Twitip

Today Mark Ramskill (@ramskill) from SubHub, takes a look at some of the steps that new Twitter users can go through to get going.

Twitter, having been quickly adopted initially by key influencers, has grown into a mass-market communication tool, with millions of users.

If you’re publishing content, undertaking online marketing, and looking to keep up with the latest trends in anything web related then Twitter should be featuring highly as a ‘weapon of choice’.

In this article I’ll be assuming you are new to Twitter, and that rather than wanting to use Twitter as a way of simply keeping up with friends, you want to use it as a tool for valuable engagement and maximum effect, avoiding the white noise that Twitter can also create if used incorrectly.

I call this ‘Using Twitter, the Smart Way’.

(more…)

Today Collin Robinson from cjgraphix takes a look at EventBox – an exciting new social network manager client for Mac users that does Twitter…. and a whole lot more.

I’m always looking for a good way to simplify my social media lifestyle. The best way for me to do this has been with desktop apps, and I have plenty of them. The downside to these apps was they were all single site apps. I needed something that would combine multiple sites like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and more into a single app. Someone over at http://www.thecosmicmachine.com/ must have been listening because they delivered in a major way with EventBox.

(more…)

In this post, Pierre Far (@pierrefar) explains how to kick start a community using Twitter. Pierre recently launched a URL shortening service with analytics called Cligs (@cligs), and used Twitter to build a community around the service. Here are his notes from this experience.

Whether you’re a startup or an established company, your customers are probably on Twitter. And whether you like it or not, they’re going to complain and praise your company and products on Twitter. Let that sink in a for a second: they’re going to complain and praise your company and products in a very public forum. There is no escaping that your reputation can be, rightly or wrongly, negatively or positively affected because of a handful of tweets.

But I’m not here to scare you into creating a Twitter profile. What I’d like to do is tell you how wonderful an opportunity this is to engage with the Twitter community, in public, and win the hearts of this community.

The Key to Community Engagement is Monitoring

To know which members of a community you need to be talking to, you need to know who’s talking about you. On Twitter, that’s quite a feat. Think about the challenge you have: Twitter has millions of users. Some are very popular with thousands of followers (i.e. very influential) but most are not that popular. Some tweet very regularly and some tweet very rarely. Some simply whine about your product, some post wishes for features, some express frustration, some give constructive feedback, and if you’re really lucky, some sing your praises. How would monitor all this activity?
(more…)

Do you have a Twitter Plan? I don’t – but when Nicole Nicolay (@nik_nik) from My Tech Opinion told me about hers I asked her to write it up as a post. It won’t be for everyone but for those who like a little structure – a Twitter Plan might help. Here’s Nicole’s tutorial.

Is there rhyme to your twitter reason? Do you have a plan when it comes to your tweets, or are you a spontaneous tweeter? Believe it or not, there can be a happy medium.

If you let it, Twitter can easily steal your time and work efficiency. And as much I enjoy conversing with others in the comforts of my home office, it can be extremely distracting if you are tuned into Twitter all day long. So how do you stop diluting your work day but also take advantage of this rockin’ social media channel… especially, if it’s not in your regular job description (if it is, lucky you)? Simply put, you need a Tweet Plan. With a Tweet Plan you can pre-organize and categorize your tweets for future use… keeping you more on track during your work day. Hey, you plan your blog posts, why not your tweets?!

FOLLOWING YOUR OWN TWEET PLAN

(more…)

Twitter Novels are one use of Twitter that many of us would never consider – but there’s a growing number of Twitter Novelists exploring the medium. Today Brandon J. Mendelson, author of The Falcon Can Hear The Falconer (a Twitter Novel) gives some tips for writing Twitter Novels.

A word of caution: As far as English language Twitter novels go, this is new territory. Based on early results, as compiled by ReadWriteWeb, there have not been any success stories. RWW never spelled out what would be defined as a success, but I took their comments to assume no Twitter novelists have crossed into the mainstream or made money. It may be only a matter of time before this changes.

What I’m presenting here are suggestions on how to write and operate your new Twitter novel based on my experience writing “The Falcon Can Hear The Falconer”. I hope what I’m proposing will provide a blueprint for interested writers to create successful Twitter novels.

(more…)