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Wednesday 30 June 2010

Google Me vs Facebook

Will Facebook ever have competitors?
Google is planing to create a new Social Network as Google Buzz never made it globally.
And we hope that Google Me will not be to Facebook as Google Buzz was to Twitter.
Google Me is planing to be a Platform just like Facebook where people will be able to share and communicate with each other just as people do on Facebook.
Surprise surprise, former CTO of Facebook has been put into this mayor project for Google, so we will see soon what is going to happen.
What we know is that if Google doesn't manage to compete at the same level with Facebook, it will only benefit Facebook.

Tuesday 29 June 2010

Twitter Sets New Record: 3,283 Tweets Per Second

Despite massive Twitter activity due to ongoing World Cup match play, Twitter’s biggest tweets per second record to date was during last week’s NBA finals. That record was shattered yesterday as Twitter users published 3,283 tweets per second at the close of Japan’s victory over Denwark in the World Cup.

These new numbers come directly from Twitter . You may recall that the previous record of 3,085 tweets per second came at the close of the Los Angeles Lakers’ victory over the Boston Celtics on June 17.

Both of these recent records are staggering given that Twitter — during normal daily activity — averages roughly 750 tweets per second. The Japan-Demark World Cup figure means that activity swelled 438% above average, which helps to put recent service issues into perspective.

Wednesday 23 June 2010

Top 10 Reputation Tracking Tools Worth Paying For

Dan Schawbel is the author of Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success, and owner of the award winning Personal Branding Blog.
Reputation management is essential to both individuals and companies. The more popular your brand is, the more critical it will be to keep tabs on it and the more time it will consume out of your day. If you work at a startup and no one has heard of your brand, or if you’re an individual who has just started blogging, these tools are still useful to you.
If, on the other hand, you’re brand new to social media and aren’t known by many people, then these free tools might be a better place to start.
You should consider paid services if you are unable to manage and keep your pulse on your online reputation. Also, paid services help you analyze and understand the magnitude and sentiment of conversations around your brand, which would take you even longer if you did it manually. Services start out at a minimal price of $1 for individual bloggers and shoot up over $100,000 for large enterprises. If you are considering using a paid service, select the one that best matches your current situation and scale up as your requirements grow.
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How to Begin
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You need to decide if you want software for tracking conversations or if you want to pay a vendor for consulting and reporting. You might want all three. The difference is the amount of labor you’ll have to expense versus the amount of money you’ll want to spend.
Companies should bring all stakeholders involved in this type of a decision to the table before selecting a vendor to use. The key for success is to figure out what groups within your company can benefit from this type of information. The obvious groups would be in marketing research, public relations, advertising, and then executives, who will not only have to sign-off on this initiative, but are most concerned with how their corporate brand is being portrayed in the media (new/traditional).
Depending on the service you are considering, you may have to select keywords (with pay per keyword/phrase services), so that you can track your competitors, your own products or personal brands within your company. Once you have buy-in and one or more people as dedicated resources to either use the vendor’s software or analyze and communicate their reports and strategies across the business, you are ready to select a vendor.
I recommend the top ten vendors listed below (in no specific order):
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1. Buzzlogic
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Buzzlogic offers the “BuzzLogic Insights” application, where you can discover, engage and assess influencers in your industry. You get a collaborative dashboard, which provides you with insight into whose blogging about you and allows you to share this data within your company. There are also watch lists for tracking specific bloggers, blogger profile lists, and social maps (see who links to who).
They divide their services into two major buckets: marketers and PR people. Marketers gain product feedback, understand brand perception and receive monthly readership statistics. PR people are able to build relationships with influential bloggers, discover new influencers and track products that matter to them.
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2. Radian6
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Radian6 ( ) offers a solution, where you can setup certain keywords to monitor on a dashboard, automatically track the keywords on blogs, image sharing sites and microblogging sites, and then have it report back to you with an analysis of the results. Data is captured in real-time as discovered and delivered to dashboard analysis widgets.
The solution covers all forms of social media including blogs, top video and image sharing sites, forums, opinion sites, mainstream online media and emerging media like Twitter ( ). Conversational dynamics are constantly tallied to track the viral nature of each post.
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3. TNS Cymfony
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TNS Cymfony offers the Orchestra Platform, which is built on a Natural Language Processing engine that automatically identifies, classifies, qualifies and benchmarks important people, places, companies and topics for you.
The platform is able to decipher between different media sources, such as traditional media and social media. Cymfony’s differentiation is that their engine dissects articles, paragraphs and sentences to determine who and what is being talked about, whether something or someone is a key focus or a passing reference, and how the various entities mentioned relate to one another.
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4. Nielsen
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Nielsen offers Buzzmetrics, which will supply you with key brand health metrics and consumer commentary from all consumer-generated media. They also have ThreatTracker, which alerts of real-time online reputation threats and gives you a scorecard to show you how you’re doing relative to the competition.
Nielsen has a very strong brand name as the world’s leading provider of marketing information, audience measurement, and media products and services. Pete Blackshaw, father of consumer-generated media, is one of the leaders in charge of this powerful service.
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5. Trackur
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Trackur offers a monitoring plan for individuals ($18 per month), companies ($88), enterprises ($197) and agencies (N/A). Like many of the other services mentioned, Trackur works around your keywords and then organizes the results for you in the form of a Dashboard. Depending on the package, you’ll be able to save more keyword searches and have more frequent updates to your Dashboard.
Trackur was built by one of the leading experts in reputation management, Andy Beal, which gives the service some added credibility.
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6. Brands Eye
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Brands Eye offers reputation management packages for bloggers ($1 per month), small businesses ($95) and enterprises ($350). The tool tracks every online mention of your brand, giving you a score that accurately reflects the state of your reputation over time. Part of the differentiation is that you can actually tag mentions of your brand and rank them in terms of a number of pre-determined criteria.
Like many of the other services, you are paying for keywords that you can track. The frequency of how many times you receive updates grows depending on how big your package is.
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7. Reputation Defender
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Reputation Defender offers four different services, including MyChild (starting at $14.95 per month), MyReputation ($14.95), MyPrivacy ($9.95) and MyEdge ($99). MyChild scours the Internet ( ) for all references to your child or teen by name, screen name or social network profile and reports back to you. MyReputation allows you to review everything that is available to you online, and MyPrivacy allows you to remove your personal information from people search databases, such as Pipl and Peek You.
Finally, MyEdge is a solution for owning your Google ( ) results. All of these services scale in size depending on your need and how much money you want to spend.
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8. Sentiment Metrics
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Sentiment Metrics has a reputation management tool that, just like the other services mentioned, helps you monitor what is being said about you, your brand and your products across blogs, forums and news sites. The reports you’ll receive by using this software focus on sentiment (it’s in the name), which tells you if the mention is positive, negative or neutral.
The reports have nice visual graphs and you can break them down by gender, age groups and location. One of the big differentiators and benefits of using this service is that you get email alerts sent to you whenever you have bad press.
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9. Visible Technologies
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Visible Technologies offers two different services. The first is TruCast, which is a comprehensive solution for social media analysis and participation used by enterprises who want to track, analyze and participate in social media communities. The differentiation here is that you can comment on blogs and forums directly from the tool they provide.
The second is TruView, which protects and promotes reputations online. This service is similar to Reputation Defender’s MyEdge in how it helps you take ownership of your Google results by ensuring there is positive and relevant content at the top of search engines for your brand name.
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10. Cision
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Cision offers the Cision Social Media service, which claims to monitor over 100 million blogs, tens of thousands of online forums, and over 450 leading rich media sites. One of the main benefits, just like Nielsen Buzzmetrics, is that these companies have been monitoring and measuring traditional media sites for decades, so they can provide a more comprehensive solution across the board.
Cision’s product is unique in that it offers 24/7 buzz reporting. Their service is powered by Radian6, which is mentioned above. They also have a Dashboard and daily reports, just like the other services, where they tell you what’s going on with your brand twice a day through email.
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Final Thoughts
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Depending on your work schedule, business needs, how popular your brand name is and how much money you want to invest in reputation management, any of these services may be of great assistance to you. And using a fee-based reputation management service, in combination with a number of free services, is a wise decision. Most of the services above aren’t real-time, so subscribing to Google alerts and Twitter feeds is still very important for monitoring your brand.
The sooner you get ahold of what people are saying about your brand and plan how you will respond and manage those relationships, the more successful you will be in social media. This area is still relatively new and no company has gotten it 100% right yet. The complicated part of monitoring a brand in a social world is that humans are needed (human error). Some posts are sarcastic or others are using brands as examples to illustrate a bigger idea and these tools may respond differently.

Monday 21 June 2010

Top 10 Free Tools for Monitoring Your Brand’s Reputation

Dan Schawbel is the author of Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success, and owner of the award winning Personal Branding Blog.
Brand monitoring has become an essential task for any individual or corporation. Years ago, when people talked about our brands, it was behind our backs and we almost never found out about it. Today, most of these dialogues are right in front of our own eyes and the number of locations where our brands may be cited is astronomical!

We must remember that conversations are being held on the web with or without our consent. That means we can choose whether to be observers, participants or outcasts. Before you select observer or outcast, remember that these conversations can have a negative impact on your brand. Also, when conversations start on the web, like a forest fire, they travel very fast and wreak havoc along the way; what might start out as a mere tweet, may turn into a blog post and then make national news.
Here’s a basic reputation management system that I’ve been using, as well as a list of the top 10 free tools you can start using today.
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How to Begin
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Depending on how popular and well-known your brand is, there may be few or many people talking about it. If you’re looking to start a blog, position yourself as an expert or start networking actively in your desired topic area, then listening is an important research routine. As you become more well-known, more conversations will be held around your brand name, so you’ll spend more time listening and possibly responding to blog posts, tweets, etc. If you’re a large and popular company, you may need to hire someone to manage these monitoring tools daily.
The first thing you need to do is acquire a feed reader. I personally use Google reader ( ) because it’s easy to sort feeds, bookmark/favorite them and share (give value) them with your network.
I would also register for a Delicious account, which can help you sort and organize blogs that mention your brand. Think of Delicious ( ) as your own research and development plant. Once you’ve set up these two accounts, the following tools will help you locate articles that mention your brand, feed them right into your central hub (Google ( ) reader) and allow you to manage them (Delicious).
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1. Google
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Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results based on your choice of query or topic. You can subscribe to each alert through email and RSS. The alerts track blog posts, news articles, videos and even groups. Set a “comprehensive alert,” which will notify you of stories, as they happen, for your name, your topic, and even your company. Yahoo! Pipes ( ) is also a good tool for aggregating and combining feeds into one central repository.
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2. Blog Posts
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If you have a blog, then you have to be on Technorati, which is the largest blog search engine in the world. They say that if you don’t claim your blog in Technorati, then you don’t own it! When you register with it, Technorati tracks “blog reactions,” or blogs that link to yours. Search for your brand on Technorati, and subscribe to RSS alerts so that when someone blogs about you, you find out.
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3. Blog Comments
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Backtype is a tool for monitoring blog comments. If people commented on various blog posts, citing your name, you never used to have a way of tracking it, until now. Backtype is a service that lets you find, follow, and share comments from across the web. Whenever you write a comment with a link to your Web site, Backtype attributes it to you.
Use it to remind yourself where you commented, discover influencers who are commenting on blogs that you should be reading, and continue conversations that you started previously. You can even subscribe to these comments using RSS. coComment ( ) is another tool that will help you manage your comments across the web.
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4. Social Comments
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Yacktrack lets you search for comments on your content from various sources, such as Blogger , Digg , FriendFeed, Stumbleupon, and Wordpress blogs. For instance, if you comment on a blog, you can locate other people who are commenting on that same blog post and rejoin the conversation.
My favorite feature of this tool is the “Chatter” tab, which allows you to perform keyword searches on social media sites and then notifies you of instances of your brand name. Yacktrack’s search page results also give you an RSS feed for the search term. You can also use Commentful and co.mments to track your social comments on the web.
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5. Discussion Boards
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Along with blogs and traditional news stories, discussion boards are another channel where people can gather in a community and talk about you. Most people disregard discussion boards until they see other sites commenting on information viewed on them. Use boardtracker.com to get instant alerts from threads citing your name.
Boardreader and Big Boards are other tools that work similar to this one
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6. Twitter
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Twitter messages (tweets) move at the speed of light, and if you don’t catch them they will spread like a virus. Using Twitter search , you can locate any instances of your name and decide whether you want to tweet back or ignore them. It really depends on the context and meaning of the tweet.
Conduct a search for your name, your company’s name, or various topics you’re interested in and then subscribe via RSS. Twilert and TweetBeep are additional tools you can use to receive email alerts.
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7. FriendFeed
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FriendFeed is a social aggregator. You have the ability to take all of your social accounts, such as YouTube , Delicious, Twitter, blog, and Flickr ,
and pull them together into a single (Friend) feed. You can conduct searches on your brand throughout all social networks at once using this search engine.
Aside from learning about the latest video or tweet related to your topic, you can analyze comments that people make under them. FriendFeed users tend to favorite and comment on what you share and tracking it will become more important as this service grows in population. You can also receive alerts straight to your desktop with Alert Thingy.
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8. Social Search
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Social Mention is a social media search engine that searches user-generated content such as blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos, and microblogging services. It allows you to track mentions of your brand across all of these areas.
The results are aggregated from the top social media sources, such as Flickr, YouTube, Digg, Delicious, Twitter and more. Like the other services, you can subscribe to your results by RSS or email. Other social search engines include Serph and Keotag.
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9. Interactive Search
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While all the other tools listed are quite rudimentary, this one is rather complex and intelligent. Instead of being hit with hundreds or even a thousand results for your brand name, Filtrbox only delivers the most relevant, credible mentions of things you need to track. Its “FiltrRank” technology scores content based on three dimensions: contextual relevance, popularity and feedback. You can look back to previous searches 15 days out for free as well.
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10. Your Network
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A lot of people overlook a strong network when it comes to monitoring their brands. If you have a robust network, especially people in your industry who observe the same keywords as you, then you will receive important updates without even asking for them.
I get updates for just about everything now, including Facebook ( ) messages stating that I misspelled a word in my blog post and email messages pointing to an article I was referenced in. If you concentrate on building relationships, you won’t miss a beat, even if you want to!
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What to Do Next
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After you’ve selected which tools you want to use in your brand reputation management system and you’ve set the proper RSS or email alerts for your name, company and/or topic, now it’s time to set a schedule for when you want to check your status.

Will you do it once a day, twice a day or once a week? When you’re first starting out, once a day or week will work for you, but I highly encourage those who participate regularly to pay more attention to their online brands. Just Googling your name won’t be enough. You need to be a bit more paranoid in the digital age. in order to prevent fires from spreading, actually network with people who are talking about topics of interest or thank people who have complimented you.

Think about the brand reputation you want to project to the world. Wouldn’t you like it to be positive!?

Sunday 20 June 2010

TWEET IDEAS 13 Things to Do on Twitter Besides Tweet

Tired of delivering the typical stream of status updates on Twitter? Why not try some of the following ideas for other things you can do with the service?
Thanks to an open API and a philosophy of interconnectivity, Twitter’s vast array of third-party services has you covered on a number of alternative uses for the famed microblogging tool.
Let’s take a look at a few of them.

1. Share Files

A service called FileSocial provides a great way to send files smaller than 50 MB. Simply sign-in with your Twitter credentials to share your file with all your followers. FileSocial uses OAuth to log you in, which is more secure than asking for your Twitter username and password.

If you want to send a person-to-person file privately, check out FileTwt. You’ll have to sign up for an account on the site to enable private file-sharing up to 20 MB in size. The downside is they don’t use OAuth for authentication.

2. Exchange Business Cards


Routinely running out of those business cards made of dead trees? Work in an industry where almost everyone you meet is on Twitter? Check out twtBizCard, a simple service that lets you set up an electronic business card that can be easily tweeted to your new contacts by sending them an @reply with the hastag #twtBizCard.
When you sign up, the service will pull in the data from your Twitter profile as starter information, and you can add other details to customize your card.

3. Share Music

Music lovers have a lot of options in this category (see 10 Ways to Share Music on Twitter). Depending on exactly what you want to do, you might want to check out a few of these. For example, Blip.fm is very much like Twitter but specifically for music, and can integrate with your Twitter account to share what tracks you’re listening to or “blipping.”
To that list we’d also like to add Songza, a very easy to use music search engine that lets you easily tweet any track you’re listening to by clicking the song name and selecting the “Share: Twitter this” option.

4. Share Images

The media-specific Twitter tools abound, with a goodly number of options available for image sharing here too. Perhaps the “classic” service here is Twitpic, but even beyond image hosting services there are a number of alternative methods for sharing photos on Twitter by SMS, email and more.
To this list we’d also like to add that Flickr added Twitter posting earlier this summer as well, so if you already use Flickr to host your image collection, this is a great way to also share photos to Twitter in one fell swoop.

5. Share Videos

To round out the media-specific categories, there are also third party services lining up to help you share video on Twitter as well. From TwitVid.io to Tweetube (which handles other sharing duties as well), there’s probably a service out there to cover your needs.
We’d also like to add TwitVid.com and 12seconds.TV to that list. The latter perhaps obviously limits you to only 12 seconds’ worth of video, but it meshes well with the spirit of Twitter’s 140 character homage to brevity.

6. Raise Money

It’s still an emerging trend, butTwitpay is out in front of the microtransaction platform pack on Twitter. It’s a hot space that Facebook is looking to get in on as well.
There are still some limitations to using Twitpay as a Twitter payment platform, but for the adventurous there could be money to be made from selling your own wares via the service. Or, take a cue from Wi-Fi startup SkyBlox, who used Twitpay to raise a portion of their funding via Twitter.

7. Lobby for Health Care Reform


Want to bring a little participatory democracy to your Twittering? Check out Tweet Your Senator, a feature of the President’s website that mashes up Twitter with Google Maps to help you send a message to your Senator about healthcare reform legislation.

8. Screencast

Looking for a one-stop shop to whip up a quick screencast and distribute it on Twitter? Check out Screenr, a screencast tool with seamless Twitter integration.
You have 5 minutes to record your videos including the ability to pause and restart, and you can preview the screencast before sending it out.

9. Play Games
Love it or hate it, interactive Twitter-based game Spymaster can be addictive if you play it, or insanely annoying if you don’t. If you’re interested in playing, or just finding out more about the mechanics of the game and what it’s all about, be sure to check out our comprehensive Complete guide to Spymaster. And please don’t assassinate us.
Spymaster isn’t the only game in town, either. Check out some of these other alternatives for getting your Twitter game on as well.

10. Social Bookmarking

Delicious, diigo, et al feeling like too much overkill? Or just looking for an easy way to archive the links you share on Twitter?
Enter Fleck Lite, a simple bookmarklet-based tool that will both generate a shortened URL based on the page you’re sharing and archive the collection of links you’ve shared for later reference. If you share a lot of links on Twitter and want a convenient way to remember them for later, definitely give this one a try.

11. Be Someone Else

Ever wanted to know what Twitter looks like through another user’s eyes? Wonder no more: cTwittLike is an application that lets you see the Twitter stream someone else would see. Just enter the Twitter name of the person whose shoes you want to walk in, and you’ll get a list of the latest tweets from the users being followed by that person.
Unfortunately, due to lots of attention from the interwebs this app is currently down. But hopefully you’ll be able to return to your regular schedule of Twitter voyeurism soon.

12. Start a Petition

Looking to change the world but don’t know where to start? Petitions are a powerful tool organizers have been using for decades to raise awareness, demonstrate support for an issue, and bring people together around a common cause.
Check out several startups helping you start petitions on Twitter, from Act.ly to Twitition and more.

Saturday 19 June 2010

How to Manage Your Social Profiles and Create Virtual Business Cards

How many online profiles do you think you have right now? I know, too many to even count! Such is the case with anyone that uses Web 2.0 sites these days.
Whether you have boatloads of profiles or just a few, you need a way to manage your profile information. Here are some tools that you can use to share your profiles online, kind of like a virtual business card.

Tell us in the comments how you share your profiles online.

Customize Your Twitter Background
Twitter has become a popular platform to share your profile. Users are creating customized image backgrounds with all of their vital contact information and using their Twitter account as their primary social profile.
Instead of just using a generic image of some pattern or photo of the dog or kids (guilty as charged here), many people are making their own business card-like backgrounds with detailed biographical information, self-portraits and more contact details. It’s rather simple too, you just edit an image you want to use and add your bio and contact info, then upload it to your Twitter profile. Here’s an excellent example.



Use Your Social Networks

LinkedIn is the network of choice for many professionals. It’s becoming increasingly common to see people using the URL to their LinkedIn profile instead of links to their own blog or website.

Facebook and MySpace profiles are commonly used, but far too many companies block these two social networking monoliths, which could make them a bad choice for your primary online profile.

Aggregate Your Information

Retaggr is a new online profile service that allows you to add all of the social networks that you belong to and create a virtual business card. The cool thing is that this isn’t a static display, the card can actually reveal recent activity on the social sites that you belong to.




FriendFeed has become one of the most popular aggregators for social networking sites, so naturally it’s also become rather popular for sharing your online contact information. The URL is easy to remember, http://Friendfeed.com/username. The best thing about this method is that all of your social networking feeds are available on there too.

MyBlogLog’s widget provides a versatile profile page that shows all of your points of contact in one place. MyBlogLog is used primarily by bloggers, so this might not be the best solution for non-bloggers.

Google Profile was announced almost a year ago by Google and has ever so slowly been showing up in some Google services such as Shared Stuff, Google Reader and Google Maps. The promise was made to centralize all of your profiles for various Google services as well as other services into one place. Sounds nice, but it sure is taking a long time to roll it out to all of their services.



Plaxo has been around for many years. It’s well-known as a social aggregator because of its Pulse feature which was released before FriendFeed, but its primary function has always been address book synchronization and contact management.
Many people are using their Plaxo profile as their virtual business card because it serves many purposes. Not only does it share all of your contact information, but it allows your contacts to stay informed of any changes that you make to vital details such as where you work, email addresses, phone numbers, etc. It also allows them to keep in sync with the changes that their contacts make, which is most useful. The pulse social network aggregation is just an added bonus.

Use Online Business Cards
rmbrME is trying to convince people to go as far as throwing away their real business cards by using their online business card service. Their claim is that your information online is more interactive than a paper business card which can get lost too. While a cute marketing concept, I think it’s silly to ever think real business cards will ever go the way of the DoDo bird. Is there a potential place for this type of service where people can exchange their information by beaming their mobile devices at one another? Sure, why not.

DropCard is another virtual business card service that’s trying to convince people to give up their old habits of paper business cards. Once again, there are some benefits to the service, but traditional business cards are here to stay.

Create an About Me Page
One of the most commonly used methods of sharing profile and contact information appears to be the About Me page on blogs and websites. Most of them aren’t done very well though; they only contain the most elementary bits of information. However, the trend lately has been to create more socially dynamic and engaging About Me pages. Here’s an example from Julia Roy:



At first glance it appears to be the usual About me or Contact me page. There’s a personal and professional biography and the all-important email address. Then you’ll start to notice more social aspects. There’s the Twitter feed, of course. Then it jumps to what she calls A Digital Life, which shares all of her most commonly used social networks with links to her profiles on each site.



The other interesting and ultra-informative section that you don’t see that often is called Digital Ink, which is where Julia shares links to some of the articles and interviews that involve her or her website. It’s a fun and different way to learn about someone, through the eyes and experiences of other people.



An About me page doesn’t have to be the usual dull and static page that we encounter all too frequently. It can be a dynamic and active webpage with information that’s updated all the time. It can present not only who you were in the past and who you are today, but also link to what you’ll be doing in the future.

There are many ways we can choose to present ourselves and share our contact information online. This will continue to evolve as new services enter the scene and address our need to manage our profiles and contact information.

Perhaps it would be a good idea to have an aggregator that works with your OpenID account so that all of your contact information is centralized and available for use on any new service that you join. It would save a great deal of time and typing, that’s for sure. In the meantime, we will continue to spend a lot of precious time editing and updating our profile information all over the Web in an effort to keep everything consistent and up to date.

Twitter, Facebook, Digg Can You Join Too Many Networks?

Dan Schawbel is the author of Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success and publisher of Personal Branding Magazine and the Personal Branding Blog.
There are literally thousands of social networks on the web right now, but which ones should you join?
Many people have spread out their personal brands on too many networks and are now unable to manage their existence on all of them. As the number of social networks grows (more startups) and shrinks (economic downsizing), we must be smarter about which ones we join and which ones we ignore. Today, we’ll go over a simple method you can use to figure out which social networks to participate in so your brand is visible and easily manageable across the web.
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A social network is only as strong as the amount of people that are a part of it
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Think about it, if a message board has no messages or a blog has no comments, the likelihood that you will be the first to contribute is slim. If there is no one to interact with on a social network, then why join? If people in your location aren’t using it, then it makes no sense to join as well.
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Credibility matters
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So the social network has a million users; that’s great. What if the million users are people with no status and are not more successful than you are? There is no point in being part of something that can’t serve as both a support system and resource for your personal brand. If the people on the network aren’t credible, then you won’t get anything out of it.
To me, LinkedIn is the most credible social network on the planet right now because it contains profiles of Fortune 500 executives and leading entrepreneurs. The average individual salary on LinkedIn is $109,000 and legends like Bill Gates have already setup their profiles there. Then there’s Twitter, which is home to celebrity users such as Britney Spears, Shaquille O’Neal and MC Hammer. Facebook has industry titans such as Michael Dell and MySpace is home to Paris Hilton.
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Ponder relevance
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The largest social networks, with millions of users, are always going to be relevant for you because they target the masses and not a single niche. Any smaller network that you join must be supported by an interest that is relevant to your brand. Aside from the main topic of the social network being of importance to you, the users on that network (credibility) are just as important.
Totspot.com is a social network for mothers and their babies. If you are a single male who attends college, this network certainly isn’t for you. The same goes with MyDogSpace.com, which is targeted at people who have a pet dog. If you don’t have or want a dog, then you best join a different network. Signing up for every social network is a waste of your time and gives you no means to start or hold a conversation with that audience.
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What about PageRank?
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PageRank is extremely important for your personal brand because it allows you to command your Google results. This is great for promotion and protection in the digital world. If you sign-up for social networks that have a high PageRank (see volume), you can block any bad press you may receive over your lifetime.
For instance, if you Google my name, you’ll see my LinkedIn and Twitter accounts in the top 10 results. These are two spaces where there isn’t bad press or content that I don’t want people to view. My friend, Jeremiah Owyang, states that your Google results are your new business card. Your results are a depiction of who you are, so it’s smart to join the networks that best represent your brand, and carry a high PageRank, so people can easily view them and be impressed. Any social network with a PageRank of 6 or higher is satisfactory.
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Some social networks aren’t built to last, especially in this economy
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If you don’t believe a social network will withstand this economy because it’s not funded or because it doesn’t have a business model, then don’t bother. If you join a social network, take the liberty of filling out a profile page and then spend hours building a community, then find out it’s shutting down, you’ve lost all of your hard work. You wouldn’t have enough time to direct others to your other networks before the sites closes.
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Create a social network worksheet
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To further show you how to classify social networks and select the best ones to house your brand on, I used Microsoft Excel to create a spreadsheet. Notice how the “usual suspects” pass all the tests, while some of the niche players do not. This spreadsheet is “personal specific,” meaning that it’s built through my eyes and not yours. Some of these networks are relevant to you, so you should join them to meet people who are similar to you. Does a network have to pass all these tests? I would say as long as it passes at least 3 of them, you may want to join it.
If you want to get more value out of this kind of worksheet, then add a column for “user name” and one for “password,” so you can keep track of where you are and how to access each one.
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First impressions on the web
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As the number of social networks increases, people are tempted to join more and more of them. When this occurs, your personal brand becomes spread too thin. Your ability to constantly update each profile, to ensure it includes the most updated and accurate information, will be unmanageable and unenjoyable.
Also, by joining a social network, you are setting “conversational” expectations, meaning that people should expect you to have a decent level of participation on each one. If you fail to update your profiles and, either build content or network with other users, then it’s a waste for you. The only exception is if the social network has a high PageRank, which you can use as a defense mechanism.
What all of this comes down to is how first impressions on the web have been completely redefined. Each entry point into your personal brand may be different (how people access information about you), so consistency and accuracy becomes extremely important. In this way, limiting your social network participation to only the one’s you’re most suited to communicate on, is highly encouraged.
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Next step: how to manage your social networks
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After selecting and committing to using social networks in your daily routine, it’s time to learn how to properly manage them. When it comes to your profile information, you will have to manually update it over time. A LinkedIn profile, for example, won’t fill itself out on its own. A systematic approach you can use for updating your profiles, could be writing down the ones you’re on and the date when you last updated it. Every time there is a milestone in your life, you should make sure they all reflect that update.
Here are a few tools you can use to update your content on social networking sites. By using these tools, your personal brand will have a consistent message throughout the web.

- Tubemogul: If you like web video and want to see your videos appear on many social networking sites at the touch of your mouse, then Tubemogul will be a very helpful tool. After submitting a video using this service, your video will load on MySpace, YouTube, AOL Video, Blip.tv, and more.

- Twitter Feed: Ever wonder why many blogs are broadcasted on Twitter automatically? By using Twitter Feed, you are able to syndicate your blog entries through Twitter, without having to manually tweet each post.

- Gravatar/OpenID: Your picture and name are the two most important brand assets you have on the web. Instead of uploading different pictures of yourself to various websites, Gravatar/OpenID will take your web presence and make it consistent wherever you go.

- Ping.fm: How would you like to update your status once and have all your social networking sites respond? Ping.fm allows you to submit a status update and have it appear on around 30 social networking sites, such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr and Dellicious, within seconds!

- FriendFeed: This service has gotten extremely popular, especially when Twitter had a lot of downtime months ago. All you need to do is submit your social networking accounts and it will stream them into one feed that people can subscribe to or that you can push out to Facebook and other networks. Another tactic you may try is to use create your own FriendFeed widget, which you can embed on social networks, your blog or website. People will get a better sense of everything you’re doing using FriendFeed and it will save you time from re-creating the same content.

Managing your social network profiles will become increasingly tedious, unless you take the proper steps to only join ones that will further your personal brand and use social tools to alleviate the process. Updating your profiles is extremely important, especially at a time of economic recession, when hiring managers are looking for the best talent. You wouldn’t want to look less experienced than you actually are, would you?

Twitter Hits 2 Billion Tweets Per Month

According to Twitter CTO Dick Costolo, about 65 million tweets are sent on Twitter each day. This equates to roughly 1.96 billion tweets per month, a stat that’s corroborated by Pingdom’s estimate of 2 billion tweets per month.
Just over a week ago, we reported that Twitter hit the 15 billion tweet mark. The service announced its ten billionth tweet just a few months before that, and hit the one billion tweet milestone back in the fall of 2008. Twitter’s growth curve is clearly accelerating.

Costolo also stated that the service sees around 135,000 new registrations each day; we’re not sure how many of those new users are unique people versus new accounts for business or other purposes. Another unknown is exactly how many of these registrations end up being regular users of the service and how many accounts drop off after a month or two.

To take a closer look at some of Twitter’s stats, including adoption, attrition and actual tweet content, check out this infographic on Twitter’s growth.



As Twitter becomes a larger part of Internet and general media culture, these kinds of stats point toward the company’s eventual, inevitable graduation from startup to corporation. Numbers such as these come as great news to advertisers, and that fact surely will help Twitter’s revenue, which in turn bodes well for an acquisition or — perhaps more likely — an IPO.

Why Big Brands Struggle With Social Media

Tom Smith is the founder of Trendstream, a research consultancy that specialises in providing research and consultancy on social media, web and mobile. He formerly worked as Head of Consumer Futures at Universal McCann.
Social media continues to grow globally in terms of adoption, usage, interest and impact in a massive way. It’s undeniably changing the way that content and information work particularly in terms of the publishing of consumer opinion. This has transformed the way that consumers relate to brands and the way that brands should operate, driving direct interaction, transparency and a more consultative approach.
However, we still operate in a system defined by the old media world and consequently big brand involvement is still in the main tentative and sporadic. From my experience of trying to get big brands to embrace the social revolution, there are a number of reasons why they have yet to embrace the real opportunities that involvement can deliver:

1. Social Media is often viewed as just another marketing channel: It is of course so much more; it is a completely different approach to interacting with consumers and customers. Of course, you can advertise in a social media environment, but the true return on investment comes from developing communities, creating content to be shared, and talking and listening directly with consumers.

2. It does not fit into current structures: True social media falls somewhere between marketing, PR, communications, content production and web development. No one is quite sure whose responsibility it is and who should ultimately deliver their organisation’s social media strategy.

3. Communities and content are global: Users of social media connect, consume, and share content globally with little care for international borders. Marketing and PR departments and objectives are set up nationally or regionally. Very few organisations have a truly international structure and perspective.

4. Social media needs a long term approach: To build community, distribute content, or get people actively involved in an application takes time. Marketing and PR work on short time frames and are wedded to sets of individual campaigns or short term objectives. Social media is not a campaign, it’s a permanent approach.

5. No guaranteed results: You book advertising and it’s guaranteed to work. For, example you book a web campaign on page views and you keep going until you reach your goal. This is what advertisers call a push medium, i.e. you choose when people see it. Social media is a pull medium; usage and interaction is totally dependent on the user choosing to do so. If it’s not relevant or lacks creative brilliance it will not work. This makes it hard.

6. The metrics are new: Companies are used to the big numbers of advertising, but these numbers are different. Advertising is measured in booked exposures, i.e. page views, while social media is measured in direct interactions, i.e. number of friends, number of views or number of users. These numbers will always be smaller, but not necessarily any less measure of success.

How do big brands take the proper approach to social media?

Fundamentally, it is about putting in place the right organisational structure with a social media department, which is responsible for a company’s long term approach to open their companies up to consumers and have a permanent social media presence. They should also work with marketing and PR to make sure that advertising, product development, research and communications all fit into the social media picture and all aspects of the company and the product are socially optimised. Certain forward thinking organisations, such as Intel and Ford, have already done this and this is the approach that should be followed.

There is also need for more and deeper research, to understand and quantify the value of engaging with consumers in social media versus traditional advertising. This is an emerging area that will see a lot more investment over the next year or so as is needed to show the financial case.
Lastly, companies need to look long term and understand the value that social media can bring to cultivate lifetime advocates of their brand. This is not about campaigns, but a permanent positioning. Hopefully, the current economy can help companies take this long-term perspective that has been lacking in the boom years.

Twitter Tips for Brands in 140 Characters

So what’s a brand to do? My tips, in 140 characters or less:
Brands have to be more than just faceless organizations online. They need to offer value added content about their brand/industry/sector.
I hope that we contribute to the Twitter conversation by bringing news and info not only about our cause but related topics as well.
Each brand can represent more than its product or service. It represents a whole industry and related content attached to that industry.
You don’t have to talk about your competitors but you should talk about what your customers come to you for.

Creative Ideas for Brands on Twitter

I would also add that a brand has to use every marketing tool according to the players already in the game. Don’t come to Twitter as a new brand and expect people to follow you just because you are well known. You need to offer more. I believe every brand can offer more, especially on Twitter because of the nature of the conversations that go on, not in spite of it. I would love to hear from some of my beloved brands like Coca Cola, Proctor & Gamble, Sam Adams, and on and on.

P&G
Can tell about the old days of sponsoring Soap Operas and how that went. Or they could talk about some of the staple food items in a historical context. I was fascinated by a show on TV once that traced the history of ketchup of all things. Can’t P&G or Heinz give me that for free on twitter? Intersperse Tweets with links and Twitpics and blog posts that craft a whole story. Speaking of craft, Kraft could talk about cheese all day long and you CAN make it interesting.


Coca Cola
Has millions of ways to go with this, from showing old ads, to trivia to history and answering questions about the product. I see many ways that staple brands—ones that people would think would be boring online—can be exciting. Not all brands need to reinvent the wheel with their own Social Networking sites. Some of the best tools like Twitter are out there for free to let people know all this great stuff about you.

Sam Adams
Getting back to it, Sam Adams or any other wine or beer company can hire a great writer to craft a campaign where they tell the story of their brand across multiple platforms over time. Twitter is a great place to start. I love beer. I can think of many ways of using Twitter alone to really engage an audience online just with Twitter, a blog, an RSS feed and a few well-placed Social Networking groups. The brand brings the recognition and the power to Twitter, not the other way around. Brands need to learn to use it wisely by supplying people (Tweeple are people too, you know) with content that engages and informs.

Brands on Twitter? Absolutely Yes!

It’s funny but every time a new technology comes around like Twitter, people scrabble to figure out how their brand can market to it. But, in reality the people who are using it every day already know how. In a new media space, new media rules still apply. What I mean is don’t revert back to the tried and true methods to market whenever a new media technology comes along. Brands should watch the space and learn how others are effectively using it on a personal level and then just play along. It is quote simply, watch and learn.
The group will take care of the spammers and insincere brands on Twitter. Nobody will follow them back. They will get reported. They will be ridiculed into submission, eventually. There is no reason to call for a wholesale ban of brands on Twitter. I for one, want to hear what they have to say.

Why Brands ABSOLUTELY DO Belong on Twitter

1. Twitter is Opt-In
Drapeau said that Twitter was for people to talk to people and not brands to project their message. Particularly distasteful to Drapeau was a humanless brand dumping useless information or worse, some SEO company marketing in a company’s Twitter account.
Fundamentally, I agree with what Drapeau says about the spammy Twitter accounts that are used just to get one more silly site link out there by an SEO company or brands that totally misunderstand and therefore misuse Twitter. It undermines Twitter’s usefulness in a small part. But since, as the author himself points out, Twitter is an opt-in service (meaning I can follow who I want and not follow advertisers) the impact is minimal.

2. Twitter is the New Phone Company
The debate did not rage on Twitter so much a simmer, mostly with brands themselves coming to their own defense. This is by no means the only debate out there on the usefulness of Twitter either as a form of communication or as a marketing tool. Many purists will probably cringe to hear me mention Twitter as a “marketing tool” and I sympathize with them.
Look, I am a centrist. Sorry to sound so wishy-washy about it but I believe that there is room for both brands and for person-to-person communication on Twitter. In fact, that is what I would argue the thing that makes Twitter so great. I believe it was Chris Brogan who recently Tweeted that he follows so many people because he thinks of Twitter as the new phone company. It is certainly a useful utility that might even grow up to be even too useful and powerful to ever be meaningfully monetized. Not that it can’t happen but Twitter has become such an extremely dynamic form of communication that it may transcend that simplistic, “where is your business model” mentality.

3. Brands Can Have Personalities Too
Like snowflakes, no two Tweeple (as some call Twitter users) are alike. It’s like a geek version of the Breakfast Club: there’s the shy lurker follower that follows everyone but rarely Tweets. The social butterfly who just @ replies to everyone all day. The loudmouthed soapboxer who just likes to talk about what is best for other people. The intellectual sharer who provides useful links and retweets. The big mouth that just goes around starting trouble with random Tweeple. Or the egoist Twitterer who can only talk about themselves or their newest, greatest vidcast.
In the end, we follow who we follow for our own reasons. On the TWIT podcast someone said that we shape our own stream on Twitter. Nothing could be truer. My personal strategy is to keep the people I follow to around 100 people or under. For that, I must be selective. I have people I just like. People who are big time influencers. Others are loudmouths that entertain me with their Tweets. And others whom I respect their intellectualism. In there are some brands. I actually have a lot of respect for people who Tweet under a brand. Brands can have personalities too.

Getting Rich is a Science

Have you ever wanted to receive a very straight forward
explanation of how to make money and build your wealth
without spending a fortune with so called “experts”?

Well, there is a book which I can highly recommend to you
and best of all I am not trying to sell it!!!
Grab your f.ree copy of this little known wealth bible that had
a big part to play in the launch of the best selling movie and
book – The Secret, featuring Bob Proctor.

The Science of Getting Rich By Wallace D. Wattles,
Click here to access your copy, no email or details required!

-----> The Power of Getting Rich

My advice is to set yourself just 30 minutes for a few days
and you will be through this in no time, then make sure you
follow up by taking action!

Friday 18 June 2010

Your Mindset Will Determine Your Success

No matter how much you want to succeed in making money online, unless your mindset is right, unfortunately it is very unlikely that you will!
However there is some good news. My friend Mark Anastasi introduced me to cutting edge software called subliminal power, which when you set it up on your laptop or pc will help you focus your mind on success in a very subtle way.

http://bit.ly/PowerOfTheMind

I use it every day and have used it with amazing success. Honestly, I did not believe it would work as I am very sceptical about some of the claims that are made but Mark was very convincig and sure enough he was right!
Check it out for yourself! Worst case, you can sign up as an affiliate seller for it but honestly I am a huge fan of this.
Check it out now, you have nothing to lose !

http://bit.ly/PowerOfTheMind

How to Remove Inactive Tweeters From Your Account

Today I want to share other little tips with you for free

Twitter has a low retention rate, so it’s highly likely that
some people you have selected to follow in the past are no longer active.
You may want to unfollow inactive users to keep your following count down,
or in case the account on Twitter get re-released and picked up by someone else in the future.

http://untweeps.com/

It is one really simple free service that will help you identify inactive users you’re currently following.
It will show you who hasn’t tweeted of late, and give you the option to unfollow them.
You can choose to see who’s not sent a tweet over certain time periods.
90 days seems a reasonable span to consider an account abandoned
(although Twitter’s official guidelines give you 6 month’s grace).
You can also view 60 or 30 day options if you plan to be more aggressive in cleaning your follow list.

I recommend doing this twice a month and 50 people each time only.

Hope all this information is very useful for you.

MAJOR NEWS FOR TWITTER .... the end of paid SEO?

I don't know if you heard about this, but there was a very exciting announcement recently from Google about Twitter!
And it is FANTASTIC NEWS for us Twitter users :-)
Google, who as we know are the "Internet Gods" have said that they are now indexing tweets!
What this means is that when you type what you are searching for into the Google search icon, Google will now also check "tweets" from Twitter for responses to your search as well as the usual websites, blogs and articles. This means that Twitter is now not only a major free traffic generator but also an amazing free tool for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).

------> Click here to watch the Demonstration

Wednesday 16 June 2010

How To Write An Interesting Tweet

Have you ever wondered what the secret is to writing good tweets that will result in your link being clicked?

The importance of learning how to write a good tweet should not be under estimated. No matter how interesting the page is that you want to send your followers to, unless you have an eye catching tweet, you will get a very low click through rate to the site.

I have great success with getting people to click through on my links. I have received over 13,000 clicks through to a site in seven days.
What’s the secret??

Here are some tips I recommend:

1Write in a non obtrusive way
2Do not make it sound like a sales pitch
3Grab your followers attention and peak their interest
4Make it sound like there could be an interesting article to follow
5If possible, make it funny so that it will be retweeted also for a viral effect!
6Write about topical subjects such as big celebrity bust ups or major news!

An example of a tweet I used for the Subliminal Power product (http://www.bit.ly/L5tln) was “People fear public speaking more than death! At a funeral, people would rather be in the coffin than giving the eulogy! ”. It’s the subtle differences that can make the difference of 1 sale a week to 50 sales a week to the same followers purely by getting people to click into the sales pitch or other.

A Simple Tip For Making Cash With Twitter

A very simple but valuable way of generating quick cash with Twitter.
When you sign up to http://bit.ly/payfortweet, they use your site to advertise from their selection of tweets from all kinds of companies as varied as chocolate companies to travel sites. You simply tell them the niche you are interested in advertising and they will tweet to your account with your approval. Don’t be concerned if you feel that your account may be compromised by the types of tweets they send out as you have full control of what is sent. What I mean by that is, you make the decisions on the following:

1.The frequency of when they can tweet relative to your tweets
2.What they can advertise
3.You can preapprove every tweet they send
4.You can even rewrite their ad so it is in the format you choose!!!

You get paid in two ways. Firstly on a commission basis for any sales made from your ads or secondly, and this is the one I love, you get paid per tweet J Yes, its true, after a certain amount of time, they will pay you per tweet and I have been paid over $5 a tweet regularly on multiple twitter accounts!! When this happens your account increases very quickly. It is SO easy to withdraw your earnings too. There is a button which asks you if you want to cash out now and hey presto, within seconds, your money is on your paypal account like magic!!!

So YES it works, not just theory!!

3 Tips - Making Money With Twitter

I am going to provide you with 3 valuable pointers to remember in
order to increase the money you can make with Twitter.

The shortened version for those in a rush are ....

1. Don't have just one account
2. Don't have an auto DM leading directly to a sales page
3. Don't only use automated tweets

The extended version :) ....

1. Don’t have just one account
In order to ensure that you are suddenly not cut off from twitter,
which you may well be using as your primary selling tool, be sure
not to become dependent on just one twitter account. If you do,
you can be shut down, even by accident, for a minimum of a week or
now even a month with the new T&C’s which for you could result in
the loss of thousands of dollars. Use and groom at least two
accounts and it’s really up to you how many you find manageable.
Any more than five accounts will prove difficult!

2. Don’t have an auto DM (Direct Message) leading directly to a sales page
The first thing I notice about 90% of the people I think about
starting to follow, is that they send you directly to a sales
page! This immediately sends the impression, that like so many
others, you just want to use your followers as customers! Don’t
do this! You may immediately lose a follower even if you turn out
to have the best intentions in the world. The one exception I
would make to this is if it is your own product and that you make
this clear in the DM.

3. Don’t only use automated tweets
Automated tweets are great! It allows you to have a life and at
the same time tweet information to your followers that they
really enjoy or find interesting or valuable. The problem is that
more and more people only use automated tweets. If you use 100%
automation in your accounts, you will lose followers. People want
to hear about you, that’s why they follow you so do not just send
them information that is in no way personal.