Twitter Poll: How many times should people share links to their articles on Twitter?

Five cool ways to add tweets to your blog

If you are one of the millions of people active on Twitter then there is also a good chance that you may be creating content elsewhere on the interweb and committing your thoughts more fully to the blogosphere. If that is the case then you ought to consider using one of the many widgets available that enable your tweets to appear on your blog (or website for that matter). Not only is this aesthetically pleasing and gets readers involved in your tweets, it also helps strengthen your personal social media ecosystem – by this, I mean using one platform on which you are active to sign post traffic to another. So there you have it – this post was borne out of necessity to highlight some of the tools available that allow you to make your tweets show up on your blog. I hope this post highlights a few widgets from the basic, up to the more sophisticated.

Twitter

Twitter allows you to embed your tweets fairly easily by copying and pasting some HTML into your blog. If you’re just starting out in the blogging game, I would recommend you use this widget as it creates the code in a matter of seconds. Whilst, the Twitter option is functional, easy to use and offers some personalisation, it is perhaps less visually pleasing than its cooler rivals. However, simplicity is not necessarily a bad thing and for someone with an urge to create content, rather than get bogged down in the intricacies of code, you could do a lot worse than using the standardised Twitter widget. To get this quick bit of code, simply visit the Twitter Goodies site and choose from a profile widget, search widget, faves widget or list widget.

TwitStamp

TwitStamp is very much in the same vein as the standard Twitter widget in that it speedily offers you a choice of funky badges that displays your latest tweets. This app scores higher when it comes to personalisation in comparison to the Twitter widget, whilst retaining its user friendly feel. There are some other great features that let you play around with the badge’s size and background, as well as a handy TwitCard feature you should check out that incorporates your name, avatar, bio, latest tweet and number of followers.

Language is a Virus

This writing prompt (and somewhat unusually named) website offers hundreds of widgets that you can select by size, colour and style. If you are looking for something unusual that other people (probably) won’t have, then this site should be your first port of call. Whilst, there are many, many widgets which are not to my taste, the sheer breadth of designs is worthy of your attention. The main problem will be choosing just one. Again this site guides you through an easy step-by-step process and gives you some code at the end.

Tweetizen

Tweetizen is a slightly more complex widget as it incorporates tweets from particular groups. This is ideal for blogs with several authors or companies who have their employees tweeting for them. It’s fairly straightforward and produces a piece of embed code that you can add anywhere on your blog or website. In addition, you can even customize the look and feel of it by adding an extra stylesheet to override the default CSS stylings.

Tweet

In common with a lot of Twitter tools and apps, the best ones are often created by small teams of developers elsewhere. The beauty of opening up your API is that the crowd can take it on, change it and ultimately make it better. Tweet is another fine example of just that. This unobtrusive piece of JavaScript code enables you to do lots of things, way above and beyond just embedding your latest tweets. For instance, you can display tweets from a particular Twitter search, incorporate tweets from other accounts, as well as the automatic linking of #hashtags. Whilst, this code enables you to do all sorts of creative things, a decent understanding of coding basics is required.

This is a guest post from our good friend Ben Cotton you can read the original post here. Ben is currently employed by Edelman Digital, having previously worked in PR research, a professional cricket club and busy press office. You can find out more about Ben from his blog, Tweets or Linked In profile.

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!

Guest Post Ben Cotton: The latest Tweet-cessory

This is a guest post from our good friend Ben Cotton. Ben is currently employed by Edelman Digital, having previously worked in PR research, a professional cricket club and busy press office. You can find out more about Ben from his blog, Tweets or Linked In profile.

Apologies for the awful title, but I was struggling to come up with another decent one. Some of the alternative suggestions I’ve had thrown at me from my wonderful friends and colleagues include ‘load of junk’, ‘pile of crap’ and something altogether unrepeatable. In fact, a lot of it was unrepeatable. The object which caused me to pen such an awful title and generated such outrage is the personalised Tweet Notebook I’ve just ordered.

To fill in the gaps…a Belgian company is offering people the chance to have their tweets committed to notepaper for $12. To be more precise, for your money you get a plain notepad with your tweets at the bottom. Admittedly, it does seem frivolous, indulgent even and dare I say it, a bit arrogant. But, it was the sheer novelty which immediately appealed to me – then came feelings of frivolity, indulgence and arrogance. Followed by the abuse. A lot of abuse.

However, I’ve tried to rationalise my purchase. I like the opportunism of the company. It’s a brilliantly simple idea. They’re taking something that is typically inexpensive and dull. Few things are more boring than a notepad – and they have turned it into something people will be willing to pay a lot more for.

I think this tweet-cessory (apologies) is geeky and cool in equal measures, but I also think it’s great to see your tweets being turned into something tangible rather than consigned to the bowels of Twitter search – never to be seen again.

The question is, at $12 a pad, will I use it sparingly or just start writing smaller?

P.S. For those on a budget you could always have a go yourself using Tweetbook.

The top five reasons why people don’t follow you on Twitter

This is a guest post from Shannon Chiarenza it can also be found on her blog here. If you would like to write a guest post drop us a line.

Many people use Twitter as an online marketing tool for their business but fail miserably at it because they don’t get that Twitters main purpose is to carry on a conversation.

Here are a few common mistakes:

Mistake #1 Talking to yourself

This is something I had to learn the hard way and it’s the same for your website content and all other things you put on the internet; people don’t care about you and what you have to say unless it relates to them.

The fix:

Do your tweets look like this?: “just baked cookies, ate 3 already yum!”.
Our self indulgent ego assumes we are the centre of the universe…but we aren’t and no one cares that you just ate cookies. Here’s how to fix that statement so everyone else benefits from your baking:

“Just baked cookies, ate 3 already, so delicious here’s the recipe” AHA! Now we love you, and we will RT (retweet) that so we too can be the ones that shared a great recipe and then you become this valuable resource for all good things…see how that works?

Or do your tweets look like this:
“Just updated my blog…” “Just updated my website…” “Just wrote this post…”
“Want to learn how to think like a millionaire? Click this link which leads to my affiliate website that I’m trying to pass off as something I read and liked when really I’m tricking you” (kinda like what I just did with the cookie recipe)

Twitter is social media, think of it like attending a gathering of people, you wouldn’t approach someone and talk about yourself immediately because you look like a jerk. People want know “what’s in it for me, how are you going to benefit my life?” Keep that in mind whenever using social media, especially while promoting your business.

Mistake #2 Presenting Yourself as a Business and Not a Person

Why would I want to follow ABC moving company? Even if I was moving, why would I want your boring tweets scrolling through my twitter updates? Seriously, no one likes advertisements and that’s all you’re doing is advertising. There are very few exceptions like Starbucks, they’re a huge company with many fans and can get away with it, but for everyone else, we want to talk to a real person not a logo.

The Fix:

Talk to people, get to know them, comment on their tweets, RT the ones you like. Use your expertise in your field to jump into a conversation and give some advice but don’t use twitter as a billboard for your business.

Mistake #3 Going on a Following Spree

I get many different people following me from personal trainers promoting their protein powder to wrestling enthusiast and I know they’re only following me to gain more followers for themselves…but I check their updates anyway to see if they are worth following. What makes them worth following is seeing they converse with others and are actively participating in the bigger conversation through Twitter.

The other thing I check for is the ratio from followers to following, if they’re following 1,200 people but only 200 are following them I know they went on a following spree clicking on anyone and everyone hoping to beef up their twitter followers. I usually won’t follow back unless they have interesting tweets.

The Fix:

Stop following people and start tweeting interesting things, start a conversation. I’ve had people follow me with an empty twitter page, why would I follow you if you literally have nothing to say? Let the followers come to you, it’s not a popularity contest, it’s the quality of your tweets that matter.

Mistake #4 No one likes a Negative Nancy

Whining, complaining or just tweeting about all the things that piss you off in this world really won’t land you too many followers. The exception to that is if you’re clever and witty about it and it’s become your trademark. However most of the time it’s a drag and it makes you look sour and can be very bad for your business.

The Fix:

Look for positive things to say, compliment others on Twitter, brag about someone else’s achievements, point out something that makes you happy and share it with others for them to try. Avoid talking politics and religion unless that is what you tweet about, it’s too easy for those tweets to spiral into a heated argument…and they almost always do.

Mistake #5 Too Narrow of a Niche

I’ve had people follow me who tweet about something I’m not at all interested in like golf. I don’t golf and I personally find golf incredibly boring, no offence to those that love the sport, it’s just not my thing. So if you follow me and all of your tweets are about golfing I’m not going to follow you back because I have no interest in the sport.

The Fix:

Talk about other things too, comment on other conversations, post a link to a funny video. It’s ok if many of your tweets are about golf as long as you add other things that aren’t related so someone like me can find something in your tweets I can relate to.

And just for an added bonus:

Big, BIG Mistake…Direct Message Abuse

When someone follows you, never send a direct message that says: “thanks for following, check out my secrets to online wealth at www.Icouldcarelessaboutyou.com”. I’ve stopped following a few people for that. This is better: “thank you for following I look forward to your tweets!” It’s a bit generic and I get that a lot but it’s much better than blatant self promotion!…Like this: Follow Me on Twitter.

You will soon be able to tweet from @anywhere – Twitter’s announcement explained

Music and film fans will be well aware that this week is South By South West, one of the world’s biggest displays of independent film and music. The festival is also the home to one of the world’s largest conferences for emerging technology. South By South West Interactive has built up an enviable reputation for attracting the brightest stars in emerging technology and in the past has played host to the launch of digital stars including Spotify and Twitter.

This year Twitter’s CEO, Evan Williams, returned to SXSWi to announce the next step in Twitter’s quest for world domination, the Facebook baiting @anywhere.

@anywhere is Twitter’s new system of tweeting directly from any website and remaining permanently logged into Twitter wherever you are online, much like Facebook’s Connect service.

In Twitter’s own words:

“Imagine being able to follow a New York Times journalist directly from her byline, tweet about a video without leaving YouTube, and discover new Twitter accounts while visiting the Yahoo homepage”.

From what we know so far the service is closer to Twitter adapting to the ways we already use it than an entirely new direction for the service. Users have been tweeting links and adding their own comment since Twitter began, @anywhere will simply make it easier for us to do so and making content sharing a little easier.

Twitter are still playing their cards close to their chests on this one but we can expect all to be revealed on April 14^th at Chirp, Twitter’s very own conference, and then we’ll get an idea of the full extent of Twitter’s plans.

Twitter and its new location feature – A quick video demo

Below is a useful two minute video from @derickson detailing how Twitter has integrated location tags into tweets – so you can show people where you are tweeting from.

Personally, I think this is just the beginning of what we are likely to see in this area. Soon I am sure you will be able to see all tweets from a particular street, shop or town and sorted by time and influence.

The growing popularity of Foursquare has no doubt had a huge impact on Twitter’s strategy for product development. In other words this is Twitter’s response to location based social networking.

Got a secret then why not share it with everyone on Twitter?

Secrettweet.com is a Twitter tool that allows you to share your darkest secrets with everyone on Twitter anonymously. It has it’s own status update box where you can tweet directly from.

The most popular tweets are then collated and posted at the top of the home page and some of them make for interesting reading. The top eight on the day of writing were as follows:

Top Tweets for 3/08/10
1. 64921 "I allowed a married man to send me naked pictur…
2. 61492 "I hate my husband. He has ruined my life. Sucke…
3. 21192 "I’ve been in a secret lesbian relationship for …
4. 10973 "My wife thinks we are working on our relationsh…
5. 5919 "i hate it when a co worker (who is obese) wears…
6. 24323 "I sometimes miss my life before I had kids. I …
7. 1015 "I really want to bang my officemate, while my w…
8. 7522 "I want superpowers more than anything else in t.

Personally, I wouldn’t use this site but it is interesting and it has built up a substantial following of more than 25,000. I do wonder what percentage of the tweets are real and whether some people just post things up to be amusing.

The top ten ReTweet measurement tools

Many of us working in the world of digital public relations and social media are often asked by our clients to measure how effective our online campaigns have been. This can be done in various ways across different platforms but I thought I would share one way for the platform Twitter.

To be honest fans and followers aren’t accurate indicators of a user’s influence anymore as both can now be purchased or users can use one of the many autofollow tools Wadds highlighted in a post recently. There has been a lot of procrastination over whether you should even look at them at all anymore. My personal view is you should take all Twitter numbers with a pinch of salt and take a wider perspective. No metric is perfect but make sure you look at several rather than one in isolation as this can often give you a false view. Twitter metrics include:

1. Follower numbers?
2. Status Updates?
3. How interactive they are? Do they reply or simply broadcast messages?
4. Lists – how many Twitter lists are they included in?

You could also use a Twitter ranking system from tools such as Twitter Grader or Twiiterholic but often I question how useful these number are they don’t really tell you anything tangible.

Another metric which can be used is how often are the users’ messages retweeted. So following my recent post about the top Twitter statistic tools, I thought I would add to this with the finest ReTweet tools which are currently out there. Here are my top 10.

1. Tweetreach – This basically searches Twitter and looks at everyone who tweeted and who follows them to make a set of calculations. The reach is the total number of different people who would have seen tweets on this topic in their Twitter stream. This takes into account people who follow the same people. It looks back through the user’s last 50 tweets but you can buy a pdf report for $20 which goes back further.

2. twitteranalyzer.com – this is a great tool which shows you lots of interesting statistics. Click on reach at the bottom and you can see how far your tweets have travelled.

3. Retweetrank is apparently a representative of the number of times a user has been retweeted by others. It lets you find the ranking of any twitter user. Along with the rank, the latest retweets of the user are shown and an RSS feed can also be grabbed for the same.

The top users, who produce the best content, and have been most retweeted recently, are listed in a leaderboard system. I question how useful the rank is as it doesn’t really give you anything tangible unless you compare it with another user in this particular system. 
 

4. TweetMeme is a another service which aggregates popular links on Twitter. It categorises them into categories, subcategories and Channels, making it easy to filter out the noise to find what you’re interested in.

I like this app as it is a nice and clean design and is pretty easy to use and find interesting content.

5. Twidentify.com searches everything but it apparently ranks results based on who gets retweeted the most. It uses the number of retweets as a measure of influence. You can also run a trend search and it creates a nice line graph as illustrated below which I suppose you could add to your reports.
 

6. dailyRT is another tweet aggregator that gathers the most popular tweets on twitter and displays them using its own scoring algorithm and filters.

Hot tweets displays tweets in order based on their dailyRT rank and can be filtered by all items in the search box.

Live tweets displays tweets in real time as they gain popularity and are also filterable by all items in the search box. This is useful for events as you can filter the tweets based on #hashtags and keywords to find key topics people are shouting about.

7. RTweetist this is a tool for discovering trends, popular topics and popular people by tracking Retweets. It apparently monitors Twitter for fresh links and ranks them according to how new and popular they are. The main homepage looks a little dull and dated to me but the tool itself is quite quick at pulling data from Twitter. The main drawback for me is there are no statistics or pie charts that I can find.

8. ReTweet Mapper This is a viral marketing scientist’s own search of ReTweets. I am not sure what I think of this because it didn’t really produce any results for the few searches I performed but quite a few people seem to like it.

9. ReTweet radar provides you with a large category cloud of trending topics to drill down in on as well as displaying the most retweeted links and tweeple.

10. Backtweets is pretty responsive and useful for seeing all of the Twitter links associated with a term.

Added Extra
Repeets.com apparently scans Twitter for all the ReTweets and displays the recent and most popular ones. I can’t rank this service as on the day of writing it wasn’t working.

Finally I would like to offer a hat tip to Jon Bishop who had a list of his top six ReTweet monitoring tools, most of which I have also used in my list

This has been cross posted on: Norton’s Notes

A pretty Twitter app for sharing Tweets with others – Twitterfall

If you are attending an event or conference and you know there are other Twitter users at the venue you can use Twitterfall as a great way to see what other people are tweeting about and get involved in the conversation.

Even better than that, if you are organising the event yourself you can even beam it on the main screen at the back of the room and use it as an interactive sounding board for people to tweet questions from the audience. It looks great and can be tailored accordingly. Twitterfall describes itself as

a way of viewing the latest ‘tweets’ of upcoming trends and custom searches on the micro-blogging site Twitter. Updates fall from the top of the page in near-realtime.

You can also type in custom search queries yourself, and select or deselect these as much as you like by clicking on them. These custom search queries can also be refined by location by using the Geolocation panel (in beta).

I have tested it for Tweasier and you can see the results here: http://twitterfall.com/tweasier.