Alert Blog Reviews

Okay, so it’s been a few months in the making, but the shiny, new TwiTip is finally here! Thanks to the folks at Cre8d Design we’re more organized, colorful and easier to navigate. Check out the Add A Tip page, too! Now you can submit your guest posts right through the site, which is (in my opinion) way cool. Even better, regular guest authors will have their own bios for even more exposure. We’d love to hear what you think, so don’t hesitate to peek around and come back here with feedback. We’re still cleaning up a few things, so please be patient and let us know if you have any problems! © 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips . TwiTip Has a Shiny New Look!

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TwiTip Has a Shiny New Look!

We spend all day talking to each other about the importance of social media. I agree that it is important. We also seem to yell a lot about how social media can cure many marketing ills. I am often included in that kind of talk as well. We act as if social media is right for everyone to some degree or another. I feel that way most times but I am beginning to wonder if this is not putting the cart before the horse for the SMB (small and medium business) market. The Center for Media Research shared a report that tells an interesting tale regarding the SMB and social media. According to a new Citibank / GfK Roper survey of 500 small business executives across the United States, 76% have not found social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to be helpful in generating business leads or for expanding their business during the last year, while 86% say they have not used social networking sites to get business advice or information. Why is that? Well, the next point tells the tale. The survey found that general search engine sites such as Google and Yahoo! trump small business-focused sites and the WSJ.com as destinations for small business owners to seek business advice or information. 61% of respondents say they rely on these search engine sites. The first reason offered for the apparent lack of social media sophistication is the lack of time. I don’t disagree but I think it may be more basic than that. I think it’s lack of trust. Most small business people are literally just starting to understand the basics of good web design and development so the social media thing is way ahead of them. Is it because they aren’t smart? No. It’s more likely that they aren’t just suckers who listen to everyone prattling on about social media and how it is the light unto their path to profits. Many small business folks live around many small town folks. Small town folks may be using social media but they aren’t telling all of their cool friends in some urban center how they just crossed the street and are now successfully maneuvering down another block to do that again. They live where people are trying to get on with life in a difficult economic environment. As a result they are not interested in the latest and greatest social media trends. They are interested in getting what they need at the right price from someone they trust. Search engines and a good web site are more than enough to accomplish that in the vast majority of cases. Here’s how business owners in this poll see social media So go ahead and complain that I and the SMB just don’t get it. That’s cool. You have your opinion and it counts just as much as the next guy’s. What’s interesting though is that the battle cry of the hip or the Fortune 500 is yelled on a field far, far away from where a lot of people work, live and purchase. In fact, these aren’t battlefields at all. They are just simple places where people want some solid information they can trust and not just the referrals of ‘friends’ who wouldn’t know them if they stepped on them on their way to the next street corner.

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SMB’s – Behind the Curve or Right on Time with Social Media

By Zoey Dowling . Follow her @zoeyspeak . Twitter is a bright, shiny universe of new friends, new ideas, hilarious little snippets and occasionally even a spot of news. It’s a great way to promote your blog or your business. But if your primary purpose on twitter is promotion and not to connect with other people – abandon ship. Twitter is not for you. Ulterior motives don’t do well. They result in one action: UNFOLLOW. Mistakes are easy when you start out. After all, no-one is updating their status – they’re engaging with one another! And that’s confusing – is it private or can you join in? How do you make the most of it and have fun? Well for starters you could avoid the most irritating twitter behaviours. And before you start trawling through my twitter stream – yes I have committed most of them. 1. Gluttony (Over-Sharing) Do not, I repeat do not over-share. Do you really want to know about someone else’s digestive problems? I didn’t think so. When you went into graphic detail about your gastric flu did you consider all the people reading your tweets while they were eating? Your followers should be wanting to know more about you, not less. 2. Pride (Over-Promotion) People get pretty sick of you if all they here are continual, duplicated plugs for whatever it is that you’re promoting. The argument that some of your followers may have missed it because of the timing doesn’t hold water. It’s extremely irritating to see exactly the same tweet repeated. Get creative and find a way to send the same link in a different way. For example “my loyal follower has just commented at my blog, what do you think?” And yes over-promotion includes blathering about blog stats, follower numbers or fans. 3. Sloth (Automatic Anything) Anything that is automated means that you don’t care enough to make it personal. This includes automated DM messages for new followers, an automatic tweet in response to keywords or an auto-follow in response to keywords. This puts you squarely into the spambot category. If you don’t want to spend the time on twitter to be personal, don’t bother at all. 4. Greed (Not Engaging) Things get pretty boring pretty fast if all you do is update your status, post links, post pictures and promote your blog. In order for people to care about any of that, you need to engage with them. This involves replying when something sparks your interest, or you think you can be of help; re-tweeting where you can add value; and getting involved in the discussion. 5. Envy (Crashing the Party) Work out the difference between joining the discussion and crashing someone’s private conversation. If a tweet starts with @user it generally means it’s not for public debate because if the author wanted everyone they follow to see it there would be another character in front of the @user to make it visible to everyone. But if you really want to participate in the discussion at the very least acknowledge that you’re crashing. It’s less douchey that way. 6. Wrath (Blasting) I don’t care how passionate you are about your topic, there is no excuse for blasting. There is nothing wrong with how passionate you are and that passion will probably lead you to find many like-minded people on twitter. But (and it’s a big but), ramming your opinion down someone else’s throat when they don’t agree with you is no way to promote your cause or yourself – particularly if you haven’t taken the time to get to know the person at the end of your rant. I’m sorry activists but twitter isn’t really designed for you because you end up unleashing the bulk of your argument about a theory on one person. Not really fair is it? 7. Lust (Celebrity Stalking) Everyone loves to follow a celebrity or two. Nothing wrong with that. Although fair warning if you follow @mrskutcher and @aplusk you will have to witness some pretty treacly interchanges. It’s not the celebrity part that is the problem it’s all of their followers. If you say anything at all that could be vaguely interpreted as negative, be prepared for all of their followers to be all over you like a rash. In part because celebrities are so idolised but mostly because deep down their followers are thinking that by attacking you, ‘the hater’, the celebrity will acknowledge them, and might actually follow them back. So avoid the lemmings, they’re not worth it. © 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips . 7 Deadly Sins of Twitter

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7 Deadly Sins of Twitter

By Alok Saboo – Follow @truvoip Twitter is a great platform bringing together millions of people for you to interact. The challenge, however, is to identify the subset of this twitterverse that is relevant for you. The value that you can derive from Twitter is a function of the quality of people that you interact with. Today, I will present a great tool – Tweepi – that makes the onerous task of finding and following quality people a cakewalk. Tweepi presents a geekier, faster way to manage your Twitter experience. It currently has four tools and hopefully we will more in the future. Geeky Follow: Before you can prune your friend list, you need to build your friend list. Geeky Follow enables you to follow active tweeples who share the same interests are you. Just identify popular tweeple in your domain and selectively add people that are following them. The underlying idea is simple, people following users that you idolize share similar interests as yours. For example, if you are interested in technology related tweeps, you may want to follow users following @mashable or @techcrunch. After you enter the popular user, Tweepi will provide the list of users following the popular tweep and also provide various statistic about them, such as location, number of followers, tweets, replies, RTs, etc. Using all this information, you can then selectively follow the users that match your criteria. Ideally, you want to select tweeps who have been retweeted often and who also actively engage with others. Flush: While Twitter encourages interaction, you may find several users following you back. Depending on your requirement, you may want to unfollow users that do not reciprocate your friendship (indicating that they do not value your opinion). Tweepi provides a simple tool to unfollow users that are not following you back. Once again, Tweepi will provide all the stats about these users to help you make an informed decision about whom to unfollow. Geeky Reciprocate : Reciprocate does the opposite of Flush.  Reciprocate provides you a list of tweeps that are following you, but you are not following them. Again, based on the statistics that Tweepi provides, you may or may not decide to follow back your followers. Cleanup: Over a period of time, you may find that you have lot of friends, but they are not tweeting enough (e.g., left twitter) or spamming (the biggest complaint on twitter). Cleanup provides you some help to prune down your friend list to eliminate dormant or spammy users so that you continue to have a good experience with twitter. The best part of Tweepi is that it provides you with all the information you need to make a decision, but you are the ultimate judge. Tweepi even provides preset rules that you can use to make your search more effective, e.g., you can sort on the basis of followers to following ratio. Overall, it is a great tool to make enrich your Twitter experience and I would strongly recommend everyone to give it a try! © 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips . Tweepi – Twitter Follow Management With Stats Related posts: Did @PhilBaumann Just Save Follow Friday? Follow Friday Soup To Follow or Not to Follow; that is the Question

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Tweepi – Twitter Follow Management With Stats

Everyone has watched Facebook grow in popularity and significance over the past year or so. It almost sneaks up on you just how far reaching the social networking site has become. Claiming over 300 million users is impressive enough but some research is showing that there is data to support the claim that Facebook gets 1 out of every 4 pageviews in the US. Holy crap. That’s saying something. Henry Blodgett at the BusinessInsider Here’s a startling conclusion by Perry Drake of database marketing firm Drake Direct: Facebook accounts for 25% of U.S. online pageviews. Perry’s analysis was prompted by a study showing that the figure in the U.K. is 1 in 7. He pulled some Compete charts and concluded that the number here is 1 in 4. Google, meanwhile, accounts for 1 in 12 pageviews (8%). And Facebook is rapidly closing in on Google in terms of visits and uniques. Ok, so my first question was as always, who is Perry Drake. Drake’s bio over at his blog describes him as a consultant (isn’t everyone?) but also notes In addition to consulting, Perry is an Associate Professor at New York University in the Integrated Marketing Master’s Degree Program. Perry currently teaches various database marketing and web analytics and search optimization classes within the Integrated Master’s degree program and the Digital Marketing program. So while this isn’t Forrester type research I suspect that this gentleman has done stuff like this before and some of the numbers are a bit startling. Not the least of which concerns the number of unique visitors v Google as evidenced by the chart below. While Google holds a lead the trending must make some folks at the Googleplex a little antsy. Now, research is what research is. The numbers as collected by Compete need to be assumed accurate and I don’t know to what degree that can be verified or trusted. What can be considered though is the real impact of Facebook. Everyone likes to talk about Twitter but the sheer numbers of Facebook and its more in depth and personal feel make it, in my opinion, the best of the social media arenas. That is purely a personal opinion so you can agree or disagree all you want. What would be hard to disagree with though is the move that Microsoft made yesterday to try to harness some of this informational firepower . It looks like things are going to get pretty interesting as we move into the age of ‘real time’ search.

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Geesh! Facebook Sure Gets A Lot of Pageviews