Twitip

by Eric Stoffle – Follow him @topicturtle

For new Twitter users, understanding Twitter and how to use it may change in those first few days after signing up. It could mean working through the learning curve or it could mean too much frustration to continue. Some people stay, others move on, realizing Twitter wasn’t for them. I know of some people, including me, who stopped using Twitter but came back and tried it again to find out they really enjoyed it. The problem is, as with many things in life, there is a learning curve. I want to offer three important steps to surviving the Twitter learning curve.

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by Sherice Jacob, author of “Get Niche Quick!” – Niche Marketing Online – Follow her @sherice

Just like in real life, your online social life will expand to fit any amount of time you give it.  Twitter is the most notorious for this “productivity drain” – that’s why talented programmers have taken it upon themselves to create new ways to make managing your online social life even easier.  Here are seven of the most popular software applications you can use to effortlessly keep up with Twitter (and other popular networks) even when you can’t be constantly connected.

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Hey folks, another Sunday Roundup from a few suggestions made through the contact form for Twitter related sites and tools to check out. You may or may not be familiar with these, but each week I’m trying to feature three of the dozens that come in. – Lara

• Pair your Twitter account with your favorite IM client (Yahoo, Windows/MSN, or Google Talk) with Twip.me (requires username and password for Twitter’s API). Uses simple calls to send your tweets to “twipme” and have them post to your Twitter status, @replies, or direct messages.
• Chirbit aims to take “microblogging” to the next level with “micro-podcasting” where you can record short blips of audio, much like you would a 140-character tweet.
• Tweetcloud’s goal is to quickly show users “what’s being said” across the Twittersphere or from a specific Twitter user through an intuitive interface (a cloud). Useful for searching #hashtags or by username and topic.

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 Alexander Moya Barquero of Tecnovits (Spanish). Follow him @twivits.

Image by respres

Twitter tools have emerged all over the web, as this great service offers many ways to get in touch with people that really matter to you. However, safety is another of those things that matter and not all Twitter tools are trustworthy.

But don’t be alarmed, not all the tools out there are after your twitter identity! Let’s have a look at 11 twitter tools that don’t require your password and are still very useful and powerful:

Statistics:

TweetStats: Statistics for your Twitter account, this tool graphs the amount of hourly and monthly tweets of your account, the amount of replies and the interface that you use the most.

TwitterFriends: One of the most complete Twitter statistic tools, with just your twitter username you can find out very impressive statistics, but don’t just take my word for it, Darren wrote a more complete review of this tool: TwitterFriends – A Useful Twitter Metrics Tool
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Hey folks, just wanted to make mention of a few suggestions some of you have made through the contact form for Twitter related sites and tools to check out. Many of these I’m sure you probably haven’t heard of yet. We get SO many of these, that I’ll likely be posting some every week. – Lara

Virgil Vo writes:

I’ve just recently created a new Twitter Application called Listento.fm. You can share both music and video files on Twitter. All you have to do is cut and paste a direct MP3 link or a YouTube/IMEEM link, as well as supplying the name of the artists and the title of the song. Upon doing so, a media page will be created and you can then share it with your followers.

Listento.fm has been featured in these publications:
http://www.killerstartups.com/Video-Music-Photo/listento-fm-share-music-video-on-twitter
http://www.feedmyapp.com/p/a/listento-fm-share-music-video-on-twitter/9212
http://go2web20.net/app/?a=Listento.fm

Nitin from TrialX sent us this:
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by Yohay Elam of Forex Crunch. Follow him @forexcrunch.

The growing popularity of Twitter and the extensive use of it becomes very time consuming. Topify, a simple but powerful tool, saves a lot of time and energy when replying to direct messages and responding to new followers. Topify also has an added value in detecting spam followers. Let’s look into it.

Topify was created a few months ago by Arik Fraimovich & Ouriel Ohayon, two Israeli web entrepreneurs. The basic idea of their service is to simplify email notifications on Twitter. I’ve been using Topify lately, and found it’s a superb time saver.
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Nisha Chittal is a student who blogs about politics, social issues, twenty-something life, and technology at Politicoholic. Follow her @nishachittal

(Editor’s Note: This post was submitted prior to the changes at Twitter.com in regards to @replies versus @yourusername and how it handles that. Please take that into consideration when reading!)

When I was new to twitter, I had no idea what I was doing — as is the case for most people when they first sign up. After I started following a few people I noticed all the different applications their Tweets were coming from: Twhirl, TweetDeck, Twittelator, Twitterific, PowerTwitter, TwitterFon, the list goes on. How do you sort through all of them and find the right application to use? Is any one of them better than the others? After trying nearly everything, I have a few ideas as to how to find the right Twitter app to suit your needs.
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This is just a short post to answer one of the most commonly asked questions here at TwiTip:

Where did you get the ‘ReTweet’ button for your blog?’

The answer is that it is from the team at Tweetmeme (a service that tracks hot stories on Twitter). You can get the code for this button here.

It is currently available in the full sized version that I’m displaying:

As well as a compact version:

It can be installed simply using javascript code in your blogs template or as a WordPress plugin.

One of the most common questions that I’m asked by fellow Twitter users is how I manage the large number of people that I follow and am followed by on Twitter.

I always struggle to answer that question because to be quite honest there are days that I don’t think I do particularly well with the task and where it can all seem a little overwhelming.

However…. one of the tools that has helped me incredibly to manage the task is TweetDeck. TweetDeck has a lot of great tools designed to help Twitter users with a variety of tasks – some of which are simply indispensable to those trying to connect with large numbers of people.

Yesterday I stumbled upon a great video by Jesse Newhart which shows a few of the features of TweetDeck that he uses to stay engaging with over 15,000 followers. In the video Jesse talks about his API settings and how he uses Filtering to find people to engage with and interesting information.

To be honest I’ve not previously used the filtering feature very much (I do outline one way that is different to Jesse below) – however now that I see how Jesse uses it I think it could become quite useful.

Here’s the video. Below it I share 3 more techniques that I use with TweetDeck.

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