Twitip

By Karl Staib of Work Happy Now! Follow him @workhappynow.

Twitter only allows 140 characters. There is an infinite amount of things you can say, but only so many ideas to pull from. It’s hard to keep people entertained with your tweets.

The best way to keep from burning out and giving up is to have a brilliant plan that will allow you to reach your goals and meet amazing people.

1. Stay Creative

Tweeting looks so easy, but we all know it’s not. There is a lot of thought that goes into each tweet. Penelope Trunk of Brazen Careerist (@penelopetrunk) has each tweet reviewed by an editor before she sends it out. Well that’s what she told us.

You need to find new ways to get onto other tweeters’ radars. Don’t be afraid to switch around words. Tweeting is an art and sometimes you need to stand out by being different. Don’t be afraid to disagree. Don’t do this too often, but every now and again you can spur on an exciting conversation.

It’s the routine that kills the most tweeters. All they do is link back to their blog and they wonder why they aren’t meeting cool people and having fun connecting with other tweeters. (more…)

By Nathan Hangen, follow him @nhangen.

As I’ve been following people on Twitter, I’ve noticed an interesting trend. More and more people are starting to use a validation service to create a gateway between themselves and new followers. On the surface, this looks like a great idea, but I’ve come to realize that it might not be – here’s why: (more…)

Yesterday I posted a reader question looking for your Top 3 Twitter Tips. The answers were quite varied, but here are some of my personal favorites that came in:

• Don’t tweet & drink- it is worse than drunk dialing. @recruitnik
• Engage people around you. @ reply them, FollowFriday them, talk with them. You get a lot more out of Twitter when you engage. @jbwagner
• Don’t be one of those obnoxious “auto thank you” people. @jessicawaters
• Don’t answer Twitter’s question of what are you doing? Unless you’re mega-famous, nobody care’s what you’re doing. @robneville73
• Forget “monetizing” (other things are more important – and that’s not a real word, anyway). @SpikeTheLobster
  [Though I disagree that it's not a "real word" - I do agree that it's best kept off Twitter. - Lara]
• Don’t make it all about you and your company and don’t post the same type of update over and over. @timeontaskva
• Use TweetDeck to filter your followers. @pereca

If you have more Top 3 Twitter Tips to add, please feel free to do so here or on the original post.

By Jeff Hurt of Midcourse Corrections: Views From The Trenches. Follow him @JeffHurt.

Finding your community in Twitter can sometimes be a challenge, especially for Twitter beginners. Social media sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and NING have flourishing and established communities that are easy to find. Twitter has some growing and thriving communities too but it’s often a best-kept Twitter secret.

Enter #hashtags and Twitter chats.

Twitter chats offer an effective way to meet people with similar interests and share insights into specific topic. Currently there are more than 35 weekly scheduled Twitter chats on certain days and times with like-minded professionals discussing a variety of questions. Here’s how you can find your Twitter community and participate in a Twitter Chat.

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by Nathan Hangen – Follow him @nhangen.

I like to compare Twitter to a new relationship. At first, you are interested, but your guard is up. However, as time goes by, you find yourself spending more and more time together until the relationship blossoms and takes on a life of its own. Twitter has a great way of pulling you in like this in a way that no other social network can. Everyone seems warm and friendly and you quickly find that you can take your guard down and start talking with people from all over the world as if they were a guest in your home.

I love Twitter for this reason because it seems that it has never been easier to build so many relationships so quickly. This is really something most of us, unless we are celebrities, have never had to face before. That is, having to deal with thousands of friends at once. At first, a few hundred friends are easy to manage, but soon you have a list of thousands that you have to sort through. It can become a daunting task trying to keep up with everyone, much less interact with them. This is why I don’t think I’d be able to use Twitter without TweetDeck and why I think that the following advice just might save the Twitter interaction that you’ve come to love.

What we are going to do is turn a normal Twitter feed into something that is easy to use and makes interacting with people much easier. If you don’t have TweetDeck, then I highly recommend that you go and grab it now before you finish reading this post. Although Twhirl does come in handy for certain tasks, in my opinion, nothing works as seamlessly with Twitter as TweetDeck does.
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by Janet Fouts (follow her at @jfouts).

DestroyTwitter?

What kind of name is that for a helper app? Hmm, let’s take a look at this new Adobe Air app for Twitter. Because it’s an Air app, it runs on multiple platforms and outside the browser, freeing up your browser for other work. The UI looks a lot like TweetDeck in layout. You can choose from three different “canvases” displayed in columns:

• Home, Replies and (Direct) Messages
• Search, Saved (Favorites), and Sent
• Preferences, Account, People

Each pane is pretty much self explanatory for most Twitter users, even though they’ve given them slightly different names.. The account pane shows your profile information and the people pane shows user information when you click on an avatar, similarly to Tweetdeck. Unlike Tweetdeck you can’t create custom columns for groups, probably the most important feature in TweetDeck in my book.

The preferences pane is where the best features are. You can fine-tune your preferences to open the app at start-up, manage the size of the workspace and how many tweets you want to show at once, or make the font size larger (essential for me, the font when it first launches is unbelievably small). In these days of limkited API calls to Twitter, you can set how often you want DestroyTwitter to ping Twitter for new Tweets and you can set different rates for search and messages, so you can ration your 100 calls to the API per hour based on how you use Twitter. Like the new release of TweetDeck, you can also see how many calls to the API you’ve made, and if you’ve gone over limit, when you’ll be able to call again.

All in all it’s a slick app with some thoughtful features and a very web two oh design. Will DestroyTwitter replace Tweetdeck on my desktop? Not yet. It won’t replace Twhirl either. At least not until it adds a multi-account feature anyway. That said, not bad for an app that was realeased with only “ten days of design and development”. Wow. Look for interesting things from this team.

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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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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