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Though a large percentage of created Twitter lay dormant—one study found 10 percent do 90 percent of the tweeting—that isn’t stopping aggressive and forward thinking marketers from squeezing every last drop of utility out of it. A pair of the top social media and search marketers in the country think the last thing a marketer should do is take Twitter lying down.

Coverage of SMX Advanced continues at WebProNews Videos. Stay with WebProNews for more updates and videos from the event this week.

Michael Gray

In fact, SMX Advanced Seattle speakers Michael Gray (Atlas Web Service) and Joanna Lord (TheOnlineBeat ) recommend marketers be so present on Twitter that they approach omnipresent. Advising as panelists for the Twitter Tactics & Search Marketing session, Lord and Gray think 14 million unique monthly visitors is incentive enough to tweet, retweet, and autotweet.

“Be helpful, be friendly, and be aggressive,” said Gray, who prefaced his presentation by saying all advice was from a commercial perspective and not a personal one, though there isn’t necessarily a right or wrong way to tweet. People are talking, asking questions, using Twitter as an information source. Marketers should reward their followers by helping out.

Joanna Lord

And of course, being aggressive by definition means not being a passive tweeter. “Retweet if you think the information is useful. It really helps people like you.” In addition Gray offered these tips:

Dig through other people’s follow lists to find people to initiate a relationship with by following them also. He recommends WebProNews’ Twellow, our Twitter yellow pages, to help with this process of finding people with expressed interest in the service or product you provide.

• Answer @replies when necessary.
• Use scheduled tweets whenever possible.
• Ask questions, take surveys, conduct polls.
• Look for every opportunity to automate your account.
• Keep it short and tweet: direct, relevant
• Tweet early, tweet often
• Ask for retweets

Aside from the large number of Twitter users, Joanna Lord finds marketing value in the site because it reaches all demographics on an international level. But because professional tweeting can be so time consuming, she also recommends automating the process. At the same time, she warns against overdoing it. “Spammers are the enemy, so don’t become one,” she said. “You love Twitter tools, but don’t one,” Lord finished.

Nonetheless she provided a rather extensive list of tools to consider:

• Tweetlater.com
• Futuretweets.com
• Tweetspinner.com
• Tweetmeme.com
• Backtweets.com
• Twitturly.com
• Twibs
• Twitterfeed
• Grouptweet
• CoTweet
• Twitterhawk
• Hootsuite

WebProNews Video anchor Abby Johnson contributed to this article.