By Alyssa Udall (@udallyss)

Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites have become a major tool for bloggers around the world.  These sites help bloggers increase awareness, loyalty and traffic to their blogs.  How do they do this?  By posting tweets that describe a certain blog post and include a shortened link in the update.  Here is an example of a tweet that was in my home stream this morning:

This type of update is called a teaser.  It entices your followers to click on your link to read more about whatever it is you’re talking about.  Your teasers should be carefully crafted in order to create the most effective tweets.

Here are some qualities of succesful twitter teasers:

They ask a question (i.e. “What’s the deal with Twitter Lists anyway?”)

They use strong words that catch the eye (i.e. vampire, CNN, H1N1, bacon… use your imagination!)

They talk directly to individuals (i.e. “Do you have a custom logo to brand your business?”

They’re weird, original, personal and quirky (i.e. anything that @s***mydadsays tweets about–[insert profanity warning here])

Once you start crafting some teasers and trying them out, you should keep track of which links receive the most clicks.  This will tell you how you’re doing and what type of teasers are most enticing to your followers. You can do this by using a third-party Twitter application like CoTweet or HootSuite, which use URL shorteners like bit.ly and ow.ly.

As a final tip, make sure you leave some space leftover in your teasers (including the link) so that your followers can retweet you.  When someone retweets you, your entire username (plus @ and “RT”) will need to fit in the tweet, so make sure your teasers are short enough to allow this!