button. Start tweeting yourself putting out good quality info about your subject and interject it with your own thoughts and of course what you are doing about it. A good proportion of the people you follow will follow you back if they like what they see. This is called the organic method, it’s growing an audience without the aid of (or interference from) other methods. The organic method is slow, not all the people you follow will reciprocate so you have to follow a lot before your audience grows. By way of natural selection you will be followed by others just because you are tweeting good stuff so keep your quality of info up and be a regular twitterer.

On the subject of growing an audience I have taken part in a scheme based on the pyramid model over at John Cow. There is no selling involved and it’s free so don’t worry. Basically you agree to follow five people me and John Cow being two of them and then you promote the link that the system gives you. The idea is you promote and get five followers, then those five get five and so on. It sounds good – but to tell you the truth it’s not working too well for me, but perhaps that’s because I haven’t really asked anybody to follow the link yet. Give it ago – in theory the result should be good for all concerned and it doesn’t cost anything and you aren’t contributing to twitter spam.

I’m aso about to trial TwitterRocket from upstart blogger. I’ll let you know how that goes in another post.