Posting Statuses To Twitter At The Perfect Time – Timely.is

You might never have stopped to think about this, but… are you tweeting at the right time? I mean, to the vast majority of people, using Twitter amounts to nothing but tweeting something when they feel like doing it, and trusting their followers will get the message, read it and process it.

The truth is that sending a tweet when nobody is around is almost the same as not sending it. The tweet will become buried by all the messages that come after it. That is a simple, unavoidable fact.

And that is what Timely is here to address. It is a web application that can take care of scheduling all your tweets, and sending them when they would reach out to more people. Once you give Timely access to your Twitter account, the application will take care of analyzing the last 200 tweets you have sent, and figure out the best time slots for anything you want to send in the future.

If this sounds good to you, then you will be happy to know that Timely is a free service. Timely will analyze all your tweets and figure out what times of day you get the best engagement and then auto schedule your tweets for those best periods of the day. As your followers grow, Timely will adapt and learn what new times might be best. The app also provides tweet analytics and performance insights that shows you how you’re doing (including click-throughs and audience reached).

In a nutshell: If you send out multiple Tweets at once, it could annoy some of your followers. There’s also the risk that your Tweets could be pushed to the bottom of their feeds if they aren’t constantly reading their feeds. Timely helps fix that by scheduling your Tweets, and has the added benefit of some light analytics afterwards.

It is also a fantastic app for those managing multiple Twitter accounts who wants to optimize when their tweets are scheduled. The Timely bookmarklet makes for a nice work flow where you can fill up your queue of tweets quickly and then let Timely find the best time to tweet them out (and you can change between accounts with a single click). Great for community managers and others who want to share helpful links on Twitter without spending all day on it.

Posting Photos To Twitter With No Ads – Posterous

Posterous you say? I thought that was a blogging platform? Fear not, I mentioned that these would be creative tools, so read on to find out more about how to implement Posterous. There are a lot of ways to share photos with your followers on Twitter. Posterous, however, has a position in the photo sharing market that makes it truly the best option for sharing photos are Twitter, one that offers numerous advantages to you as a user and blogger.

If you have made your decision to start blogging through a tumblelog and you chose to use Posterous, you already have a distinct advantage to sharing your photos on Twitter through Posterous: your followers will be linked to your blog to view the photos and not to some 3rd party application like TwitPic.

This is advantageous in many ways: the foremost way being you allow users to check out a separate blog in addition to photos. Your blog can contain much more than just the photos that you’ve sent to Twitter! Services like TwitPic offer the bare minimum; pretty much only photos you upload to them which can be shared one at a time, and nothing else.

Many of these services are ridden with ads and look very cluttered and tacky. Meanwhile, using the “Clean Sheet” or one of Posterous’s other sleek themes will allow you to share your photo content on a nicely laid out on a blog style page with no ads and no distractions. You will notice Rainn Wilson from “The Office” does this on his Twitter. The benefits do not end here however.

Posterous offers the option to upload multiple photos at once and have them automatically appear in a very sleek slide show display. No more spamming your followers with shortlinks, simply upload a few photos that you took at the moment or recently and send one link out via Posterous to Twitter and give you followers a few things to check out. This makes your photo Tweets much more entertaining and worthwhile.

Additionally, you photos will display in a clean timeline. Posterous offers the aforementioned blog style layout, so your other photos display in date order for your users to check out. So after a person is linked to a photo of yours via Posterous, they now have access to the rest of your photos in a timeline style.

Lastly, you can add commentary to the photos in Posterous to give your readers a little more insight. This is another ability that adds value per Tweet. Gone are the days of “Here is me _______ – [shortlink]”, now you can upload photos and stay in the 140 character limit on Twitter while adding additional content on Posterous, giving your readers more context and description. It is also something that adds optional depth to readers they are interested.

Getting More Followers On Twitter By Sharing Content – CloudFlood

As you know, being a power user and having an impact on Twitter means that you need followers. Having a large follower base on Twitter means your tweets will reach as wide an audience as possible: not only your followers, but those who they retweet it to.

Having a large base on Twitter also allows you to inform people of other ventures that you are apart of, site as a new site or new release of something. One great method for gaining peoples interest is a “freebie”, giving something away in order to get something small back from the user, possible an email address, or maybe… even a tweet spreading word about whatever your new endeavor is.

Enter Cloud:Flood. To maximize the number of people who tweet about whatever page you’d like to direct them to, follow three easy steps to implement the Cloud:Flood app in perfect form: first, create a free product you want to give away to your website visitors. It could be an eBook on your chosen topic, an MP3 or even a Zip file full of PSD’s.

Then, make a button on the Cloud:Flood site, linking to the file you want to give away, and a page to promote (this can be any page you want, whether it is a new site, a new product, a new post…anything!). You then place the button that you just made on Cloud:Flood next to the freebie offering on your site.

Site visitors see the freebie, and are asked to Tweet or FB Share your link in order to get it. People love getting something for free, so from my experience, this has a high conversion rate: why would your followers pass up something free from you if all they have to do is send out a tweet or Facebook share? Once they share your link, they are automatically given the freebie.

You both win here: your followers get something for free, and you get free, guaranteed promotion on Twitter through their tweets, which you can set (you enter a predefined message to be shared before you make the button). Start up your next big project with a huge boost from Twitter with this technique, and you’ll be glad you did! Not only will you get eyeballs from Twitter visitors on a page you desire, but if you have the predetermined message mention your name, you’ll gain followers as well. So get to work on your next freebie, and let Cloud:Flood do the rest.

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



3 Creative Tools For Power Twitter Users

1. Setup a Twitter account just for your RSS notifications
You won’t have to use this account much beyond the initial setup but create an account that will be used just for your RSS Tweets. Use a profile image for this account that’s an RSS icon to make it stand out. For example, my account is @ShannonRSS.

2. Log in to Twitterfeed and setup your RSS feeds

• You’ll need to create a Twitterfeed account and then choose the “Create New Feed” button in the upper-right corner.
• Give your feed a name.
• Enter the feed URL where it says so and give it a test to make sure the address is correct.
• Click on the “Advanced” option at the bottom. Set some options here. I highly recommend putting the feed name in the “Post Prefix” box so that when the RSS info is Tweeted, you’ll know where it’s from. You can also adjust other options here for the content that will be Tweeted to you.
• Click the button to continue to step 2.
• Under available services, choose Twitter. The first time you land on this page, you’ll have to authenticate your brand new RSS Twitter account. After you have it setup, it will be listed as an option here in the drop-down box.
• Click the “Create Service” button and you’re done with this feed.
• Repeat these steps for each feed that you want to subscribe to. This initial setup takes a bit of time but after that, it’s very easy to just occasionally add one.

3. Login to your regular Twitter account and follow your RSS account
So now you’re going to follow yourself and whenever a new Tweet gets posted to your RSS account, you’ll see it in your timeline. If you often miss Tweets in your timeline, you can always go to your RSS account to view the Tweets on that account. You may also want to share your RSS account name if other people want to subscribe to the same RSS feeds.

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



How To Use Twitter To Get Your Favorite RSS Feeds

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:

• It takes a lot of time to validate every single message you receive – Although I don’t mind filling out a captcha every now and then, filling them out by the dozens negates what could be a positive experience. I’ve grown accustomed to ignoring these messages and as a result, I never get to communicate with the people on the other side.
• It can be confusing – Some people, particularly those new to Twitter, might not understand what Twit validation is or why it exists. Placing barriers in the way of communication is essentially the same thing as locking your Tweets, which is another behavior that I find troubling. What is the point of joining a network if you don’t want to communicate?
• Rather than taking your time to filter your feed, you are placing the onus on those interested in following you. Sure, I can ignore the request for validation, but in the end I’ll end up talking to myself. Although there are a select few I follow without a follow back, I don’t like to make a habit of it. Not because I’m a jerk, but because it shows good faith. If you aren’t interested in what I have to say, then we are going to have a hard time communicating.

We can blame the spammers for this, but they don’t care if they ruin the experience. Still, why should we let them change the way that we communicate online? Eventually, Twitter will find a way to weed out messages in the same way that Gmail does, but in the meantime, consider removing the validation from your account and taking the time to filter on your own. If you don’t want to communicate with the masses, then maybe a valdiation service will work for you. However, if your business or brand relies on open communication, then you should think twice about placing roadblocks in between you and your customer.

If you are truly concerned about a cluttered or spam filled Twitterfeed, then consider using groups via TweetDeck or Seesmic. If there are only certain Tweeters that you pay attention to, you can also import their stream via RSS to be sure you don’t miss a thing. Lastly, it only takes 5 seconds to block or unfollow someone, but it takes nearly 20-30 for me to validate my profile for you. Multiply that by a dozen or two and you’ll see why most people don’t have the time to make it worthwhile.

The concept is noteworthy, but the execution leaves something to be desired for. One of the reasons that I love Twitter is that it opens the doors to communication. The problem with validation is that it closes them. What do you think?

[image: Unhindered by Talent]

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



Twitter Validation – My Take

Many people have pondered the question: how can Twitter be used as a marketing tool? Twitter is becoming a powerful tool to market your websites, content and products. If you’re running a niche website, Twitter is an indispensible tool in your marketing arsenal.

When I launched Webinar Central last fall, a directory and calendar of upcoming webinars, I was faced with a dilemma. I needed to market my site to as wide an audience as possible with no budget other than the cost of spending my time. I decided to turn to Twitter and it has become a key tool for building readership and interacting with my readers. Not only have a I built a strong readership, but networking with other professionals has created partnership opportunities that have been very exciting.

Since Webinar Central was launched in October, 2008, I’ve gotten almost 25% of my traffic solely from Twitter. During the early launch days, it was responsible for most of my traffic until the site rose in it’s search rankings and I started generating traffic the old fashioned way. So, it’s great for creating quality traffic, when your site would otherwise be inactive, while it waits for indexing from the Google Gods.

Setting Up Your Twitter Backbone

I recommend being methodical when you go about initiating a Twitter Marketing campaign. It will save you time, which is your most valuable asset. Here’s a guide to the back end you’ll need for marketing a niche site on Twitter.

Setting up Accounts

I would advise against using your personal Twitter account to market your niche website, especially if you post about personal topics on your Twitter feed. It will look more professional in the long run to have a dedicated feed. There are exceptions to this; like if you’re building a personal brand. For Webinar Central, I simply setup @webinarcentral.

Customize Your Profile

I chose a cute logo as my avatar to draw attention to it, and it’s proved popular. I also matched the color scheme of the profile to the logo and filled in all the sidebar information about the website. You don’t have much room to say a lot, so be sure to get your point across as succinctly as possible.

Badges on your website

So visitors to your site know they can follow your feeds on Twitter, I recommend putting a Twitter Counter badge as well a Twitter Grader badge near the top of your website, usually in the sidebars. I would not recommend putting your Twitter feed directly on your site; you will run the risk of being redundant.

Set-up Feeds to Monitor

Twitter’s search function is incredibly powerful and perfect for monitoring the entire network for what your site is targeted at. Think about the key phrases that your website targets. Once you run a search, Twitter makes it really easy to turn it into an RSS feed that you can throw into your RSS feedreader of choice. As an example, I monitor the phrases ‘webinar,’ ‘webinarcentral,’ ‘gotomeeting,’ etc. For my Anglophile blog, Anglotopia.net, I monitor for the word Anglophile and follow anyone that mentions it.

Setting up these feeds serves several purposes. The first is you can immediately follow people discussing the topic your website is based on. If someone talks about a webinar, chances are they are interested in learning about more of them, so they are worth a follow. Another reason to have these feeds set-up is so you can monitor the mood and trends for your topics, especially if there is a #hashtag for it.

Seek Followers

The most important aspect of Twitter Marketing is to gain followers. Not just any follower you can get your hands on but quality followers who will value your content and what you have to offer.

The first step is to monitor the Twitter feeds. Next, you can find people in your industry/niche and follow them. Follow their followers and so on. You can also use tools like Twitter Grader to recommend users that you should follow.

How do you measure success in this regard? If they follow you back, then they are a quality follower. If they don’t follow you back, you can weed them out later.

Twitter has limits for most new accounts. You can only follow up to 2,000 people at any one time. So, if you start reaching the limit, then it’s time to weed out the people who aren’t following you back.

I spent several days following as many people as I could until I hit the limits. Once I hit the limits I started cleaning out the account, to the point where my follower/follow ratio is very similar. This has left me with over 1,300 followers and growing by about 5% a day, without any further effort.

Working Smart – Twitter Tools to Use for Niche Marketing

Using Tweet Later

I’m not a fan of totally automating your Twitter activities, but I think it’s perfectly all right to automate parts of it. I’ve avoided having auto-replies and auto-follows set up, I think it’s important to screen who’s following you and to actually engage with them instead of sending them a DM that goes to your website or a product you’re pushing.

That being said, I use tools like Tweetlater lightly. For Webinar Central, I set up daily Tweets to go out in the mornings with a summary of that day’s webinars. If I have a new poll out, I’ll schedule a Tweet to go out in the afternoon to catch the bored in the afternoon crowd who may be looking for something to do. You can find out more about Tweetlater in this TwiTip Post about TweetLater.

Using Twitterfeed

Once you have a good following, you need to leverage that audience by making sure your site’s RSS feed is being posted on Twitter. You can use great free tools like Twitterfeed. Twitterfeed is a fantastic tool to automatically have your RSS feed posted on your Twitter Stream every time it’s updated. It’s free and very customizable. You’ll need to sign up for an account and set everything up. Everytime someone posts a new webinar to Webianr Central, it goes into the RSS feed and shortly thereafter onto the Twitter Feed. You can read more about Twitterfeed in this TwiTip Post.

That’s the extent of my Twitter automation.

Don’t Forget to Engage

Twitter marketing takes a huge investment of time to setup, but once you have it going, you should not stop. You always need to be looking for new followers and talking directly with your followers. To succesfully market your niche site on Twitter, engaging in the ‘grand conversation’ with your users is so very key. Don’t set everything up on auto-pilot and expect success to come your way.

The Golden Rules

My four golden rules for niche marketing on Twitter are: Be Useful. Be Timely. Be Willing to Engage. Don’t be Spammer.

Good Luck!

When Jonathan Thomas isn’t seeking the latest Webinars for WebinerCentral.net he’s taking a breather on his popular Anglophile Blog Anglotopia.net. You can follow him on Twitter: @jonathanwthomas or @webinarcentral

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



Marketing a Niche Website on Twitter

I love Twitter, sometimes a little too much. I’m in the midst of a Twitter break and it’s … not easy. There may come a time in any Twitter user’s life—a big assignment is due, a baby’s on the way, it’s time to refocus—when stepping away from Twitter is both necessary and healthy. Whether you’re on Twitter for making friends or furthering your ambitions, there are a few things you can do to make the most of a Twitter hiatus and make it stick.

1. Leave a note.

Twitter boundaries can be wobbly, at best. Announcing an extended Twitter absence is simply the sociable thing to do. If that doesn’t work for you, consider image management. An aura of mystery is nice sometimes, but a languishing Twitter account can and will say a number of far less mysterious things—you’ve flown the coop, grown bored or lazy, or gone off sulking, among them—to current and potential followers.

Announcing your intentions also keeps you on task: if you say you’re taking a break to focus on work but start tweeting again three hours later, you’ll just look foolish.

2. Connect in other ways.

Letting TwitterFeed tweet your blog posts while you ignore your followers may feel like going out in the evening when you stayed home from school, but you’re far less likely to lose followers if you’ve already mentioned your absence, and those who stay on top of your blog posts via Twitter will be grateful.

As guest posting is to blogging, is guest tweeting the answer to being away from Twitter? Maybe. Is your Twitter account bigger than you (@ricksanchezcnn, for example), or is it a one-man (or woman) show? What is certain: always (always, always) be up front about it.

3. Now, take a break from Twitter.

Have you ever shown up to a pool party without a bathing suit and went home in wet clothes? That’s a little like “just checking in” on Twitter. Maybe you intend to make it quick, maybe you’re just going to watch, but before you know it you’re in the pool with everyone else. Stay away from the pool.

4. In the meantime, make a list.

Like great ideas that come in the shower where pen and paper don’t fare well, what seem to be your best tweets ever will come when you’re taking a break. Make a list—in a notebook with old-fashioned paper and pencil, in a text doc, or via an e-mail you keep forwarding to yourself. If it’s an important message (it’s a girl!) and it can’t wait (change of plans, can you pick me up at 8?), there’s always e-mail and the telephone.

5. Log out.

The first few times you type “tw …” into your browser—out of habit, or maybe from that nagging feeling that you’re missing out on the party—and land on Twitter’s quiet homepage you’ll feel … well, I don’t know how you will feel, but I felt a little silly. (TweetDeck users and users of other Twitter clients, please share your application-specific self-humiliation strategies in the comments.)

That Twitter home page won’t make you write the report or spend the weekend with your family, but it will remind you that the reason for your Twitter hiatus was, in all likelihood, a good and honorable cause. It all comes down to what makes you happy, what keeps you healthy, and what feels friendly. This is social networking, after all.

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



How to Take a Twitter Hiatus – 5 Tips for Taking a Break

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.

I’m also a big user of TwitScoop so having the ability to have it included in a window within the client is handy too.

I guess as I think about it – the reason I like TweetDeck is that it enables me to use a variety of tools that could be accessed by a variety of services – all within the one client. I’m not constantly having to run to a search tool, logging into TwitScoop, checking individuals twitter pages – it’s all happening on my desktop in the one application.

I also love that it can be run quite effectively in a single column view or opened up to a more comprehensive one across the full screen.

The fact that TweetDeck is still only at version 0.20b excites me – there’s obviously a lot more to come!

TweetDeck is my Twitter application of the year!

2. Twitterlator Pro

Another massive change in my use of Twitter mid year was when I started using the iPhone as my primary mobile phone. I’d been looking forward to this for a long time (Australia only got the iPhone with the new 3G version.

Being able to Tweet from the road, local cafe, while waiting for the Train, at the football…. etc was quite a new experience and so I needed an iPhone Twitter client that was up for the job.

I tested them all – starting with the free applications and then progressing to the paid ones. I settled on Twitterlator Pro (itunes url) for a number of reasons.

Perhaps the biggest reason was the ‘replies’ page. Again – my biggest challenge with Twitter is that I am following a lot of people – so to follow the timeline for everyone that I follow is just not practical. When on my iPhone I tend to live more in the ‘replies’ section and Twitterlator Pro has one of the best of these.

I also love that you can manage multiple Twitter accounts from the one application, that you can see Twitpic pictures within messages, that it has a ‘nearby’ feature to find out who is twittering close by – etc. Many of these features can be found within other iPhone Twitter clients but for me Twitterlator Pro simply ‘fits’ with my Twitter workflow.

Note – there is a notable up and coming iPhone Twitter client that could just take the place of Twitterlator Pro.

In the last month or so Tweetsville (itunes url) was launched and while I’m hooked on Twitterlator Pro Tweetsville (website) has been getting more and more of my iPhone Twittering attention because – well, its got most of the features that I use on Twitterlator Pro but just seems more intuitive.

It’s in its early versions so still has room to improve but I suspect will become my #1 iPhone application in 2009 – the only reason I didn’t name it in my main list is because I’ve been using Twitterlator Pro for six months and so it’s really been more useful to me this year than the one month I’ve had with Tweetsville.

3. TwitterBar

I almost overlooked this application when planning this list – simply because it’s become such a part of my Twitter workflow that it has almost become invisible.

TwitterBar is a Firefox Add-on that allows me to share links on twitter from the address bar of Firefox.

As I’m surfing – if I find a site that I like and want to share all I do is simply add a few words that I want to include with the link to the address bar (before or after the URL) and then click a tiny little grey button to the right of the address bar. Doing this posts the URL and my message to Twitter.

If I’m not sure if I have enough characters left I hover the cursor over this little grey button and it tells me how many I have left.

There are other tools for sharing URLS on Twitter and I’ve tested many of them – but this little add-on is quick, easy, quick and unobtrusive…. and I use it 10-20 times a day!

4. TwitterFeed

I know some on Twitter don’t like tools that automatically post links from blogs – but…. well I’m a blogger and my Twittering centers around blogging. Add to that that most of my followers are online when I’m asleep because I live in Australian and I needed a tool that would do what TwitterFeed does.

In short – TwitterFeed checks the RSS feeds to my blogs every hour (you can change this frequency) and if something new has appeared in the feed it takes the link and tweets it for me. It allows me to customize the tweets so I can add a little message (“New from TwiTip:” for example) so followers know what the link is.

There are options for what is shown (you can show the title, title and description and description only) and you can even filter your tweets by keywords (so that only some links get posted).

TwitterFeed offers you a range of URL shortening services – I use Tweetburner (twurl) which allows me to go to Tweetburner and check what links are being clicked on most (handy to know as a blogger interested in tracking what posts are connecting with readers most).

Again – there are other tools out there including some good WordPress plugins that do it from your blog – but I use TwitterFeed because…. well it works (99% of the time).

5. TwitScoop

This is another tool that I’m constantly looking at (more than I realize). As mentioned above – I use it largely because it is built into TweetDeck but do use the actual site too.

There are a number of things that I use it for including:

1. It’s my newspaper in the morning – one of the first things I do in the morning is to check TwitScoop to see what is ‘hot’. I’m amazed how much news I find through it over my morning coffee.

2. As a blogger is is a fantastic tool for watching for hot trends and topics that are being discussion right now. A number of times I’ve been able to break stories simply by watching what is ‘buzzing now’.

3. Conferences – it’s also quite useful when you’re at a conference, listening to a speaker or tracking a live event to see what people are saying about it.

Other tools that I’ve been using:

There must be hundreds of Twitter Applications and Tools available now so the above 5 just scratch the surface. I’d love to hear your own Top 5 list in comments below.

Before you do – here’s a few others that I use from time to time.

• TweetBurner – as mentioned above, I use this to shorten urls and track what gets clicked on (TwitClicks is another of these).
• Twhirl – I used this a lot at the start of the year and still do on occassion – but TweetDeck has taken it over.
• Tweetlater – I only use it occassionally but it is useful if you need to set a Tweet to go off later.
• MrTweet – everyone’s been raving about this new service lately – it recommends people for you to follow based upon your network.
• TweetBeep – free twitter alerts for keywords
• TweetScan – another alerts tool
• TweetStats – interesting stats on your twitter useage

OK – so it’s over to you – what are your Top 5 Twitter Applications and Tools for 2008?

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



5 Twitter Applications and Tools that Made Me a Better Twitter User in 2008

I imagine there are written guidelines somewhere on how to conduct yourself on Twitter, but I haven’t read them and I don’t intend to. I’ve always believed in learning by doing and my first few weeks on Twitter have been an eye-opener. My conclusion — it’s all about agendas.

Fortunately, recognizing someone’s particular Twitter agenda is not that difficult. Just go back through their tweet history and a common thread will likely emerge.

Here are some examples of Twitter modus operandi I’ve witnessed so far:

1. Blog vomit

Twitterfeed will post your blog rss feeds to Twitter automatically and there are Twitter members that use the site purely for that reason. Personally, I see nothing wrong with that, but if you don’t invest some effort in following and conversing with like-minded Twitter members, you might as well be broadcasting to Mars, because no one will notice you.

2. It sucks to be you

I could spend all day watching these people’s tweets. The Buffies and Biffs can’t wait to let you know which expensive wine they just drank, the $1000 suit that had to be returned because it wasn’t up to snuff, and mentioning as many SEO Internet moguls as possible in their tweets, in the unlikely event some of the twinkle will magically rub off on them by osmosis.

3. American Gigolo/Gigoless

They only follow sexy avatars in the hopes of hooking up. Truth is, if you gathered most of these real people in a room, you’d have a Star Trek convention. No offense, I’m just saying.

4. Ain’t nuthin’ but a gold digger

There are Twitter snobs that feel Twitter was created for the sole purpose of hyping their online business. They generally do not converse with anyone who does not share their particular area of expertise. You can follow them, and they will follow you, but don’t expect a “good morning” from them any time soon. They are too busy figuring out ways to outdo the competition. A succubus if there ever was one.

5. Ladies and Gentlemen: Rodney Dangerfield

I call these the one-line-wonders. Posting tweets with a punchline and an imagined rim shot. Hey, I’m witty. Look at me. Problem is, if you take the chance on replying to one of these tweets, you get nuthin’ in return. It’s all one-sided. That’s why stand-up comedians are usually introverts.

6. Secret Squirrel

These are the voyeurs of the community. Seldom, if ever, exchanging dialogue — they just like to watch. Heaven forbid that anyone would actually talk to them — what response could they form? I imagine their lips are stitched shut like in some weird NIN video.

7. Welcome to my tent

It’s all about the numbers and the sheik eagerly welcomes you to his harem of followers with promises of interesting banter and witty repartee. So you click the “Follow” icon and wait. Success — he/she follows you in return. This looks promising. What generally happens, though, is Buffalo Bill flings you down the hole with the other followers, never to be heard from again. How many is too many? Only Precious knows for sure.

8. The Town Crier

If it weren’t for this guy, I’d never know what was going on in the world. A veritable fount of rss feeds from CNN, MSNBC, and Bloomberg, he’s got it down, man. As soon as news breaks, Ron Burgundy has tinyurl’d it, entered his commentary and tweeted it, at lightening speed. How does he do it? I don’t care — I just hope he doesn’t stop or I’d be a complete moron.

9. Tupperware party

I fall into this category, as do most Tweeple. You establish a comfortable group with whom you have regular conversations, albeit in 140 character segments. It’s fun, entertaining and you manage to pump up each others’ egos one tweet at a time. They read and comment on your tweets and blog posts, and vice-versa. You feed off of one another and there is little risk involved. Over time, however, this can get boring. That’s when you go searching for fresh meat, I mean new followers. It’s all good — it’s just part of the game.

10. Combo meal

The longer you frequent Twitter, the more likely you will find yourself developing more than one agenda. A multi-tasker, realizing that one can kill two or three birds with one tweet. Very efficient — managing to pimp your blog or website, spread viral headlines and videos, and flirt — in one perfect 140 character tweet (also referred to as a twoosh.) Barack Obama did it and so can you — achieve total Twitter nirvana.

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



10 Twitter Agendas – What’s Yours?

In this guest post George Angus from

A few months back, my daily routine was just that – routine. Grab the first cup of java, head to the writing den and get to it. Check the email, put out any immediate fires and then spend some time working the feeds.

Twitter has changed all of that. Ok, maybe not all of it. Just try and get that first cup of coffee out of my hands. It did however, change my morning and certainly my daily routine. As soon as I start my browser I open a Twitter tab and it stays open all day. I don’t go straight to the RSS feeds any longer.

In a lot of ways, Twitter is my RSS feed “reader”.

What?! Blasphemy! I can hear it now. Stick with me, I’ll explain.

Here’s how a typical scenario plays out, right? You come across a site that may be new to you and it’s full of great stuff. You decide you want to know when this site puts something new out there so you find the big orange button and click away. Done. Then once a day/week/month you head on over and weed through your feeds. If you’ve got 15 or 20 feeds to get through it’s a pretty big task. Suppose you have 50? Yikes, it’s going to be a long day.

This is where Twitter as a feed service comes in to play. Take an honest inventory of your subscriptions. How many of those do your really want to follow every day? I’ve worked very hard to build a community. There are folks who are regular visitors and commenters on my site and we have interaction on nearly a daily basis. I want to know when they post something new, I want them to know when I’ve posted. In addition to my community, there are some sites outside of my clan that I like to pay attention to. All of these folks are on Twitter.

My Twitter day goes something like this: I back page through my timeline to see if anyone has tweeted a post. If it’s one of my clan or if it sounds interesting I’ll click on over and have a peek, comment as appropriate and move to the next one. I’ll back page roughly twelve hours or until I find my last tweet. From that point forward I’m keeping an eye on the timeline every now and then. Admittedly on some days this is more difficult than other’s but for about the past month it has been doable.

Benefits

Here are the benefits of using Twitter as a feed:

• Lightning fast response. Don’t deny it, you want that coveted #1 comment position. Using a standard feed reader, when was the last time you were able to grab the brass ring at a big-boy-blog?
• ReTweet. If I find a gem, I’m going to RT the post and share, share, share. This gets the traffic to the post while it is still fresh. I find that my clan also RTs my posts on occasion bringing it back into the limelight.
• Clutter reduction. Focusing my efforts in this single arena keeps me sharp and focused and able to respond quickly to most anything.
• I can contribute. By the time a feed ends up in my mailbox or reader the conversation is about done. I feel like I’ve pulled my soapbox up to the town square of a ghost town.

Final Points

• If all you ever do is tweet your posts you are going to end up very lonely. Don’t do it. This is a community. Engage, contribute and have a presence.
• For those sites that have not been Twitterized, switch from a feed reader to an email subscription. (although you still lose the lightning fast response with this option)

Ok folks. Let’s hear it. Your turn…

PS from Darren

I was chatting with one Twitter user recently who literally does use Twitter to read their more important feeds.

Here’s how they explained doing it:

1. They set up a Twitter account especially for feeds. They marked it as a private feed which only they follow (ie they don’t let anyone else have permission to follow it).
2. They have an account at TwitterFeed and have added the RSS feeds of around 30 blogs that they follow.
3. They then forward these feeds to their private Twitter account.
4. As new posts come up on the blogs that they follow the feeds of they come into their Twitter stream.

It’s perhaps not a system that will suit everyone – but this person loves it – it enables them to center even more of what they do online around Twitter.

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



Will Twitter Replace RSS?

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

Using a combination of Twitter tools, you can practice enlightened self-interest without the need for prescription drugs.

Following are examples of how to save time with Twitter tools to find out 1) what your friends need, 2) collecting that information, and 3) giving them that information.

Note: Don’t try this with ALL of your friends, just a few – or you really will go mental!

What Does My Friend Need?

Most of us have a general idea of what our friends need, but may have missed the few tweets about problems with a client project or thesis.

TweetStats can be used to find out details about your friend (in a non-spying way, of course . After you’ve entered your friend’s twitter ID, Study the TweetCloud:

Mousing over the tweetcloud shows 49 mentions of “coffee” in Darren Rowse’s twitterings. Is this useful information? You decide.

How Can I Find It?

Once you know what your friend needs, use a combination of the following automated search methods:

• Test Keywords With Monitter.com – This snazzy tool let’s you compare the frequency of three different keywords. In Melbourne, Australia, “coffee” occurs more often than “cappuccino” or “tea”:

You can then subscribe to updates on your search using the RSS feed.

• TweetBeep works much like Google alerts, but you can combine keyword searches with location criteria. It also allows you to be alerted whenever a particular web-site it tweeted, even if the URL is shortened!

• Don’t Forget Google! Google alerts will pick up anything outside of Twitter. Set the alert to “as it happens” so that you can quickly send any valuable content to your friend.

How Can I Get It To Them?

Beyond TweetDeck, iTweet, Twhirl and Twitter.com, here are two pain-free ways to get information to your friends:

TwitThat: This is a firefox add-on that lets you quickly post the URL of a website you’re reading. The cool thing is that you can create a “reply list” of your friends in a drop down menu:

Clicking “twit” automatically posts the webpage in twitter as “@Problogger – found this:” Saves much more time than copying and pasting URLs and headlines. Also, having your friends listed in this drop-down keeps them foremost in your mind.

TwitterFeed is a utility that automatically posts updates of any RSS feed. Like TwitThat, you can also create a “reply to” prefix of tweets. In our example, we could post updates from the Starbucks blog and post them with “@Problogger – Coffee News:” at the beginning of the tweet.

This is perfect for those situations where someone is working on an urgent project and would love to receive helpful information from you, even while you’re sleeping!

If used thoughtfully (in a non-stalking way ), these techniques can help you be useful on Twitter without going mentally insane.

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



How To Be Useful On Twitter Without Going Crazy

• Twitter desktop clients (I’m a fan of Twhirl and TweetDeck)
• Twitter Applications for iPhone (I’m a user of Twittelator Pro)
• Twitter user ranking services (like Twitterholic)
• Visualization tools (like TweetWheel)
• Tools to import RSS feeds to your Twitter account (I use Twitterfeed)
• Tools for setting tweets to go off later (Tweetlater)
• Metrics tool (TweetStats – Twinfluence)
• Tools for sharing pictures on Twitter (Twitpic)
• Services to tweet to groups (GroupTweet)
• Twitter Directories (Twellow)
• Tools for finding new people to follow (Twubble)
• Tools for helping you to track Twitter Conversations (Tweet2Tweet)
• Trend Tracking tools for what’s hot on Twitter (Twitscoop)
• Tools to help Twitter integrate with other applications (TwitterCal – which lets you add items to your Google calandar by Twitter)
• Services for groups to tag and organize tweets (HashTags)
• Twitter updaters (Ping.fm – which allows you to update status on multiple sites like Twitter)
• Twitter backup services (TweetTake)
• Services to let you track which links people are clicking on in your Tweets (TweetBurner)

These are just some of the tools services I’ve used in the last few weeks and they only scratch the surface at the hundreds of Twitter tools that are released.

What Twitter Tools and Services do you use? Leave the ones you love in comments below.

I’m looking forward to finding out which ones get mentioned most and finding some new ones that I’d not previously discovered.

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



What Twitter Tools and Services Do You Use?