Twitip

By Nathan Hangen, follow him @nhangen.

Once upon a time, Twitter was an innocent and casual place to hang out. Everyone was positive and was nearly over-interested in what everyone had to say. However, now that the initial “buzz has worn off and people are realizing how difficult it can be to manage thousands of follows and followers, the interaction has been reduced to tightly knit groups of key players and in turn leaves many people without the friends they once had. Sure, everyone has a base of friends, followers, and fans that they can rely on to spur conversation and reply to their requests, but overall it has become increasingly difficult to stand out in the crowd. Since getting noticed is one of the crucial aspects of getting more “legit” followers and building a following that converts into blog readers, buyers, and fans, finding ways to get noticed is extremely important.

The simple methods, like RT’ing, offering contests, quoting, and recommending friends for #followfriday no longer have the power they once did. Although those staples are still great ways to increase your influence, if you really want to get noticed on Twitter you’ll have to find other ways to create buzz and show up on the radar. (more…)

By Nathan Hangen, follow him @nhangen.

I remember the good old days back before Twitter had gone mainstream where it was a small and exclusive hangout for tech geeks and social networking addicts. There wasn’t a lot going on, and we didn’t have a lot of “celebrities” in the neighborhood, but we also didn’t have to worry about bots, spammers, and internet marketers. Sure, Twitter deserves to be set free for rapid consumption by all internet users, amateur and geek alike, but if we could only do something about these bots then Twitter could feel like home once more.

I don’t like getting my inbox hammered with spammy DM’s, and I certainly don’t like being tricked into following someone so that they can launch a full scale attack with a barrage of bit.ly affiliate links, but like so many others I didn’t really know what to do about it. Well, finally I had enough and I developed my own anti-bot strategy to keep my Twitter feed clean from Twitter spammers and other unruly scoundrels. It goes a little something like this: (more…)

by Nathan Hangen – Follow him @nhangen.

I like to compare Twitter to a new relationship. At first, you are interested, but your guard is up. However, as time goes by, you find yourself spending more and more time together until the relationship blossoms and takes on a life of its own. Twitter has a great way of pulling you in like this in a way that no other social network can. Everyone seems warm and friendly and you quickly find that you can take your guard down and start talking with people from all over the world as if they were a guest in your home.

I love Twitter for this reason because it seems that it has never been easier to build so many relationships so quickly. This is really something most of us, unless we are celebrities, have never had to face before. That is, having to deal with thousands of friends at once. At first, a few hundred friends are easy to manage, but soon you have a list of thousands that you have to sort through. It can become a daunting task trying to keep up with everyone, much less interact with them. This is why I don’t think I’d be able to use Twitter without TweetDeck and why I think that the following advice just might save the Twitter interaction that you’ve come to love.

What we are going to do is turn a normal Twitter feed into something that is easy to use and makes interacting with people much easier. If you don’t have TweetDeck, then I highly recommend that you go and grab it now before you finish reading this post. Although Twhirl does come in handy for certain tasks, in my opinion, nothing works as seamlessly with Twitter as TweetDeck does.
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