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Okay I'm On Twitter

Written by: Linda Siniscal

Article Overview: Tools to help you maximize Twitter

Okay I'm On Twitter

Everywhere you turn these days, people are talking about Twitter. There seems to be an explosion of these social network sites the past couple of years - MySpace, Facebook, Plaxo, LinkedIn, and now Twitter. If you don't know what Twitter is, it is a social networking and micro-blogging site that allows users to send "tweets" as well as read other user's (followers) "tweets". Tweets are limited to just 140 characters.

Once you have your account established and your profile completed, here are 10 tools that I have found will help you maximize Twitter.

• 1. Mr. Tweet - is a website that will recommend people for you to follow based on your tweets and the individuals you are currently following. This site helps you build up your following counts and you receive updates every 2 weeks.
• 2. Tweetag - is a search engine for tweets. Tweetag allows you to browse through all the public tweets published on Twitter.com. On the homepage is a tag cloud which displays the 40 most frequent topics currently being discussed on Twitter. You can search for particular keywords, for example, QuickBooks and all the messages mentioning QuickBooks will appear.
• 3. Tweet Deck - is an Adobe Air desktop application, currently in public beta, that looks to capture the abundance of social media and display it in a unique columned user interface. Okay what does that mean? It has the ability to group people together all on one screen. You can create separate groups for friends and work colleagues which allows you to easily monitor any subject within Twitter.
• 4. TwitterMySite - allows you to add a Twitter button to your blog, website or even eNewsletter to get people to follow you.
• 5. Minggl or TwitterFox - these tools are add-on's if you use Firefox as your internet browser. The Minggl toolbar makes it easy to manage information across various social network sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. You can create a message from Minggl and select which sites you would like the message posted - to all or just one. You can view all the friends you have on all the social network sites and even send individual messages to them. TwitterFox is just an extension that notifies you of your friend's tweets on Twitter. A tiny icon is added to the status bar which notifies you when your friends update their tweets - you can also update your tweets directly from TwitterFox.
• 6. Ping - Ping is a service that enables social networking users to post a single message to the various social networking sites simultaneously.
• 7. Tweet Later - allows you to send an automatic message to new followers welcome. You can set up the message to either be a public or private message and you are limited to 140 characters. With Tweet Later you can also set up keyword tracking alerts similar to Google alerts.
• 8. Twitter Feed - is a service that allows you to set up an automatic feed from your blog to your Twitter account. You can control the frequency of the updates as well as add a prefix before each tweet such as "blog post".
• 9. Twellow - is the yellow pages for Twitter that makes it easy for you to search for people on Twitter in a multitude of categories.

TwitterBerry - is a mobile client for posting updates to Twitter - for those that need their Twitter fix when on the road. There are also applications if you are an iPhone user - Twitter for iPhone

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Article Tags: abundance, adobe, desktop application, explosion, followers, internet browser, li li, linkedin, nbsp, public beta, quickbooks, search engine, social networking, that allows users, tweet, twitter, ul, user interface, work colleagues



Related Forum Posts
Re: Using Twitter To Double Your Traffic? - I'm sure in many cases Twitter sends more traffic than Search Engines because most people don't have good enough SE rankings to get SE traffic. But anyone can get Twitter traffic. The problem is that Twitter traffic won't convert for the most part and SE traffic will. I'd venture to say that 98% of the time getting just 100 visitors from search is better than getting 2000+ from Twitter.
How to Use Twitter to Market Products? - How do you use Twitter to market products? Has the Twitter route given you good results? Please share your experience and ideas on how to use Twitter to take a product to the customers. Thank you in advance.
Re: Social Media Works If You Do It Right... - Hi Michelle, Ah, but it seems hashtags are still being used by a lot of people - including Twitter! So I would still use them for your keywords. It's just that if you are searching for something on Twitter you can either go the #hashtag route, or do a direct search on the Twitter homepage. I guess you could use #hashtags when searching on the Twitter homepage as well! DH
Re: Facebook or Twitter? - Thanks for the feedback guys! I personally started with Twitter and am now moving over to Facebook. I polled people on both my accounts and (not surprisingly) the Twitter people said Twitter and the Facebook people said Facebook! The actual order of my social media presence looks like this: 1) LinkedIn (with little success) 2) Twitter 3) YouTube 4) Facebook
Re: Twitter vs Facebook - I use Facebook pages for Business and rarely ever use Twitter. I hace lost count of the no. of Hotels that I have visited, regarding their marketing campaigns, that may have 5k Facebook Fans and only 100 followers on Twitter. It is a lot more difficult to engage with people on Twitter and thus harder to gain traction. If you are a business like Nike, then Twitter is great, but if you are an SME, then focus on Facebook or LinkedIn (if you are providing a professional service.) You can always have your Facebook feed directly in to Twitter, so you can have a presence on both, but do the work on one. Also check out ping.fm for managing campaigns - it is a free tool, and a great time saver.


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