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Thursday 31 March 2011

How to use Twitter Lists effectively to target your followers


Twitter introduced the concept of lists about 16 months ago to enable the manual grouping of people into categories.

If you visit Formulists or Listorious you can type a keyword and see the different lists that people maintain. Searching for the keyword apples, for instance, you can read Twitter biographies of the 491 people who someone added to a list about honeycrisp apples. You can either follow the list or follow its members individually.

Any Twitter user can create his or her own list, or follow an existing list — such as the above one about apples.
I used to love creating lists. I embraced lists with passion and for the better part of two years I followed few people by way of the “follow” button and followed everyone else by lists instead. Because I kept changing the names of my lists and the people in each list, I also kept following and unfollowing different people.

But the passion is gone. I still like the concept and continue to follow some lists around government and public relations, but I’m tired of having my own lists. And, in fact, short of a local community list and a humor list, I deleted the other dozen lists I’d managed.

Because I use twitter.com as my primary view (and not third-party tools like Tweetdeck or Seesmic), it was time-consuming and unproductive to click a different list’s link every time I wanted to view its members’ recent tweets.

Which leads me to announce a new tactic in my ongoing quest for internet enrichment and resource productivity: I am once again following people outside of lists. It’s a tactic I once employed. I count 700+ people today (up from a mere 12 only two weeks ago). I don’t care about Klout scores and I don’t care if anyone I follow chooses to follow me back.

Do I look at twitter all day long? No.

Am I more productive since following people outside of lists? Yes.

Am I seeing more people’s names flow by quickly? Yes.

Will I see everyone’s tweet? No.

My purpose to tweet today has not changed since creating an account on day one. I tweet to enrich myself, to learn, and to share. Twitter lists, as helpful as they are to showcase people around categories, are less effective (to me) as a means of following and conversing with people.

But these are my thoughts about lists. How do you use lists?

Monday 28 March 2011

Twitter by the numbers at age five


Five years ago on 21 March, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey fired off the first tweets officially giving life to the micro-messaging service.


Five years ago on March 21, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey fired off the first tweets officially giving life to the micro-messaging service:


Here are some facts about the San Francisco-based startup:

-Dorsey's Twitter account @jack automatically sent out the first tweet, 'just setting up my twttr,' on 21 March 2006 and Dorsey followed it up with the first 'human-generated' tweet 'inviting coworkers'.

-Twitter has more than 200m registered users sending more than 140m tweets a day.


-Last year, Twitter users sent 25bn tweets and the company added more than 100 million new registered accounts. It has averaged 460,000 new accounts per day over the past month.


-Pop star Lady Gaga (@ladygaga) has the most Twitter followers with 8.78m followed by Justin Bieber (@justinbieber) with 8.13m million, Britney Spears (@britneyspears) with 7.12m, Barack Obama (@barackobama) with 6.97m and Kim Kardashian (@kimkardashian) with 6.73m.


-Actor Charlie Sheen (@charliesheen) was the fastest to one million followers, picking them up in just 24 hours.


-The hashtag (#) feature on Twitter which groups tweets by subject debuted in August 2007, proposed by a user.

-In October 2009, Google and Microsoft began integrating tweets into their search products.


-Twitter has 400 employees and is adding workers almost weekly.


-Twitter is based in San Francisco, with additional employees in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington.


-Twitter was incorporated in April 2007; it was co-founded by Biz Stone, Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey - @biz, @ev and @jack.


-The initial Twitter logo was created by Stone, a former graphic designer.


-Twitter chief executive Dick Costolo is a former improvisational comedian.

Saturday 26 March 2011

8 New Facebook Page Changes: What You Need to Know


Are you wondering what to do about the new Facebook page changes? This article will explore the important changes and what it means for your business.

On Thursday, February 10, Facebook finally pulled the trigger and announced the updated layout of Facebook pages. They made the change to bring them more in line with the recently redesigned personal profiles and to provide a more consistent user experience.

As with any major change to the Facebook user experience, the new design and features were accompanied by complaints, but overall, were well received.

Let’s take a closer look at these changes and what they mean for your business.

#1: Many Functions Are Changed

One big improvement is providing one-click access to several admin tasks, rather than having to go through the “Edit page” link.

Managing page admins is now accessible via clicking “See all” in the Admins area in the right column.

Basic Information can now be edited by clicking the “Edit info” link just below the page name at the top.

The “Edit page” link is now a button, located in the top right, just below the “Home—Profile—Account” links.

Admins can easily change their page’s category by clicking the “Edit info” link under the page name, then selecting the category from the pull-down menu in the edit screen. This is also available by clicking the new “Edit page” button, as shown above.

The Fan Count section in the left navigation has been simplified, with the fan pics eliminated and replaced by a simple count.

Clicking “people like this” brings up the familiar popup dialog where admins can remove or ban fans or make them admins.

The “Information” box has been removed entirely, and there’s no longer a place where a brief description of the page can be presented when it loads. Visitors will have to click the “Info” link in the new left-column navigation to access more information about the page.

View Insights and Suggest to Friends have both been removed from the left column to the right column, just below the Admins area.

The “n friends like this” section has been moved from the left column to the right column, with smaller thumbnail images but a count of how many of the owner’s friends like the page, as well as some other pages that have liked your page.
The “Links” section at the bottom of the left column, with a selection of recent links posted to your wall, is gone.

I think these changes are uniformly excellent, resulting in a cleaner, less cluttered interface.

#2: The New Masthead—Expanded Opportunity for Creatives

The new masthead for pages, like the redesigned personal profiles, now features the five most recently added images (Facebook calls this the “Photostrip”) which, when clicked, expand to full size in “lightbox” fashion, keeping users on your page instead of taking them to the photos page.

Although the addition of the Photostrip adds more space for visual branding, admins will be disappointed to learn that, unlike on personal profiles, the order of these images can’t be fixed, a feature that spawned some nice creativity on personal profiles.

On pages, these Photostrip images are reordered each time the page loads, and this can’t be changed. I imagine Facebook enforces this randomness to encourage the social use of this area, showing thumbnails of the five most recently added images, over using it for branding.

Brands are, however, already accepting this randomness and rolling with it, coming up with creative combinations of the profile pic (now reduced from 200 x 600 px to 180 x 540 px) and the image strip, either actively embracing the randomness or incorporating images that aren’t dependent on their order.

ShortStack Lab, located in the gambling mecca of Reno, NV, riffs on the random with a slot machine.
The Vogue magazine page simply incorporates imagery.

And HyperArts has taken a somewhat playful, self-referential approach, with the letters scrambled on each page load.
Creatives should enjoy the opportunities presented by this new masthead.

#3: Bye-Bye Tabs—Now What Do We Call Them?

This is one new feature many admins will view as a downgrade, and with good reason. The ability of brands to present clear tabbed options at the top of the page, in line with how websites present navigation, has been replaced with a less prominent listing of page sections in the left column, just below the profile pic.

This significant change in the user interface will force admins to rethink their page navigation, which is a good thing.

Tips: In order to maximize the visibility of the left-side navigation:

* Keep the profile pic to under 200 px in height, so that your navigation isn’t pushed below the fold and is as close to the top of the page as possible.
* Consider incorporating text into your profile pic to highlight “tabs” you don’t want visitors to miss (obviously a trade-off with profile pic height!).
* Keep your navigation concise, including only the essential sections of your page. Tabs that are removed via the new navigation Edit function (click “More” to see “Edit” at the bottom of the navigation) can be restored later with their content intact.

* Reorder your sections/tabs in the navigation so the most important are first. You can easily do this using the “More—Edit” feature, then click and drag each section to achieve the desired order. Note: As before with the top tabs, Wall and Info come first!

Tip: From the page’s editing screen, admins can now customize the name of iFrame-based applications/tabs (or legacy FBML apps) they have added to their page, changing the “Custom Tab Name” even if they are not an admin on the app itself. This is great news since the same iFrame app might be used on multiple Fan Pages, but each page can now display its own unique name for the tab.

It’s easy. Just click the “Edit page” button; select “Apps”; locate the custom app in the “Added Apps”; click “Edit settings”; rename the tab; click “Save”; viola!:

Bug Report:

* Exiting out of Edit mode for the navigation. The only way I’ve found is to either click on one of the sections (other than the wall) or reload the page. There should be a “Save” or “Exit Editing” link.
* If your list is less than seven sections (including Wall and Info), the “More” link disappears AND the “Edit” function is gone, preventing reordering the sections. In the bug report I filed, Facebook says “This has been added to our wishlist.”

The above should help compensate for the diminished prominence of the top tabs. It’s not ideal, but it’s the hand we’re dealt!

#4: Use Facebook as Your Page or Personal Profile—Shape-Shifting!

This is definitely the most “revolutionary” new feature of the update. Previously, page admins could only comment as page admins on their own pages. Now, page admins can move around Facebook as their page, commenting on other pages’ walls (but not on personal profiles), and liking other pages (previously, this was “favoriting” a page).

Facebook has made toggling between your identity as a page or as a person easy. You can do it from the “Account” link at the top right (Account—Use Facebook as Page) where you can select which page you’d like to use.

Or, if you want to use Facebook as the page you’re currently on, there’s a shortcut in the right column. Click “Use Facebook as [your page name]“; that link then becomes “Use Facebook as [your name]” so you can easily switch back.

When you opt to be a page, those two links in the top right of the page—“Home” and “Profile“—change to reflect this, with “Home” displaying only news from pages you’ve liked and the “Profile” link taking you to your page’s wall. And the 3 notification icons to right of “Facebook” in the top left area change to just 2, “Likes” and “Notifications.”

You are now your page and you inhabit a world not of friends, but of pages!

Keep in mind: This is a double-edged sword. Yes, you can now comment on other pages as your brand, increasing exposure/awareness. However, other (perhaps competing) brands can post on your page. This could open the door to a new flavor of spam.

You’ll need to be more diligent about checking for posts from your competitors displaying their brand to your fans.

#5: Featured Liked Pages—A Great Opportunity for Promotion and Partnership

As Facebook says, “These pages are shown on the left of your page. Up to five pages are shown at a time, and you can specify which of your liked pages always rotate there by selecting them as featured.”

These are pages that your page has liked (previously "featured").

Tip: Although the five featured “likes” are presented in random order on each page load, you can select which pages are included in the mix.

Click the “Edit page” button. Click “Featured,” and then click “Edit Featured Likes.” From the popup you can select the liked pages that will rotate in that area.

With this control, you can use this section to highlight other pages you admin or any other pages, such as partners.

#6: New Wall Filters and Admin View—Improved Page Management

Admins now have two ways of viewing wall posts, accessible via the left-column nav:

If “Wall” (the default) is selected, you can view posts either by “Everyone” or just by the page.

Note that the “Everyone” option is not in chronological order but is presented according to how relevant, shared, interacted with and other criteria (Facebook’s algorithm for assessing post quality is called EdgeRank) the posts are. So a more recent post can easily trail behind a more commented-on post, for example.

“Admin View” is a new feature and a convenient way for admins to manage wall content. Select “Recent” to see all—not filtered by Facebook—non-page posts in reverse chronological order. Select “Hidden Posts” (posts by users you’ve hidden or posts filtered by EdgeRank). Admins can unhide hidden posts as well as perform familiar functions such as banning a user or reporting spam.

Tip: Users now have more control over what appears in their news feed. They can filter their feed to show “Friends and pages you interact with most” or “All of your friends and pages.” The default setting is the former, and given that default settings usually go unchanged, brands may more frequently be filtered from news feeds when users don’t interact with their posts in their news feed when the user may actually still want to keep up with the brand’s news.

#7: Email Notifications for Page Activity

This has been a frequently requested feature and is now provided by Facebook.
Admins can opt to receive an email alert whenever a comment is made on one of their pages, sent to the email address they use for their account. (Edit page—Your settings)

Click “View all email settings for your pages” to be redirected to the “Pages” section of the Notifications screen.

#8: Static FBML App Is Out; iFrame Applications Only—Sort of…

Another big one here. Facebook’s Static FBML application brought the ability to create custom tabs utilizing HTML, CSS, FBML and JavaScript (actually FBJS, Facebook’s flavor of JS), to the masses. Many thousands of users, from individuals to the largest brands, have used Static FBML tabs to promote their brands and incorporate the viral elements of Facebook via FBML tags.

However, as Facebook announced in August 2010, the roadmap was to eventually phase out FBML and migrate to iFrames, and they’ve now announced that after March 11, 2011, admins will no longer be able to add the Static FBML application to their pages.

Where admins with little coding experience could utilize widely available templates and tutorials to create their custom tabs with Static FBML, creating an iFrame canvas application entails a deeper understanding of web technologies, requiring that you understand how to work with iFrames and HTML, create a Facebook application, upload files to a server, and utilize XFBML (FBML that can be used on websites) and the PHP scripting language to integrate with Facebook. The age of the amateur coder on Facebook may be coming to a close.

The good news for Static FBML fans is that Facebook will continue to support existing installs of the application and the custom tabs, as well as continue to allow admins to add and edit their custom tabs. However, they do urge people to migrate their custom tabs to iFrames sooner rather than later, as they are deprecating FBML (in other words, gradually eliminating it).

It could be many months or even years before Facebook terminates FBML altogether. No one knows and Facebook isn’t saying.

But Facebook has added support for iFrames to page tabs (previously, aside from some hacked methods, iFrames wouldn’t load on page tabs), and developers are relishing the increased flexibility in developing their applications (iFramed pages are hosted external to Facebook and thus can use standard web coding and scripting) rather than dealing with the quirks of FBML and FBJS.

Wednesday 23 March 2011

Twitter Tips to Boost Small Business Marketing


Twitter is both a fun and useful small business marketing tool. The best way to get the most out of Twitter is to incorporate the service into your current marketing strategies, but keep in mind that Twitter is only helpful tool -- not a small business marketing solution on its own.

In this Twitter tips article, we'll take a look at different ways you can boost your small business marketing messages by maximizing the content of and exposure to your 140 character-length messages.

Learn the Twitter Basics

There is a lot of information readily available for Twitter novices, so for the purpose of this article we'll assume you have an active Twitter account and are ready to start tweaking your tweets for maximum exposure. If you are new to Twitter, we recommend that you start by reading this Twitter Dictionary on Webopedia.com to get familiar with the Twitter lingo and to learn more about how the service works.

One way that small business owner, ecommerce site owners or entrepreneurs can use Twitter is to send out links to new content-relevant articles, blog posts or even promote new store products, contests or anything else to spread the word about for your small business.

Using Twitter, you can send this information in a message that is 140 characters in length. While that may sound rather simple, as with any marketing message, there are a number of things to consider. For example, you'll want to track how successful the message is and also ensure that Twitter users with related interests see the message to maximize retweets.

Prepping Your Twitter Marketing Message

The first thing to do is to get the URL -- or Web address -- of the page you want to tweet about, and come up with a descriptive message about the page you are linking to.

Throughout this article, we'll use this recent article, A Buyer's Guide to Remarketing Service, as an example.

For this you could use any number of descriptions including; A Buyer's Guide to Remarketing Services, Learn about Ecommerce Remarketing, How to use remarketing to convert cart abandoners, or any brief statement that would pique someone's interest.

Shorten URLs and Track Twitter Traffic

Once you have an idea of the message you want to send out, the next step will be to take the URL of the page you will direct Twitter users to and shorten it in length to give you extra characters for your small business marketing message. In the tweet you can provide a direct link using a URL redirection service (more commonly called a URL shrinker). This is an online service that will assign a short URL to the page and redirect users from that shorter URL to your website.

Using our example, we would need to include the following URL in the Tweet: http://e-commerceguide.com/article.php/3886596. Our URL is 46 characters. By using a free URL shrinker we can change that to a 20-character URL and use those saved characters to add more meaningful details in the Tweet. The Bit.ly service (20 character URLs) can redirect people with this shorter URL: http://bit.ly/94pZA9.

As an added benefit, once you have found a URL shrink service you like, you can register for a free account and obtain tracking information and see how many hits the shortened URL gets, and also track how many people on Twitter will retweet your short URL. This tracking information will be useful to help you determine which of your small business marketing messages work on Twitter -- and which get ignored.

Some of the other URL redirection services you can try include: Cligs (20 character URLs), and TinyURL (25 character URLs).

Put Your Twitter Message in Front of Those Who Care

Every tweet you send as a part of your small business marketing strategy should be written with goal of obtaining the most exposure on Twitter as you can -- which means you want people with similar interests to your message, and hopefully, retweet it to their followers. For this reason, you need a good Twitter following with an interest in what you tweet about, and you also need to make sure people not in your follower list can also find your message to retweet it for maximum exposure.

On Twitter, a hash tag is a way of organizing your tweets for Twitter search engines. Basically, this will allow others to search Twitter for a specific topic -- and if you have tagged your message with the search term your tweet will be seen by a larger audience with related interests.

You will add a community-driven hash tag in your tweet to help others discover relevant posts when they search twitter. For example, with our EcommerceGuide.com tweet, popular and relevant hash tags include #ecommerce and #smb.

To narrow down good hash tags you can search Twitter for a number of your related topics to see how popular that subject is. Choose several hash tags and leave space in your 140 character update to include one or two with each tweet. This helps expose your message to others who tweet about the same topic.

Finalizing Your Small Business Marketing Tweet

So now, our example tweet that we have been creating along the way will read something like this: "A Buyer's Guide to Remarketing Service http://bit.ly/94pZA9 #ecommerce #marketing." This is only 81 spaces, so we still have lots of room to spice the message up a bit.

Retweeting is crucial to maximizing your exposure so making it easy for others to send out your small business marketing message is helpful. You can encourage retweeting simply by leaving space for someone else to include the standard retweet statement without having to edit the tweet. This means you will need to leave the number of characters in your username, plus space for adding the RT @ message.

On Twitter I use "AuroraGG" so I need to leave enough character space that anyone can just add "RT @AuroraGG." So in this case, we would have 94 of the 140 characters used.

Lastly, you can use the remaining characters to expand your topic message, add an additional hash tag or whatever you choose to do. Often when tweeting about EcommerceGuide.com articles I will add something like "Check out my new #ecommerce article today" or something that lessens the feel of marketing to those reading. For example:

I have a new #ecommerce article online today. Learn about ecommerce remarketing services http://bit.ly/94pZA9 #marketing.

There you have it. A good 140-character tweet that gets your small business marketing message out in the twitterverse, with less than 5 minutes of planning, once you know how to do it.

6 Blogging Tips to improve traffic to your Blog


At the end of 2010, just before breaking for the holidays, I had a conversation with my co-worker about our New Year’s resolutions, and we got onto the topic of our “work resolutions.” We both mentioned that we wanted to do more writing and blogging both for Engaging Times and our own personal brands. We agreed we’d be sort of a support system – like gym buddies, except for blogging.

clip_image002There are countless benefits to building one’s personal brand. You raise your profile, along with your company’s. The goal is to be considered a thought leader in your space and develop a significant online and professional network.

Well, it’s now mid-March, and while I’m still no gym rat, my blogging resolution is where I have slacked the most. So in order to give myself and fellow blogger wannabes a jump start, I decided to put together a list of basic tips to follow when blogging.

1. Keep it short. A blog post doesn’t need to be more than 3 or 4 paragraphs. We’re used to getting our news in 140-charater bites, so a blog post much longer than 500 words isn’t likely to keep your readers’ attention. Think about when YOU start to lose interest when reading an article online.

2. Make it easy to read. Use bullets, bold font and short paragraphs to help your readers identify key themes and navigate easily through your post.

3. Choose a catchy title. What will people be searching for? Many will decide if they want to read further just based on the title, so make sure it grabs their attention.

4. Use links. You can keep the length of your post under control and enhance your content by linking to external information, rather than going into detail on your blog. Let the reader decide if they want to learn more. Choose to have your links open in a new window or tab so visitors aren’t taken away from your page.

5. Please, for the love of blog, PROOFREAD! I catch some flack around here for being the “grammar police,” and while I don’t expect everyone to have an AP Style Guide on hand at all times, you can avoid silly mistakes. Use spellcheck. Have a friend proofread. Don’t force me to write another post on the difference between their/there/they’re, your/you’re and its/it’s.

6. Choose a topic to blog about consistently. What subject is interesting to you personally, and how does that relate to your professional life? For those who don’t know me, I’m the resident PR girl. I’m interested in social media and digital marketing, so expect posts from me on how those themes interact. What topic is relevant to you?

Monday 21 March 2011

Happy 5th Birthday, Twitter

It’s officially been five years since the very first tweet was sent by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. The message, which read simply “just setting up my twttr,” has since been followed by some 30 billion 140-character-or-less musings as Twitter has catapulted into the upper echelon of consumer web companies.

With a valuation said to be approaching $10 billion, the Twitter of today is very different than the Twitter of five years ago (or even one year ago for that matter).

Once often criticized by the mainstream media for being mundane and trivial, the service often plays a major role in world events (and serves as a source for said media). It’s also gotten more than a few people fired.

Once questioned relentlessly about how it would make money, some estimates peg the company’s 2011 revenue at $150 million as its advertising platform continues to evolve.

And once the center of an ecosystem of hundreds of different clients and third-party applications, Twitter now finds itself at odds with many of the developers that helped propel the feature-light startup in its early days, as it builds its own apps across platforms.

What does the next five years hold for the company? While rumors of an exit to the likes of Google or Microsoft persist, its executives maintain incredibly lofty ambitions, with recent sound bites including co-founder Evan Williams declaring that the service will get to one billion users, and CEO Dick Costolo comparing the service to an essential utility, like water.

What are your predictions for Twitter’s next five years? Let us know in the comments.

Thursday 17 March 2011

How should a social media report look like?

We often get asked what are the important metrics that should be measured on a Facebook Page. Is it simply the total amount of your fans? Does bigger always means better? Or are there another metrics which are as (or even more) important the the fan count? We have created a simple list of metrics which you should always follow in order to get a relevant measurement of your performance on Facebook:

1. Total number of fans

Yes, it is an important metrics to follow, although, not the only one. Having a good base of fans is always good for your brand.

2. Stable positive growth

Besides number of total fans, you should also take into consideration the daily/weekly/monthly growth of fans on your Page. Is it relatively stable or are there big ups and downs? Your fan base should be always steadily growing. Make sure you do not start losing fans. If that happens, try to identify why are your fans leaving you. Is it a wrong content on your Wall or simple loss of interest?

3. Regular postings on your Wall

Connecting with your fans on a regular basis allows you to give your fans daily information from your company. Make sure you post regularly and don't spam your fans.

4.User wall posts and interactions

While analyzing your Page, you should always look into the number of user wall posts and also their interactions (likes and comments on your wall). This way, you are able find out if your Page is "alive", if it has engaging fans, etc. Having tens of thousands of fans is nice, but they are worthless if they don't interact with you.

5. Evolution of your Engagement Rate

Keep your audience interested by posting regular and engaging posts. If the total engagement on your Page drops, analyze your content to find out why.

6. Response rate

Facebook is all about communication. Fans expect you to talk with them. Make use of this platform and engage into conversations with your fans. They will appreciate it.

Tuesday 15 March 2011

Writing Killer Content in 140 Characters or Less

How do you say what you want to say in less than 140 characters? Ask any writer out there. Writing short is difficult.

But it’s something comedians have been doing for years – writing short, pithy punch lines. Ask Comedian Michael Ian Black who recently decided to add advertisements to his tweets. Black wrote in his blog “As of today, I’ve written 2,655 tweets. That’s a lot of free material, all of it contributing to the entertainment of the 1.5 million people who follow me, as well as the multibillion dollar capitalization of Twitter itself.”

Yes, comedians have the art of writing short down. But so do poets. Talk about imbuing thought-provoking meaning with as few as characters as possible! I don’t know if anyone does it as well as E. E. Cummings.

Whether comedian or poet, writing short is a good skill to have, especially if you have a Twitter account (and who doesn’t?) which caps posts at 140 characters. I once had a mentor who told me the best writing uses the most effective language with the fewest words possible. A good goal whether character restricted or not.

The trick is getting your message across in 140 characters or less without sounding like a monkey with a computer. They say even a monkey with a keyboard can eventually spew out Shakespeare, but I think he might lose his audience first.

Michael Pollan provides a great example of writing meaningful but short content with this 7-word manifesto: eat food, mostly plants, not too much.

Those 7 words say a lot.

That’s what we’re looking to do with Twitter. Say what you need to say in as few as words as possible. The trick is to find ways to let people get to know who you are, what you have to offer, and have a little fun in the process. Writing with only 140 characters can be a limiting handicap.

Or not…getting rid of the necessary words and characters can also be freeing!

I gathered some of my favorite Writing Killer Twitter Content tips, added some of my own, and came up with this list. Here’s Tips on Writing Short in the Twitterverse:

- Choose Your Words Wisely. You want to pick the right words that evoke the right amount of meaning with as few as characters as possible. A thesaurus can help with this. For example, if you have a choice between two words, “lighthearted” and “fun,” go with the latter!

- Get Verbal. Select verbs that are more emotive to get your message across. An example would be to use a word like “leap” instead of “jump.” They’re both energetic verbs with equal characters, but “leap” implies more emotion.

-Lolly, lolly, lolly leave your adverbs here. Dustin Wax suggested on Lifehack that one way to shorten characters is to leave adverbs to a minimum. Adverbs use up important real estate and your content will be perfectly fine without it. Well, there’s an example of an adverb right there. I didn’t need to say “perfectly and fine” to get my point across. Don’t use two words when you can use one.

- KISS. Have you heard the saying, Keep it Simple, Stupid? That notion works here too. One way of doing that is to do what Dom Sagolla recommends in his book 140 Characters, keep your tweets focused on one thought. Hey puts it this way, we need to learn to “say more with less.”

- Writing is in the rewriting. The folks at ReadWriteWeb ask an interesting question. Maybe we should all learn to read and write in Mandarin where each character is actually a word. That’s a great idea, but in the meantime try this tip. Write exactly what you want to say, then begin the process of rewriting; paring it down while keeping an eye on that character count.

- Know the lingo. Twitterville has it’s own grammar. Use it. I promise there will be no school marms tapping your hands with rulers. And if there are, you can ignore them. Some examples of Twitterville Grammar is leaving out unnecessary words such as “that” and “which.” People understand what you’re trying to say without them.

- It’s not about you. Leave out personal pronouns. You can just say, “Going to BlogHer Food!”

- It’s all about you. Lisa Barone reminds us in her post How to Write Better Tweets to be sure to keep Twitter posts personal so people will want to read them.

- Don’t beat around the bush. Tweeting is not the time to be cryptic. Say what you want to say, but leave out the “I think” explanatory phrases. Of course you think it, otherwise you wouldn’t be tweeting it.

- The Link-anizer. If you’ve got more to say than 140 characters allows, write a provocative intro and then link to the rest of it. There are oodles of link shorteners out there – Tinyurl, Hootsuite, Bit.ly, etc. Pick your favorite and use it!

- Size Matters. Copyblogger suggests using small words. They say “…simple words work better than big ones. Write ‘get’ instead of ‘procure.’ Write ‘use’ rather than ‘utilize.’ Use the longer words only if your meaning is so precise there is no simpler word to use.”

- Be Creative. Mark Twain once said, “I don’t give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.” Twains words ring true today. English is a living language and Twitter is just the place to have some fun with your word choices.

We hope these tips help you be expansive in your Twitter thoughts while at the same time minimal in Twitter characters!

Saturday 12 March 2011

9 Ways To Get The Most From Twitter

There have been lots of negative comments in the press recently about Twitter and that’s a shame. What they don’t realise is Twitter is a not always a natural, instant thing; to get Twitter you need to hang around a little longer, pick up new followers and find people to follow. There are no set rules for how to use Twitter. If you want to Tweet about your every day tasks, then as far as I’m concerned, that’s fine. But if you really want to get the full benefit, then below are the things that work for me:

1. Tweet, often and honestly.

That doesn’t necessary mean you tell the truth it just means tweet things from the heart, things that you care about, things that amuse or entertain you or, if you must, things that will get a re-action.

2. Follow

Find people you like and follow them. It doesn’t have to be famous people, just ones that say things you can connect with. They might follow you back!

3. Don’t Tweet because you want more followers!

There are millions of Twitterers, they will follow you because they like what you say in 140 characters, not because you’re trying to sell yourself or other stuff.

4. Show people cool stuff.

Stupid photos, interesting links, things that make you smile or angry, music tracks (see blip.fm) and other peoples blogs!

5. Re-tweet.

Seen a Tweet you like? Make sure others know about it. That’s what makes the Twittersphere go round.

6. Respond

You don’t have to re-tweet everything, but letting people know you’re there and like what they say is always good, so hit reply. Don’t worry if they don’t answer back – it’s not about how they interact with you, but how you interact with them.

7. Block and move on

Don’t get sucked into a flame war. While it’s good to have people with different opinions on your follow list, there’s no need to put up with those you find offensive or annoying. That’s what blocks for.

8. Use hashtags (when necessary)

Hashtags are excellent for grouping comments together. Why is this important? It makes it easier to find items on similar themes; it also helps identify what are the most important issues on twitter (Trending topics).

And finally and most importantly:

9. Its not just about your blog.

When people follow me, I like to follow them back if, and only if, I like what they are tweeting. The number of times I’ve been to individual twitter pages to just find no other interaction, no re-tweets, no hashtags just a Tweets of “Hey, new post today!” Why would I want to read that?

I do, because of Twitter, read other people’s blogs when they post. Why? Because they interact, they communicate, they re-tweet, they hashtag; basically they get out there and are part of the community and I find what they have to say interesting.

In conclusion, Twitter is all about interaction. I only started to blog because of Twitter, I found I had more to say and 140 characters is not enough sometimes. I hope people read it, hey that’s surely the point of blogging, but that’s not why I Tweet. Yes it’s handy for letting people know I’ve blogged a new post (and it’s worth retweeting several times, such is the transitory nature of Twitter) but if that’s all it becomes about, then maybe Twitter isn’t for you.

Thursday 10 March 2011

How to get more retweet action on Twitter

I’m sure you’d love to receive more retweets that you currently do. In fact, we all do, I’m the first to admit it. Why? Because more RTs means more traffic to your blog, to your videos and to whatever it is you want to share with others. Besides, more RTs also mean to get more exposure in other people’s stream so it would be easier to you to attract new followers. Well, today is your lucky day buddy because you’re going to read my best tips to get lots of Retweets.
  • Keep your tweets short and leave at least 25 characters with free space. ¿Why? In order to get RTs your tweet will need that free space to contain the RT and @username. Besides, short tweets get more RTs because they look nicer and cleaner than long ones and, above all, because lazy people don’t like to read too much, and the Internet and Twitter is plenty of lazy people :D .
  • The content of your tweet must be interesting and eye-catching.
  • Just ask on your tweet for a RT. I don’t use it but I know many people who apply this technique and works quite well for them. For example: “Looking Into the Mirror of Life – http://su.pr/193M7S – Please RT!”
  • Place strategically some call-to-action buttons on your blog to make easier for your followers to share your content. If you use wordpress I recommend you to download and use the smart sharing plugin just as Mashable.com does.
  • Make some RTs to your followers. Some of them will want to return you the favour. If they don’t do you can’t get upset with them. Well you can but you shouldn’t because they don’t force you to RT their tweets; it was your choice.
  • You can create a group of 5 to 10 twitter buddies and share your own tweets. I don’t apply this tip because it has two potential negative effects: (1) I don’t think that your followers will be happy to see the same people’s tweets time and again; and (2), it’s quite probable that your buddies don’t have the same or similar amount of followers as you have.
  • Use hashtags in an effective way. I suggest you to add just one hashtag or even two but not more. ¿Why? Because they make your tweet look dirty and, at the same time, you would seem a spammer.
  • Find some twitter users in your niche. Create a new column using TweetDeck with their @username. Check the RTs they receive and follow those people who made the retweet. If you’re lucky they will follow you back. If they don’t you can try replying some of their tweets or Retweeting them. You can identify who don’t follow you back and unfollow them manually with who.unfollowed.me.
  • Make sure your blog posts have great and eye-catching titles.
  • Send your tweet several times over the day. You can schedule your tweets with su.pr.
  • Be grateful to people for retweeting your tweets. Don’t thank all at the same time. Each follower who RT your content deserve your complete attention and your sincere gratitude.
  • And finally, my best piece of advice: be a good twitter user, be social, actively engage your followers, build meaningful relationships and your retweets will skyrocket for sure.

Follow these tips and your tweets will receive more retweets than ever before.

Wednesday 9 March 2011

How to grow over 10 000 your followers on Twitter

It’s never too late to build a large, loyal Twitter following—if you think outside the box. In this guest post, Matthew Magain from SitePoint shares some tips on how you can grow your Twitter following to more than 10,000 in less than a week.

I admit it: we were a bit slow to recognize the potential of Twitter at SitePoint.

Sure, a few of us had dabbled with personal Twitter accounts, but we never really acknowledged Twitter as a viable medium for communicating with customers until, well, everyone else was doing it! By the time we decided to jump on board, our preferred username had already been snapped up by an enterprising squatter (we had to settle for @sitepointdotcom). Not the ideal beginnings for building a successful Twitter presence—and more than just a little ironic considering we pride ourselves with being at the cutting edge of the Web!

Despite beginning on the back foot, we were able to attract 13,000 followers in less than a week—an impressive following that surpasses CNN and the New York Times.

Here’s how we did it.

Dangling The Carrot

Everyone loves free stuff. At SitePoint we publish around 10 books in a year (yep, of the dead-tree variety). We decided to make one of our best-selling titles available as a free PDF to anyone who followed us on Twitter within a 14-day period.

It was a somewhat risky proposition for us—it’s both expensive and time-consuming to produce a high-quality book. We were therefore faced with the very real possibility that we might be giving away something of considerable value to thousands of people, only to have them un-follow us immediately afterwards (luckily, this hasn’t happened!).

However, the fact that we offered a free book is only one reason our campaign has succeeded. If you’re thinking of running a similar promotion, here are six tips, based on our own experience:

1. Give It A Name.

Any successful marketing campaign needs to have a catchy name. Before this venture, our marketing manager had jokingly used the phrase “Twitaway” a couple of times around the office, to mean a “Twitter giveaway”. We realized that this was in fact quite a catchy compound, and decided to run with it. We quickly registered the twitaway.com domain, and referred to the Twitaway promotion in all marketing material that went out.

twitaway.png

2. Do Your Homework.

We hit a couple of hurdles on the first day we set our campaign live—primarily due to the fact that we weren’t aware of Twitter’s throttling of the number of Direct Messages you can send in a day (as you can guess, we hit our limit pretty quickly).

It is possible to get around this limitation (it requires that you submit a request to Twitter for your account to be whitelisted). If we had done our homework better, we’d have realized this before embarking on such a project. Perhaps you’ll learn from our lesson, so you’re not scrambling desperately to get hold of Twitter support at odd hours, requesting that your request be accelerated in the queue. Not that we would ever dream of doing such a thing…

3. Have a Plan B.

We knew from the beginning that there would be visitors for whom signing up to Twitter would be a friction point. We gave these folks the option of submitting their email address instead of forcing them to sign up to Twitter—as a result, we’ve ended up with 60,000 email addresses as well as our 13,000 Twitter followers (and counting!)

4. Roll Your Own.

We opted to auto-follow every one of our followers, and sent them their download link immediately after following us. Initially we made use of the third party service Tweet Later, but it became obvious early on that auto-follows and Direct Messages were getting dropped.

Luckily, we have some smart developers on the team, and they were able to throw together a custom tool based on the Twitter API that duplicated the auto-follow and Direct Message functionality in about a day. We also added the ability to send mass Direct Messages (so we could send the download link to our existing followers, as well as new ones).

We’re currently running both tools—Tweet Later does the majority of the grunt work, and our custom tool steps in and picks up the crumbs whenever Tweet Later drops the ball, which gives us the added benefit of a crude form of failover.

5. Plaster It Everywhere.

Once our giveaway had launched, we did everything we could to get the word out—we emailed customers who had purchased the print book or who had downloaded sample chapters from sitepoint.com; we blogged about it, posted in our forum, modified our email signatures … everything short of screaming from the rooftops (although I’m pretty sure I saw our marketing manager doing that, too!). Most importantly, our download link encouraged the recipient to help spread the word, so retweets formed a huge part of the viral momentum that gathered.

6. Give It Some Iron.

There’s no point inviting tens of thousands of people to visit your site if your servers aren’t up to the challenge. We’d run similar giveaways in the past, and had our fair share of being slashdotted or dugg. We knew in advance to host our landing page on a scalable, fast infrastructure (read: a cloud computing service such as Amazon) so that this would be a non-issue. And it was.

Conclusion

Regardless of your initial follower count, it’s possible to grow a large Twitter following by giving people real incentive to begin following you—such as an exclusive offer for Twitter followers. The SitePoint Twitaway reinforces the notion that Twitter is more than just a tool for attention-seeking individuals looking to forge personal relationships and discuss breaking news—it’s a legitimate channel that companies can leverage to strengthen their brand, expand their customer base, and increase traffic to their web site.

Of course, once you’ve attracted these followers, it’s up to you to keep them by delivering timely, relevant content to the Twitter feed. That part is up to you.

(Note: The Twitaway offer has been extended by one week—follow SitePoint on @sitepointdotcom to receive your free PDF of The Art & Science Of CSS.

Monday 7 March 2011

More Facebook changes for this week

Facebook Upgrades Comments Plugin for Websites: Did you know Facebook allows you to add comments to any web page using its platform? Facebook now allows readers to have their comments published in their Facebook news feeds. And when friends comment back in Facebook, the reply will show up on your site. This is something all bloggers should check out.

facebook comment plugin

This is how the comment I left on a recent TechCrunch blog (with the new Facebook Comment plugin) is published on my Facebook Profile wall.

Facebook Likes Button Clicks Go to News Feed: When your readers Like something on your website, this now generates an update on their news feeds that looks like Facebook Share. It appears as if you’ll only need one Facebook button on your blog or website in the future: the Facebook Like button.

facebook likes

I Liked these pages on these websites and this is how the updates show up on my Facebook Profile and in my friends' news feeds on Facebook.

Saturday 5 March 2011

25 hours and 17 minutes to get 1 million Twitter followers!


It's a known fact that the Guinness World Records logs milestones for every esoteric achievement known to man. So with Charlie Sheen "high" on the drug he calls "Charlie Sheen," it was not inconceivable that he would "score" the coveted honor for the "Fastest Time to Reach 1 Million Followers" on Twitter ever. (take that, Ashton Kutcher!)

Clocking in at 25 hours and 17 minutes, everyone's favorite bi-polar ranter was able to reach this goal. As of this posting, the Two And A Half Men star, is closing in on 1.2 million, with a bio that reads, "Born Small…Now Huge…Winning…Bring it… (unemployed winner)."



Then, as if winning 'Best Actor' at the Emmy's or some other industry award function, #TeamSheen tweeted the following thank you to his ever-loving fans, when he tipped the scales at 1 million, just 11 hours before this post.



Remarkedly after joining Twitter on March 1, in less than an hour, Sheen amassed more than 60,000 followers and a Klout score of 57 - without tweeting one word. According to an Advertising Age report, Sheen was able to get his account verified quickly as the result of the Internet startup Ad.ly brokering his account with Twitter. Ad.ly apparently represents a long list of A& B-List celebrities who are known to attract the media, such as Kim Kardashian, Snoop Dogg and Paris Hilton.

"It was Ad.ly that got Charlie Sheen up on Twitter," says Ad.ly spokesperson Krista Thomas. "Based on trusted relationships with our executives, Charlie's management team reached out to us. Right off the bat, we realized that Charlie's voice has no contemporary. We knew he had one speed: go."

"So we helped Charlie get ownership of @CharlieSheen on Twitter and verify his account to ensure that friends and fans would have no doubt as to his identity and the authenticity of his tweets. As we have with many celebrities, our stellar talent team then helped get Charlie and his team started with Bit.ly, Twitpic and the other Twitterverse tools he might need - something we do quite often for athletes and artists."

So as Sheen continues to "defeat the earthworm" with his tweets, and threaten his ex-wives with his "fire-breathing fists," has he redeemed himself within social media circles by reaching this milestone on Twitter? Or is this just a desperate attempt by a man slowly losing his grip on reality to attach himself to yet another media outlet? In either event, I'm sure his tweets over the course of the next several news cycle will be "breaking news" and sopping up all the air in the room.

It's an odd commentary on life, when the Twitterverse can reach such heights as providing a forum for oppressed people to help achieve democracy in the Middle East, and then in a blink of an eye sink to such depths as to provide a run-away freight train like Sheen with a soap box to broadcast more of his bi-polar (er, excuse me, bi-winning) rants.

Wednesday 2 March 2011

Following Google's lead, Bing incorporates social media into search results

Shortly after rival Google began integrating social media into its online search results, Microsoft's Bing search engine made a similar announcement that it will start including a user's social media "likes" with results.

This latest announcement builds upon Bing's previous efforts to integrate social media into its search results. Now, whenever a user searches certain terms, results will include any related items his or her friends have liked on Facebook. Such results will be accompanied by a thumbnail image of the friend.

"As people spend more time online and integrate their offline and online worlds, they will want their friends' social activity and their social data to help them in making better decisions," Lawrence Kim, from Microsoft's Bing social team, wrote for a company blog post.

Last year, Microsoft incorporated information from users' Twitter accounts into search results.

Google, the online search market leader, now incorporates posts from websites, such as Flickr, YouTube and Twitter, into its search results. Privacy settings on Facebook don't allow information from the site to be incorporated