Entries Tagged 'Twitter Tips' ↓

Twitter has recently made some controversial changes to the retweet feature. So here’s a selection of answers to the most urgent questions that are being asked by the Twitter community.

How Did The Retweet Develop?

If we had to select just one reason for the rapid growth in the popularity of Twitter, it would be the Retweet feature.

It is this feature that has allowed the Twitter community to discover the things that are of most importance to them at any moment.

However, when the Twitter platform was initially designed, it’s highly unlikely that the founders envisaged the Retweet concept.

The Retweet custom (adding RT then the @username before the original message, possibly followed by a short comment) was developed over time by the early Twitter users, then embraced by several third party applications until it become one of the cultural icons of the internet age.

It was something that the community worked out for itself and evolved over time, rather than a business strategy that was designed from the beginning, and that’s a major part of its charm. People like to believe that they’ve discovered something rather than being told what to do.

Twitter gave us a simple platform and we developed customs and traditions so that we could use it in the way that brought most value to our lives.

What Were The Problems With The Original Retweet Convention?

However, the ad-hoc retweet system developed by the early Twitter users is not perfect.

First, as you have to include both the @username of the original tweeter plus the designation RT, there are situations where you have to edit the original message to comply with the 140 character limit. Apart from being more time consuming, this can lead to a loss of context in some retweeted messages.

Second, if several of your followers retweet the same message, this can lead to significant repetition of content in your timeline.

So towards the end of November 2009, Twitter rolled out a completely new Retweet system in an attempt to fix these issues.

What Is Twitter’s Solution?

They have added a new Retweet icon to the website interface. So instead of having to cut and paste messages then add RT and the @username all you have to do is click the icon.

When you retweet a message using this new icon, your followers will see the message in their timeline alongside the avatar of the Twitter user who posted the original message. This happens regardless of whether they are following that person.

Twitter also claims to have fixed the repetition of repeated messages in the timeline by grouping together identical retweets. So from now on, you’ll only see a repeated message once within your timeline. There will also be info under the message letting you know the two or more of your followers who have retweeted the message.

If you want to manage your retweets, clicking on the retweets link on the right hand side of the main interface will bring up a page with 3 options;

a. Retweets by others - This is a list of all the retweets made by the people you follow. The appear in largely in chronological order although the most popular retweets tend to appear near the top of the list. This gives you the option to reply to any of them or retweet them to your followers.

b. Retweets by you - A list of all the messages that you have retweeted. This gives you the option to reply to tweets or to cancel your retweet using the undo link.

c. Your Tweets, Retweeted - See which of your tweets have been retweeted by your followers.

Finally, it’s also possible to block retweets from appearing on your timeline on a user by user basis. Just visit their profile page, click the green circular retweet button (next to the following message at the top of their page) until it turns grey. Their tweets will no longer appear in your timeline. To unblock them, just reverse the process.

What Do Twitter Want To Accomplish With The New Retweet Feature?

Twitter co-founder Evan Williams has stated that the new Retweet feature is designed to;

a. Avoid attribution confusion when people retweet messages,

b. Prevent retweeted messages that are broken or lose the original context, and

c. Reduce the amount of noise in the timeline.

The ultimate aim is to make the Twitter network a more powerful tool for “helping people find out what’s happening now that they care about.”

That’s all very noble, but still seems rather superficial. A business team as talented as the one running Twitter always have a deeper, more profound strategic reason for everything that they do.

So What Could Be The Real Reason Behind These Changes?

Several theories (both plausible and ridiculous) have been advanced, including;

1. The grouping of retweets may be necessary to reduce the strain on bandwidth. This is plausible given that there is no option to modify the original message which will significantly reduce the number of different retweet messages that stem from the same original source.

2. To encourage people to use the main website (rather than third party apps) so that they can make more money if they introduce ads in the future.

3. To encourage people to use apps rather than the main website to save bandwidth.

However, in light of the recent announcement from NewsCorp (where the NewsCorp content will be removed from the Google index in favour of an exclusive deal with Bing) this could be a way for Twitter to leverage the power of their network to turn a profit without having to resort to charging users or displaying ads within the network.

If Twitter could reach a deal with one of the search engines, such as Google, to provide the data required to improve their real-time search engine results, it could help them to generate significant revenue.

And unlike the situation with NewsCorp, which appears to be commercial suicide, this option could be a viable alternative for Twitter as all the content is user generated.

What Are The Positives?

a. The retweet system is much quicker and easier to use

b. Your timeline will contain less noise

c. The new API means that third party apps will be able to support the new Retweet function more efficiently (or so the programmers claim)

d. As you can’t edit the original message there is no risk of annoying the original author by changing the context of their message or using the wrong attribution.

e. You can retweet messages up to the full 140 character limit without using some of the allowance including the letters RT and the original author’s @username.

f. Perhaps the best news is that you can still use the original manual retweet system, although they will not appear in the section showing who has Retweeted your tweets. And in time it may not be picked up by the various apps and services once they’ve been updated to support the new retweet feature.

And that’s the high point of the new official retweet system. It all starts to break down from this point.

What Are The Negatives?

There are several negatives and a large number of irritated users. According to one poll, only 6% of respondents like the new retweet feature as it currently stands. Even worse, thousands of users are using the Twitter network to spread their grievances.

Here are just a few of the complaints advanced by the Twitter community;

a. It puts strangers in my stream

b. They have changed the definition of retweeting

c. Social media is all about trust. Using someone else’s avatar in my timeline loses that trust factor. When I used to see a retweet by one of the people I follow, I immediately knew 3 things; (i) it’s a retweet, (ii) it’s worthy of my attention and (iii) it will probably link me to someone I may like to consider following. Now I see an unfamiliar face.

d. It removes my ability to add my own commentary. From now on, Retweeting something means that you agree with it. So it has become a vote for that tweet rather than an opportunity to add my own editorial judgement that my followers trust me to deliver.

e. I no longer had the chance to add value through my retweets because the new system simply attaches my meta data to something that already exists.

f. It takes away my visibility in my own network. It does me no good to find good content and retweet it if I’m not getting credit for it.

g. Why can’t they concentrate on reliability of service?

h. It makes it too easy to retweet, meaning that people will no longer be selective when seeking out the best messages and content to share.

i. Grouping the retweeted message makes it easier for me to miss popular messages within my timeline.

j. As many apps don’t support the new Retweet feature yet, anyone who uses a third party app may miss out on messages that have been retweeted.

k. When the new retweet system is used, deleting the original message now deletes all the retweets, making it much easier to remove information from the system.

l. If you @reply, it goes to the tweet originator, rather than the person who retweeted it. If you want to reply to the retweeter, you have to visit their profile and reply to another of their regular tweets or manually enter their @username. In both cases, the “in reply to…” function is rendered useless.

m. The retweet function doesn’t show up if you are reading tweets via a list.

n. As you can now add someone to a list without following them, their retweets using the new system won’t show up on your list.

o. If people are following a list that you are on, but they aren’t following you personally, they won’t see your retweets.

p. It’s almost like they sat around asking, “What would Microsoft do?”

The overall feeling seems to be that the Twitter should let the users develop the way that they like to use the service then modify it to reflect the conventions that the crowd have developed.

Only time will tell whether the developers at Twitter listen to the people who have helped the site to reach its current level of popularity.

Who Will Like The Changes?

If you generally use the main Twitter.com site to retweet messages, you rarely add comments and you don’t mind unfamiliar avatar images appearing in your timeline, you will probably prefer the new system. It’s quicker, cleaner and more compact.

Who Will Dislike The Changes?

If you like to add comments to your Retweets, if you like to get exposure among your followers for highlighting valuable tweets or if you prefer to see familiar thumbnails within your timeline, you’ll be sorely disappointed by the recent changes to the Twitter network.

What Should You Do?

At present, many of the existing Twitter apps don’t support the new Retweet feature. So if you like the new Retweet feature, use the main Twitter.com site until your favorite app supports the latest changes.

If you don’t like the changes, continue using one of the third party apps to operate your Twitter account, continue using the old manual RT @username method, then cross your fingers that the app you use doesn’t adopt the new Retweet feature.

If you still use the interface on the main Twitter site, there’s a Firefox Greasemonkey script created by Leonard Lin that modifies the way the new retweet function works within your browser.

Download The Retweet Greasemonkey Script Here

Once you’ve got the addon installed, retweeted messages that show up in your timeline will display the avatar of the person who posted the original message and the avatar of the person who retweeted it (one of your followers). This layered avatar makes it clear that the message is a retweet and reduces the shock of finding an unfamiliar image in your timeline.

However, please bear in mind that this script only affects the avatars that you see in your browser. It will not affect the way that your use of the new Retweet system affects other people. Several people have stated that they will unfollow anyone who uses the new system. So if you use the new Retweet function, be prepared for some of your followers to leave you.

What do you think of Twitter’s new retweet feature? Let us know in the comments below.

Last week we looked at the best tools to share your video clips using Twitter.

As a natural progression, this week we’re going to look at the tools that will allow you to start your own Twitter based live TV channel.

Live video streaming has been around for a while, but in recent months a number of these services have started to integrate with Twitter to create a powerful broadcasting platform.

So here are the leading services that will allow you to combine the promotional power of Twitter with live video streaming.

Twitcam.com

The first service is Twitcam which is owned by Livestream (formerly known as Mogulus). In essence they’ve taken their Livestream service and streamlined it to work with Twitter.

Just sign into Twitcam using your Twitter login details, then your webcam can capture the live video stream while Twitcam broadcasts it to the world and automatically tweets out the link to your followers.

But it gets even better…

When people view your live video stream, they can login to Twitcam with their own Twitter details and interact with other viewers using an integrated chat function which simultaneously updates their own Twitter account.

As you can imagine, when more people get used to the concept of Twitter based streaming, quality live video content has the potential to go viral and reach a significant number of viewers around the world.

At present, TwitCam doesn’t provide any options to customize the chat room of your new TV channel either in terms of looks or the urls that it uses. However, these issues are likely to be solved in the future as Twitter based video streaming continues to grow in popularity.

Another notable absence for such a high quality Twitter related service is the lack of support for the OAuth login system.

CamTweet.com

The second main competitor in the live Twitter streaming arena is CamTweet. Owned by Justin.tv this service has just emerged from private beta and provides substantially the same service as Twitcam.

Once you login to CamTweet using your Twitter details, a couple of clicks and the system will stream your video content live to the web and let your followers know that you’re live on air. Your viewers can then take part in the Twitter based chat which will help to promote your live show to an even wider audience.

Ustream.tv

Finally, it’s worth bearing in mind that the other major live streaming service provided by Ustream provides a Twitter chat function in addition to its own social networking features.

This is an exciting area to watch as it effectively allows you to launch your own live TV channel, using the Twitter network to record the interaction between your viewers at the same time as promoting it to their followers.

Provided the content of your video stream is relevant and of good quality, the connection between video streaming and Twitter will allow your live TV channel to develop a significant number of viewers within a short period.

In fact, within a few short months, the best shows will have more viewers than some of the minor television channels in certain countries.

The other interesting thing related to all these developments is what they say about the way the market feels about the future prospects for Twitter.

Despite having cutting edge technology and a powerful business model in a rapidly growing sector, these video streaming businesses have chosen to spend significant amounts of time and money releasing major Twitter based versions of their core product.

If they’re correct, the Twitter phenomenon will continue to grow and remain one of the leading communication platforms for many years to come.

Have you used any of these live video streaming services? Have you used Twitter to promote your own TV channel? Share your experiences and your predictions for the future development of this technology using the comment system below.

At present, one of the fastest growing Twitter trends is video messages. The great attraction is that it’s quick, more personal and allows you to convey more information more accurately for people who feel rather restricted by the 140 character limit.

And due to the relentless growth in the popularity of Twitter, this has been supported by an explosion in the number of Twitter enabled video sharing services.

Many of these services have been specifically designed to support Twitter video sharing, nearly all social networks allow you to tweet out your content and several well-established video sharing sites have added Twitter functionality to their box of tricks.

However, due to the sheer number of options, it can take a long time to work out the best service to meet your needs. So here is a quick summary of the different services that will allow you to share video using Twitter.

At the time of writing, there are a large number of Twitter video services but none of these services dominate their market. However, as these services reach agreements with leading Twitter clients such as Tweetdeck, Twhirl and Seesmic Desktop a few of them will achieve much greater recognition and develop a significant number of users.

1. TwitVid

TwitVid, which is one of the leading Twitter video sites, hopes to emulate the success of TwitPic, both in terms of publicity and user base.

And thanks to the ease of use, Twitvid has every chance of achieving these objectives. Just login using your Twitter details, select the video file that you want to upload, add a short message of up to 117 characters (the remaining 23 characters are used to post the link to your video) and click the tweet button.

You can also upload your videos to TwitVid using email, your mobile phone or straight from your webcam.

One of the major advantages of this service is the file size limit, which allows you to upload up to 1 GB or 20 minutes of video.

TwitVid extends the social element of the service by allowing you to retweet, share and reply to videos direct from the site.

2. Twitc

If you want a high quality professional application to showcase your video on Twitter, look no further than Twitc. This excellent site allows you to host and share both videos and photos in a wide range of different file types.

You can upload multiple files at the same time, use high resolution HD videos and perform all the regular activities such as searching, commenting and updating your Twitter status (whether or not you include a video). In addition to uploading your own content directly, you can also import videos direct from a website address, which means you can use videos from YouTube and any other video sharing site.

However, all this extra functionality means that it takes longer to share your videos with the world. Before you can upload any content, you need to create an album. Then as you upload your videos you have to specify the album which will store your video. Once uploaded, you have to select the album and the appropriate video within the album then create your tweet.

Twitc takes a few moments longer to use, but if you’re looking for professional results, it’s the best option.

3. Twiddeo

Although the Twiddeo site looks rather plain, it provides all the basic video sharing functions. You can upload your video using the web, email or record it live using your webcam.

The site also allows you to comment on other videos using the Disqus platform and view all of the videos shared by every user.

However, there is one aspect of this service that deserves special credit. If you use the FireFox browser (and we always recommend that you do), there’s a neat greasemonkey script [http://beta.twiddeo.com/tools] that allows you to play Twiddeo videos from your Twitter profile.

Other Alternatives

Tweetube is a service that has gradually evolved from a simple device to share YouTube videos into a complete video hosting and sharing service. Tweetube now offers multiple photo uploads using the web or email, commenting, webcam uploading and multiple link sharing. However, webcam videos are limited to 25 seconds in length and the only other way to share videos through your Twitter account is using a YouTube url.

TwitLens covers Twitter based video and photo sharing. It also allows multiple uploads, mobile uploads and commenting. Videos are limited to a maximum file size of 50mb which is the equivalent of a few minutes depending upon the level of video quality used.

There are three features that make Twitlens stand out from the rest of the competition. First, it makes use of the Twitter OAuth system which means you can login to this site using your Twitter details without worrying that the security of your account will be compromised. Second, you can upload videos anonymously (well, as anonymously as the internet allows), which will attract numerous embarrassing videos and a few in the public interest.

Third, Twitlens provides a great way to notify specific people about your latest video. Once you’ve uploaded your content, just select the Twitter usernames that you want to inform and they will receive a tweet from you about your new post.

Bubble Tweet is a really smart looking site that allows you to record or upload a short video of up to 30 seconds. When people click on your Bubble Tweet page your regular Twitter profile will appear followed by a circular video bubble that will play your welcome message. This is a really fun way to introduce yourself to new followers and begin to build a relationship in a way that’s impossible with traditional text.

Twibeo allows you to connect with your friends through the exchange of photos, videos, links, and posts up to 500 characters long.

VidTweeter is an easy to use service that allows you to display videos from YouTube, Hulu, Metacafe, Vimeo and DailyMotion. Just enter your Twitter username, select the service you want to play a video from, enter the video url and it will give you a link to tweet out to your followers. When they click the link, they will see your Twitter page with the video of your choice floating in front.

12 Seconds remains true to the original idea behind Twitter by allowing you to share video message of up to 12 seconds in length.

Status Adder allows you to update your Twitter account with text, pictures or video from your mobile phone.

MobyPicture offers a complete service that allows you to update all your social networks, including Twitter, Facebook, Wordpress, Flickr with text, photos, audio and video. You can use the web, email, desktop clients or your cell phone.

TinyCast is quick and easy to use. Just record audio or video from your webcam then post it direct to your Twitter account.

Tinyvid.io allows you to share your favorite videos on Twitter. Just paste the video url, comment on it, then post it to your Twitter account.

Most Twitter users follow less than a few hundred people, which means that they’re able to keep track of all the tweets that pass through their account.

However, once you follow more than a thousand Twitter users, the stream of messages flowing through your account really starts to speed up.

Eventually it reaches the stage where you can’t keep track of all the tweets posted by the people that you follow.

Your first instinct may be to unfollow certain Twitter users whose tweets are less relevant to your interests.

And in some cases, this is a good idea.

However, this won’t help you much if you follow a number of people who post a combination of amazing tweets and complete rubbish.

So here are a few of the best Twitter filtering techniques that you can use to separate the good from the bad in your Twitter stream.

Link Filtering

According to recent stats, approximately 19% of all tweets contain a link, so this provides another way to filter your Twitter stream.

Introducing MicroPlazza, a useful service that allows you to organize the messages in your Twitter stream that contain links according to either the recency or the popularity. The system takes into account the number of times that each link has been (re)tweeted and more specifically, the number of times that these links have been tweeted by the people that you’re following.

This method of filtering is based on the idea that you’re more likely to be interested in the links tweeted by the people that you’ve chosen to follow.

MicroPlazza also allows you to sort the Twitter stream of any other Twitter user, so you can see the popularity of the links that the people they follow are posting. This is extremely useful if you follow people with a specific interest and you want to keep up to date with relevant links that are circulating within these micro communities.

Group Filtering

Another way to filter your Twitter stream is to organize the people that you follow into specific groups.

Splitting the Twitter users that you follow into different groups means that there will be fewer people in each group which will slow down the rate at which new messages flow through each group making them easier to track.

There are several different ways to sub-divide your Twitter stream. One of the best ways is to use a Twitter client that supports grouping, such as the desktop programs Destroy Twitter, Tweetdeck and Seesmic or a Twitter web-based application such as PeopleBrowsr.

Some of these options also allow you to filter your groups even further. For example, Tweetdeck allows you to filter the tweets in each group according to specific keywords.

In general, creating Twitter sub-groups is a good way to regain an element of control over your Twitter stream. However, as it only allows you to sort users at an account level, the results aren’t perfect.

For example, if you follow 500 people in the PR industry who tweet about general items in addition to their work, filtering these users into a specific group will help to concentrate the number of PR related tweets in the stream, but it will still contain a significant amount of trivia that is of little interest to you.

Grouping will make it easier to keep up to date with each individual category, but ultimately, you’ll still have the same number of tweets flowing through the selection of categories that you create.

Keyword Filtering

The third way to keep your Twitter stream under control is to filter the tweets according to specific keywords.

Philtro is an interesting Twitter filtering service with great potential. Once you sign up and link it to your Twitter account, you can give any tweet that flows through your Twitter account the thumbs up or the thumbs down. Over time Philtro learns the type of tweets that you like and the ones that you dislike. This data is then used to filter the messages that flow through your Twitter account so that you only see the posts that are likely to be of interest to you. The more tweets you rate, the better the system works.

Likewise, Filttr is a web-based application that allows you to apply keyword filtering to your Twitter account. It allows you to blacklist and whitelist keywords which are then specifically displayed or prevented from appearing in your Twitter stream. However, due to the number of filtering options available, it can take some time to work out how to get the best from this service.

Do you find it difficult to keep up with all the tweets flowing through your Twitter account? How do you keep your account under control? What method of filtering do you use? Have you discovered a better way to keep up to date with your Twitter stream? Let us know using the comments below.

If you’re going to spend time developing your social media profiles, such as Twitter, it makes sense to use sites that will remain popular and relevant for the foreseeable future.

So here are the latest social media stats relating to Twitter.

After a temporary blip in traffic during May, Twitter continued to grow strongly during June (traffic up 16.6% to 23 million unique visitors).

During June, Facebook grew by 8.45% to 122.5 million unique visitors, while Myspace grew by 7.19% to 61 million unique visitors.

So Twitter and Facebook continue to grow rapidly (with Twitter rapidly closing the gap - at thie rate of growth, Twitter will overtake Facebook within 2 years), with Myspace remaining relevant as far as the areas of music and entertainment are concerned.

During June, Twitter users spend an average of 31 minutes, 17 seconds on the site. However, as this doesn’t include the use of the Twitter API for other clients such as Tweetdeck or Twhirl, the real amount of time spend on the site may be significantly higher.

But even more impressive is the sheer amount of coverage received by Twitter. It’s everywhere at present, including the news, newspapers, TV shows and even the movies.

The buzz is deafening!

During June, Twitter was mentioned 2.73 billion times across all media. And that’s not including the number of times it has been mentioned in local newspapers and television programs around the world.

In fact, news monitoring service VMS has estimated that the value of these media mentions over the past month is worth $48 million. Compare that with Bing, the recently rebranded Microsoft search engine, which only received $573,834 worth of media mentions over the past 30 days. Even Google, the undisputed internet leader, received less coverage than Twitter during June.

And finally, a recent study by TubeMogul has shown that in terms of the amount of video viewed, traffic from Twitter is significantly more valuable than traffic from Facebook or Digg. While Digg traffic will watch for an average of 58 seconds and Facebook viewers watch 74 seconds, Twitter traffic clocks up an average viewing time of 118 seconds.

Various reasons for this difference have been advanced. The most likely explanation is that unlike Facebook and Digg, which are targeted at the whole community and have a broad range of on page distractions, Twitter users have a more closely targeted audience (their followers) with a built in tendency to click on links posted by their favorite Twitter users.

So what do all these figures tell us?

Facebook, MySpace and Twitter remain the most popular social media sites and continue to pull away from the rest of the crowd.

The amazing success of Twitter has even helped to redefine the future development of Web 2.0 social media services. Obviously it’s highly unlikely that Twitter will be able to maintain this level of media buzz and visitor growth, but the longer it continues to soar, the more influence it will have on new Web 2.0 sites.

And due to the sheer number of visitors they attract and the level of participation they encourage, all three of these sites are here to stay for the foreseeable future.

So all your effort spent building your Twitter profile is unlikely to disappear any time soon. And on a deeper level these new stats also show that Twitter is an extremely effective way to promote online videos.

Let us know you thoughts about these latest figures using the comments below. Do you think Twitter will continue to grow at the current rate? How long will this level of Twitter related media buzz last? Will Twitter overtake Facebook? Will Twitter remain relevant or will it suddenly fall out of fashion? And do you think the reputed goal of Twitter to achieve 1 billion users by 2020 is achievable?

Twitter is one of the premier micro-blogging sites. It allows you to build a community of people based around your regular 140 character posts. Likewise, Wordpress is one of the leading blogging platforms. It allows you to build a community of visitors around the topic of your site.

And thanks to the popularity of both platforms, there are now several high-quality tools that allow you to integrate your Twitter account with your Wordpress blog in order to combine the benefits of both communities.

So here are some of the best Twitter-Wordpress integration tools.

Twitter Tools

This powerful Wordpress plugin provides a range of options that allow you to link your Twitter account to your blog.

You can use it to display your Twitter posts on your blog. Alternatively, you can use it post a message to your Twitter account whenever you publish a new blog post.

Alternatively, The Twitter Updater does the same job, but allows you to specify the text that will be used in your Twitter updates when you publish a new blog post.

TweetMeme Button

This plugin adds a small icon to every post on your Wordpress blog that provides your visitors with a one click option to tweet about each post.

We use Tweetmem on the Twitter Power System blog (see the green icon at the top right of every post) and it has provided the site with a significant amount of traffic and visibility.

But that’s not all…as the plugin also displays the number of retweets that each post has received, it provides an element of social proof. In general, people are more inclined to retweet material that they know is popular. So the more retweets each post receives, the more it is likely to receive.

Alternatively, you can use the TwitThis plugin to achieve similar results.

Twitip ID

This plugin adds an extra field to the comment form on your blog so that people can enter their Twitter username. You can then choose to display these names next to the comments that appear on your blog.

This provides an additional element of community on your blog, as it allows the people who comment on your blog to find each other on Twitter.

Twitt-Twoo

Once you install this plugin it allows you to update your Twitter status from the sidebar of your blog. This Ajax powered script provides you with another quick and easy way to keep your Twitter account up to date.

Alternatively, you can use the Twitter Sharts to update your Twitter account from anywhere in your blog.

TweetSuite

The TweetSuite Wordpress plugin provides an entire suite of tools, such as retweet buttons, auto-tweeting of new blog posts, tweetbacks etc allowing you to achieve most of the features provided by the other tools featured in this post.

Twitter Badge

This short piece of javascript provided by Twitter allows you to display a badge that automatically shows the messages you post to your Twitter account.

Just login to your Twitter account, select one of the badge styles and paste the code into your blog.

These badges can be displayed on almost any webpage, not just a wordpress blog, but they fit nicely on the sidebar of most blogs.

Using a combination of these tools, it’s possible to bridge the gap between your Twitter community and the visitors to your blog.

What tools do you use to integrate your Wordpress blog with your Twitter account? Are there any Twitter-Wordpress integration tools not listed here that you highly recommend? Let us know using the comments section below.

As many people use Twitter for business purposes, it’s important to be able to assess whether the time and effort you spend using Twitter is justified from a business perspective.

Unless you achieve a certain level of measurable success using Twitter, you may find it more effective to leverage your time more efficiently elsewhere.

So how do you know if your Twitter efforts are paying off?

First, you need to work out what you want to achieve using Twitter. Build a community resource? Drive traffic to your site? Network with people in your industry? Once you know what you want to achieve, set yourself related goals and use these tools to monitor your progress.

Here are a few different methods you can use to assess the effectiveness of your time spent using Twitter;

1) Number Of Followers

In the early days of Twitter, it was automatically assumed that the number of followers you could attract was the most accurate measure of your popularity and level of Twitter success.

However, it has rapidly become obvious that this measure is nothing more than a minor factor regarding the effectiveness of your use of Twitter.

10,000 followers isn’t necessarily better than 1,000 followers, especially if the smaller group is a closely integrated community with common interests.

However, a larger community of followers gives you more scope to build relationships with a select group of people with whom you have most in common. It also provides the potential for your messages to reach a larger audience.

2) Traffic

If you want to drive traffic to a certain site or a specific page within a site, there are various methods that you can use to measure your progress.

First, check the log files or analytics data for your site. Second, use a link shortener with tracking stats such as Cligs to post links within your tweets. And finally, use Backtweets to check the number of links on Twitter that point to the page that you want to promote. Just visit Backtweets, enter the address of your website and it will display all the links that point to your site on Twitter.

If you find that lots of links to your site appear on Twitter, but few people click through to your site, it indicates that the wording of your tweets could be improved to attract more attention and encourage people to click through.

Alternatively, if the number of people who visit your site is high in relation to the number of links on the Twitter network, it shows that your tweets are attracting plenty of attention. So you need to focus on getting more people to retweet your information in order to increase the number of links that appear on the Twitter network.

The best way to achieve this is to increase the quality of content that you link to, so that it inspires people to share it with their own Twitter followers.

3) Favorites

One of the most underused aspects of Twitter is the function that allows users to build a list of favorite messages. As these lists are accessible to the public, they can be used to assess the impact of your tweets within your Twitter community.

The number of people who mark your tweets as one of their favorites can be used as a measure of how much attention people pay to your messages, and more importantly, whether people value the information that you provide.

To check how often other people store your tweets as favorites, just visit Favotter and enter your Twitter username. The results will show which of your tweets have been made favorites and how often.

If you monitor these results, it’s a good way to assess the type of information that it appreciated by your community and provide them with more of the same.

4) Retweets

Retweets are the quickest way to expose your Twitter messages to the widest audience possible. The best way to check the number of retweets that your messages receive is to use the Twitter search tool to search for;

@username rt

or

@username via

or

@username retweet

Just replace username with your own Twitter username.

5) People Talking About You

What is the general level of impact that you’re creating on Twitter? How often do people mention you?

Use the Twitter search engine to search for @username. This will reveal how many people have mentioned you on the network. If you want to find the people who are not talking about your directly (i.e. those who mention your name but aren’t replying to you), just search for username -@username

This will filter out the results that include the @ symbol before your username.

6) Engagement

If your main aim is to build relationships with other people in your industry, you should focus on the number of individual conversations that you hold with other individuals rather than the results of the messages that you broadcast.

In order to achieve this, it’s important to monitor the level of engagement you achieve with people you contact. How often do you initiate a public conversation with people from your community? How often do they respond? etc

Whatever you want to achieve using Twitter, the right combination of these measures will help you to monitor your progress and allow you to assess whether your time using Twitter is well spent.

Let us know using the comments below if you have any other measures that you use to assess your progress on Twitter.

One of the most controversial aspects of Twitter surrounds the issue of users who develop a massive Twitter network where they follow tens of thousands of people.

We’ve received several comments and questions asking how it’s possible to interact and keep up to date with all the tweets if you follow several thousand people.

So we’ve given it some careful thought and arrived at the conclusion that it’s impossible to maintain personal contact on a regular basis with several thousand people. In fact, it’s barely possible to maintain personal contact once you follow more than a couple of hundred people.

However, this doesn’t mean that your Twitter community becomes worthless once it grows beyond a few hundred followers. So here’s how to add value to your Twitter community once you’ve followed more than a few hundred people. If you focus on these vital issues, it’s possible to develop a powerful network containing tens of thousands of Twitter users.

1) Don’t Expect To Be Able To Keep Up With The Flow

Once you follow several hundred people, the messages that flow through your Twitter account will really start to speed up. Every time you refresh the page, dozens of new messages will appear.

By the time you follow several thousand people, it will become impossible to read every message. So it’s essential to recognize that you won’t be able to keep up with every tweet. That’s just part of the price you have to pay when your Twitter community grows beyond a certain size. We’ll get to the benefits in a moment…

2) Your Twitter Community Is Like Society

Your Twitter community is like the development of primitive society. It passes through a series of distinct phases. These phases are neither better nor worse than one or another, they’re just different.

As your community grows from several dozen, to several hundred, to several thousand, the nature of your relationship to it will pass from a series of direct, individual relationships to a relationship with the community as a whole.

Over time, based on the responses you receive to the content that you provide, you’ll get to know the character of your community. You’ll get to know the type of information that they want and the things that they’ll be able to help you with.

The best solution is to focus on providing your community with useful, relevant content and interacting as and when you have time. If you provide good info, your community will grow.

A small community will be more relevant and more personal. As it grows from a few people to a village, then a town, then a city, it will become less personal, but of the thousands of people, you will be able to develop closer relationships with the people who are most closely related to your interests and your personality.

But having said that, don’t become obsessed by the number of followers that you attract. Unless you’re a celebrity or a public figure you won’t be able to compete with the number of followers that they attract. A vast number of people will follow celebrities just because they’re celebrities and not because they have any relevance to their interests.

Ultimately, your Twitter community may be more valuable to you, than their Twitter communities are to them.

Why?

Because their Twitter communities are only of any worth due to who they are, rather than the sense of community that they’ve taken time to develop. Let’s face it, how many celebrities on Twitter will take the time to build rapport with any of their followers?

Remember, more followers doesn’t mean better, just different.

A smaller community is more personal. A larger community is less personal, but is more likely to contain people who are more highly relevant to your interests.

3) Be Careful Who You Follow

Focus on following people who are somehow relevant to your circumstances. Follow people with similar interests, outlooks, ideas and/or those who are based in a certain location.

This will help to keep your Twitter network more closely focused and relevant to the interests of everyone who is part of the community. Then it’s up to you to decide whether to follow people who follow you.

4) Don’t Tolerate Spam

Whenever you see a message in your stream that’s obvious spam content, unfollow that person. Following several thousand people will make your Twitter stream move quickly, but it’s even worse if there’s an element of your community who constantly send out low quality, self-promotional material.

5) Reward Good Content

When you have a community of several thousand people, it becomes impossible to maintain a personal relationship with every member of your community. However, there are three important things that you can do to maintain the sense of community within your Twitter network.

a) Add Random Value

When time permits, reply to random messages that flow through your Twitter account. Comment on things that interest you, reply to questions that you’re qualified to answer. Add value to your community by helping them at random.

b) Develop A Sub Network

Like a real world community, you will form closer relationships with certain people. Whenever you develop a closer relationship with anyone in your community, add one of their tweets to your list of favorites and follow all their tweets. As you interact with them regularly, you’ll develop a small sub-network of friends within your broader Twitter community.

Ultimately, finding these people from within your larger community will provide you with much more value than your main community. However, developing a larger network from which to discover these people is a necessary pre-requisite of building this sub-community of close friends.

c) Amplify Good Content

Whenever you find a tweet that contains good value that you know will be of interest to your community, give it the oxygen of publicity by retweeting it. This will provide your own followers with good content and reward the people that you follow for posting good content.

This transfer of quality information from one micro community to another, based on merit and your knowledge of the character of your community, will help to improve the quality of the Twitter network.

6) Make Sure People See The Valuable Content That You Share

When a cocktail party gets busy, you have to raise your voice slightly to make yourself heard. It’s exactly the same with Twitter. As your followers begin to follow more people, their Twitter stream will begin to more faster. They won’t see/read all of the messages that pass through their account.

So when you post a valuable message, you may have to repeat a variation of your content a couple of times so that more people get a chance to read it.

Post your message on different days and at different times of the day. Just don’t go mad, otherwise your followers will.

7) Be Yourself

And finally, always remember that you can’t please everyone and that it’s bad to try.

In fact, the larger your community, the more likely it is to contain a few people who complain about your use of Twitter (too many tweets, too many links, too many followers, tweeting about the wrong topics etc).

However, if you modify your behaviour to please a small minority of your community, you won’t be acting naturally and your new style of behaviour may annoy as many if not more of your community.

So be who you are, do what you do, act naturally and if other people don’t like it, they’re free to stop following you.

That’s part of the beauty of Twitter.

But what do you think? How many people do you follow? Do you think there’s an upper limit to the size of a useful Twitter community, or do you agree that it’s possible to benefit from a community of any size?

Add your comments below to share your opinions with the rest of the TPS community.

Hubspot have just published a report on the state of Twitter as of June 2009. It has a range of interesting stats collected from the 4.5 million Twitter profiles on Twitter Grader.

Did you know what Twitter is attracting 5,000 - 10,000 new accounts every day, the average user tweets 0.97 times per day and 33.44% of all tweets begins with the @ symbol.

Mmm, very interesting, but what does this mean for most Twitter users?

At first glance, not much, but when you dig a little deeper, it’s possible to identify a few things that will make your use of Twitter more productive.

Let’s begin with the basic items;

a) If you have a homepage url, include it in your profile (80% of users don’t do this). If you have a website, why make it difficult for people to find it.

b) Write a short bio to let people know who you are and what interests you. It’s only 160 characters, but more than 75% of users haven’t done this.

c) Include your location in your profile (nearly 70% of users haven’t specified a location). Many Twitter users are looking to connect with other people in their part of the world, so adding your location is another filter that will help to make your community of followers more relevant.

d) Follow relevant people who have similar interests. This piece of advice might sound insultingly obvious, but more than 54% of all Twitter users haven’t followed one person. How do they expect other people to find them?

e) Tweet. Again, this may sound too obvious, but more than 54% of users have never send a tweet. If you never post any messages, how do you expect people to interact and respond to your messages?

If you follow these five simple steps, it will allow you to build a better micro community than 80% of Twitter users.

Now let’s move on to the more advanced techniques…

One of the main Twitter trends is the rapid reduction in the amount of attention that each user can give to any one tweet. As more and more people follow more and more people on Twitter, the number of tweets that are flushed through the average users timeline, means that only a small fraction of your followers will see any one of your tweets.

This is where the report does provide some clues on how to make your Tweets stand out in order to gain attention.

Option 1: Make Your Tweets Shorter

As you can see from the graph, a large number of tweets stretch beyond 133 characters as users try to pack as much into each message as possible.

However, at the other extreme, very few tweets are shorter than 30 characters. If you can be extremely creative with your choice of letters, your tweets are more likely to attract attention because;

a) They’re much shorter than the average length of message (the human mind notices differences more readily than similarities), and

b) The eye can read your entire message in one glance (people are basically lazy and have so much information competing for their limited attention)

Option 2: Provide A More Specific Location

The Hubspot report also contains a list of the top 20 locations mentioned in the Twitter profiles studied. When compared to the same list in the previous Hubspot Twitter report, an interesting trend emerges.

Twitter users are becoming more specific in the location that they display in their profile. Instead of using a country or a state, they mention a city or a town.

This may be due to the rising popularity of tweetups where Twitter users meet other people in their locality. However, it also indicates that people are increasingly interested in getting to know people who live in their part of the world.

This emphasis on building local Twitter communities means that you will build a more relevant, focused group of followers if you specify your location more accurately. So instead or USA or Texas, try Austin or Houston.

Option 3: Timing Is Crucial

Below are the approximate number of twwets posted on the Twitter network every day of the week.

Mon 650,000
Tue 790,000
Wed770,000
Thu 850,000
Fri 810,000
Sat 570,000
Sun 675,000

The Weekend is less popular, while the number of tweets builds to a peak on Thursday.

This graph shows you the average number of tweets posted per hour over a 24 hour period. As you can see, the network has a number of peaks and troughs during the day, with three increasingly large peaks at approximately 9am, 4pm and 10pm during the US business day.

So in order to achieve maximum exposure for your tweets, focus on Tuesday to Friday and time your tweets so that they arrive on the network just before the three spikes in use (in other words, 8am, 2pm and 9pm). As more people access their Twitter accounts shortly after these times, there is a greater chance that your followers will see your recent tweets.

Click Here To Collect A Full Copy Of The Hubspot Report

What do you think about the figures presented in the Hubspot report? In what direction do you think Twitter will develop? Join the discussion by adding your comments below.

If you want an alternative to the specific Twitter search tools that have appeared in recent months, here’s how to search for relevant people on Twitter using our old friend Google.

Due to the amount of buzz surrounding Twitter (and the fear that human edited Twitter search may present a serious challenge to Google), all the new pages on Twitter are indexed rapidly, which means that Google is a good alternative to the range of Twitter search tools that are available.

If you already know some of the advanced search commands on Google, you have a great advantage. If you’ve never used the advanced Google search commands, just follow the examples and replace the sample search words with your own requirements until it becomes second nature.

When you’re looking for people on Twitter, there are four basic factors that you can search;

Name, Profile, Location and Tweets

1) Searching for Twitter users based on their name

site:twitter.com intitle:”james* * on twitter”

site:twitter.com intitle:”peter* * on twitter”

You can also search for a person’s full name, for example;

site:twitter.com intitle:”stuart laing * on twitter”

Shows there are only 3 Twitter users call Stuart Laing.

Just change the name in the search to suit your own needs.

2) Searching for Twitter users on the words used their bio profile

site:twitter.com intitle:”on twitter” “bio* * sport”

This will provide you with a long list of people who have used the word sport in their Twitter bio. Again, just alter the search term to suit your own needs.

3) Searching for Twitter users based on the location in their profile

site:twitter.com intitle:”on twitter” “location florida”

Google will return a list of Twitter users based in Florida.

It’s also possible to combine these search factors, for example, if you want to search for Twitter users based on their location and the words used in their profile, use this search formula;

site:twitter.com intitle:”on twitter” “bio* * pr” “location florida”

This will return a list of Twitter users based in Florida who have PR in their bio.

4) Seaching for Twitter users based on the words that appear in their tweets

site:twitter.com/*/statuses/* “golf”

This will return a list of all the Twitter messages containing the word Golf that have been indexed by Google.

If you prefer to use Twitter specific search tools, here are a few of the best options;

Twitter Search Is the main Twitter search engine

TweepSearch Allows you to search for people according to the words that appear in their Twitter profile

TwitScoop Allows you to keep up to date with the latest Twitter trends based on the popularity of keywords currently appearing in the main Twitter stream.

What tools do you use to find people on Twitter? Do you prefer to use tools that are specifically related to Twitter? Do you use Google? Or do you prefer using another method to find relevant people on Twitter? Please share your thoughts on the best way to search Twitter in the comments section below.

And finally, we’ve recently discovered a powerful technique that allows you to search any of these tools direct from your main browser address bar.

If you use the Firefox browser (and we recommend that you do), here’s what to do;

Step One: Select the Twitter search tool that you want to use.

We’ll start with the main Twitter search tool at http://search.twitter.com

Step Two: Type any word into the search box and click search.

Step Three: Add the search result page to your list of bookmarks.

You can click the star icon to the right of the main address bar or use the keyboard shortcut (control + D) then click done.

Step Four: Click the bookmarks menu in the browser toolbar at the top of the page and scroll down to the page that you just bookmarked.

Right click the entry, select properties from the menu and once the info box appears we have two changes to make. In the box labeled KEYWORD, enter a tag that you will use to open up the twitter search page in the future. For example, I use the letters ts, which are short for twitter search. From now on, whenever you type ts into your browser address bar and press enter, that search page from your bookmarks will automatically appear.

You can use this simple technique with any page and it will save you a great deal of time on the pages that you use regularly. However, it gets even better.

Step Five: As I just mentioned, to make our twitter search shortcut really interactive, we have to make a second change in the properties box for your bookmark. Just above the box labeled KEYWORD, you should see a box labeled LOCATION. This contains the address of the page bookmarked. So, if you typed sport into the search box before you originally bookmarked the page, the url will look like this;

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=sport

The page address now has a query string added to the end that tells the site the word to search for. We’re going to delete the search term and replace it with %s (percentage sign followed by the letter s). So the location url should now look like this;

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%s

Click the save changes button and we’re ready to test our work.

From now on, whenever you want to search for something using Twitter search, all you have to do is type your key into the main browser address bar followed by a space and then the search term that you want to find.

For example if you selected ts for your key to the twitter search bookmark and you want to search for any mentions of motor racing on Twitter, all you have to do is type the following into your main Firefox address bar and press enter.

ts motor racing

The search page will automatically appear with your results. You won’t have to find the page then enter your search term. It may only save you a few seconds every time, but you can apply this technique to any pages that you use regularly and any other sites that you search frequently, for example, youtube, twitterholic, tweepsearch and even the Twitter Power System blog.

You could even program the Google based Twitter searches into your browser bar using this technique. Just perform the search, bookmark it, add your desired tag then replace your search term with %s (please note: you can only use this technique with searches that include one search variable).