In the past few weeks I have been hearing more and more people saying that Twitter is useless. For those of you who are not too familiar with Twitter I recommend reading my write-up on the service or better yet creating an account on twitter.com and start diving in. For those of you feel that Twitter is useless and that it drives very little traffic, here is what you are probably doing wrong:

You have too few friends. If you have no friends on Twitter and you continuously twit messages, of course you aren’t going to get any traffic. You need to add friends that you know or that may benefit from your twits. That way when you link to a website, your friends see it and visit it. If they like it, they may consider linking to it from their twitter account or their website.

You need to connect your blog to Twitter. If you have a blog and you are looking to leverage Twitter then you need to add your blog to it. This way every time you make a post it gets sent to all your Twitter friends who can help increase your traffic. Although this sounds obvious, it seems that tons of people don’t do this. There are many ways to link your blog; Twitterfeed is just one you might check out.

You aren’t leveraging your website traffic. You can connect your Twitter profile to your website. That way all your twits appear on your website and others also start following your twits. You’ll be amazed on how this can drastically increase your twitter traffic because some people will not follow your website, but they will follow your twitter profile. Follow Search Engine Land On Twitter provides some tips here, and Twitter offers badges you can put on your site here.

If you think Twitter is useless, I recommend trying these things out. You should see a good increase in traffic. Think of Twitter like a RSS reader where users follow tons of people. If you want to succeed, you need to try to get many people to follow you just like how you want tons of people to subscribe to your blog’s RSS feed.

Neil Patel is co-founder and CTO of ACS and writes regularly on social media issues through the company’s blog, Pronet Advertising. The Let’s Get Social column appears Tuesdays at Search Engine Land.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

Related Topics: Search & Social | Social Media Marketing