Twitip

What advice would you give a business wanting to explore the world of Twitter?

I’m speaking later in the week on the topic (I’ll post a summary of my presentation next week) and would like to feature the tweeted advice of a few readers of this blog.

Here’s how it’ll work.

Login to Twitter or your favorite Twitter Client reply to @twitip with your advice. I’ll take a screenshot of as many people’s advice as I can to include their responses in my presentation.

Please keep your advice to a single tweet. Thanks for your help.

Please note: I won’t be able to use comments in this post, just tweets as I want to show the tweets as screen shots.

by Mark McGuinness of Wishful Thinking and co-founder of Lateral Action. Follow him at @markmcguinness

(image credit: tomsaint11)

Stop and think for a moment about the people you follow on Twitter the moment you see them.

These are the ones you have no hesitation in following — you’re delighted to find them on Twitter and look forward to receiving their Tweets.

Chances are they fall into two categories:

1. You know them outside of Twitter.
2. They’re doing something interesting outside of Twitter.

So if you really want to get more followers, you should do two things:

1. Get to know people outside of Twitter.
2. Do something interesting outside of Twitter.

It might seem counterintuitive, but if you look at things like this, one of the best ways to boost your follower count is to log out of Twitter and do something more exciting.

Remarkable People Don’t Spend All Day on Twitter…

The most popular people on Twitter tend to be those who are doing remarkable things elsewhere (e.g. Barack Obama, Stephen Fry, Tony Hsieh). The more interesting your background, the more people will follow you.

(more…)

by Glenn Murray of copywriting studio, Divine Write. Follow him @divinewrite.

I must have Twitter all wrong. I follow people because I want to hear what they have to say. Not just what they @reply specifically to me. I like to read every tweet in my Twitterstream. This imposes a practical limit on the number of people I can follow. If I follow more than about 100, I simply can’t keep up. Even at 100, it’s all but impossible.

But I seem to be in the minority here. Most people I see on Twitter follow more than 100 people. Many follow several hundred people, if not thousands. There’s no way they could be reading every single tweet in their Twitterstream. (I’ve spoken to a few people on Twitter about this, and none who are following thousands claim to read everything.)

This raises three very interesting questions:

(more…)

by Tim Bursch. Follow him @timbursch

So, you’ve been on Twitter for awhile and realize it has some value beyond updating others on your every move.
You may have followers and conversations, but most of your tweeps are on the surface. So, how do you build stronger connections?

Here are 6 ways to take your connections deeper:

1.    Add Value
One big theme here is giving value on Twitter. People do not want to be sold, spammed or overwhelmed with tweets of little value. Think before you tweet. Ask, will this add value? Will this help someone?

2.    Listen. Really? I thought Twitter is where I get to talk and tell people stuff.
- Use the Favorites to save things you are listening to and might want to talk about later.
- Try to read your tweet-stream in batches rather than watching your Tweetdeck all day.

(more…)

by Paul Anthony of Web Distortion – Follow him @webireland

The great thing about Twitter is that it has the potential to solve real time problems extremely quickly. With a host of people available online at a particular moment, you can use it to get help on a multitude of levels.

This real time capability has helped establish Twitter as a ‘help engine’ and the twittersphere is awash with stories of how Twitter has helped its users. Guy Kawasaki has had a laptop cable hand delivered by a fellow Twitter user – Matt Perez has used it to test different versions of a website on various mobile devices. It has even had more humanitarian benefits helping to prevent death threats at a school. It has even proven it’s worth through live tweeting at conferences, when a speaker became ill, and people rushed to help.

Many of us are now turning to Twitter as the first place to get an answer or help on a potential problem, its alot quicker than waiting for a reply on a message board. So, if you decide that the Twittersphere is the place you want to ask questions and get help, what are the services and sites you should be following on Twitter?

(more…)

by Web Designer Debbie Campbell (@redkitedesign) from Red Kite Design.

One of my networking/leads groups got off on a tangent in early December and decided that we needed to learn more about social networking. One Facebook enthusiast volunteered to do a presentation on that, and since I had the most experience with Twitter (all of 5 weeks) I was nominated to do the Twitter talk.

So I’d been using Twitter for just over a month, although I’d had an account for a lot longer. I had never really spent the time to understand what it was about, and frankly wasn’t convinced that it would useful for me as a businessperson.

That may sound odd. I’m a web designer and developer, and for the past six months I’ve been a very busy one. I have a lot of demands for my time – taking online classes, going to meetings, project work, blogging, LinkedIn, and so on. I thought that Twitter looked like a big waste of time.

(more…)

Just a quick post about a new Twitter service called Twuulu, that connects your Hulu watching habits to your Twitter account.

In case you’re wondering, Hulu is a really cool service that lets you watch your favorite movies and television shows for absolutely free. Miss that last episode of Ugly Betty? Watch it anytime you want at Hulu.

Currently the service is in beta testing and is available by invite only, however the folks at Twuulu have offered up 350 invites to TwiTip readers! Just click the link, sign up, and you’re connected!

Reminder: As one commenter below noted, Hulu is only available to US residents at this time. They’re working to resolve that, however it is a timely process of acquiring permissions for distribution and so on. Learn more at Hulu’s support page on geofilters.

Techcrunch today are reporting that Twitter has just tweaked the title pages on Twitter users pages to now include users names at the start of the tags instead of the end.

So my tags now read – ‘Darren Rowse (problogger) on Twitter’ instead of ‘Twitter / ProBlogger’.

This might not sound like much but it’s actually a fairly significant tweak when it comes to search engine optimization and has already increased the search engine rankings for Twitter for the names of those using it.

For example – on a search for my name in Google (not that I’d ever search for it…..) my Twitter page now ranks #3 whereas it previously ranked less than 10th (on the second page). Many twitter users that I’ve just done searches for now have their twitter pages rank at #1 for their names.

There are a number of implications for this:

1. It could be useful (or not) for reputation management – online reputation managers often teach about how it is important to ‘control’ the top listings. The more results that you control in the top 10 search results for your name/brand the less likely people are to find negative things about you. Of course this could also be used for ‘evil’ by people wanting to hurt your reputation

2. Twitter is outranking many users homepages/blogs – I’m lucky to have a blog that ranks higher for my name than my Twitter page but as mentioned above there are quite a few Twitter users whose Twitter pages outrank their own home pages. This won’t phase some – but I know a few people who will be a bit ‘miffed’ by this.

In fact I just chatted to one blogger who is now outranked for his own name by Wikipedia (he didn’t even start that page (and doesn’t really ‘control’ what appears on it), LinkedIn, Technorati and now Twitter. His own blog (with his name in the URL even) ranks 5th for his name!

update: there’s a poll at Tweet Social asking people where their Twitter page ranks in Google – it is early days but most seem to be reporting rankings between #1-#3.

3. Good for Twitter’s Growth – as the Techcrunch article explains, this will certainly increase the number of people hitting Twitter as a result of search results. I guess this is potentially good for Twitter users as it means more and more people will be on the network.

Interested to hear your thoughts on this SEO tweak by Twitter?

Today Mark Ramskill (@ramskill) of SubHub and TalkContent takes a look at the amazing reach potential of Twitter, as a distribution mechanism.

These days ever increasing numbers of us are falling victim to information overload.

With a totally overwhelming number of sites and blogs on the web, all vying for our attention, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to both keep up and take part in ‘the conversation’.

While RSS feed readers have helped in many respects, with their ability to aggregate multiple sources and allow us to quickly assess what we want to read in more detail, there is still the inconvenience of having to find and add your own sites of interest and their corresponding feeds. There is also no means for immediate response or discussion.

Enter Twitter . . .

May I suggest, if you are fairly new to Twitter, that you read my TwiTip article, Using Twitter … ‘The Smart Way’ , to get yourself up to speed.

Over the last few months, Twitter has slowly but surely become my main source (or should that be fix) for quality information. Through applications such as Tweetdeck, I continually receive the very latest information (links, feedback and commentary) on my desktop, allowing for immediate digestion, review and onward distribution.

It’s like having my very own newswire!

(more…)

UPDATE: there are two polls in this post – please vote in both.

This poll is motivated by my increasing frustration with the automated DM that seems to be increasingly being sent when I follow new people.

I counted up how many automated ‘thanks for following me’ messages I received in the last 24 hours and it was 45. While I can see why people are tempted to use this tactic (the messages often include links back to blogs, other social media sites and even affiliate links) a quick survey of my Twitter followers just now showed me that virtually nobody likes them – some even unfollow those who send them.

So I’m interested – do you use an automated DM when someone follows you? You’re welcome to vote and comment anonymously if you’d rather not identify yourself but I’d be interested to hear why people feel the need to do it, what results they’ve noticed from it and if they’ve noticed a backlash from doing so.

 Loading ...

And a 2nd poll…

 Loading ...

I should also give a reason for not liking automated DMs – the main reason for me is that they clutter my Direct Message window (and email inbox as I get them sent via email – something I’m considering stopping). When you get 45 automated ‘thanks for following, check out this link’ messages a day the genuine and personal DMs that you get become lost in the noise.

I also find them to be impersonal and a put off – Twitter at its best is about engagement and connection, an obviously automated DM goes against that and doesn’t create the best impression.

Looking forward to reading your comments below. Do you do it? What do you think of automated DMs? Should Twitter make some changes to stop them?

Update – due to numerous people asking on Twitter (this hit a nerve) I decided to add a 2nd poll asking what you think/feel about getting these auto DMs.

If you’d like to get the results on these polls either subscribe to our RSS feed (I’ll post them in a week) or follow me on Twitter and I’ll tweet the results.