Twitip

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!

Twitter and Journalism might not be two words you’d normally put in the same sentence – but today Jason Preston from Eat Sleep Publish (follow him at @jasonp107) asks if Twitter can be a real news platform? We’d love to hear your opinion in comments.

Image by Shaver

For centuries, “journalist,” “reporter,” and “newsman,” have been reasonably interchangeable. After all, a reporter often works for a newspaper or TV station, where they are employed to do journalism.

But recent trends in publishing and digital tools have required that we look at new definitions for these words. Being a journalist has started to mean being someone who ties stories together into a narrative, whatever the medium.

How do these differences apply to Twitter?
(more…)

Here’s a few Twitter links for your Wednesday:

• Flickr my background is a tool to put your latest Flickr Image in your Twitter Background.
• Web Worker Daily writes How Twitter is a Communications Game Changer.
• Computer World explores 5 ways to Tap the Power of the Tweet.
• Mark Evans has launched a blog to keep an eye on, Twitterrati, a blog that will cover a variety of Microblogging tools and news.
• Eat Sleep Publish has a great post – Twitter to Journalists: Hear’s how it’s done. A great post filled with tips from real twitter users.
• Obamba’s Twitter Ac has stopped updating since the election. Ironically his follower numbers have escalated faster than normal since then.

I’d like to include ‘Twitter news’ here on TwiTip and so thought that the best way to do it was Twitter style in 140 characters or less. Speed Tweets will contain news, links to Twitter related posts and the odd Twitter tool.

Here’s our first edition of Speed Tweeting.

• RWW reports that Twitter has added a groups functionality to their Japanese partner service Twicco. Lets hope we see it on Twitter soon too.
• Pistachio Consulting have released a research report on microsharing applications for businesses.
• TweetBeep is a Twitter Alerts tool that notifies you via email when words you’re watching are tweeted. Think Google Alerts for Twitter.
• CNET speculates about how Twitter will make money through Corporate Accounts.
• The Twitter blog reflects upon the election day and night, activity, signups, messages and more were all up.
• Wired reports on Twitter’s Stickiness.