Tag Archives: Twitter

Guy Kawasaki Repeats Tweets: So Do It

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Guy Kawasaki feels the need to apologize for his practice of repeating tweets since this goes against the spirit of the early days of Twitter. He has some interesting charts showing the effectiveness of repeating tweets. Given this, he is in no way repentant. We would do well to follow his example.

As he points out, Twitter now is a very different online space from what it was in the early days. Then one would send the word to a few friends on what was happening in your neck of the woods.

Now the Twitter-scape is a rushing torrent of tweets and it is very much a matter of hit-or-miss whether you will see the tweets of your friends when so much else is going on. Twitter continues to see exponential growth so this problem will get worse as time goes on.

Given this, we should all find Guy Kawasaki’s approach one that we can adopt without qualms. The tweets should of course be worth repeating and the repetition should not be too often nor for too long. However in a world that has got used to the multiple appearances of television ads, sometimes within minutes, repeated tweets should not be viewed askance. Indeed it will still be true that most people will not see any of them or possible one or two occurrences. That can hardly be described as overkill.

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Tweet Tips For Max ReTweets (RTs)

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ReTweets Are The New Currency Of The Web as Michael Arrington noted.  That makes the launch of a new search engine Topsy, which had been in stealth development for three years, particularly propititious.

Links are sorted by those that Twitter users are sending around the most, weighted in favor of links sent by more influential Twitter users. You can sort results over all time (going back to September 2008), last month, week, day or hour. Results show popular links and also the most influential users tweeting about that topic. Click on that user and you’ll see all their tweets about the topic.

Topsy isn’t looking at the number of followers in determining Influence. Rather, Influence is gained when others retweet links you’ve sent out. And when you retweet others, you lose a little Influence. So the more people retweet you, the more Influence you gain. So, yes indeed, retweets are the new currency on the web.

Getting RTs for serious topics

If your topic is particularly newsworthy or appeals to the masses, then getting a large number of ReTweets is not very surprising.  If you are writing on something that has a limited appeal, how do you get your readers to tell others via Twitter about it.  What  tweaked my interest was that a recent tweet about a blog post got 30 ReTweets at this time when checking via a Topsy search for ‘PageRank Null Hypothesis’ (note – some of these had different short URLs).  The Tweet was as follows:

Pl. RT – #PageRank Calculation – Null Hypothesis http://cli.gs/tNV9Ny – Is this how #Google does it? #seo

Topsy even indicates that there were 16 associated ReTweets of the corresponding Sphinn entry.  Others may find the reasons for this good performance of interest and value.

Automatic Tweets from the Blogging software

If your blogging software is set up to automatically send a tweet to Twitter when the blog is published, then you should make sure that the Titles ReTweet Well.

You may wish to add appropriate hashtags to your post title as well, although we have more to say on that below.  Chris Brogan also had some related tips on how to Spread Your Wings And Get More Retweet Action.

Hand-crafted Tweets

There is no harm in letting the software do its job, but it may well be appropriate to take its output and make a more twitter-visible tweet.  Louise Doherty has a formula for getting retweeted and that is a good start.  However there are some further tips that are worth mentioning.

The most important is of course to make sure the title has words that are likely to draw your readers interest.  In the above example, it is probable that the phrase ‘Null Hypothesis’ tweaked the interest of all those who have struggled through their statistics courses and wondered how it could possibly come up here.  If you can find a short catchy phrase like that, you are a lot farther ahead.

Working the Hashtags

A hashtag such as #google ensures that all those who watch out for tweets that have been labeled with the google hashtag are likely to see your tweet.  It is a way of targeting a particular audience.  Which hashtags are worth using?  Clearly popular hashtags are the only ones.  You can get an idea on this by doing a Twitter search for say #google.

Check out how old the tweet is at the bottom of the search results page.  Currently for #google it is about 2 hours ago, which is fairly good.  You will get the same result for #seo.  #pagerank on the other hand is about 7 days ago, so it is still worth considering but is less popular.  Just to give a point of comparison, a search for a current trending topic such as “Swine Flu” shows tweets at the bottom of the page that are only from 2 minutes ago.

The other point that is worth mentioning is that the addition of hashtags does not seem to influence twitter searches so that a search for Google will include entries with #google as well.  In other words the ‘#’ is ignored in the Twitter search for the non-tagged version of the word.

Getting a little help from your friends

Having crafted the best ReTweet-able Tweet you can, all that is left to do is to seek a little help from your friends.   If you have done your work well, they will probably be delighted to do their bit.

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Social Media Is An Oxymoron

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An oxymoron means that two words forming part of a phrase represent opposites or are contradictory.  George Carlin popularized Military Intelligence and Jumbo Shrimp as examples of oxymorons.  Other somewhat famous ones are Authentic Reproduction, Cautiously Optimistic, Civil Disobedience, Deafening Silence, Detailed Summary, Friendly Fire, Honest Crook, Humane Slaughter, Metal Wood, Tough Love, White Lie and the list could go on and on.

Social Media is another such oxymoron.  Media most often is assumed to be mass media such as TV or radio.  Social on the other hand implies relationships between individuals.  The masses versus individuals – there is the contradiction

The social media scale

You are perhaps unaware of the social media scale since we are introducing it here.  The scale is defined by that oxymoronic name really.  In a way the two words represent the two extremes of the scale.

At the Media end of the scale, we have the minimally social ones, which merely allow you to vote on items that are classified by the medium. Examples of this are reddit.com and digg.com.

At the other end of the scale, we have social media that are online spaces where you can ‘meet’ and interact with others.  Facebook and LinkedIn are examples of this.  Others will be found to fall between these two extremes.  StumbleUpon for example is closer to reddit but does provide for messages between friends.

Where Is Twitter On the Social Media Scale?

The interesting anomaly in all this is Twitter.  Twitter itself was very much at the social end of the scale in its genesis.  The objective was to let your close  followers know your current status.  Many still use it that way.

However some participants have abandoned that approach. They seek to get the maximum number of followers by following as many other people as they can.  Since some people have arranged that automatically they will follow anyone who follows them, this approach can almost allow you to create your own mass medium.

If you want to check out some data on people using Twitter in this way, check out the TwitterScore website. More specifically check out the Top Users.  There are some very famous names there and also some top agencies such as CNN and the BBC.  Scrolling down you will see some people who clearly have worked hard to create an audience for themselves.  At # 200 at the moment, for example, you have Jonathan Nafarrete, who is “Just some guy. Photographer and social media consultant” and who has 63,553 followers.

The fact that Twitter is both social and a mass media is perhaps why many people are having a difficulty knowing how best to be involved.

Update

For a confirmation that Twitter is hard to classify on the social media scale, you may wish to read: New Twitter Research: Men Follow Men and Nobody Tweets. For suggestions on how to work with social media of whatever type, try ‘With A Little Help From My Friends‘.

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Titles Must ReTweet Well

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Titles are Eric Lyndoman’s passion and he suggests you should Smash a Brick into the face to get another blogger’s attention if you have no prior relationship with that person.

What he really means is that you need a good headline to stop someone in their tracks. The headline does not only exist at the top of the content. It is in the subject text of email, it may be in a twitter post, a rss feed, a digg headline, etc. It is that headline that must get the blogger’s attention if anything is to happen as a result.

Lyndoman talked about smashing a brick for that really great post you have written. However the same principle is at work for all that you write. Some call it the Attention Economy. We all have too little time to do all that we wish to do. This time overload is magnified now with the Mobile Web becoming more prevalent. Your window on the world may well be your cellphone. As you see even more of what is going on, what will stand out from the noise.

More and more people will only see your title or headline. How can you make sure that there is enough to draw their attention, even if they know you already. I suggest that every title you write should be very clear on what is the subject behind it.

The other important phenomenon is that many people are now seeing the world through the small Twitter window of 140 characters and spaces. As evidence, Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, hinted that it could become a partner of the micro-blogging site, Twitter.

“People really want to do stuff real time and I think Twitter has done a great job about it,” Larry Page, Google co-founder said in a closing address at their Zeitgeist conference . “I think we have done a relatively poor job of creating things that work on a per-second basis.”

So what does that suggest for our titles. Often people may share a blog post link with their friends by retweeting. If you do the math and allow for the starting “Pl. RT” and the short URL, you may have only less than say 70 characters and spaces for the title, if someone wants to add some words of encouragement or some hashtags.

The title must get the attention of others who will only see that retweet so it should be clear on what they will get by visiting the link. It must signal the promise of something that they will be keen to check out. In practice, 70 characters and spaces gives much more than you really need. This post title takes only 24.

If you are convinced by the logic, why not support the principle by retweeting this post. All you need to do is use that Tell-a-Friend button bottom left (hover and click on Social Twitter) or copy and paste the following in your Twitter Status field.

Pl. RT: Titles Must ReTweet Well: http://cli.gs/98D7YP : A good message for all. #seo #links #twitter #search #sem #linkbuilding
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Cellphones, the latest kitchen tools

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The Cellphone is hardly a toy in the kitchen according to the NY Times.

One high-tech cooking tool, however, has transformed the kitchen lives of many Americans: the cellphone.  It has become the kitchen tool of choice for chefs and home cooks. They use it to keep grocery lists, find recipes, photograph their handiwork, look up the names of French cheeses, set timers for steak and soft-boiled eggs, and convert European or English measurements to American ones.

Although restaurant chefs have often resisted new technologies, cellphones have now crossed the technology barrier from the office into the kitchen.

Chris Cosentino, the chef at Incanto restaurant in San Francisco, says his iPhone has greatly simplified the math in his cooking.  He said that he sees multifunction devices like the iPhone as the real technological revolution for chefs.

For amateur cooks, new cellphone software helps control the chaos of planning, shopping and cooking dinner at the end of the day.  You can always use software from BigOven.com, a Web site with about 167,000 recipes. BigOven has a free iPhone application, searchable by ingredient, by rating, and by course.  This has been downloaded more than a million times since it was released in October.

Of course there is a question of how much of the recipe and ingredients can easily be seen on a small cellphone screen.  Here you may possibly need Recipes reduced to their Twitter essence.  In other words all compressed into 140 characters and spaces.

Maureen Evans is the person who thought of this approach.  You can now follow her tweeted recipes at twitter.com/cookbook.  They are now followed by more than 13,000 people.  Evans is now fielding numerous calls from cookbook agents and the media.

While Evans loves her stacks of cookbooks with “verbose top-heavy instruction from celebrity cooks that tell you how every minute of the process is supposed to look and smell and feel,” she also sees a place for “just a small amount of assistance to get dinner on the table after a long day at work.”

Having such information readily available on a cellphone clearly meets a real need for many people.  Meals on the go just got even more portable.

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Little things mean a lot

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It’s all about the little things. So says Mitch Joel, president of award-winning digital marketing and communications agency, Twist Image, in a thought-provoking piece in the Vancouver Sun.

Our world is quickly becoming much more about the little things.  People like Twitter because they like getting information via these small, friendly and compact methods.

The businesses that are able to satisfy this new habit are winning by creating an online engagement that transcends what we would have traditionally thought about consumers. Consumers want “just enough” information. And, if you can give them “just enough” information quickly, they will probably then be open to stuff that has a little depth and perspective.

Your business is going to get attention by doing the little things fast, and then winning customers over with the supporting context of everything else you are publishing and marketing. Seth Godin, got it right: Small Is The New Big.

This natural tendency is clearly accelerated by the move to the Mobile Web.  If everything must arrive via that tiny screen, it does not leave room for lengthy discourses.  It has to be small when you are on the go.

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Getting Links With Twitter Hashtags

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We have suggested elsewhere that Google should adopt a Weakest Link approach in its search algorithms.  There are far too many people spending far too much time amassing more and more links to their websites.  They do this with the mistaken understanding that this may help their websites be more visible when people do Google keyword searches.  If only Google would rely only on links with more authority, this time wasting and irritating activity could cease.  Unfortunately it has not happened yet.

The only links worth having are links that do command some authority. That is true now and will continue to be true however the keyword search algorithms may change.   Darren Rowse of Problogger as usual provides some excellent advice in his post on 11 Ways to Increase Your Chances of Being Linked to By a Blogger.  Here are his 11 items of advice:

  1. Write something worth linking to
  2. Suggest a Link to a post not your site
  3. Develop a Relationship
  4. Demonstrate Knowledge of the Blog and Blogger
  5. Research
  6. Add Value
  7. Stay on topic
  8. Be selective in what you promote
  9. Reciprocate
  10. Build on the Experience
  11. Be Link Worthy

Most of these are almost self explanatory.  However his article is a good one if any of them are unclear to you.

Another way of trying to get on a blogger’s radar screen is to follow them on Twitter.  Most bloggers do tweet their Twitter followers to let them know when they have written a new blog post.  If you happen to spot such a tweet, then by retweeting their blog post tweet, you may well find they will start following you and the relationship begins.  I think this is sufficiently valuable, that it might usefully have been included in Darren Rowse’s list, if he had wished to extend it  to 12 ways.

Of course only your followers see your tweets.  Only if the blogger does a Twitter search, will s/he see what you have retweeted.  To increase the chances it may be seen, you could always try using a hashtag.  If for example, your post is about TGIF then in your retweet add the #tgif hashtag. Others who find that of interest may spot it and retweet it and perhaps word will get back to the original blogger.

If you have found hashtags useful in making connections and gaining links, why not add your experience in the comments here.  Non-spamming comments are welcome and do get a link in consequence, which should be worth having.

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Twitter Chat Rooms

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I must admit my vision of Twitter is very much like that painted by Kelly Forrister  who sees it as the Twitter river.  She works on David Allen's Getting Things Done Seminars and provides individual Coaching for their clients around the world.

It's an interesting look on how fast the world is moving, or how little our attention spans are willing to absorb, that a quirky little service like Twitter seems to be luring so many of us in.  Have you ever been to one of those Lazy Rivers at a resort hotel? The kind where you hop in and out as you please? And around it goes, whether you're in the river or not. That's the best description I've heard of Twitter.

That's largely the way it goes even if you use some service like Tweetdeck to keep things somewhat organized.  Of course you have Twitter Search and  Hashtags that can allow you to explore just a smaller creek but it is still moving along.

This week I now have a new perspective.  If you want to get together with a few friends just to explore something rapidly, then you can use TinyChat, which are Disposable Chatrooms especially for the Twitter Generation

Sometimes all you need is a simple chatroom for real-time text chats. TinyChat solves this problem by creating simple, disposable chatrooms. Tinychats works exactly as advertised. It's a disposable, no-frills chatroom, with a deliberately limited feature set. There are no accounts to sign up for and whenever you open up a new room, TinyChat will simply create a new URL for you.

If you are looking for more permanence, then I highly recommend TweetChat, which gives you access to more permanent chat rooms.  In fact they are just showing you the tweets for a certain hashtag, but it is very user-friendly.

To get the idea, you might want to check out Brandchat,which is to be found behind the #brandchat hashtag.  This group meets every Wednesday to discuss branding , brand development and customer service. Every Wednesday morning 10 a.m. CST, they tap into their “collective mind” on Twitter and discuss everything branding. Next meeting is April 1st.  If you have a question, you can even join their Facebook group.  Anything on the Facebook wall gets put on the #brandchat agenda.

If up till now, Twitter has been a raging, tumultuous river, pop into a chatroom and enjoy quietly meeting a few people.  Why not try the Google #friendconnect chat room?  It always is very quiet there. :(

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The NOW Web Is Not The Mobile Web

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The NOW Web is a new term to describe the cyberspace collection of all the information packages that may be currently flying around “online”.  Some may assume that must be the same as the Mobile Web.  This is not the case.

The Mobile Web is a subset of the World Wide Web.  The World Wide Web is all those online properties that are accessible once you know their Universal Resource Identifier (URI).  The Mobile Web is that section of WWW.that is accessible if you are using a mobile device.  The Mobile Web is thus defined by the hardware used to connect with it.  It is concerned with online properties that have a URI.

The World Wide Web itself is a subset of the NOW Web.  The NOW Web is intended to signify all those information packages or what might be called Instants that are currently available either via the Internet or perhaps via a telephone circuit or a cell phone wireless connection.  It might be an RSS news feed, or a request to get involved in a Google Chat, or even an indication that one of your Facebook friends has come online.

Clearly any Instants that you may be interested in should be accessible to you and ideally you should be made aware of their creation (via alerts) and of their ongoing existence.  The NOW Web is therefore defined by the interests of users or consumers.  It could be seen as a user-centric defined concept.  There are many technical challenges in working with this expanded NOW Web.  However this way of picturing the flux of information flow may suggest creative ways of better fulfilling consumers’ needs.  This NOW Web way of looking at the online scene was suggested by the way in which Twitter has so grabbed people’s attention and interest.

Footnote:  It should be mentioned that this use of the term, NOW Web, is much bigger than that suggested by Vaibhav Domkundwar.  The concepts are very much related, but this bigger use may suggest more interesting technical solutions.

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Getting Results From Twitter

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Twitter for many used to be a way of passing the time, like watching the crowds walking along the High Street, or watching a turbulent river flow by.  Fascinating and in some ways relaxing.  However with so many people now using Twitter it has become a rich resource that you can use effectively for business purposes and many people are.  How can you best get results that justify the time you may spend on Twitter.

Biana Babinsky has some suggestions on how to Stop Wasting Time And Get Results On Twitter.  It boils down to the following three suggestions:

  • Evaluate Your Goals For Twitter and work to achieve them
  • Don’t Borrow Time For Twitter but only spend the time that you have available for Twitter
  • Track Everything

One problem is that Twitter as such is a very rudimentary process geared only to see what is happening instantaneously as it passes by.  Other software does a better job of helping see the bigger Twitter picture.  I thoroughly recommend TweetDeck, which better gives you an overview of what is going on in the recent past.  In particular it allows you to see instantaneously on the same screen, the Replies and Direct Messages that are of interest to you.  Just fire up TweetDeck on whatever regular schedule works for you, say every two or three hours, and you can stay aware of your corner of the TwitterSphere.

To improve your Twitter performance further, I highly recommend TwiTip, which is a website wholly dedicated to high performance tips for Twitter. TwiTip is edited by Darren Rowse from ProBlogger Blog Tips.

For example a recent post offered suggestions on How to Target and Attract High Quality Twitter Followers from Your Blogging Niche.  Some of the more interesting suggestions were:

  • Follow Your Niche’s Trusted Authorities – Twellow will tell you who the big players are in your niche and you can then follow them.
  • Turn on Your Radar – be aware what these high profile users in your  niche are doing by subscribing to their blogs via RSS.
  • Start dialoguing with them by sending @replies on a subject you know they care about
  • Blog on topics that mention something that is of interest to them and let them know

Twitter is not just frothy foam that is floating by like a turbulent river.  There are serious possibilities of developing important relationships.  Do your homework and make Twitter work for you.

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