How to use Tweasier’s Scheduled Tweets

Five ways to use personal and company accounts on Twitter

In business, people buy people. Being transparent is key on Twitter. Here are 5 situations where using personal and company accounts can bring in more quality followers. In business, people buy people. Not companies.

Of the dozens of people who want to follow you, the ones whose profile is open & transparent, supported by a photo, will resonate most.

You are less inclined to follow a company – there’s more chance they’ll want to sell to you than converse with you. Though a corporate Twitter account, used in the right way, can build credibility for the company.

For someone you know, you’ll feel more inclined to converse with a Twitter account under their own name with their photo than one under a made up name with a weird picture.

Here are 5 situations which call for the different use of personal & company Twitter accounts. Using a tool like Tweasier makes it easy to manage multiple Twitter accounts at once.

1. Owner Managed Business – Professional Service
   With a business founded on your knowledge & skill, it’s better to have a Twitter account under your name, with your photo. You company and brand is, frankly, secondary to everyone apart from yourself.
   I wrote a blog recently about accountancy firms whose natural tendency is to hide behind their company name.
2. Owner Managed Business Selling Products
   Where a product requires no explanation, the customer is primarily interested in the price and quality e.g. with a confectionery company selling wine gums is a known product & knowing who the owner is has little relevance. A company Twitter account would work best here to send out all the tweets then using a personal Twitter account to Retweet to friends.
3. Larger Branded Service Companies
   If we take the accountants from #1 and project them 3 years into the future, their brand may have become established. However, all clients personally know their contracting partner and he remains their first point of contact. So it remains important for the partner to tweet from his personal Twitter account. However he can supplement it with Retweets of company news from the company Twitter account.
4. Larger Branded Product Companies
   Brand ambassadors come into their own in this scenario. By that I mean employees of a company who are passionate about their company and tweet news and updates through the company account.
5. Groups and Communities
   This is similar to #4 but comprises a looser connection of people. A good example is business networking groups. The group leader can send tweets for the next event through the group Twitter account e.g. @4NDenton then get all the group members to Retweet through their personal accounts.

So consider your company and what your audience expect. Then choose the right Twitter account for maximum impact.

This was a guest post written by Martyn Hodgson an Internet Marketer from Get Above The Fold based in Yorkshire. We would like to thank Martyn for taking the time to write this.

How reliable do we expect our social networks and tools to be now?

I was reading an interesting post by Patricio Robels this morning on econsultancy entitled: Can brands trust social media platforms? My first thought is not really but does it really matter all that much that they are not 100% reliable.

In the post Patricio comments:

Upon logging in to Twitter on Monday, I was greeted with the news that I was following nobody and had no followers.

So while this was a temporary glitch resolved within a few hours, it wouldn’t have been the end of the world if all was indeed lost. Yet for a brand that has invested heavily in Twitter, logging in to see ‘0 following‘ and ‘0 followers‘ would probably be the source of confusion, worry and possibly even anger.

The good news is that Twitter seems to have improved its reliability over the past year. The fail whale hasn’t retired, but it makes less frequent appearances. The problem with my account, however, which wasn’t isolated to just me, highlights an inconvenient truth: for all of Twitter’s improvements, it’s still not exactly what one might label ‘reliable‘.

I tweeted about the same issue yesterday as I noticed it as well – see the image on the right. I have to admit I don’t share Patricio’s optimism that Twitter has improved its reliability. I have noticed more outages in the last six months than in the previous two years and these are mainly down to the development of new features and the new look twitter which has been widely welcomed and that was highlighted in an a poll today by Mashable.

I think we have all become accustomed to things working all of the time but the fact is these social networks are complicated pieces of kit that have taken years to develop and you can take that from someone who has been developing a twitter management application for almost nine months. However, that said should we now expect our social tools to be reliable all of the time? And does this change if the service is free like Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare or Doplr? Or do we all accept that web applications break from time to time and this is now the norm?

I have my own views but let me know what you think – thanks.

Cross posted on Dead Dinosaur.

An interview with Tweasier CEO Chris Norton featurs in Web Designer Magazine

Twitter management tools – why did they remove bulk unfollow tools?

For the last nine months I have been working on creating a Twitter management application that added value to the Twitter experience. The application, called Tweasier, is currently in beta testing and has several hundred people using it on a daily basis – I have found their feedback absolutely invaluable and I now recognise the importance of having a beta period. During these nine months I have seen a variety of Twitter applications have their services or features throttled by Twitter and I have been asking myself why?

A good example of this was Twitter Karma which allowed the average Twitter user to sort their friends by people who were following them back. It was a useful tool which meant that you could cleanse your account from time to time and keep the numbers down to a reasonable and manageable level. Sometimes people you follow, just stop using Twitter altogether, so a spring clean can be effective.

As Twitter has grown, so has the noise in an average users Twitter account. The early adopters of Twitter used to see pretty much everybody’s tweets but now, as there are so many interesting and insightful people out there to follow, you can occasionally miss an important tweet or two. For a news junkie like myself I hate to think that but that’s the way it is on Twitter these days and we have all come to accept it.

Too Many Fail Whales

Twitter has had a bit of a bad run recently launching a few new features which have stumbled and cause the network to break down on regular occasions. Sometimes I actually feel I might as well start having a relationship with the FAIL WHALE as I see him more often that my own account. However, this has prompted Twitter to reduce the limit of requests third-party-applications like Tweasier, Tweetdeck and Hootsuite can make it to its API (down to 175).

By doing this applications have become much less stable and I personally think this may well start affecting the user’s relationship and love for the network.

My Advice to Twitter

So my first bit of advice to Twitter is to sort the stability of the network out and return the trust to the users and the developers which have helped make Twitter as popular as it is toady.

My second piece of advice is to re-examine bringing back bulk unfollowing. Now don’t get me wrong I am not a spammer and I don’t believe in spamming but surely there is a better way to stop Twitter spammers than removing the usefulness of bulk unfollowing from all third-party applications.

Twitter actually changed its rules and now only allows single line unfollowing. In my opinion this is wrong, so please bring back features like bulk unfollowing, so the regular users can trim their accounts when they need trimming otherwise it makes it a far harder process to spring clean an account and people will be following dead accounts which is surely a bad thing for Twitter anyway.

My answer to stopping the spammers is simple, when a users syncs their account with an application their details are kept in the user’s profile. Why then can’t Twitter just have something that flags up when an account is growing and reducing at an alarming rate using one of these applications? Ban these guys whose accounts fluctuate and keep the users happy by giving us back a useful features.

I would love to offer Tweasier’s users the capacity to select all but the way the rules stand that won’t be the case for some time.

New Twitter tool needs your feedback

At Tweasier we are busy finalising our Twitter application but we need your help to tell us what features you would really want from a Twitter application.

We also want to hear what you like about our current version and what you think could be improved. We will be spending the next few weeks using all of your feedback to hopefully create a Twitter application that adds real value to the Twitter experience but we simply can’t do it without your help.

I will be filming a series of walkthrough videos of the features, so here’s a 2 minute taster of our search function which is pretty useful.

If you want to join the fun and get involved in our exclusive beta programme click here and register your email.

Tweasier’s search facility explained in 2 mins

We have had a great response to the beta invites but I am acutely aware that Tweasier has a lot of clever features that our users would like explaining very simply. So I have created this two minute video walking you through how to use the search facility in the Tweasier application.

The Tweasier Twitter Management Application launches in Beta

Well the time has finally arrived and Tweasier is entering the first stages of beta testing.

The idea for Tweasier came from an idea after I started blogging here specifically just about useful Twitter tools. The Tweasier blog started to grow in stature and popularity and I started to think that maybe a tool should be developed which has some really great features. I suppose you could say it’s because of you guys.

The application is only in beta testing (so please be gentle) but we are hoping you guys (its users) will help us find the nasty bugs so we can eradicate as many as possible before we launch this tool to the world.

The new Tweasier application is packed with helpful services, allowing Twitter users to do any of the following:

• Run, save and clone Twitter searches based on location, keywords and personal biographies so conversations can be monitored.
• Receive personalised email notifications informing the user about their activity within the Twittersphere
• Visit Tweasier’s fully equipped analytics suite – providing more than 30 different up-to-date statistics on any Twitter account. Some of the graphs and data can also be exported for use in future presentations or reports.
• Sort an account’s friends or followers by more than 20 different criteria such as: people that haven’t tweeted in the last 30 days, people that didn’t follow the user back and also prune your friends to clear an account up if necessary.
• Users can take a quick peek at Twitter conversations between two people to get both sides of the story.
• Users can read messages, tweet, direct message and even shorten long URLs using Tweasier’s dedicated Twitter client.
• Scheduled tweeting – users can write and save several tweets until later in the day
• Users can use Tweasier’s own in-house ranking system which easily shows whether a user is worth following or not

For those of you more social, you can like Tweasier on Facebook, follow us on Twitter or simply subscribe to the blog.

I hope you like Tweasier but if you have any questions, feel free to drop me or one of the team a line. If you would like an invite email me.

We will look forward to hearing what you guys think of it.

The Tweasier team creates its Facebook Page – Join us and catch our new app video preview

We are busy putting the finishing touches to the Tweasier application which we plan to launch within the next few days. In preparation for the big launch we have created our own Facebook page which has been integrated with this blog. Apologies for the blatant plug but please can you show us your support for us by liking us and joining in the fun in Facebook.

As a nice added extra I have inserted the preview video of the application which helps bring the new Twitter application to life.

Thanks guys – all of your support is greatly appreciated.

A twitter tool that automatically sorts your Follow Friday’s out

Well it’s Friday again and what’s the one thing everyone does on Twitter on a Friday? That’s right they share some of their favourite Twitter users with their networks using the #hastag #FF or FollowFriday.

Traditionally you had to go through all of your friends yourself and pick them out yourself which can take time but now there is a clever little Twitter tool that does it for you called The Twitter Tag Project. Now this is a very simple tool but it’s also very effective this is how it describes how it works:

Type in your twitter username.

1. The engine will scan the last 200 tweets, count the dups, and return your most active friends.
2. The results will display:
   #FollowFriday @friend1 @friend2 @friend3 @friend4.

Like I said this tool is simple but effective and it certainly get’s a big thumbs up from me and the Tweasier team because it makes your life easier. Give it a whirl but don’t forget to add us in your Follow Friday’s guys .

Happy Friday!