Whether you are using your Twitter account for business or personal, it can be hard to make Twitter work for you. When you first start to use Twitter, it’s exciting but at the same time it can be really overwhelming. After a couple of weeks you want to be seeing the benefit otherwise you’ll begin to feel like you are wasting your time. Wouldn’t that be a shame? These 5 key Twitter tactics will help you get the most out of Twitter.

1. Listening
If you haven’t heard, social media is about conversation and that includes listening. Twitter is yet another social media tool. On Twitter listening translates to reading the posts from your followers and replying to them.

2. Monitoring Your Products
Sure you could do individual search for your products and/or brands but it would be a lot faster and more effective if you used an application like Twitter Search, which will let you set up a column in Tweet Deck where you can monitor any mention of your products and/or brands. Set up as many searches as you like.

3. Finding Quality Followers
There are millions of people on Twitter. You want to find followers that are relevant to you or your business. These are people who are really interested in your tweets, which can lead to some excellent connections with potential clients, new or existing suppliers, and professionals in your industry. Again you can use Twitter Search to make the process of finding quality followers much more effective and faster, but there’s even a better application called Tweet Spinner, which is best described as a Twitter CRM.

4. Checking Your Twitter Influence
While you can use Tweet Spinner to identify the best people to follow and those to stop following, you will need to review each account to determine whether they are worthwhile to follow. Applications like Klout work great to automate this process.

5. Shorten Your Tweet Links
You have only 140 characters to tweet and that’s not many, and really you should only use 120 characters so that there are some characters left for retweets. There are many tools available that will shorten a link and many are free. Http://bit.ly is free – all you have to do is register and start to enjoy shorter URLs.

These 5 key Twitter tactics will help you make the most out of Twitter whether personal or business related.