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After reading how you should plan out your tweets , I thought of how you can fully utilize groups when retweeting. There are many Twitter clients out there, but I use HootSuite to schedule tweets and create custom columns or groups of specific people you follow.  Creating these specific columns, which we can thank to Twitter clients, allow for you to keep tract of any tweet that you may have missed. Think about how much time you spend scrolling through your home feed and retweeting what was just tweeted. And when you usually make that retweet as soon as the person tweeted it.  Doing this not only wastes valuable time, but it makes retweeting the content a “joke”. What is the purpose of retweeting? There are times when something you retweet is valuable to the followers that are following you and not the person who originally tweeted. Then, there are times when you retweet what your followers already received from that person who originally made the tweet.  I believe the true purpose of retweeting is to help out the person who originally made the tweet by spreading out their content. Theoretically, if Pete Cashmore from Mashable tweeted “ Drunk Driver in Texas to be Named on Twitter “, his 1.8 million followers could all make two decisions. First, they could all retweet this to most likely everyone that has already seen the tweet, which would not be very valuable. Or they could spread out the tweet throughout the whole entire day, without Pete or anyone on Mashable having to tweet the article again, so anyone that might have missed it when it was first tweeted. How do you prevent yourself from retweeting right away? Create customized columns with your Twitter client. Think about the typical people that you follow and retweet what they have tweeted.  Group these people together and keep in mind that the more followers you have the more columns you will want to think about creating. For instance, if you have 1,000 followers or less than 5 columns should allow you to have all the retweets you want to make later all ready at the top and not “hidden”.  On the other hand, if you have say over 10,000 followers, I would consider that you create more specified columns. From doing this, you will ensure the mission of retweeting what you wanted to retweeted is completed and valuable. © 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips . Customized Columns for Valuable Retweeting

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Customized Columns for Valuable Retweeting

When I first started tweeting I would post randomly throughout the day about something that had caught my attention at that minute. The problem I found was that my tweets lacked bite and were in danger of all sounding the same. It was also taking up a huge chunk of my time, flitting in and out of the twittersphere. So, I took an afternoon out a couple of weeks ago and set up a content plan. Much recommended for bloggers, I found that planning ahead really helped to provide posts which were useful and informative for followers. I did this by collecting and researching useful content – e.g. seo tips, geek jokes, quotes – and then sitting down and using a spreadsheet to book a time to tweet the info and to then pre-load the posts into my software. The benefit of doing this is that I now take time to seek out relevant information, knowing that I don’t have to tweet right now. Instead I make notes, add the tweet to the content plan and then schedule the tweet. I’m also able to add spontaneity when it feels right instead of posting lots one day and little the next, keeping a steady stream of interesting content running for my Followers. © 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips . Content Planning to Add Value to Your Tweets

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Content Planning to Add Value to Your Tweets

Ad.ly is an ad network for Twitter. You set your price and approve the targeted ads before they’re inserted (marked as ads) into your Twitter stream . And now, Ad.ly is adding analytics to its platform. Ad.ly has partnered with PeopleBrowsr to analyze participating publishers’ followers, as well as how they receive ads. The analytics offer information on user engagement, male and female segmentation, location, and sentiment analysis. Ad.ly founder Sean Rad said the analytics, “provide Twitter users the data they need to become more prolific content creators.” As with all user-based social media advertising, there have been a number of ethical and practical questions floating around Ad.ly. Would a service like this increase the noise in the stream? Would it turn off or even drive away followers? Now users are better equipped to understand how their followers interact with their sponsored tweets. What do you think? Would you use Ad.ly? What kind of analytic data would you need to help you evaluate the service?

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Sponsored Tweets from Ad.ly Add Analytics

That’s right—Twitter is integrating more with yet another popular search engine. Yeah, it wasn’t enough to promise quasi-real-time results from Twitter in Google results, now Google has convinced Twitter to join Friend Connect . Now your Twitter login will work on any Google Friend Connect site. It’s been a year since Twitter joined Friend Connect , but that initial membership meant only that site followers could use their Twitter profiles and avatars on GFC sites they joined. Now, however, the integration is more complete, integrating Twitter into websites more fully. For site owners, the integration works both ways—you can promote your site easily on Twitter and your Twitter profile on your site and among your Friend Connect Followers. You can invite your Twitter followers to visit and join your site, and you can invite your Friend Connect Followers to follow you on Twitter. Friend Connect Followers can also promote your site on Twitter, either posts, pages or comments on the site—and those tweets are broadcast to your followers, too. Perhaps best of all, if you’re already using Google Friend Connect, you don’t have to do anything to enable the new Twitter features—as Google says in their explanatory video , “It just works.” Overall, it does seem like an easy way to integrate Twitter into your site and make sure your tweeting users can participate and integrate that into the discussion. That alone is a pretty attractive feature. What do you think? Would you add Google Friend Connect for the Twitter integration? How do you integrate Twitter into your site or blog?

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Twitter Integrates into Google Friend Connect

Define Your Purpose Before you go changing anything around on your twitter profile to make it more professional you must decide what the purpose of the account is. Is your purpose to connect with friends and family? Is your purpose to share important updates to customers of your store or online business? Is your purpose to attract potential clients and to give them an understanding of why they should choose your product or service? If your purpose is only to connect with friends and family then you don’t really need to have a professional presence in my opinion. But if your purpose is business related then the following steps will help you create a professional presence on twitter. Sometimes people will have a personal and a business-related purpose for using twitter. In those cases I recommend having a personal twitter account and a separate business related account on twitter. 1. Get a custom background To create a professional presence on twitter you want to have your own unique background. The default background is used by millions of people and you want to set yourself apart. There are many websites that will help you create a customized background for your twitter account. And the best part is that most of them are free. To create a custom background for my twitter account I used Twitbacks.com. 2. Use a picture of yourself Twitter allows you to have a small avatar picture associated with your account and I recommend using a personal photograph for this. It doesn’t have to be a professional headshot where your hair and makeup is perfect; it just needs to be a picture of you. This allows your followers to connect your tweets and messages with a real person. This personal touch adds credence to what you say. 3. Your phone number I like to post my phone number on my twitter account for all of my followers to see. When followers see a phone number listed with a twitter account it gives them confidence that if they had a problem or question there is someone they could call. I know some of you will be uncomfortable doing this and it’s completely understandable. But if you run a small business or work in any line of sales then you really need to have your phone number listed on your twitter account. To my knowledge twitter does not allow you to actually list the phone number as part of your account. But you can have it be part of your background. In the example below you can see my phone number is on the far left side: 4. List your email address You will also want to list your e-mail address on your twitter account. Just as with phone numbers, you can’t actually list your e-mail on your account but you can include it as part of your background. I know some of you will be concerned about posting your e-mail and receiving spam. To deal with this I created a second e-mail address that I used specifically for my business. And this is the e-mail address that I post on my twitter account. Luckily Gmail has a very good spam filter and so I actually get very few spam messages in my inbox each week. 5. Be professional in your tweets People follow you for a reason. Whether it’s to hear about new products your store is offering or updates about the cause you represent, people are listening to what you say. And the minute you deviate from that you will lose followers. So before you post a tweet ask yourself, “Why are people following me? And is this new tweet something they want to hear about?” If the answer is no or if you’re not sure then do not post the new tweet. 6. Tweet regularly but don’t overdo it I will usually tweet something in the morning and then sometimes in the evening. 1 to 3 tweets today is optimal. You want to your followers to see something from you each day but you don’t want to overdo it. The last thing you want is for one of your followers to see that the last 20 tweets are all from you. When this happens to me I immediately unfollow the person. 7. Only follow people that you’re interested in A popular way to get followers is to follow a whole bunch of people and hope that many of them follow you back. This results in you having 3,000 followers and you are following 3,000 people yourself. When people see this it looks less professional. They know there is no way you can be listening to what all 3000 people are tweeting about. On the other hand it is much more impressive if you follow just a few people and yet have hundreds of followers yourself. When people see this they are more likely to follow you in my opinion here. © 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips . 7 Ways To Create A Professional Twitter Presence

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7 Ways To Create A Professional Twitter Presence

Managing your followers is one way to make sure your tweet stream is always relevant. One technique using ReFollow is about removing people, the other about adding. The two most important ingredients for great people to follow are: 1. Current 2. Engaging Current meaning they are still active on Twitter. With a high drop-out rate, people tend to leave Twitter and never come back. A useful way to find out who has left is to login to ReFollow and click on the top “I’m Following” and then on the top-right “No tweets in X days”. I usually choose 30 or 90 days, since not everyone is a daily tweetaholic like me. At this point you don’t have to choose “Select All” and “UnFollow”. At the very least it allows you to look over the list and realize some people that you really like or know personally haven’t been on in a while, and maybe drop them a line. The best thing about ReFollow though is finding people that are engaging with you that you may not be following. Choose “I’m not following” from the choices at the top (make sure this is the only one checked off) and then on the right hand side in the middle of the page, check the option “Users who have @mentioned me”. This will show you all the people on Twitter that have mentioned/replied/retweeted you that you are not following. I love doing this search because it shows me who is making an effort to reach out. It shows who supports me, and that makes me happy and I want to see who they are so I can possibly support them. This is a great option especially if you’ve fallen behind or don’t get notifications at all about new followers (like me). © 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips . Use ReFollow.com To Find The Most Engaged and Dearly Departed

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Use ReFollow.com To Find The Most Engaged and Dearly Departed

A number of people have asked me recently what I think about running advertising in Twitter streams. Should it be done or avoided? What impact might it have on you as a Twitter user if you do run them? Are there times you should and shouldn’t use ads to monetize your Twitter account? My opinion is pretty simple. I know no everyone will agree but it’s probably somewhere in the middle of the spectrum of opinions on the topic. Some argue that Ads should never be used on Twitter – others argue that you should monetize your account in any way you can. My Opinion on Ads on Twitter: I have nothing against it in principle. I see now reason why someone investing time, creativity, energy and brain power into becoming an influence in this medium shouldn’t be able to receive financial reward for doing so. People on Twitter who genuinely grow their audience big enough to attract advertisers are usually doing something useful. Whether it be entertaining, informing, educating, empowering etc – I see people using other mediums making money for doing this type of thing, why not on Twitter? I make a living from my blogs (about half my income from them is from advertising) and while Twitter is a unique medium in some ways I don’t have issue with it being monetized if done well. Interestingly it was 5 or so years ago that the big debate was about whether blogs should be monetized – many of the same arguments were going back and forth at that time – just replace ‘Blog’ with ‘Twitter Account’ and you’ll from some of those old articles to see where the debate is heading! Having said that – I personally believe that three elements probably should come into play when considering whether you run a particular ad on your account. The first is perhaps more about ethics than the other two which are for me just good business sense and about delivering value to my followers: 1. Transparency If you’re being paid to tweet, disclose it. How you clearly do it in 140 characters can be challenging but it can be done ranging from ‘Sponsored Tweet’ in the tweet to ‘#ad’. I suspect we’ll see some widely accepted practices emerge around this in the coming year. 2. Relevancy I was asked a while back to run an ad in my twitter stream for running shoes. I refused in the same way I would refuse to run the same ad if someone wanted me to run it on my blog. My blog and twitter stream are on the topic of social media and blogging – not shoes or running. While I do stray off topic from time to time on Twitter (and my followers forgive me for doing so) – receiving money for a tweet that is totally irrelevant to my topic will probably not go down well with my followers. I’m not sure it’d deliver much value to an advertiser either to promote an irrelevant ad (although I see my fair share of them on TV). Related to this I’d probably also be wanting to only do sponsored tweets that are legitimate and not scammy products or services. Really it comes down to keeping on topic and being useful to followers. 3. Frequency I’ve run three disclosed and relevant advertising tweets on my @problogger Twitter account in 2 years (one through ad.ly and another two were sold directly). In that time I’ve tweeted 15,330 times. I don’t think I’m in danger of letting my Tweet stream become overrun by paid tweets. However if twitter advertising does take off I could see the temptation for some Twitter users to let their streams become overrun by sponsored Tweets. In the same way that I refrain for letting all of the real estate on my blog above the fold get overrun with advertising (pushing the content down under the fold) I would want to let ‘content’ and being useful be the primary thing that I do on my Twitter account. What other Factors Would You Ad? These are the three main factors that I’d consider as I look at whether I’ll tweet something for money. © 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips . My Opinion on Ads on Twitter [or Sponsored Tweets]

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My Opinion on Ads on Twitter [or Sponsored Tweets]