How To Use Twitter For Etopps In-Hands

Twitter is the fastest growing social media website in 2009. It is a microblogging site in which you can only answer "what are you doing?" in 140 characters. As of this writing, there are over 1.2 million accounts worldwide and it's growing in leaps and bounds.

So with this kind of a market, how do you capitalize on this to sell your etopps in-hand cards?

The first thing you want to do is get your feet wet. Create an account with your name, your real name that is. (Remember, web 2.0 is about transparency) If you provide your ebay or etopps username, make sure you have a photo of yourself, a head shot preferrably.

Like with other social media sites, your little biography can go a long way. Mention your interests: etopps, topps, sports cards, your favorite sports team(s), etc. The more you include what and who you like as a collector/seller, the more you'll be found by others do searches to find people like you who have the same interests as them. It works this way on myspace and facebook.

After sprucing up your bio (which can be more than 140 characters even though it says this in the account setting section), click on the "find people" link. This is where you can type in keywords that have something to do with the etopps cards you're selling.

Here's an example. Let's say you are selling Steelers in-hands. Type in the word "football" in the search box. I found 316 results with the ones having the most "followers" listed first.

When you "follow" another account user you will see all of their 140 character max "tweets" or posts.

There's something else extremely important about twitter. People include links to interesting things on the web and they usually begin with the letters tinyurl at the beginning of the URL address. Since there are only 140 characters, it's hard to squeeze in long website addresses for specific things. To show people an etopps listing, you need to download a tinyurl creator at (aptly) tinyurl.com

At this website you want to download the program that will let you create a tinyurl on any website page by right clicking on that page and clicking the tinyurl creator option. When you do this, the tinyurl link is automatically copied on the clipboard function on your computer and you're ready to paste it into your tweet.

Let's use a real life example that I used for my new website. I sell superhero merchandise for kids. So my customers have mostly been these kids' moms. So I did a search for the mom bloggers and the moms who say they have kids in their bios. Earlier this week one of them tweeted that today was her 3-year old's birthday.

When you want to reply to someone for anyone to see, there's an 180 degree arrow button to click if you want to reply to that person. Since she was following me and I was following her already, I could "DM" (direct message) her which I did (in 140 characters). I wished her son a happy b-day and told her about my website and gave her a discount. She, in return, thanked me and bought 4 items.

This is the magic that can happen on Twitter.

For etopps cards, do a search with the keywords "gift" and "ideas" so you can help someone out who's asking for birthday ideas for a boyfriend, hubby, son, friend. Link them to your etopps in-hand listings and see what happens. You may not get a sale every time but at least you come across as being helpful, kind and human. Which is what everyone wants everyone else to be on twitter.

Once you have an account, follow me to learn more and I'll return the favor and see how you do.