All The World's a Twitter

Twitter is quickly growing in popularity and giving social networks like MySpace and Facebook a run for their money. Twitter asks the simple question of its users "What are you doing?" and it's amazing that such a simple question has an unlimited amount of answers.

How does this apply to IMVU? Well for starters, it seems every day I run across another member of our community who has a Twitter account. Even IMVU Inc. has one and they use it to update us on important news from new client releases to Daily Outfit Contest themes. It's come to my attention what a great marketing opportunity this is both for each content creator personally, as well as the entire IMVU community.

Each person I find uses Twitter a bit differently. Me for example, I have a more personal twitter account in which I update friends and family of quite literally what I'm doing at any given moment of the day. Sometimes I throw in some IMVU related "tweets" but it's mostly your every day stuff. But others have taken their Twitter accounts to a more business type level. Developers like Pop, NickyRat, Ashantaey and DarkAngel5 use their accounts to do announcements of new products, freebie giveaways and more. And this marketing idea seems to be working well for them.

I think it's important that the community work together in support of our virtual world. It's become apparently that IMVU Inc. cannot sustain our life here themselves and I believe it is up to us to do our share. With that in mind, I want to share a few Twitter marketing tips!

1. When announcing new products, be sure to leave a link in your "tweet" about the product. Always use a URL shortener so that you can fit as many characters as possible. For Twitter, I like to use http://bit.ly for its Twitter integration. It allows you to see how many times the link has been clicked on.

2. Don't just spam your followers with product information. Communicate with them. Read their "tweets" and respond to them. Make them feel like you care about them, and they will care more about what you are posting.

3. Play games with your followers and offer products from your catalog as a prize.

4. When possible, include the tag #imvu in your "tweets". Together, we can make #imvu a Trending Topic, thus getting our virtual world some attention!