How Hard Are You Listening

If you’re monitoring Twitter and Google for mentions of your brand or website, you’re probably only seeing half of the conversation. What about people that shorten your URLs and share them without linking to your Twitter profile? What if someone mentions your brand name in the comments of someone else’s blog? Do you even know ...

Don’t Be Afraid To Experiment

I see most businesses approaching social media the same way. The first thing they look for is a standard set of best practices and social media etiquette. Then they might go off and find some case studies or social media marketing examples. If they aren’t overwhelmed by the diverse results they receive they will most ...

How To Not Be a Twitter Spammer

Twitter Spam, we all hate it and want it to go away … but what is IT? The general population of Twitter tends to classify spam as unsolicited promotional material that provides little to no value to the community. Some (possible) examples of this are: Bots that RT specific users TwitterFeeds of blog posts Affiliate ...

Quality vs Quantity on Twitter

7 Web Based Twitter Productivity Tools

Two things I hear a lot when talking to people just getting into twitter is: It takes too much time How do I gauge my success The truth is that there are TONS of FREE tools out there that address both these issues. In my opinion some tools do their jobs better than others. This ...

Printer Tweet 10: Finding Some Local Friends

Now you’re on Twitter and tweeting like the pros, but how do you develop a following. This involves a little reaching out. Granted people will find you without you having to go find them, but finding them first speeds up the process. The first thing I tell anyone to do that is looking for more ...

Printer Tweet 9: Automating Your Tweets

Twitter’s API allows for information to be sent to your Twitter account without ever logging in. This is handy when using other status update type sites that you would also like posted on twitter. Here are a few examples of the more popular sites being used. BrightKite BrightKite is a location-based version of Twitter that ...

Printer Tweet 8: Hash Tags

Hash tags are a means of organizing conversations around events, holidays, ideas, webinars and the list goes on. Anything you would like to have an organized conversation about could have it’s own hash tag. Anyone can create their own hash tag by simply placing a # before their tag. For example, during Graph Expo, Rick ...

Printer Tweet 7: URL Shortening

One of the greatest things about Twitter is the ability to scan it quickly for resourceful links. When Twitter first burst onto the scene, people needed a way to shorten their links so they wouldn’t take up the whole Tweet. The result of this need spawned a whole slur of URL shortening websites. Example: http://www.magicomm.biz/blog/url-shortening-on-twitter ...

Printer Tweet 6: Direct Messaging

You’ve now mastered Tweeting and Replying to your fellow twitterers but maybe you want to message a user without the rest of the world seeing it. No problem. Just type “d”, then a space, then the username of the person you would like to send your message to. So if my boss wanted to send ...