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!

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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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.

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