Twitip

By Firas Steitiyeh – Follow him @steitiyeh

It’s known that a brand for a product is like reputation for a human being. There are so many articles, books and people that talk about branding and how it is done properly. A lot of bloggers out there, who are most probably new, just do not care about their Twitter page and how it looks. Considering that you have got a proper brand and theme for your blog (or product) now you need to have a Twitter branded page that matches your current brand. (more…)

By Nathan Hangen of Making It Social. Follow him @nhangen.

When I look at my Twitterfeed, I see that a lot of people are spending time talking about themselves. I get that…I really do, but let me ask you something. How many people on Twitter do you really pay attention to? Of those, how many of them talk about themselves more than they talk about others? If my guess is right, I’d say that the percentage is less than 25%. So why is it then, that people feel they have to talk about themselves in order to convert you into a reader or a customer? (more…)

By Laura Christianson – Follow her @BloggingBistro

As I skimmed my Twitter stream, only three tweets enticed me to click through to the blog post:

All three of these tweets are brief, unusual, punchy, and they feature strong nouns: vampire, bacon beer, Krazy Glue.

Entertaining teasers seem to be in short supply on Twitter. Normally, my Twitter stream brims with two main types of teasers:

Steroidal: Boost your sales 500% in 1 week! http://hyperlink.com

Put-you-to-sleep: Read my blog post about my book tour http://hyperlink.com

We can do better than that, people! (more…)

By Alok Saboo – Follow @truvoip

Twitter is a great platform bringing together millions of people for you to interact. The challenge, however, is to identify the subset of this twitterverse that is relevant for you. The value that you can derive from Twitter is a function of the quality of people that you interact with. Today, I will present a great tool – Tweepi – that makes the onerous task of finding and following quality people a cakewalk.

Tweepi presents a geekier, faster way to manage your Twitter experience. It currently has four tools and hopefully we will more in the future.

Geeky Follow: Before you can prune your friend list, you need to build your friend list. Geeky Follow enables you to follow active tweeples who share the same interests are you. Just identify popular tweeple in your domain and selectively add people that are following them. The underlying idea is simple, people following users that you idolize share similar interests as yours. For example, if you are interested in technology related tweeps, you may want to follow users following @mashable or @techcrunch. (more…)

By Mary Rose Maguire – Follow her @MRMaguire

When you first join Twitter, it’s a slightly crazy world filled with celebrities, “wannabe-celebrities,” multi-level marketing folks (“Make money from home today!”), major brands, regular folks, and every kind of spammer you can imagine. It’s easy to spot those who will not add anything of value to your stream. On Twitter, you have three choices when someone follows you:

1) Follow them back.
2) Don’t follow them back but allow them to continue to see your tweets.
3) Block them, in which case they won’t be able to see your tweets and will not show up in your “followers” list.

Usually, most people decide not to return-follow an account. Sometimes when you’re new, following back can make your follower list look more robust. Other times, you may not really care if a realtor from Alaska is following you but since you live in Hawaii and have no intention of ever moving to Alaska, you’re not following them back.
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By Zoey Dowling. Follow her @zoeyspeak.

Twitter is a bright, shiny universe of new friends, new ideas, hilarious little snippets and occasionally even a spot of news. It’s a great way to promote your blog or your business. But if your primary purpose on twitter is promotion and not to connect with other people – abandon ship. Twitter is not for you. Ulterior motives don’t do well. They result in one action: UNFOLLOW. Mistakes are easy when you start out. After all, no-one is updating their status – they’re engaging with one another! And that’s confusing – is it private or can you join in? How do you make the most of it and have fun? Well for starters you could avoid the most irritating twitter behaviours. And before you start trawling through my twitter stream – yes I have committed most of them.

1. Gluttony (Over-Sharing)
Do not, I repeat do not over-share. Do you really want to know about someone else’s digestive problems? I didn’t think so. When you went into graphic detail about your gastric flu did you consider all the people reading your tweets while they were eating? Your followers should be wanting to know more about you, not less.
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By Jade Craven – Follow her @jadecraven.

Twitter recently introduced a new feature called lists to many users. This isn’t available to everyone – I’ve heard many reports of people who are unable to see anybodies lists. Basically, it allows you to organize the people you follow into several different categories. These can be made private and can be followed by others.

This is an awesome for those who are using the web interface as you can choose the groups you want to read at any time.

However, there are some considerations you need to make before embracing this feature.

1. People may be offended by not being included on a list.

Some of my friends created lists like ‘awesome friends’ and ‘top bloggers.’ They used these terms as generalist lists but some people took offense at not being included on a list.

This is very similar to the follow/unfollow situations that happened before people started to embrace groups on other clients.

So, what can you do to avoid offending?

• Have a disclaimer on your twitter landing page

• Make your list private

• Organize lists by geographic region – ie, Melbourne bloggers.

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By Fredrickus Williford of CalTweet – Follow him @blackmediaprop

With Twitter implementing the new “report for spam” button that has been buzzing as a trending topic around the Twittersphere this article is right on time. Stalkers beware: Twitter isn’t therapy it will only increase the number of people you’re following.

After reading below you will understand that the first step to improving your Twitter behavior is to admit that you have a problem and slim down on the people you’re following.

Here’s 5 reasons why Twitter builds a healthy appetite for stalking:

1. It encourages you to follow people you are already clearly obsessed with. Early warning signs of a stalker to be.

2. It gets fans one step closer to celebrities & high profile internet entrepreneurs. Twitter has to be the only social network that celebrities actually use themselves… at least that what appears to be going on behind these famous Twitter handles.

3. Service is down just as much as it is available. It goes down (very often) without notice and forces you to find other ways to keep up with the people you stalk follow.

4. The fact that you have to constantly type in the person your @mentioning creates a recurring cycle in your brain of repetition of the person you’re stalking following on Twitter.

5. Last but not least. After so many @mentions and DM’s to the stalkee with no signs of them knowing you exist it forces the follower/stalker to find other means of getting the stalkee to acknowledge there 140 characters of Twitter love. That’s where the All NEW “report @insertstalkername for spam” will come in use.

Make sure you read over the above reasons and make sure you’re not at fault or showing early warning signs of becoming an e-stalker. If all else fails we know who to blame. Hint: Tweet-Tweet.

By Trevor Dobrygoski of Twit 101 – Follow him @trevord209

Have you seen the Hangover? If not, you may want to grab the eight other people out there who haven’t and go give it a peek. Without ruining it for all eight of you, here is a quick rundown.

A group of four friends go to Vegas to celebrate an upcoming wedding. After a long night of bachelor party fun, they lose the groom. The remaining three spend the bulk of the movie trying to remember what happened, find their friend and make it back to the wedding in LA.

Had the guys took advantage of their Twitter account and used a few of these simple tips, many pitfalls and shenanigans from the day after could have been avoided. I am not a fan of using cliches, but hindsight is 20/20. (I’ll admit if they did use any or all of these tips, it would have made for a really boring movie.) (more…)

By Joi Murugavell – Follow her @joidesign

A short definition of hashtags:

On Twitter hashtags act as a means to create ‘groupings’ of tweets about a specific topic. Anyone can create a hashtag on twitter by simply appending # to a word (preferably a short word). Then other people who are interested in this topic look up the hashtag and ta-da all tweets about that particular topic are in one place. A recent event using hashtags brilliantly is #marketingnow. The diverse and often opposing opinions on hashtags is what makes it a powerful learning tool. Read more about hashtags and find out how to use them here.

The good

Hashtags are often used by companies to form a collective knowledge-base (and pats on the back) ‘in one place’. Adobe does this extremely well. Check out this example  of multiple hashtags being used to announce Adobe’s plans to open the iPhone to flash developers with its release of FlashCS5 (huge news for developers and iPhone users). (more…)