TwiTip » Twitter Tools

3 Creative Tools For Power Twitter Users

tdomf_2ae17 — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 13:53:54 +0000

There are a lot of tools for Twitter out there. We’ve all heard of the big ones: that’s not what this post is going to entail. What I’d like to dive into are some creative tools for Twitter that I haven’t seen a lot of people use, and that you can start to implement so you’ll be ahead of the pack!

Posting Statuses To Twitter At The Perfect Time – Timely.is

You might never have stopped to think about this, but… are you tweeting at the right time? I mean, to the vast majority of people, using Twitter amounts to nothing but tweeting something when they feel like doing it, and trusting their followers will get the message, read it and process it.

The truth is that sending a tweet when nobody is around is almost the same as not sending it. The tweet will become buried by all the messages that come after it. That is a simple, unavoidable fact.

And that is what Timely is here to address. It is a web application that can take care of scheduling all your tweets, and sending them when they would reach out to more people. Once you give Timely access to your Twitter account, the application will take care of analyzing the last 200 tweets you have sent, and figure out the best time slots for anything you want to send in the future.

If this sounds good to you, then you will be happy to know that Timely is a free service. Timely will analyze all your tweets and figure out what times of day you get the best engagement and then auto schedule your tweets for those best periods of the day. As your followers grow, Timely will adapt and learn what new times might be best. The app also provides tweet analytics and performance insights that shows you how you’re doing (including click-throughs and audience reached).

In a nutshell: If you send out multiple Tweets at once, it could annoy some of your followers. There’s also the risk that your Tweets could be pushed to the bottom of their feeds if they aren’t constantly reading their feeds. Timely helps fix that by scheduling your Tweets, and has the added benefit of some light analytics afterwards.

It is also a fantastic app for those managing multiple Twitter accounts who wants to optimize when their tweets are scheduled. The Timely bookmarklet makes for a nice work flow where you can fill up your queue of tweets quickly and then let Timely find the best time to tweet them out (and you can change between accounts with a single click). Great for community managers and others who want to share helpful links on Twitter without spending all day on it.

Posting Photos To Twitter With No Ads – Posterous

Posterous you say? I thought that was a blogging platform? Fear not, I mentioned that these would be creative tools, so read on to find out more about how to implement Posterous. There are a lot of ways to share photos with your followers on Twitter. Posterous, however, has a position in the photo sharing market that makes it truly the best option for sharing photos are Twitter, one that offers numerous advantages to you as a user and blogger.

If you have made your decision to start blogging through a tumblelog and you chose to use Posterous, you already have a distinct advantage to sharing your photos on Twitter through Posterous: your followers will be linked to your blog to view the photos and not to some 3rd party application like TwitPic.

This is advantageous in many ways: the foremost way being you allow users to check out a separate blog in addition to photos. Your blog can contain much more than just the photos that you’ve sent to Twitter! Services like TwitPic offer the bare minimum; pretty much only photos you upload to them which can be shared one at a time, and nothing else.

Many of these services are ridden with ads and look very cluttered and tacky. Meanwhile, using the “Clean Sheet” or one of Posterous’s other sleek themes will allow you to share your photo content on a nicely laid out on a blog style page with no ads and no distractions. You will notice Rainn Wilson from “The Office” does this on his Twitter. The benefits do not end here however.

Posterous offers the option to upload multiple photos at once and have them automatically appear in a very sleek slide show display. No more spamming your followers with shortlinks, simply upload a few photos that you took at the moment or recently and send one link out via Posterous to Twitter and give you followers a few things to check out. This makes your photo Tweets much more entertaining and worthwhile.

Additionally, you photos will display in a clean timeline. Posterous offers the aforementioned blog style layout, so your other photos display in date order for your users to check out. So after a person is linked to a photo of yours via Posterous, they now have access to the rest of your photos in a timeline style.

Lastly, you can add commentary to the photos in Posterous to give your readers a little more insight. This is another ability that adds value per Tweet. Gone are the days of “Here is me _______ – [shortlink]”, now you can upload photos and stay in the 140 character limit on Twitter while adding additional content on Posterous, giving your readers more context and description. It is also something that adds optional depth to readers they are interested.

Getting More Followers On Twitter By Sharing Content – CloudFlood

As you know, being a power user and having an impact on Twitter means that you need followers. Having a large follower base on Twitter means your tweets will reach as wide an audience as possible: not only your followers, but those who they retweet it to.

Having a large base on Twitter also allows you to inform people of other ventures that you are apart of, site as a new site or new release of something. One great method for gaining peoples interest is a “freebie”, giving something away in order to get something small back from the user, possible an email address, or maybe… even a tweet spreading word about whatever your new endeavor is.

Enter Cloud:Flood. To maximize the number of people who tweet about whatever page you’d like to direct them to, follow three easy steps to implement the Cloud:Flood app in perfect form: first, create a free product you want to give away to your website visitors. It could be an eBook on your chosen topic, an MP3 or even a Zip file full of PSD’s.

Then, make a button on the Cloud:Flood site, linking to the file you want to give away, and a page to promote (this can be any page you want, whether it is a new site, a new product, a new post…anything!). You then place the button that you just made on Cloud:Flood next to the freebie offering on your site.

Site visitors see the freebie, and are asked to Tweet or FB Share your link in order to get it. People love getting something for free, so from my experience, this has a high conversion rate: why would your followers pass up something free from you if all they have to do is send out a tweet or Facebook share? Once they share your link, they are automatically given the freebie.

You both win here: your followers get something for free, and you get free, guaranteed promotion on Twitter through their tweets, which you can set (you enter a predefined message to be shared before you make the button). Start up your next big project with a huge boost from Twitter with this technique, and you’ll be glad you did! Not only will you get eyeballs from Twitter visitors on a page you desire, but if you have the predetermined message mention your name, you’ll gain followers as well. So get to work on your next freebie, and let Cloud:Flood do the rest.

Tweetdeck Officially Launches for Android

tdomf_2ae17 — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 13:57:03 +0000

It’s about time! The ever popular twitter app, Tweetdeck, has finally come to Android. Just announced, Tweetdeck 1.0 can now be downloaded after a few months of beta testing.

Tweetdeck had a whopping 36,000 beta testers prior to this launch in an effort to make sure the app worked without fail.

What is interesting about the release, is that this particular version of Tweetdeck happens to be the most recent version of the app that has not even been tested for iPad’s or iPhone’s yet. Usually, it comes to the iPad and iPhone first.

Here is a great video on YouTube showing off the new Tweetdeck 1.0 for Android:

Create Collaborative Newsstreams with Twitter and MyTweetMag

tdomf_2ae17 — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 11:47:20 +0000

“There’s no such thing as information overload, there’s only filter failure.”

This famous quote from Clay Shirky exactly describes the purpose of MyTweetMag: Twitter is a perfect tool for sharing information and links. But on busy days you might get in trouble when you try to filter the rich news out of the endless twitter-stream. MyTweetMag wants to help you to curate the twitter-stream together with your twitter-friends and to create a collaborative newsstream for a certain topic.

And this is how it works: Join the platform with your twitter-account, add some co-editors, select a hashtag and return to twitter.

In the future, MyTweetMag will import all tweet-links marked with the hashtag and transform them into a clean stream of headlines and abstracts. The plattform also provides a plugin to integrate the newsstream into any wordpress-blog.

What to use it for? Use it as a collaborative bookmarking-tool, a social news platform or a recommendation stream for your blog-audience. It’s up to you!

Wet & Salty Tweets: The Ocean on Twitter

tdomf_2ae17 — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 14:42:48 +0000

Tweeting about stuff that is happening in and around oceans and shorelines can be a challenge. The reason? How do I tweet about a threatened dolphin pod in Japan, a sea lion rookery in California, an exploding oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, a fancy new marina in Dubai, a diving spot in the Philippines, or a a great surfing spot in Fiji? What is the URL of a place in or on the water?

BlooSee is a Twitter-friendly ocean mapping site that allows any ocean lover to find and/or create points of interest in the ocean and shorelines in a matter of seconds. These points are given a unique URL that anyone can tweet, either directly from the “Share /Twitter” button on BlooSee or by grabbing the URL (Via the Share/URL button) and shortening and tweeting it as usual. Here are some examples:

Watching @TheCoveMovie: see the spot where dolphins are slaughtered: http://bit.ly/dwMuzu
Exploring the USS Yukon shipwreck off San Diego http://bit.ly/d2dhnW #SCUBA
Shacketon’s 100 year-old whiskey found in Atarctica http://bit.ly/aGnM0M

BlooSee also allows anyone to tweet maps of the ocean centered and zoomed in a certain way. For instance:

Sailing the Straits of Gibraltar http://bit.ly/ajZBfl
Kayaking along the southern coast of Santa Cruz Island http://bit.ly/9SNrM6
Planning a vacation to the Istria Coast in Croatia http://bit.ly/cPZU3Y

So, BlooSee + Twitter allows anyone to bring the oceans into the online conversation, for a better enjoyment and stewardship of the world’s oceans.

Stream Twitter on TVs in real-time at events, concerts, presentations and more.

tdomf_2ae17 — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 12:55:55 +0000

Have you ever been at a concert and wondered what the rest of the audience is thinking? Or been at a presentation and had a good point to add? Or at a nightclub and wanted to request a song but not deal with the security surrounding the DJ? Well, there’s a great way to do all this and more.

Connecting Twitter to TVs or projecting it on a screen at your events will add a whole new level of audience participation. Plus, you can grow your list of followers at every event. Creating a live Twitter feed to aggregate tweets sent to users, from users, or including keywords or hashtags can be quite a task.

You can run a real-time search using TweetDeck but it isn’t really optimized for screen and your audience will be squinting.

You can try to build your own Twitter feed widget but it’s a pretty daunting task involving JQuery, JavaScripting, CSS and HTML knowledge.

There’s an easier way. StreamTwitter is a little script designed for streaming tweets in real-time to any video source. Just open the script, change your search term, switch the graphics to be your own (optional) and connect your laptop to your video source. It’s optimized for TV screen resolution and looks amazing. It updates automatically with beautiful jQuery sliding effects. It can filter out bad words if desired. It is the easiest and best way to have a live Twitter feed streaming tweets including your desired search term at your events. It also comes with easy-to-follow instructions and 3 months of support if you have any questions.

If you’ve got experience with StreamTwitter, or any questions, please feel free to share in the comments!

Twitter Stalking via SMS

Lara Kulpa — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 18:55:46 +0000

So you’ve always been able to “Twitter Stalk” someone by just going to their Twitter page (example: www.twitter.com/personyoustalk) but now there’s an easier way, via your cell phone.

Twitter’s launched this with the idea that you can get Twitter updates from your favorite companies, as many tend to tweet out offers that are only available to the Twitterati. However now you can utilize “Fast Follow” by texting “follow USERNAME” to 40404. You’ll then start receiving all of updates from that user via texts on your phone.

Personally, I do use the mobile interface for Twitter, but really only for DMs (direct messages). It’s kind of like text messaging to me that way. Not sure I’ll ever use “Fast Follow” but it’s nice that it’s so much more easily available to those of us without super computers for phones!

PS – Currently, “Fast Follow” is only available in the US, but they say they’re working on implementing it for other countries.

Twitter Unicode Hashtags

tdomf_2ae17 — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 13:05:22 +0000

Twitter #hashtag in Hebrew

It as occurred to me that Twitter has no support for non-Latin hashtags. However some people use them anyway, so I wrote this Greasemonkey script that adds that support. It should work with any language, highlighting them and adding a search link.

I hope in the upcoming days also to add support for the ‘more’ button, making it an integral part of twitter usage. Download it here.

Measuring Twitter Sentiment – UpprDwnr

tdomf_2ae17 — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 15:30:31 +0000

Over the past few months, the outcry for ways to measure public sentiment online has grown exponentially. As more and more companies scramble to take the reins, we realize that these products are not only incredibly expensive, but they are also very inaccurate.

I am co-creator of upprdwnr, a tool that measures public sentiment on twitter. Think of us as the first iteration of a Twitter “like” button. All users have to do is simply add an #uppr or #dwnr hastag to their tweets, and our site measures that with the rest of the world.

As others try to find the pixie dust to accurately measure what people are saying, we ask users to use the hashtags that makes their voice louder than ever.

ChumpDump – A New Unfollow Game for Twitter

tdomf_2ae17 — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 12:55:53 +0000

ChumpDump is a new Twitter unfollow game for Google Android and Apple iPhone.

We think you’ve got too many chumps in your friends list. Friends are today’s 21st century currency in life. You see it in every social network, this obsession with collecting friends. But how many of them are really friends?

The game’s daily lottery picks a winner out of your friends this and then digs through a month of tweets and tells you a story about this “supposed friend” you’ve been following.

The analysis includes the usual: # of DMs, # of replies, and whether they are even following you to more sophisticated stuff like a Klout Influence Score and even a social graph for you to check out. The game then presents you with your friend’s latest tweets and begs the big question – SAVE or DUMP?

You earn the most points when you dump someone. You earn a little less when you save someone. And most of all, you earn more equally if you tell the game why.

“Why’s” are what we feel make the game really entertaining. Come play today!

Twitter XMPP Instant Messaging with Treegger

tdomf_2ae17 — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 16:03:44 +0000

Treegger has launched a service allowing Twitter users to chat in real time using an XMPP client such as Miranda, Pigdim, Adium, iChat (see the list here).

Messages exchanged during conversation are not stored or published on the web or anywhere else.

Bidirectional relationships (people followed and following you) are set as chat friends so if you are a massive twitter user with tons of followers don’t expect to see them if you are not following them. Unfortunately, this service is probably unusable with classic client software if you have thousand of bidirectional relations.