Alert Blog Reviews

On Twitter, you have 140 characters to play with. Most people stick to the 26 letters, 10 numbers, half a dozen punctuation marks and currency signs. Fact is, underneath your fingers there are a treasure trove of characters to make your tweets more interesting, shorter & more colourful. By making your tweets stand out, you will get more people actively reading them because subconsciously your eyes are drawn to them. If your tweets are useful (and I’ve no reason to doubt why they should be), you should end up with more clicks on links, more retweets and generally more twitter love. Here’s a few of my favourite special characters that I like to put in Tweets. I explain how to get them on the most common form of keyboards – the US Keyboard Layout (which is used by the most of the western world). If different, I will also include the UK keycode, between them that should cover most of the keyboards in English speaking countries, but if English isn’t your native language, these may be different . The characters are there, but you’ll have to dig to find them. 1. The Ampersand How To Get It: Press Shift + 7 When Should You Use It? This character is very simple, as it shortens the word “and” to 1 character, saving yourself two characters in the process. 2. The “At” Sign How To Get It: UK Keyboards – Shift+’ US Keyboards – Shift+2 When You Should Use It? Used all the time in emails, the @ sign can also be used for events (for example, the show begins @ 7pm). Saving yourself one character in the process. 3. The Asterix How to Get It: Press Shift + 8 When You Should Use It? This is one I use all the time for emotions, verbs, basically what I am doing. If I’m writing **smiles and nods**, I’m smiling and nodding. This is great in conveying how I feel about things, as well as emotions that are difficult to convey such as sarcasm. 4. The Music Symbol (Joined Quavers) How to Get It: Hold Alt & Type 14 When You Should Use It? I’ve begun seeing this more and more when people are talking about music & songs they are listening to, particularly when using services such as Last.fm & Spotify . Often people will post music recommendations, followed with joined quavers, to show that it’s a musical link. It’s a great idea to do this, as it can be a text based warning to users, by saying “this link is a Spotify link, so a song will automatically play when opened”. This’ll stop users opening music links when they really shouldn’t be. 5. Hearts How to get it: Hold Alt & Type 3 When You Should Use It? The obvious place is by sharing a link that you love, or a twitterer you love, or anything you “More than like”. This negates the old

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8 Characters to Make Your Tweets Sparkle

By Firas Steitiyeh – Follow him @steitiyeh It’s known that a brand for a product is like reputation for a human being. There are so many articles, books and people that talk about branding and how it is done properly. A lot of bloggers out there, who are most probably new, just do not care about their Twitter page and how it looks. Considering that you have got a proper brand and theme for your blog (or product) now you need to have a Twitter branded page that matches your current brand. Tip#1: Background Stop using Twitter’s default backgrounds and get yourself a customized background. There are many tutorials on the Internet on how to get yourself a decent Twitter background and if you suck in design (as in my case) I just have my logo repeated all over a solid background. If you’re looking for a top-notch twitter background, there are various providers listed on different posts of Twitip that may be what you’re looking for. Bottom line, never use Twitter’s default background. Tip #2: Avatar I always mention in my articles and discussions about branding, that your avatar should be unified on all of your public profiles including, Facebook, Twitter, Orkut, Flickr, Gravatar, MyBlogLog, FriendFeed, etc… simply, use the same avatar you’re using on the Internet for Twitter, and if you currently use more than one, just try to unify your avatar everywhere. People will reach a level where they will start recognizing you from your avatar, if you use picture1 on Twitter and picture2 on Facebook and for comments you use picture3 they will either think that 3 people share the same name, which happens, or they will have a really hard time knowing it’s you. They also may end-up not reading the comment or your update just because they don’t know it’s you. Tip #3: Design colors Customizing your design colors is a very easy task and an important one as well. You have options where you can customize colors in your Twitter profile; background, text, links, sidebar and sidebar border. Always try to use the colors used within your logo or theme, and make sure to use matching colors. I always use the same background color on both the background photo and design. For cases where a visitor with an unexpected screen resolution lands onto your twitter profile, the background image and the background color will look like one layer! Tip #4: Brand your tweets All of the previous 3 tips are design related tips, but this one which is extremely important is a contextual tip. You might be wondering how could one brand her/his tweets? And no, it’s not about Hashtags. Branding your tweets includes the core topic of your tweets, what your tweets are mainly about, are they personal tweets? Technology tweets? Financial tweets? I think that you should be tweeting about one topic the most; otherwise people will lose trust in you. Remember; Jack of all, master of none. I’m not saying if your main focus is technology not to tweet about movies. No, I just mean to have the major share of your tweets going towards one topic instead of confusing people. This is one part of branding tweets, the other part is the ethics of Twitter which most of you know. The ethics of twittering are many but the most common are: thanking other tweeps for retweeting your tweet, follow back people who are following you (in most cases), keep your tweets family rated (unless you’re in the adult industry), thank other tweeps if they recommended you for a #FollowFriday and do not spam your followers. © 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips . Get a Matching Twitter Brand Related posts: Personal Brand – How to Build Yours In Twitter Why You Should Start Over On Twitter With A BRAND NEW Account Make a Good Impression with a Custom Twitter Background

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Get a Matching Twitter Brand

By Trevor Dobrygoski of Twit 101 – Follow him @trevord209 Have you seen the Hangover? If not, you may want to grab the eight other people out there who haven’t and go give it a peek. Without ruining it for all eight of you, here is a quick rundown. A group of four friends go to Vegas to celebrate an upcoming wedding. After a long night of bachelor party fun, they lose the groom. The remaining three spend the bulk of the movie trying to remember what happened, find their friend and make it back to the wedding in LA. Had the guys took advantage of their Twitter account and used a few of these simple tips, many pitfalls and shenanigans from the day after could have been avoided. I am not a fan of using cliches, but hindsight is 20/20. (I’ll admit if they did use any or all of these tips, it would have made for a really boring movie.) 1. Mobile Updates Everyone is talking, texting and taking pics and video from their phone when they are out for a night on the town. Using your mobile device to take pictures of your night is commonplace. For smartphone owners posting to Twitter is super easy with apps like Ubertwitter or Tweetie. If you have a standard voice only phone you can MMS (picture message) your mobile photography to a web app such as Twitpic. Twitpic has a dedicated email address for you to send the MMS to. Here are the steps to find out where to send the MMS to: 1. Log into Twitpic using your Twitter credentials 2. Go to settings and you’ll see the email address Twitpic has created for you. 3. Copy that email address and add it to your phone. 2. Use Hashtags Using hashtags is a great way of tracking topics, events or even are sometimes used as part of an application. In the case of this party, the group could have used a hashtag like #dougsvegasparty. This could have brought all of the random tweets, pics and videos posted over the couple day period together. This could have answered some questions early on like “Why is there a Tiger in the bathroom?”. If they glanced through the tweets with that hashtag, they might come across something like this: [Mike Tyson needs better security. Got the tiger in the back of the cop car without wakin' up the champ. Back to the hotel #dougsvegasparty] 3. Timestamp If you haven’t noticed when browsing your timeline, every tweet has a time and date at the bottom. In the case of a bad memory (self-induced or not) this alone could have filled in many of the time gaps when things are a little hazy. 4. GPS Location Many of the new devices and services can put a map tack on Google Maps showing where you were when you sent the tweet; kind of like a digital  bread crumb. If you go with a location based service option (Brightkite, Ubertwitter, etc), it is dually helpful. Your tweets will be time stamped and also give you a location of your tweet. This will come in very handy when mid-way through the night when things are a little fuzzy and your updates aren’t as easy to follow. The problem with the first four solutions is they are very public. Anyone, including Stu’s girlfriend, could have followed the evening via Twitter. While this may be okay for some events, the happenings of these couple of days needed to be a little more discrete. Tips five and six will be a little more incognito yet offer some handy features. 5.  Reminders (@rtm) This one could have been a huge timesaver for the gang. If they sent a DM something like this to @rtm (Remember the Milk): [d rtm tomorrow 9am get Doug from the roof], they would have received an SMS with a reminder at 9am. All four of the guys could have had a horribly hung over drive back to LA together. If you can text your updates and DMs into Twitter, you should also receive incoming DMs. Alternatively, Blackberry and other smartphone users can get them with one of the numerous available applications. 6. Evernote (@myen) With a slogan like “Remember Everything”, following Evernote on Twitter could have helped the guys out tremendously. Evernote can be updated by texting a DM to @myen. All of the DMs can be searched for by typing DM or Twitter into the search box. You can take a quick peek at this post from the Evernote blog for more explanation (and a video). After the Vegas wedding DMs like these could have shed some light on their vehicle debacles: [d myen bought the high roller package. see Eddie before we head back.] or [d myen left the Mercedes parked on Las Vegas Blvd. Hope $4 was enough for parking]. This only scratches the surface of how Twitter can be used to remember things. Share your tips in the comments below. [image: Kevin Lau ] http://www.flickr.com/photos/kevinlau/2188869187/ © 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips . 6 Ways Twitter Can Help A Bad Memory Related posts: 10 Ways To Create A Community Around Your Tweetup 10 Ways To Avoid Being Sued On Twitter 10 Ways To Use Twitter For Weight Loss

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6 Ways Twitter Can Help A Bad Memory

For many people, real time is the holy grail of search—and an area that the popular microblogging service Twitter has soundly beaten all the search engines on. Google’s struggling with it, and Bing’s last foray, in partnership with Twitter, was disappointing . But they’re not about to make that mistake again. Bing says if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. They’re partnering with Twitter to bring real time to searches. Bing describes the search engine: A real-time index of the Tweets that match your search queries in results. This feature makes it easier to follow what’s going on by reducing the amount of duplicates, spam, and adult content. Giving you the option to rank tweets either by most recent or by “best match,” where we consider a Tweeter’s popularity, interestingness of the tweet, and other indicators of quality and trustworthiness. Providing the top links shared on Twitter around your specific search query by showcasing a few of the most relevant tweets. Additionally, Bing automatically expands those small URLs (like bit.ly) to enable you to understand what people are tweeting about. Instead of showing standard search result captions, we select 2 top tweets to give users a glimpse of the sentiment around the shared link. And to see it in action (or you can use it here ): Interestingly, this comes at the same time as other real time search developments from Google . However, real-time indexing and actually accessing the real time information in Twitter can be two vastly different things. Bing wisely highlights the benefits this real time search info, using personal examples from their staff, most notably “Sean Suchter (my boss) and I avoided a closed freeway on a rainy Seattle day and made our flight home” and “Eric Scheel (principle program manager on the team) a photo-gear junkie, keeps up on early product reviews and owners’ tweets, which helped him decide on his next purchase” (although clearly non-RT search could do that). For now, the Twitter-enhanced results reside at http://www.bing.com/twitter , but they may be fully integrated with all SERPs later. A partnership with Facebook is also slated to be announced today. What do you think? Is this what you’re looking for in real time search? Will you use it? Do you want it on your regular SERPs, or do you like using it separately?

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Bing Goes Real Time with Twitter