Twitip

Which Twitter Applications have you valued the most in 2008?

Here’s a quick list of 5 that have enhanced my own use of Twitter this year and why:

1. TweetDeck

TweetDeck has become my primary Desktop Twitter client over the last 6 months of the year and has quite literally changed the way that I Tweet on a number of levels.

One of the biggest impacts that it has had is in the way that it builds ‘groups’ into my twitter workflow. This has helped me immensely to manage the noise that is associated with following and being followed by thousands of people.

Groups enable you to select any number of Twitter users to follow in a special window. This means that if you miss their twees in the ‘all tweets’ timeline you are likely to see their tweets in the group you’ve set up.

Also powerful in TweetDeck is the ‘Search’ feature which enables you to track keywords and who is using them right from within your Twitter Client.

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Today Mark Ramskill (@ramskill) from SubHub, takes a look at some of the steps that new Twitter users can go through to get going.

Twitter, having been quickly adopted initially by key influencers, has grown into a mass-market communication tool, with millions of users.

If you’re publishing content, undertaking online marketing, and looking to keep up with the latest trends in anything web related then Twitter should be featuring highly as a ‘weapon of choice’.

In this article I’ll be assuming you are new to Twitter, and that rather than wanting to use Twitter as a way of simply keeping up with friends, you want to use it as a tool for valuable engagement and maximum effect, avoiding the white noise that Twitter can also create if used incorrectly.

I call this ‘Using Twitter, the Smart Way’.

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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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Get a tour of TweetBeep – a useful service for monitoring what people are saying about you on Twitter – with Sherice Jacob (follow her at @sherice) from iElectrify.

Tweetbeep is a free web-based service that lets you get notified via e-mail whenever someone mentions a word, name or phrase on Twitter. Find out immediately when someone tweets (posts) your name, company, or website address on Twitter, even if they use a URL-shortening service like TinyURL.

Step 1: Signing Up for Tweetbeep

Getting started with Tweetbeep is as easy as filling out a simple form right on the first page of tweetbeep.com. Enter any username you want for the first field – the last one is for your Twitter username.

The first page of Tweetbeep.com lets you
create your account instantly.

Once you’ve pressed the Submit button, you’ll be taken to a page where you can customize just about anything regarding the notification(s) you want to receive.

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Today John Haydon (@johnhaydon) from Corporate Dollar looks at some tools to make you be a more useful Twitter user for your followers.

Image by me and the sysop

If you’ve been using Twitter for a while, you might notice that some of the most successful folks on Twitter make a concerted effort to help out their friends / followers. And they seem to ask for nothing in return!

Many folks believe, including me, that this practice of selfless giving is central to all success, personal and professional.

The problem is that no matter how helpful you want to be, no one’s invented a way to get 25 hours out of a day.

Until Now

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Today Grant Griffiths (@GrantGriffiths) from Blog for Profit writes about using Twitter to find links to read (and how to share links with others).

Like many who publish a blog or read blogs, twitter has become a part of the morning routine. We jump on twitter sometimes before we even open our email programs. What are people talking about and what are the hot conversations taking place is usually what we are looking for.

For me and others, twitter has become a major source of what we read throughout the day. I have actually discovered recently, not only do I go to twitter some days before I open my email program. Twitter is scrolled through before I open my RSS reader, NetNewsWire.

Collecting Links to Read on Twitter

Over the last few weeks, I have found a large chunk of what I read being provided by the links of those I am following on twitter. Many of those I follow tweet links to blog post or articles they are reading. And most are sending their own blog’s RSS feed to twitter.
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