SociaListed » TwiTip

Did Twitter Kill the Video Star?

admin — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 04:00:05 +0000

Today’s post comes from Jenni Izzo, a Drexel University graduate turned Central Florida PR professional with a social media obsession. Follow her at @jenniizzo.

It appears that MTV’s attempt at reviving itself with a Twitter Jockey (an updated version of a VJ) has fallen short. After a month of Twitter-focused challenges to find the most appropriate individual for the job (measured by MTV’s own TweetLevel), the network announced the top five contestants in their “Follow Me: The Search for MTV’s First TJ” competition – and people are angry.

See, for the duration of the competition, MTV kept an up-to-the-minute contestant ranking by measuring influence, popularity, engagement and trust. In addition to these metrics, anyone could vote for their favorite via MTV and American Express’ MTVTJ Facebook page. When voting closed, the top five were listed publicly – as they had been throughout the competition – but when the announcement was made on Friday, several of the original top five were noticeably absent.

A quick search of “@MTVTJ” shows that people aren’t just voicing their complaints – they want answers. With more than ten Twitter accounts, MTV is notoriously chatty, but they’ve remained completely silent on the topic.

The way the situation is currently being handled is only making things worse – MTV and American Express are deleting the negative Facebook comments.

It’s been almost a week now, and the competition’s blog, Facebook and Twitter have not been used to confront the complaints. In a world where we are all still navigating the slippery slope that is social media, what will MTV and American Express’ (lack of) reaction mean for their image? Social media is a two-sided conversation, and you can’t expect to talk, talk, talk, then stay silent when people ask for answers.

What are your thoughts? Has MTV put the nail in its own coffin? Will this case join Southwest in the Twitter history books – or is it merely a one hit wonder?

Did Twitter Kill the Video Star?

Top Tips for Your Twitter Targets

admin — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 16:00:04 +0000

If you’re looking for ways to hit your Twitter targets, this is the post for you. First of all, you should ask yourself, what are your Twitter targets? You want lots of followers? Sure, that might lead to some bragging rights, but what’s the point? Really what you’re after is community which translates into meaningful followers. How do you get meaningful followers?

I queried some other successful Twitter-ites to learn about their favorite Twitter Tips. Here’s some ideas to take your Twitter Page from Topsy-Turvy to Titillating!

Tweeter, Push Thyself! Don’t have a personal trainer or an agent pushing you to meet those personal deadlines? That can make reaching a goal even more difficult. Annabel Candy wrote recently about using Twitter as a source for motivation. She tweets her goals to help hold herself accountable for daily goals. Talk about baking two loaves in one oven (my alternative phrase to the more gruesome bird and stone saying). Not only does this make her more accountable to her own goals, it also piques the interest of her Twitter followers. For example, she might tweet about her goal to write another chapter today to which her followers might lift an eyebrow and say, “Is Annabel writing a book?” Curiosity can kill more than a cat, it can also drive traffic to your site.
Know Your Niche. Twitterista Jaden of the fabulous blog Steamy Kitchen, suggests this Twitter rule: be entertaining, useful or both! People on Twitter are busy and in order to get their attention, you have to fill a niche. Think of your Twitter account as a blog…in 140 characters. Then next ask, why would someone want to follow your Twitter “blog.” Are you like Neil deGrasse Tyson and provide useful scientific tidbits? Or are you more like Ellen DeGeneres providing folks with funny, entertaining quips throughout the day. Go for one or the other, or find your own middle ground in between.
Sir Link-a-Lot. Grace Langlois of La Mia Vita Dolce doesn’t just post on lovely sweets, she also connects with others on Twitter. Her suggestion? Link to interesting stories. If you find something noteworthy, chances are there might be others who will too. Your blog may have a theme but you can share some of your other passions via links to other articles from aha moments, inspiring to informative articles.
Reduce. JJ of the blog, Blah Blah Blahger shares some great advice on using tools to help manage your Twitter Account. JJ says that by using a bit.ly or ow.ly, url reducer, you can push followers to your site. With a condensed, clean web link, your message won’t get lost AND you’ll be able to track the number of click-throughs that you get!
Be a Connector. Have you ever been at a party and been cornered by someone who does nothing but talk about themselves? Well, think of Twitter like one big party. You can be one of the dull people at the party only talking about yourself or you can be a connector. Suzanne Broughton of the OC Family Blog says “help others first on Twitter before linking to yourself.” She recommends this technique on your Twitter page: “Give twice. Take once.” For every tweet linking back to your site, retweet something of someone else’s and find some other way to spread the Twitter love.
Clean up the Clutter. My personal Twitter tip is to be sure to clear out the clutter from time-to-time. Once or twice a year, I go through my “follow” list from beginning to end and “unfollow” those people that are not following me back. Of course, there are some people I’ll follow no matter what. You know, like Steven Colbert. I don’t really expect him to follow me back (but it sure would be cool!). And there are some organizations I follow with expecting a follow back. You have to make these decisions for yourself, but if you use my advice, be ruthless. Keeping your Twitter follow list clean is important. It helps your Twitter experience to be more of a community rather than a sycophantic one-way dialog with someone who really isn’t that into you (another party metaphor, but it’s relevant).

Following these tips can help you reach your Twitter Targets, but it can also just make Twitter a lot more fun too.

Top Tips for Your Twitter Targets

Jump-Starting Your Company’s Twitter Account

admin — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 16:00:07 +0000

I started a new business Twitter account and acquired 350 relevant followers in one month being relatively unknown and without spamming.

Most companies have joined Twitter by now but there are a few that have lagged behind. If you’re a part of this group (as my company was), it can be really intimidating to jump into the social media scene when your competitors already have established accounts with hundreds (or thousands) of followers. I used these techniques to jump my new account from 0 to 350 followers in one month, bypassing the awkward infancy period of a new Twitter account almost entirely.

Why should you care? Getting an established account is the best way to attract new followers, and even more importantly, more interaction with your followers and a quick intro into your local Twitter community, driving communication and clicks through to your company’s website.

Set up the account

As soon as possible, grab your business’s name on Twitter if it’s still available. Mine wasn’t, but luckily the account was inactive and we were able to file a copyright request, releasing the account over to our name. If this isn’t possible, grab an available username as close to your business’s name as possible. Avoid underscores and dashes as much as possible.

Design your twitter account to look human, like the @zappos account does above. One of the best ways to do this is to add a custom background with someone’s real picture — preferably the person tweeting from the account but you can use the founders/CEOs of the company as well. Stock photos are worse than having nothing at all. Customize the colors and the rest of the background to reflect your company’s branding.

Before any promotion of the new account, write twenty tweets to fill out the first page, spacing them at least 15 minutes apart from each other. Thereafter, continue to tweet every day, 4-5 times at max for the first few weeks, and taper (if you wish) after. We want the account to look active and get that tweet count up as fast as possible without spamming. A great tool to use is CoTweet, so you can spend 10 minutes in the morning setting up your tweets for the day, spacing them 2-3 hours between each other.

Very important: Make sure your tweets are high quality and useful to your audience. At the end of the day, your account is to promote your business, but will be more follow-worthy if you interact with the community and post about other items of interest in your field. I usually try to have three or so posts per day promoting our website, one retweet (varying between native retweets as well as non-native which can add commentary), and one link out to something interesting elsewhere. You want to emphasize that you’re a real person, not a robot.

Acquire followers

Now that you have a follow-worthy account, it’s time to get followers. It would be easy to just let this happen naturally, but I’ve found that accounts with high follower counts are more desirable, and therefore attract more people. So while the goal is to get a high number of interactive followers, we’ll start out with finding twitter accounts (ideally in the same field) that auto-follow back.

The best way to do this is to use an online application called Tweepsect, built by my friend @shazow, that analyzes a twitter account’s “stalkers” (those that follow but the account doesn’t follow), “stalking” (those that the account follows without following back), and “mutual” (mutually following).

Find other businesses in your field on Twitter and inspect them using Tweepsect. What we’re looking for here is the “mutual” list, and then we can scroll through those mutually following accounts and find those that have nearly identical following/follower counts — sure sign of an auto-follower. Follow every one of these accounts you find for a very quick boost to your following count; if it’s over a hundred accounts, follow only about 50-100 per day to allow for your own following count to rise.

You can start promoting the account once you’ve reached about 100 followers: for example, write a post on your company’s blog, add links from your website and Facebook pages, tell your employees to promote it via their twitter accounts, etc. Why didn’t we do this first? People are more likely to follow an established account.

Bonus: Lists are another great metric, and still a fairly new feature. Use this to your advantage — inspect the lists that your competitors appear on and follow those that create those lists. Usually these creators will add your account to their lists as well. You can also go to Twibes.com and add your business’s account to lists in as many terms in your field as possible.

Find the community

Once you’ve completed these steps, it’s now time to find people in your field to follow and interact with. As large as Twitter is, I often have trouble finding where the good communities of people are. Tweepsect again comes in handy here — we used it before to find auto-follows but now we can use it more generally. Take a look at the “stalking” list in addition to the mutual list to find who other businesses in your field are following. Watch out for inactive accounts, designated on Tweepsect with a face next to account — these accounts haven’t been updated in 90 days.

Another great way to find those in your field is to use Twitter Search. Search for relevant hashtags of topics: #education, #gardening, #marketing, as well as related topics: #onlineeducation, #organicgardening, #ppcmarking, etc. Search for these topics once daily to get a snapshot of others in your field that are promoting that conversation on Twitter. While general topics are hashtagged fairly rarely, conferences almost always have a hashtag for the attendees. Specifically in the education space, #educon occurred about two weeks after we created our Twitter account and it provided a great resource of people to follow in our space.

If you find some really great accounts to follow, I would recommend creating a private list to stick these people on. As your account grows larger, it’ll become impossible to watch the feeds of 300+ people per day. Stick the highest quality accounts into one list and read that instead every morning.

Continue growing and interacting

Hopefully at this point, your account will have the valuable combination of a high amount of followers that also interact, placing yourself directly within the Twitter community and on the same level as your competitors. It’ll be a lot easier to coast your Twitter account since people finding your account will be more likely to subscribe – give months later, the account has more than 800 followers.

Any other tips? I’d love to hear them in the comments!

Jump-Starting Your Company’s Twitter Account

ChumpDump – A New Unfollow Game for Twitter

admin — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 10:00:04 +0000

ChumpDump is a new Twitter unfollow game for Google Android and Apple iPhone.

We think you’ve got too many chumps in your friends list. Friends are today’s 21st century currency in life. You see it in every social network, this obsession with collecting friends. But how many of them are really friends?

The game’s daily lottery picks a winner out of your friends this and then digs through a month of tweets and tells you a story about this “supposed friend” you’ve been following.

The analysis includes the usual: # of DMs, # of replies, and whether they are even following you to more sophisticated stuff like a Klout Influence Score and even a social graph for you to check out. The game then presents you with your friend’s latest tweets and begs the big question – SAVE or DUMP?

You earn the most points when you dump someone. You earn a little less when you save someone. And most of all, you earn more equally if you tell the game why.

“Why’s” are what we feel make the game really entertaining. Come play today!

ChumpDump – A New Unfollow Game for Twitter

A Twitterified Football World Cup

admin — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 10:00:06 +0000

There were a lot of things that were new to the World Cup 2010. Of all the things that were new, one of it was the fact that this was the first World Cup after the onset of the Twitter fever.

A few days back I read a post somewhere that talked about Twitter having set a new record of about 3.2K tweets per second, thanks to the Japanese football fans. That is more than evidence that Twitter has changed the way we saw the World Cup.

Twitter certainly gave us a different view of the World Cup this time. It was the match between Brazil and Chile. I wanted to get an update into the match and before I could get an update from any other website, I could get it from Twitter. I was continuously updated about the match. All I had to do was search Twitter with a few hash-tags like #brazil and #football. I could get the latest on the world cup. Just imagine the amount of tweets surfacing on Twitter every second.

Twitter showed us all a glimpse of their “promoted Tweets” just before the USA-Ghana match. Searches with hash-tags of #USA, gave results with a promoted tweet being the first results. This tweet was from Nike Soccer. It was there until the game was over and then they pulled it off. But, one sure got to know how Twitter’s promoted tweets are going to look like.

Twitter has influenced us in more than one ways. World Cup football is one such thing, but a macroscopic view shows that it was not just confined to the World Cup. Twitter is a more important member of our Internet family, more important than even Google. Or, so at least for me. Why?

1. Because I can get updated news feeds on Twitter, much faster than Google.
2. Because I am able to market my products on Twitter at zero cost, in comparison to the thousands that I would have spent at Google.
3. Because I have been able to make some good friends at Twitter.
4. Because Twitter is fun and Google is not.
5. Because I can research about anything that I wish to sell, much easily at Twitter than Google.

These are just some of the things in addition to the searches on Twitter. Carefully built search parameters can get you the desired results extremely easily and much faster than Google. What’s more, you can even save the search for future so that you do not have to write the query again and again. How useful is this? It depends upon your purpose of the search. It saves a lot of time if you are researching your market and that is where I think it is pretty useful.

As the World Cup nears its finale, it would be not be wrong to say that, at least Twitter has stamped its authority as a news channel. Twitter has given us a new perspective to the way news was read. Staying updated has a new meaning and I am sure that this World Cup will be remembered as a “Twitterified World Cup”

A Twitterified Football World Cup

Twitter XMPP Instant Messaging with Treegger

admin — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 07:00:06 +0000

Treegger has launched a service allowing Twitter users to chat in real time using an XMPP client such as Miranda, Pigdim, Adium, iChat (see the list here).

Messages exchanged during conversation are not stored or published on the web or anywhere else.

Bidirectional relationships (people followed and following you) are set as chat friends so if you are a massive twitter user with tons of followers don’t expect to see them if you are not following them. Unfortunately, this service is probably unusable with classic client software if you have thousand of bidirectional relations.

Twitter XMPP Instant Messaging with Treegger

Top 20 Twitip Twitter Tips of All Time!

admin — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 16:00:04 +0000

Yes, today I’m obsessed with the letter “T”.

I was looking through the site stats this morning and decided to see what the most popular posts were here at Twitip. It’s an interesting list, with the number one post having over 384,000 views! (Number 20 on the list has just over 23,000!)

Check them out, which one’s your favorite?

Top 20 Twitip Twitter Tips of All Time!

Create a Custom List of Tweets with TwitBlend

admin — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 04:00:27 +0000

Today’s post comes from Pongrob Saisuwan of TwitBlend. He’s showing us how to use the service. You can follow Pongrob at @twitblend.

There’s so many auto-generated list of tweets out there but the results are mostly spam. So why not make it ourselves?

With a service called TwitBlend you can easily create your own “collection of tweets” or “tweet list” yourself and it’s very easy to use!

This is what I got from spending two minutes on TwitBlend, The Foursquare Cling

TwitBlend helps you search for tweets and arrange, color, share and put it on your website.

How can I make one?

Click on “Create new blend” on top-right menu
Enter your Twitter’s account information and click “Allow” to login (TwitBlend uses Twitter’s API so you don’t need to sign up separately.)
This is “New Blend” page. You can use menu on left-side to search for your tweets, you can see your tweets from your “Home” timeline, “@ mentions”, “Sent by you” and your favourites. You can also find tweets from your own list.
There’s a search tab for you to search tweets from a keyword or username.

Below is the search dialog:
After you search for tweets you will see something like this:
You can drag and drop tweets from the right side to the dropbox on the left side, arrange and color it with “color button” on the bottom of each tweet.
After you are happy with this list you can click “Save…” at the bottom.
In this save dialog you can enter the title and tweet it to share it with your friends.
Now that you have created your own blend, you can share it with your friends or put it on your website using TwitBlend’s widget. Below is an example of TwitBlend widget on my WordPress blog.

Have you used TwitBlend before? Let us know what you think in the comments!

Create a Custom List of Tweets with TwitBlend

How To Incorporate Twitter Into Your Event

admin — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 19:00:05 +0000

[Hey everyone - our submission form has been acting up, so if you have submitted a guest post and have had troubles, please email it to me at lara@twitip.com - Thanks!]

Today’s post comes from Jenni Izzo, a Drexel University graduate turned PR Account Coordinator with a social media obsession. You can follow Jenni at @jenniizzo.

Whether large or small, Twitter can enhance your event in a number of ways. Take a hint from MTV, who recently used a live Twitter Tracker for their 2010 Movie Awards. They encouraged those in the audience, as well as those at home, to get in on the action by tweeting their thoughts, reactions and questions. Throughout the night, tweets containing “MTV” hit over 400 per minute. But, even if you aren’t planning a star-studded event, you can still use the following tips to create a tweet-worthy event.

Establish an event hashtag.
Long before you start promoting the event, create a hashtag. It should be easy to remember, short and relevant. This will be key in incorporating Twitter into your event. Include the hashtag on everything from the Evite to the Facebook page to signage at the event. Other creative ideas include: event t-shirts, business cards and centerpieces.

Create buzz before the event.
Now that you’ve established the event hashtag, get out and there use it. Tweet about sponsors, ticket sales, guest appearances and topics. Get people excited before the event and it will ensure that the enthusiasm carries over to the day-of.

Encourage attendees to tweet during the event.
Using the previously mentioned tips, make sure the hashtag is visible at the event. If you have a PowerPoint or Keynote presentation, make sure it is included on the title slide. If you will be taking planned breaks, display slide encouraging attendees to tweet — or better yet…

Host a live stream.
During scheduled downtime, replace your presentation with a live stream. A live stream should also be incorporated at all times on a projection screen. If you are announcing winners or honorees, use Twitter to share the big news. Also keep your audience actively engaged by tweeting trivia questions and giving an award to the first to tweet the correct answer.

Take advantage of post-event insight.
Twitter gives event coordinators a valuable opportunity to look back attendees’ candid thoughts. Review tweets marked with your hashtag to see what worked and what didn’t. Use this as an opportunity to improve your next event or connect with people who had further questions.

When it comes to using Twitter to enhance your event, the possibilities are endless. Feel free to add to this list and share some of your favorites in the comments.

How To Incorporate Twitter Into Your Event

5 Awesome Twitter Searches

admin — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 16:00:14 +0000

Twitter’s search engine is really one of it’s great features, and in this article I’m going to demonstrate some really cool searches you can do with it.

This is kind of a follow up to Thomas Baekdal’s excellent article here on Twitip “7 Secret Ways To Use Twitter Search” which you should check out as well.

1. Who’s saying stuff about me outside of Twitter?
This search will show you Tweets that people write about you or your company that link out to an external page. This is useful for finding what people are writing about you, or indeed when people link to your site without using your Twitter name
[your name|company] filter:links
Live example: mailchimp filter:links

2. Free Stuff
If you’re on the hunt for freebies, create variants of this search and save them to monitor when companies or bloggers are giving away freebies or offers across Twitter. This will work best if you monitor it over time. Use the “near” search operator to try limiting this to your local area (e.g. near:Sydney).
free code|coupon + keyword
Live example: free code|coupon iphone

3. Who’s showing me love/hate?
The one is a bit sporadic in terms of how effective it is, but if you add a smiley or frown to your search, Twitter (in theory) will show tweets that mention your search term in a positive or negative light. As mentioned, results are not always accurate but this is useful to setup as a monitor if you’re running a marketing campaign and want to keep an eye on the haters …..
@yourname|your real name|company name -filter:links
Live example: ipad

4. Create customers out of thin air
[variants of questions you can answer] ? -filter:links
This one needs a bit of thought and tweaking, but it’s potentially powerful. Essentially, this search finds people asking questions that your product/service/blog post can answer. So if you’ve written a great article on how to use solar power, you might search for:
“solar power” ? -filter:links

That search should show people asking questions related to Solar power due to the ? search operator Twitter supports. Adding the -filter:links will strip links from the results, which are unlikely to be people asking questions of their followers. To further target people asking for advice, just add a “How” or similar at the front.

This creates a constant stream of users you can approach with a recommendation to check out your offering.

Live example: “solar power” ? -filter:links

5. Snipe your competitor’s customers
A variation on (3), this one will find everyone saying negative things in relation to your competitor’s Twitter account, which means it’s time to swoop in and show those neglected souls some love. Add words like “problem” “useless” “unhelpful” to really zero in on unhappy folks.

@competitoraccount
Live example: @microsoft – (switch for your competitors, I didn’t want to single anyone out!)

Bonus Link

Going outside of Twitter, this article on searching Twitter via Google has some absolutely oustanding ideas to try. Lastly, for more on Twitter’s advanced search operators, check out their guide here.

5 Awesome Twitter Searches