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!

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



Speed Tweeting (reports, stats, videos and more) – 24 December 2008

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?

The answer begins with Twitter search. This is a relatively new service from Twitter. It used to be a startup called Summize that Twitter bought and integrated. By far, this is the best way to monitor Twitter. Type in a search and you get 15 hits per page (remember this number). I tend to keep the search’s tab open because the results update once a minute using AJAX: if there are new results, you get a message saying “X more results since you started searching.” Refresh the page and you get the new tweets. Also, when there are new results, the page’s title is updated to tell you how many new results there are so you don’t have to keep checking the page. How is that for real time monitoring?

The other neat thing about Twitter search is the RSS feed. Every search can be turned into an RSS feed; you can find the icon at the top of the sidebar on the right. You can subscribe to this with your favorite RSS reader, but think about what you can do if you write monitoring programs that pull the RSS data and then analyzes it. So set up searches of your brands, products, etc, and watch them!

However, once in a while Twitter search will break, especially during peak hours when you see a delay in results coming in. More seriously, sometimes it misses tweets that clearly match the query. So make sure you don’t depend on it 100% but open up other communication channels like direct messages (more on that in a bit).

For completeness, there are other ways to monitor Twitter:

• Use advanced desktop clients like Tweetdeck and Twhirl.
• Use tweetbeep, which bills itself as “like Google Alerts but for Twitter”, and be sure to read TwiTip’s own Tweetbeep for Beginners guide.
• Use the search engines: Use the [site:] operator in Google or Yahoo!; example: [google site:twitter.com] to search for all mentions of “google” on Twitter. Also, if you have a Google Alert set up for your brand, it will pick up some tweets.

Talk to Them!

OK, so you know who you need to talk to, now what?

The first thing to realize is that most of your talking on Twitter is in public: everyone can see what you’re saying. Yes, this does mean that you must never make your updates private if you’re engaging with others on Twitter. Direct messages (DMs) are to be reserved for specific uses as I’ll explain below.

Here are the different ways you talk to people:

• Thank those that praise you and extend a welcoming hand saying you’re here if they need any help, got any questions, feature requests, feedback, etc. Basically, tell them how they can talk to you if they so wish. A good way to thank people on Twitter is to also follow them, and this opens up the possibility of them sending you a DM if they so wish.
• Publicly @reply to the people that speak negatively about you offering them help. The simplest offer of help is to give them an email address for them to contact you. If it’s a problem you’re working on, tell them a fix is coming soon. If it’s a new problem they’re reporting, thank them wholeheartedly and promise a fix soon (it’s a free bug report your quality assurance people missed). Don’t be afraid to ask them to contact you privately so that they can give you a better description of the problem and have them help test the fix. And of course, follow them. They might want to DM you something private, like their username.
• Give your community a way to contact you outside Twitter. We just talked about email, but your profile page should at least give a link to a website. I can’t decide what’s the best page to link to as your website on Twitter, so I’ll give you suggestions:
• • Your website’s home page
  • Your contact page
  • Your blog’s home page
  • A custom landing page
• And don’t forget to say something sensible in the Bio field.

One last tip: don’t use services to automatically follow all your new followers. It’s impersonal, and it’s obvious. Instead, get Twitter to email you every time someone follows you (or you can check your followers periodically), and follow everyone who’s not a obviously a spammer and send them a personalized DM thanking them for the follow. You can easily personalize it by finding out their name. It take 15 seconds to do this and it’s a good thing. Don’t expect any replies though.

Brand Your Profile Page

Yes, it’s a way of talking to your community as it shows effort and that you care. It’s also a quick confirmation to a new visitor that they’re viewing the right profile. Some tips to get you thinking, and you really should read Sara Rosso’s post here on TwiTip for more details:

• Change your icon/avatar photo. Upload a small version of your logo. Twitter will automatically resize that; it will not look perfect unless what you upload is a square because the photo is a square. I usually use a large version of the website’s favicon as that’s the correct brand and is also a square.
• Change your background. I’ve seen many approaches to how this gets done: some theme it exactly like the website; some create a custom theme but using the same color palette as the website, and some just choose a color. I suggest the following: the current Twitter design is centered on the page. So use the left hand side space to put some useful info: your logo at the very top, contact details, interesting web links, etc. I did mine (for @cligs) manually, but The Closet Entrepreneur has Powerpoint and Keynote Twitter background templates to help you. A rough rule of thumb for the space on the left is 150-200px.

Get Your Blog to Work With Your Twitter Profile

The root of this tip is that how you engage with your community is not a one-off or one-channel task, but an integration of multiple channels. To this end, blogs are a natural fit to complement your Twitter efforts. So how do you integrate blogging with Twitter? Some ideas:

• Promote your Twitter profile on your blog, and link back from Twitter to your blog.
• Automatically post your blog posts to Twitter. There are many plugins that do that automatically. For Wordpress, I recommend Alex King’s Twitter Tools or WP-To-Twitter.
• Integrate Twitter profiles into your blog comments. This is easy to do using Sean Walberg’s easy instructions on Problogger.

So Does it Work?

Short answer: oh yes it does! I’d like to illustrate this with three examples.

• Comcast: The prototypical example of using Twitter to engage with your community is Comcast. The “Comcast Guy” is Frank
  Eliason @comcastcares and he can work some magic apparently. Michael Arrington (of TechCrunch) wrote up his experience of publicly complaining about Comcast on Twitter back in April, and how Comcast responded (by very quickly fixing his connection). And that’s not unique: googling brings up a lot of stories, some even proclaiming new love for Comcast. Now that’s magic.
• Google: There is a great write-up about a Google Webmasters Tools user, Gary Cope, having a problem. Gary blogged about it and that got automatically fed into his Twitter account and that got picked up by Sagar Kamdar (@skamdar), the new Webmaster Tools PM. Sagar publicly notified Gary on Twitter that the problem is being looked into, and then personally replied to Gary’s blog post the next day saying the problem is fixed.
• Tweetdeck and Twhirl: These are my favorite examples of one person making a big difference using Twitter. Tweetdeck is a popular Twitter client written by Iain Dodsworth. Iain uses Twitter as a very powerful support channel. To see it in action,
  just look at the @tweetdeck feed. Likewise for Twhirl, another popular Twitter client, the @twhirl feed is just awesome.

And these are not the only examples. ReadWriteWeb has more, and just search using your favorite search engine.
It really is amazing what a good Twitter engagement can do to your business. It builds good will, gets you rave reviews, makes people like you more (or hate you less ), not to mention creating buzz and generating links. Comcast hit it spot on when they named their account ComcastCares, because that’s what you should be doing: caring. If you care enough, a community will build itself around you. And Twitter is a very easy channel to demonstrate that you care.

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



How Your Company Can Build A Community on Twitter

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.

Twitter Novel Tips

1. Throw Out The Manuscript

Twitter is instantaneous. Serializing a manuscript may be easy, but trying to contract and make logical sense of it in 140 character bursts is not. By doing this, you limit the flexibility that Twitter grants in presenting your fiction. Start fresh.

2. Have A Plan

Although there’s no need for a manuscript, you should know where the story is going. I found writing a scene for a play to be more helpful than translating a manuscript for Twitter. The formatting for a scene provides more freedom to work within the spaces you’ve created and allow the story to grow organically. Don’t hesitate to explore.

3. Manage The Clock

What’s great about a Twitter novel is that your content is no longer static. Depending on how committed you are, you could have events happen in real time using services like Tweetlater.

4. Not Just Story. Events

If a character is mugged at 6am, you could post a police announcement on the Twitter novel looking for the perpetrator. What are the characters listening to on the radio? Is someone calling them that’s important to the story? Use Twitpic to show a photo of one of your friends or an actor to show the reader who is calling or what the mugger looks like.

The post doesn’t have to be from your outline, it could be something within the environment that adds to the story.

5. Don’t Bury The Lead

More than five Twitter posts on any given day can be dangerous. You’ll induce reader fatigue, and new readers will get lost quickly.

There’s an assumption that many of your Twitter followers will enjoy your work while on the go, so their time to take in a novel may be limited to short bursts. Focus on each post’s quality and …

6. Move It Forward

Simply put: Each tweet should move the story forward in some way. If it doesn’t, cut it.

7. Newbies And Greenhorns

Finally, you may have readers follow you after the novel has started. I recommend setting up a simple website that contains the story’s updates from where it began. Include this link on your Twitter page. Occasionally remind readers on days that you do not update that they can catch up at this website.

The format is still new, but it won’t be long until we start to read about successful Twitter novelists getting publishing deals. Why? A large following equates to a large potential customer base. If you can show you have a customer base, you are better positioned to land a book deal.

Best of luck to you on your literary journey.

PS from Darren: Have you written or followed any Twitter Novels? I’d love to see links to them and to hear your experience of them in comments below!

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



How to Start a Twitter Novel