What is Twitter?
Twitter is for staying in touch and keeping up with friends no matter where you are or what you’re doing. That doesn’t really tell us very much. Wikipedia says, “Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send updates via SMS, instant messaging, email, to the Twitter website, or any one of the multitude of Twitter applications now available”.
Twitter asks the question, “What are you doing?” and allows you to send a small update (limited to just 140 characters) to your followers. The concept is amazingly simple and that is perhaps one of the main reasons why it has caught on like wildfire. The restriction to 140 characters has resulted in Twitter being labeled “micro blogging”. A traditional blog is a log of what somebody is up to, but in a richer, more detailed format. One of the key benefits of Twitter is that you can send and receive updates (also called tweets) via your browser, email, instant messaging clients and SMS so you can keep in touch no matter where you are.
Twitter is a Broadcasting Service
Email, Instant Messaging and SMS are all direct messaging systems. You choose the person with whom you would like to communicate and you send them a direct message. Blogs are open broadcasting systems. When you publish a blog post, it will go directly to those people who have subscribed to the RSS feed but it is also available publicly. Twitter is rather like blogging with just an RSS feed. Consider the diagram below:
We have two people, Bob and Betty. Bob can follow Betty, Betty can follow Bob and if they both did that they would be following each other. That is literally all there is to the relationships between people in Twitter. It’s extremely simple and what it produces is a situation like this:
Every time you send out a tweet, all your followers will see it. Unlike blogs, Twitter is a real time broadcasting medium. You update, it is broadcast to your followers, and then it is largely forgotten (but not quite!) When you first join Twitter you have no followers and you are not following anybody else so it can seem pretty lonely.
However, there is much more to it than that! There are now many tools and other web applications that will integrate with Twitter allowing you to broadcast your tweets all over the web even without followers.
Twitter is a Mobile Communication Tool
After you join Twitter you have the option to link it to your mobile phone and / or to your instant messaging clients. By having Twitter accessible on your phone you can both send and receive updates which means that you can stay in touch wherever you are so it is a truly mobile communication tool. This can be a pretty powerful thing.
Socialising with Twitter
Twitter is a social service - you will not get much benefit from it whilst trying to use it alone.
Is This Business or Personal?
I would urge you to stop and think for a moment before you even sign up to Twitter, whether you want to use it for business or personal use or some kind of combination. Twitter was originally used mostly as a fun little tool to just keep up with friends but it has now evolved into so much more than that. If that’s the way you intend to use it and that’s all you want to use it for then just go ahead and sign up and get started.
However, if you have a business or some other online presence then you may be able to use Twitter as a way of communicating with your customers / readers / members etc. If this is the case you need to ask yourself whether you would rather be represented by your business name or your own name.
Consider for example, whether you might want multiple people to use the same account to post updates. For example, several news services are now using Twitter to broadcast the latest headlines and in these cases the Twitter account is under the name of the news service rather than an individual.
How Can Twitter Help My Business?
A lot of people just don’t get Twitter, they don’t see any value in it. Now if you are using it from a purely personal perspective then really, it is nothing more than a time consuming distraction.
The value comes if you have some kind of business / service / organisation that you want to promote. For example, you might have a standard online or offline business, or perhaps you are an artist, musician etc and want to get your work out into the community… Maybe you work for a charity and would like to gain more public awareness of it. There are many reasons why you might want to go looking for an audience beyond just your own friends and family.
It is well known that the more contact you make with a customer, the more likely you are to make a sale. These days it is much more ‘in vogue’ to sell by not selling, rather than doing the hard-push sales pitch. Twitter is a way of doing that. With Twitter you can chat to people in a friendly way and give them nudges and hints about what you’re doing in your world. Look at the benefits:
- It reminds them that you exist
- It shows them that you are human
- It allows you to mention new offers immediately
- It allows you to form a more casual relationship
When you first join Twitter you will have no followers. You can send updates but the only people likely to see them are the people who are currently surfing the public timeline on the Twitter homepage and that moves pretty fast. You aren’t going to get many followers from there! How then, should you get followers?
Ask For Them Directly
If you are creating a personal account just email your friends, tell them about Twitter and encourage them to sign up and then follow you. If you have a business and you have an email list then you could email the list and do a similar thing. If you have some kind of website, access to a forum etc then post a message about it - write a blog post etc.
One word of warning though - if you are approaching this from a purely business perspective then you need to have something to offer your customers. What It means is, if you use your Twitter account to just pitch, pitch, pitch, you will not get many followers. Twitter is not something that can be effectively used as a direct selling medium without adding extra benefits .
Stalk Your Targets
When you start following somebody on Twitter they will get an email telling them of the fact and in that email is a link to your profile. This notification can be turned off but it is on by default and most people leave it on because it is nice to know when somebody starts following you. Human curiosity will result in many of those people checking out your profile and possibly following you back.
This is rather like the strategy of linking to other bloggers if you want them to notice you. You link to them, they see it in their stats and they are curious as to who is talking about them so they check out the link. If they like what they see, they may turn into another reader. The principle is the same with Twitter but there is a caveat here - when they click on your profile, they will see a transcript of your most recent updates. If those updates don’t look interesting or there are none there then not many people will follow you.
This is a tricky situation to get around in the beginning because you have no followers so you feel as though you are talking to yourself.
Networking in Your Niche
Unless you are using Twitter just to hook up with your friends, you probably have some kind of niche that you relate to. Let that niche be Internet marketing. A musician would have his own niche within the music industry, a charity would also have some kind of niche. You get the picture.
The key is to get out there into your niche and network.
Now assume that you have some kind of online presence - whether that is a blog, some other website, an account on Facebook etc. If you don’t, then now is the time to create one! Wherever you present yourself on the Internet you should make your Twitter profile known. This also applies to other social networks.
The idea is to participate in the communities within your niche which naturally draws people to you. There is usually some kind of profile feature - whether its just a link in a blog comment, a forum signature of a fully blown profile such as that on Facebook. Everywhere you go online you have the opportunity to say who you are and when you do so, make sure you tell people where they can find you.
Using Twitter Properly
140 Character Limit / Plain text Only
Twitter updates have a limit of 140 characters. This is to allow them to be easily sent over mobile SMS systems. Twitter has since been coined a ‘micro blogging’ platform due to this reliance on short updates. The updates have to be plain text. You cannot embed HTML or any kind of control codes. The only exception to this rule is links.
Embedding Links into Tweets
Updates must be plain text but the one added bonus that Twitter provides is that it will turn links into hyperlinks. These are no-follow so don’t think you can get backlinks from these! Most links are long and so to keep the tweet size as small as possible Twitter automatically uses the TinyURL service to shorten them. This is automatic - you paste in a full link and Twitter will do the rest.
Don’t be Too Noisy
Keep the incoming Twitter noise to a minimum. Turning that around, you need to make sure that you are not one of those noisy people otherwise you’ll find yourself either being ignored or losing followers. Either way, you will no longer be getting your message across.
What is a good number of tweets? There is no absolute number and it varies according to your audience. Generally speaking, try not to update more than once per hour so in a standard day, that’s probably no more than a dozen.
Occasionally something interesting might happen that tends to cause many more - like the recent fires in California, but dont tweet all day long about mundane stuff.
Don’t be Too Quiet
Let’s not go to extremes though. Twitter is not a service on which you should lurk. If you want to get followers you have to have something to say, and it needs to provide some kind of value - interesting, entertaining, controversial etc. Basically there has to be a reason why people would want to listen to you.
Remember that your personal profile shows a history of all your tweets so if somebody comes to it and it’s just empty, or you only post a mundane update every day or so, why should they bother following you? Yes this can be difficult to do in the beginning when you don’t have many direct followers.
Using Twitter for Marketing
If you are using Twitter to market something, whether that’s a business, a blog, organisation, etc then in addition to the previous guidelines you also need to read this section. This stuff can be the make or break on your Twitter success so pay attention!
The Tao of Twitter by Ed Dale
Ed Dale put together a little video showing what he calls the ‘tao’ of Twitter which is worth watching.
Twitter is Not an IM Client
One of the points that Ed talks about in his video is the danger of using Twitter as an instant messaging system. It shows you how somebody did this recently, albeit accidentally. Look at this image:
If you read the messages from the bottom up you’ll follow along a conversation between two people. If you have your Twitter updates coming in real time, this is very distracting. In all fairness, you can see by the top tweet that this member noticed his error and corrected it shortly after.At times you will get caught up in a conversation that requires a personal response. If you need to do this then do it sparingly. Placing the @ symbol in front of somebody’s name indicates that this message is for them. For example, @cmiddlebrook
However, here’s the thing - personal tweets are still public! Twitter client gives intellisense and highlights personal tweets in a different colour. This makes it easy to forget that it is still public. When you are sending a personal tweet bear in mind that some people who are following you, may not be following the person you are talking to. This means they get only one half of the conversation, and that’s why it can seem so rude.
To offset the problem, if you are going to do this, try to word your tweet in such a way as to allow spectators to have some idea of what you are talking about. That way, they can feel more included in the conversation and it doesn’t seem so rude.
You might also want to try using the direct message system that Twitter provides instead. This allows private messages (still limited to 140 characters) between two Twitter users who are following each other.
Fly on the Wall Conversation
In the tools section of this guide I will show various ways in which you can get other people’s updates from Twitter. Whilst it is possible to get them sent directly to you via email, due to the volume of messages that can generate, most people prefer to use something that is less invasive. For example, you can see updates as popup notifications. you can also see a little number in brackets (6) that shows there are six new tweets to see. But you can choose not to read these if you want to.
Most people do not read all the tweets that come in. Many of the people are not in the same timezone as you are so they miss a lot of their tweets anyway.
This is how Twitter differs from direct communication methods like email. When somebody sends you an email you feel somehow obligated to respond if it is a personal message. If you are receiving an email from somebody because you are on their ‘list’ then as Ed says in the video, your defenses are up. But when you see people like Ed twittering about his latest Internet marketing products you can choose to completely ignore them if you want to. There’s no pressure.
The True Value of Twitter for Marketing
Of course, another key point is that just seeing Ed’s tweets come up now and then just lets you know that he’s out there, he’s doing something. Sometimes he’s out swimming with his dog. This shows that he’s a human too and not just some guy trying to sell you something.
Trust is such an important factor in today’s markets. We hate sales letters, we don’t trust salesmen and marketers. We think most advertisements are full of hype. Twitter allows you to expose the person that you are. It slowly allows you to build trust with your audience and this can have a massive impact further down the line.
If you have anything at all to market, Twitter helps you build your brand and promote yourself without direct email, without a sales letter, without any kind of sales pitch at all. If you don’t like the hard sell, then start using Twitter!
Don’t Use Twitter Only for Self-Promotion
Of course, there are some people who DO like the hard sell and they will try to use Twitter as another avenue for selling. This is a big mistake folks. The beauty of Twitter is that it is personal, it can be fun and hard sell messages can interrupt the experience and seem incredibly out of place.
Even if you promote yourself in a gentle way, don’t overdo it. You need to intertwine your promotional messages with the rest. Sometimes you click on people’s profiles and all you see is a stream of ‘New Blog Post” tweets. Really, you can get that just from their RSS, their Twitter account becomes pointless.
Remember that even though Twitter is real time, your personal history is saved on your profile. It’s worth looking at it now and then to see how it looks to an outsider. Would you follow yourself?
Twitter Tools | Platform Specific
The Twitter home page is rather limited and of course is only available via a browser. In this installment the first list tools specific to mobile devices, Windows based PC’s and Macs. After that a list of Firefox plugins.
The tools are listed alphabetically within each section, the ordering does not represent any kind of ranking.
Mobile Tools
jTwitter - A Java application that you install on your phone. You can leave it on all the time without fear of incurring data charges.
Pocket Tweets - A web based Twitter client for the Apple iPhone.
ThinCloud - Post to Twitter from your iPhone. It’s very finger- and eyeball-friendly, much more in fact than other iPhone apps. It’s got huge buttons and a friendly graphical interface
TinyTwitter - TinyTwitter works or any Java enabled device and allows you to avoid the SMS fees from being incurred by having multiple tweets going to and from your phone.
Twapper - If you wish to get Twitter updates to your mobile phone you can become overrun by messages.
Twapper is an alternative that allows you to monitor your feed from a browser and it is designed for mobile browsers (but can be used by any browser as well). In addition, Twapper integrates with 30 Boxes, an online calendar.
triQQr - An oddly named client from Germany. Not much information about features.
TwitBox - This desktop client has many features that I have not seen elsewhere, such as support for multiple Twitter accounts.
Twitterlicious - A Twitter client with some nice features including highlighting of new updates, and lots of keyboard shortcuts to make it much faster to use.
Twitteroo - A Desktop client for Twitter. Lots of nice features and customisation options.
Mac Tools
Twidget - A Dashboard utility to allow you to update your Twitter status, but does not show your timeline.
Twitgit - A rather simple application allowing Twitter access from the Dashboard.
Twitteromatic - A Mac tool that will post all sorts of information to your Twitter account automatically. For example, weather status, word of the day, lotto numbers, and many more.
TwitterPost - Has some unique features such as avatar caching for faster browsing, Growl support, and in built support for iTunes.
Twitterrific - One of the more widely used Mac clients. This is a stand-alone application with a small desktop footprint and boasting features such as highlighting of unread tweets, audio notification, keyboard shortcuts and lots more.
Multi-Platform / Others
gTwitter - A GTK+ based Twitter client for Linux.
Snitter - A Windows / Mac application based on the new Adobe AIR platform. This has a great many features and has been generating quite a bit of buzz lately.
Spaz - Another client based on the Adobe AIR platform. This one is open source.
Firefox Plugins
For users of the Firefox browser, there are a few nice plugins to try.
TweetBar - A sidebar for Twitter that works in both Firefox and Flock. This takes up a permanent part of your screen real estate and if you have another application running in the sidebar (I do), they can’t both run at the same time.
TwitBin - Another sidebar plugin for Firefox.
TwitterBar - This plugin is very handy if you like to tweet about web pages you are currently browsing. This will add a tiny icon into your Firefox address bar that, when clicked, will send an update containing everything in the address bar. The cool thing is that in addition to the web address you can type in additional text which is appended to the tweet as a note.
TwitterFox - Shows you a popup notification when new tweets come in and shows a number in brackets in your status bar showing any that are unread. Click on that to expand the timeline. Very discreet and efficient. Also highlights personal messages, and uses member name intellisense. I use this plugin and I love it.
TwittyTunes - This is a sibling of the popular plugin FoxyTunes. It integrates with a number of music players and lets you easily tweet what you are currently listening to.
Twitter Tools | Web Applications
Productivity / Useful Apps
LoudTwitter - Publishes a daily post on your blog containing a digest of all your tweets of that day.
Remember the Milk for Twitter- Remember the Milk (rtm) is a popular GTD web application. By adding the rtm Twitter member as a friend you can send commands to your account via the Twitter interface. This is particularly useful if you are using Twitter by SMS when you are out and about and you only have your mobile phone and no Internet access.
RSS2Twitter - Allows any RSS feed to be fed to a Twitter account. Useful if you want to keep track of blog updates when you’re mobile perhaps.
ServerMojo - Monitors your web server and will send you update notifications via Twitter.
SugarStats - If you are diabetic then check out SugarStats. This site allows you to monitor your sugar levels and gives you all sorts of graphs and charts. Plus you can send in your data via Twitter.
TwitterDigest - Twitter Digest lets you read Twitter updates in a more manageable fashion. Just pick the usernames you’d like to generate a digest for, and you will see all updates made by them during the past full day.
TwitterFeed - Automatically feeds your blog posts through to Twitter. Very handy if you post a lot.
Twitterment - A search engine for Twitter.
TwitterNotes - Make notes using Twitter and tag them for later use.
Twitticious - This little application will allow you to setup an automatic import of links from any Twitter timeline (even the public one) into a Delicious account for later tagging.
Map Mashups
There are so many web applications that are a mashup of Twitter and map software such as Google Maps Etc.
GeoTwitter - Fetches the most recent updates from the public timeline once per minute and displays them on an interactive map.
Twitter Atlas - I couldn’t really get this to work so somebody please enlighten me as to what it is supposed to do!
TwitterEarth - Shows you the location of live tweets but this is one of the prettier apps of its type in my opinion.
TwitterMap - You can search for any location in the world and see in detail, all the Twitter profiles that are registered there. Search is a bit slow but once it comes up you can use the usual map tools to zoom in and move around.
TwitterVision - Brings up selected Tweets in real time as they are posted. You can click on their profile, links within the tweet if there are any and you can even click a like/dislike button to say what you thought of it.
Just for Fun
Mobypicture - With Mobypicture instead of typing where you are or what you’re doing you can show your friends real-time. Just plug in your Twitter details, send a photo+text to your Moby address, either from your phone or normal email client, Mobypicture automatically posts the text and a link to the photo to your Twitter account.
Swotter - "A new kind of talking book". Swotter is a unique application that reads books to the world via Twitter! Check it out here.
TweetVolume - Type in some words or phrases and see how often they appear in Twitter.
Twiddeo - Twitter + Video = Twiddeo. Don’t just tell people what you’re doing, show them!
Twitstat - Monitors the updates from any users following the Twitstat account on Twitter. The Twitstat collects data about the updates and allows you to get various stats such as the most active users for the last few days.
Twitter Confessional (Possible Adult Content!) - Forgive me, for I have sinned in 140 characters or less… This is quite funny - it allows you to send tweets anonymously which appear in this profile. There is a small amount of spam on there but it’s mostly sexual confessions! If the receiver is open minded it’s quite funny, if not, it might be offending.
TwitterBuzz - Shows an aggregated view of all the domains that people are linking to via Twitter. However it’s not that accurate because the top domain is tinyurl which of course is integrated into Twitter to shorten long urls. Still interesting though.
Twitter Mosaic - Very creative pictures made just using Twitter avatars. Check out this Casablanca example.
Twitterholic - A ‘top users’ page showing the top 100 Twitter users based on either the most amount of followers, friends or updates.
Hacking Twitter
On the surface Twitter seems so simple and yet there are a load of cool things you can do with it.
The reason you can do so much cool stuff with Twitter and the reason that so many mashups / hacks are coming out is that Twitter has an open API that allows developers to build apps around, much like Facebook.
Pimp Out Your Twitter Profile
Once you start to get the hang of Twitter, you can make yourself stand out from the crowd by adding some unique touches to your profile. To get started go to your Twitter home page and click on the ’settings’ link at the top.
Set Your Bio
From your settings page there are a couple of things you can do here. First of all you can set the 'More Info URL'. This link appears in your profile page and is a do-follow link. Twitter profiles tend to rank rather highly in Google so this counts as a quality backlink.
Next you have your 'One Line Bio'. You only have 160 characters here so you need a short, snappy description about what you are all about.
Lastly you can set your Location. One option you’ll see down the bottom of this page is 'Protect my Updates'. If you are trying to gain exposure for something via Twitter then this should not be checked because it means that people have to obtain your permission in order to follow you. However this could be useful for a private Twitter account that functions as part of kind kind of paid membership perhaps.
Set a Unique Profile Picture
Arguably the most important thing is to set your avatar. Every time you send an update the image you set here is displayed. Also, your avatar will appear on the profiles of anyone who is following you. By having a distinct avatar that stands out (or at least something unique) you are far more likely to get clicked on by intrigued users.
If you have profiles on other Social media sites like Facebook, StumbleUpon etc then I suggest that you use the same picture for all of them for this reason.
Alter the Design of your Profile Page
The default Twitter colour is a bright sky blue but you can change all of that under the 'design' link. You can upload a picture but this doesn’t work all that well because it places the picture in the top left corner of the page and doesn’t allow you to stretch it or center it. You can tile it which is ok for some graphics but not for others.
Funky Twitter Mashups
Twitter Via Email
EmailTwitter is a simple Twitter gateway that allows you to send updates via email. This is useful because it allows you to send updates via SMS without incurring the usual fees. Very nice.
Send Emails from Twitter
So you can Twitter via email so of course the reverse must be possible right? Why on earth would you want to send an email from Twitter? Because you can! Feed your inner geek with this cool Twitter hack from Lifehack.org.
Use Twitter for Reminders
TwitterTimer is a special user that can send you reminders. Send a direct message in the format “d timer
Note Taking With Twitter
So you spend far too much time on Twitter and an idea pops into your head, what to do? You could fire up Google Notebook or similar, or you could stay right where you are and makes notes from your Twitter account to retrieve later. TwitterNotes allows you to make notes, and tag them.
Leave Twitter Voice Messages
Jott is a service that allows you to call a number and leave voice messages that get propagated to various computerised services. Jott Links is an extension that supports include Twitter so you can tweet in actual speech, rather than text.
Twitter / SecondLife Mashup
SecondLife is a virtual world which is entirely driven by user created content. Anyway, for the techies amongst you you might be interested in these three twitter apps that have been created.
Twitter / Outlook Mashup
If you are a frequent user of Microsoft Outlook then you may prefer to access Twitter directly within Outlook rather than using a separate client. OutTwit allows you to do just that.
Twitter / Skype Mashups
If you are a Skype user you can send tweets from your Skype account. See Twitter4Skype. Also, an application called Twype allows you to pull in a Twitter feed and use that as your Skype mood.
Twitter Groups
Twitter Groups is a third party service that offers functionality sorely needed by Twitter (and indeed many other social networks). One of the problems that I alluded to in the earlier parts of the guide are that you need to decide whether you want your Twitter account to represent your personal or business life.
Of course it’s never that simple is it? See the trouble is that you may have close friends and potential clients following the same account. How then do you tailor your tweets to the audience without alienating some of them? You can’t with Twitter in its current form.
Twitter Groups allows you to sort the people that follow you into groups and then send updates to just a particular group. Personally I think a simple tagging approach would have been easier but it’s better than nothing. If you have multiple audiences this is well worth a try until Twitter put in some official support for this functionality.
Multiply Your Twitter Audience
Publicize Your Twitter RSS Feed
Did you know that your Twitter feed is also available as an RSS feed? Go your profile page and then scroll down to the bottom. There on the bottom left is a ‘RSS’ button. Click on it for the link. It looks something like this:
Because this is an RSS Feed, you can publicize it! First there were web directories, then article directories and now there are RSS directories too. Here is a massive list of RSS Directories that you can submit your feed to. Be careful though… if you tend to tweet mainly about what underwear you have on, don’t go submitting it to a medical directory. Use some common sense.
Twitter / Blogging Mashup
Do you have a blog? Many blogs have a large audience, there are more people that read blogs than people who use Twitter. First let me talk about a service called LoudTwitter. This will take all your tweets from one day, package them up into a blog post and publish it on your blog.
Why is this useful? Remember that Twitter is a real time application and people on the Internet are spread all over the world. Many people watch Twitter while they are awake but not everybody will go back over their timeline from the night before.
By posting your tweets to your blog you can make sure that you’re readers don’t miss a thing. Of course you must be careful with this.
Twitter Social Button
We have Digg buttons, Stumble buttons, Delicious buttons etc etc and now we have a Twitter button. TwitThis makes it very easy for your blog visitors to publicize your blog post via their Twitter feed.
Wordpress Plugins
Now if your blog audience and your Twitter audience match and you happen to have a Wordpress blog, then you can make use of some specific plugins that allow a more fluid integration.
Why would you want to do this? In a recent blog post about the benefits of untargeted traffic. Think about how much traffic you get on a daily basis that doesn’t hang around. If your latest blog post doesn’t grab their attention then perhaps your latest tweet will. That could net you some extra followers who might become blog readers further down the line.
Anwanore’s Widget - Allows you to post several of your latest tweets into your blog and you can put it anywhere by calling a php function from within your template. The author is working on future enhancements such as an optional avatar display.
Sidebar Widget - If your theme is widget-enabled then you might want to check out this plugin which allows you to create a highly customisable widget for the sidebar.
Twitter for Wordpress - Another plugin that creates a widget for you.
TwitterTools - This plugin by Alex King allows you to archive your tweets, make blog posts out of them, send tweets from your sidebar and lots more.
TwitTwoo - Twitter in your sidebar, AJAX style - so no reloading of the page is necessary. Very stylish and easily customisable from the options page.
Third Party Twitter Integration
A whole bunch of third party tools have been developed for Twitter. Some of these tools can be used to send out your tweets to audiences on other networks and the cool thing is that these people do not need to be directly following you on Twitter.
Integrating with Facebook
Twitter have developed a Facebook application that integrates your Twitter feed into your Facebook feed. This is only useful if you actually have friends on Facebook :-) If you don’t have many, you can start now
When you login to Facebook the first page you see is the news feed which displays selected news items from all of your friends.
With this application installed, your tweets appear in the news feeds of all your friends! Of course they only stay there for a certain amount of time until they get bumped off but still, this is exposure without direct followers and I think it’s pretty damn cool!
There is another Facebook application called TwitterSync that will actually cause your latest tweet to become your Facebook status. One thing to note - any links will be stripped down to plain text so don’t think you can get a load of backlinks with this!
So why is this app useful? Well it depends on your Facebook usage - I often forget to update my status so it doesn’t usually say anything. By using this app, it makes my Facebook status more interesting which can encourage people to check me out.
MyBlogLog
I don’t think that MyBlogLog has quite the support that it has enjoyed in the past but this is still somewhere else that you can propagate your Twitter feed to and of course once it’s setup, you don’t need to do anything.
Login to MyBlogLog and then click the ‘Edit Profile’ link from the green buttons on the right. From there click ‘Services’. It’s easy to miss this. From here you can link in your profiles from a ton of other networks such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and of course Twitter too.
Jaiku, Pownce & Tumblr
Jaiku is the biggest competitor to Twitter and it has recently been acquired by Google so it will become an important platform. Pownce and Tumblr are also micro-blogging Twitter competitors. Now before you panic about having to choose between them all… relax!
HelloTxt is an aggregation service that allows you to post once through their interface and have that message propagated to all the major micro-blogging networks - Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Tumblr and a few smaller ones as well. Of course the tricky bit is getting followers on all those other networks!
If you only use Twitter and Jaiku then another solution is TwitKu which provides an integrated interface to both networks.
Twitter Badges
So we’ve covered your blog, Facebook, MyBlogLog and other micro blogging platforms. But there’s more… There are lots of places in which you can own a little piece of the Internet - MySpace comes to mind.
Twitter have released support for official badges which you can customise in a number of ways. There are Flash and Javascript versions so wherever you put these needs to have support for those technologies.
How Twitter Promotion Can Go Viral
When something is publicized via Twitter it can sometimes go viral. For example, person A tweets about a site they are browsing and that goes out to their followers. One of those people picks it up, likes it, tweets it also but it now goes to a whole new groups of people and the effect goes on. Of course this will only happen if the content is tweet-worthy but it is much easier to twitter about a url than to link it in a blog post.
Let me try to explain this more clearly with this somewhat messy diagram:
So the first tweet comes from someone whose audience is the yellow group. Perhaps it is you promoting your latest blog post… all the people in the yellow group see it. One of those people likes it and also twitters it to their group - they are the red group. Suddenly your link has hit a whole new crowd. Now someone from the red group picks it up and tweets it and this goes out to the green group and so on.
The beauty of this effect is that it happens with absolutely no participation from you! All you need to do is attract twitter followers to your blog.
But it doesn’t stop there… Ed is Twitter-savvy and his tweets are automatically posted to his blog which has another large audience. You could argue that any form of link bait can have the same effect. True, but there is one vital difference - link bait requires that people have the ability to link. They need to run a website or blog etc, they need to get out their editing software, write a post etc. That’s a lot of effort. But with Twitter, 2 seconds and you’re done. It’s just so damn easy to Twitter-promote something!
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