Twitip

As a followup to her previous post on how to be someone that others will want to follow on Twitter - Jo-Lynne (follow her at @dcrmom) has put together a post on how to get UNFOLLOWED on Twitter.

If you’re reading this site, you already know the benefits of Twitter. And whether you are promoting a business or looking for social interaction, chances are you’d like to know how to get more followers and make Twitter more beneficial to you. We’ve all read plenty of posts on Twitter ettiquete. Here’s a list of things that are sure to get you UN-followed on Twitter.

1) Bore everyone to tears with your mundane account of your day. Let us know every time you complete a task, every bite of food you put in your mouth, and every time you visit the lavatory. They will be sure to unfollow you.

2) Clog the Twitterstream with what I like to call “Serial Twittering”. Reply to everyone who has been online in the past two hours and continue to converse back and forth even when your conversation has no purpose for anyone else. Link to every page open on your browser. You’ll be sure to lose a few followers that way.

3) Or you could take the opposite approach. Don’t bother to participate at all. Don’t respond to other tweets or answer questions. You’re far too important for those peons. Just link to your latest post and move along about your day. Wait. On second thought, there’s a robot to do that for you. Just set up that plugin and you’ll never have to bother logging in to Twitter again.

4) Now it’s time to go in for the kill. Set your robot to reply to new followers with a canned greeting. In fact! You can even set it to respond when your followers post their first tweet of the day! That’s the ticket! Your followers are dropping like flies now.

And there you have it — my best advice on how to get unfollowed on Twitter. You’re welcome.

More and more businesses are looking to get onto Twitter – in this post Michael Gray shares some tips on how to get set up effectively.

As the popularity of micro-blogging continues to grow, it’s going to become a tool used by advertisers and marketers. In the same way that running a corporate or business blog is different from running a personal blog, running a corporate or business twitter profile is different from running a personal twitter profile.

Secure Your Name

Your username on twitter is limited to 15 characters, if your company name is 15 characters or less, or can be reasonably abbreviated to 15 characters or less secure it as soon as possible. Avoid using hyphens or underscores if possible, they almost always cause complications down the road. Even if you aren’t planning on using it right away, secure the name, as many people have had reported twitter is less than expeditious when addressing trademark issues.

If you have a large company and are going to have multiple people representing you, decide if you will be using one account also called a role account, or using multiple accounts. If you are using multiple accounts use a naming convention like IBMJoe or DellKathy. If you are using one account for multiple people don’t hide that fact. If it makes sense sign the tweet “@marysmith thanks for the tip ~john” or “@johnsmith thanks for letting us know ~ms”.

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There has been lots of good Twitter news, reports and ideas around this week:

The State of the Twittersphere [REPORT]

Hubspot has produced their State of the Twittersphere report. A few stats from it:

• 35% of Twitter users have 10 or fewer followers
• The average number of followers is 70
• The average number of people that Twitter users follow is 69
• Top locations on Twitter include London, San Francisco, New York and Chicago

Here it is in full:

State of the Twittersphere – Get more Information Technology

ReadWriteWeb takes the stats in the report projects forwards – concluding that Twitter would take 36 years to catch Facebook.

Facebook, Twitter and Traffic [STATS]

Also on the topic of Facebook and Twitter – Jacob Cass reports that he gets more traffic from Facebook than Twitter despite having fewer Facebook friends than Twitter followers and shows some stats from his metrics package.

I tweeted this link earlier today and had a heap of people tell me that their own results are quite the opposite. I decided to check my own and mine are completely different to Jacob. To my ProBlogger blog I had 11,500 visitors come from Twitter.com over the last 30 days and only 1500 come from Facebook. My links to new posts go up on both as Jacob describes.

Here on TwiTip the stats are even more one sided towards Twitter – although that’s skewed because this blog is about Twitter of course.

I don’t dispute Jacobs results – but would argue that it is always going to vary from site to site and topic to topic.

ReWeeting [ANALYSIS]

Pistachio Consulting has a good analytical post this week on the Phenomenon of Retweeting

Twitter for Business [VIDEO]

Laura from Pistachio also has a great presentation on the topic of Twitter for Business. It is well worth the look.

Check out her powerpoint deck here.

Twitter and Legal Ramifications [LAW]

Law.com has an article up talking about how tweets could get employers in legal trouble. Sounds like a whole lot of articles we saw a few years back on the dangers of blogging to companies.

Round Follow Buttons! [DESIGN]

And the news of the week – Twitterrati notes that follow buttons went from square to round!

Are you a Freelancer? Today Jenny Cromie, editor of The Golden Pencil, (follow her at @JennyCromie) talks about how Twitter can help grow a Freelance Business.

When I first read about Twitter in a Wired magazine article a little more than a year ago, I thought: What a waste of cyberspace! Why on earth would anyone waste their time trading banal “news” items like: Wearing pink slippers and eating a PBJ. Or, Cleaned toilet. Now for the sink.

Even productivity guru Tim Ferriss called Twitter “pointless e-mail on steroids.” At the time, I couldn’t have agreed more.

But what a difference a year makes! Like me, Tim Ferriss has now joined Twitterville. Of course, he follows no one and has about 10,720 followers. But that’s beside the point.

What I’m trying to say is that if you’re not orbiting in the Twitterverse, you might as well be living on Mars.

Everyone is all atwitter about Twitter now. It’s the THING. It’s the new pet rock of the worldwide cyber village. But I also don’t think it’s a fad. Twitter and other social networking tools are changing the way companies and individuals do business, get information, and communicate.

And the Twitterverse is getting more crowded by the day because late-adopter dolts like me finally get it. We’re all doing the “I-coulda-had-a-V8” head thump: Duh! Twitter is great for growing your business.

If you own a business of any size and you’re still not Twittering, you’re missing out on what amounts to a worldwide virtual chamber of commerce networking event that’s at your fingertips 24/7. Only on Twitter, you don’t press flesh or swap business cards—you exchange links to your Web site, blog, e-books, and online résumé. And you build relationships 140 characters at a time.

Still not convinced that Twitter can help your freelance business? Maybe my list will change your mind. As a business tool, Twitter can help you:

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In this guest post Chris Gillis from Saltline Studio (follow him at @saltlinestudio) talks about creating space for your customer on TWitter.

I’d like to talk a little about creating space for your customers, friends and future customers on Twitter today. I’ve been working closely with Bin Ends Wine (@binendswine) on Twitter to offer their customers (well, fellow wine geeks) and friends a few key things:

#1 A Twitter relationship that works in both directions

#2 An avenue for having a good time on a regular basis interacting through Twitter Wine Tastings (http://www.twittertastelive.com

When tweeting to your customer or potential customer, there certainly is a need for a back and forth. Tweeters that constantly sell are not offering anything back and will get the ‘unfollow’ right away. Someone who offers good content on a regular basis is giving back and you continue to follow them. When it comes to a business, if I want to be sold crappy products I would watch QVC streaming all day.

That is not to say that you can’t give your followers certain deals or work up discounted products just for them, after all these are some of your online friends or fellow wine geeks. So this is something that Bin Ends does on a regular basis – they offer Twitter only wines like the ones below:

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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?
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“Why do you use Twitter? How does Twitter Benefit You?”

I’ve been asked these questions so many times since starting TwiTip that I thought I’d write a post answering it. I hope that it’s helpful for those of you just starting out with Twitter (or considering getting involved).

Twitter has changed the way that I use the web and connect with others online in many ways. Those of you who’ve traveled with me on my Twitter journey since the beginning know that I started out very skeptical of the medium.

It always seemed like a waste of time – however once I started using it I immediately began to see its potential and some tangible benefits to me. Let me try to break some of them down:

1. Research Tool

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More and more Businesses are getting onto Twitter. The word’s out – but so many businesses get it wrong. In this post Aira Bongco (@airabongco) shares some tips especially for businesses wanting to use Twitter effectively. Image by photoj :-]

You may have seen a lot of companies using Twitter to promote their products and services. Some do it discreetly by sending in various links to your direct message box while some generally tweet their website links on a constant basis. However, these people got it all wrong. We, Twitter folks, view these promotions nothing more as spam. Trust must be built from the ground up in Twitter. It’s a social networking site. It is not called “social” for nothing.

Here are some tips to rub your Twitter followers the right way. Soon you’ll find out how loyal and supportive these people can be if only you took the time to get to know them.

1. Be more interested in helping than making money

Twitter followers are people. They don’t have dollar signs plastered on their foreheads. Help these people out and they will help you back. They may not always have the money to purchase your products but they will happily retweet a product for you.

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