Joshua Guffey

Posts Tagged ‘twitter’

Further big changes are coming to Twitter, we can be sure of this. Especially since Facebook’s PR stain, more users may gravitate more towards Twitter without actually closing their Facebook accounts.

End in the end, it will all just be an interesting chapter in web history — but, for now, when big Twitter changes come…what will it bring? — Okay, enough setup…here’s the meat of it.

Twitter is changing. We may not like it but it’s happening. So what will it mean? Well it’s very possible that a flatening may be occuring.

What I mean is this…
Much of what has made Twitter so significant has be that it’s been a democratic platform. Anyone can post. Anyone can read. Anyone can follow… You get the idea.

It’s also been less then impressively profitable for the founders given it’s global (and relationally…instantaneous) proliferation and impact. Only Facebook has seen faster numbers of adoption.

It’s been interesting to watch as Facebook makes moderate to serious changes to their platform on practically a seasonal basis, while Twitter has remained, largely unchanged in comparison.

Facebook has managed to piss off millions upon millions of people simultaneously. — Simultaneously! And on many occassions. Twitter’s community, on the other hand, is significantly smaller, but in many ways more loyal to the brand.

Facebook has become the social network of convenience. While Twitter is largely untapped. Which is why I think it might be wise for the powers that be at Twitter to continue to make changes slowly. We’ve seen what happens when you change something emotionally charged for millions of people. Massive trust is lost.

Now is an opportunity for Twitter, but if they go about changing too much too fast, I’m afraid they may leave some of their audience behind as well. Or at least their trust and loyalty.

I was going to write some kind of introduction to this post and then realized… you’re here to find Twitter peeps… so get to it!

Here are a few ways I’ve discovered to find the peeps that you’d most like to follow.

For the newbies: (you can probably skip this part)

• Follow some of your Gmail contacts. If you didn’t do this when you started your Twitter account, you can do that here.
• See who they are following. You’ll usually find more friends in your circles this way; often people you wouldn’t have thought of on your own.
• Tweet about topics that you want to connect with others on. People want to connect with others on similar topics and with people who share their same basic attitudes that they themselves possess.  So tweet!

Once the training wheels are off:

• Browse Listorious for who is listed in the topics that interest you. Follow whole lists or just people.
• Run some simple Twitter searches for the more obscure terms that interest you (perhaps kayaking San Diego)
• Explore who is on lists that were made by those who you already follow or who you find to be interesting or influential.
• Follow insightful, funny or interesting commenters on blogs that you read.
• Explore some influencial tweep’s favorited tweets (such as Scobleizer’s favorites) for interesting twitterers to follow.

Ninja skills:

• Twiangulate some of the peeps you already follow to see who they commonly follow.
• Use a free service called RSSFriends to watch who certain tweeps follow.  You can then decide if they are someone you’d also like to follow.
• Find tweeps using Tweepz, a site that allows you to search by bio, name and location — and to sort those results based on follower/following counts, language and more. You can even combine search metrics, like this search which uses both the bio search terms “twitter addict” and the location search term “san diego”.
• Run a specialized Google search to find people on Twitter by words used in their name/username or their bio (example “work at Google“).
• When you meet interesting people in real life, ask if they Twitter.  It really doesn’t have to be “weird”.
• Engage in interesting conversations and be useful to those who follow you.  Don’t be spammy.
  (I know that this isn’t really advanced, but you’ll know why it’s listed here)

For every technique I’ve listed here, I’m sure there are many more that I’ve missed. Why not add to the conversation by adding your peep-finding strategies in the comments?  Be sure to leave your Twitter handle for others to find you.

If you found this article useful, please consider sharing it below.  For more on using Twitter for business subscribe to this blog or follow on Twitter

If you don’t already know about Aardvark, you should.  It allows you to ask a question of those people in your networks and those of your friend’s networks.  And it does a damn good job most of the time.

Aardvark attempts to provide you with answers from people who actually know about the topic you’re inquiring about. And it’s actually quite useful. Apparently even Google thinks so since they acquired Aardvark back in February for $50 million.

Here I’d just like to mention something that relates back to my post about timing.  Aardvark (like any web social network) has users who are active at various times. This said, it makes sense to position your question at a time when it’s likely that your specific question will get answered.   This isn’t possible with Aardvark’s basic web interface or their iPhone app, however Aardvark also offers the ability to ask questions via Twitter, which has the side-effect of making it possible to schedule questions.

The usefulness for asking via Twitter is you can ask your Twitter followers at the same time.  You can also use a service like Hootsuite or SocialOomph to schedule your question for a time when more people are going to be active or for when users who’d be more likely to know will be available.

Tonight I’m just asking a general question about managing documents in the cloud so I made it for early morning (7:45am PST).  My rational is that at this time early risers will be available and also, that they may be a more organized faction of the Aardvark community.  Really the big deal here is that there will be a great deal many more users available at this time than when I thought of the question late at night.

A better example of this might be a question like “I’m planning a trip to NYC next week. Got any tips on great breakfast cafes on or around Main St?”  Something like this would probably do best scheduled around morning time in NYC, so take account of time zones too.

You can schedule a question on Aardvark by scheduling a tweet to be sent out at anytime you wish and including “@vark” in the tweet.  Have fun!

-@JoshuaGuffey

So I started to write about a related topic and the keyboard revolted. Or maybe it was my fingers.

In any case this post about “which are my favorite Twitter clients and why” pretty much wrote itself.  It’ll be useful for you if you are looking to reduce confusion or streamline your interactions on Twitter.

What is a Twitter client and why do I care?
The best user experience for Twitter is generally achieved using a Twitter client, an application that acts as an intermediary between you and Twitter and does some of your bidding; or at least makes the experience easier and more enjoyable.  Twitter clients also tend to make engaging on Twitter more feature-rich and faster than if you were to engage simply using the web interface.

My favorite Twitter clients and why they’re worth your time
On my Mac I use Tweetdeck.  It’s powerful, customizable and I find that it keeps me in the conversation.  It can however be overwhelming if you have many columns and haven’t customized the notifications to only alert you of the high priority items, like your @ mentions and lists you like to keep a close eye on.  If you need help doing this leave a comment on the blog here and I’ll help you out.

I also use Tweetdeck on the iPhone but strictly for the lists functionality.  I use it to stay up on my local peeps as well as lists I follow for news and happenings in the spaces that concern me.

Tweetie for iPhone has been for a long time my absolute favorite iPhone Twitter app.  It’s really great for accessing my main Twitter home feed and responding quickly to peeps I see there.  It’s highly intuitive and pretty fast.  Where the performance begins to break down is with lists.  Which is exactly why I use Tweetdeck for lists.  Tweetie is just too slow in this regard.  For most everything else it’s great though.

Hootsuite is good if you have a need to schedule individual tweets. Like for example, you have a thought or find some news at 11:20pm when you know that nobody will see it if you share, so instead with Hootsuite you can share it at a later time.  Just select ‘send later’ and choose the day and time you’d like it sent.  This functionality is available on both the iPhone app and the web app.

Tap 11 is my new shiny object as Twitter clients go.  I’m an analytics guy.  I get my kicks from stats and from drawing actionable conclusions from patterns.  If you like to track things too, you might like Tap 11.  In addition to being a more than decent Twitter client, it offers the added ability to view charts and stats about all manner of things you can geek out on.  It is still in private beta though, so you’ll need to request access.

What are your favorite clients and why? I’d love to hear about it in the comments below. Thanks for reading.  ;-]

-@JoshuaGuffey (whispers: “follow, follow”)

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photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/evablue

When you send out tweets or Facebook updates, do you give much thought to their timing?

There are a number of interesting considerations to be made about timing with social media marketing, depending of course upon the intention of your tweets.

Ideally, if you’re using social media for the purposes of personal branding, promotion or other communication with your people, you’re also actually being social. It’s what makes it fun, connected and gives people a reason to pay attention. But that’s for another post.

How can you be more sure that the people you serve are able to benefit most from your, let’s face it, tiny, 140 charater messages?  Just broadly, I’ll give a few recommendations. These will shift depending on your specific demographics and goals, but it’s a jumping off point.

1. Promotional tweets (or Facebook messages) should be sent at times when your target market is present in that social space. Give some thought to this and if you aren’t there yourself during those times to do the posting, consider a scheduling service. Hootsuite offers a free service that includes scheduling as does SocialPing (still in private beta).

2. Think about the content of your message and if it is appropriate for that time of day. For example, if you sell pizza and you’re running a 2-for-1 special, when do you suppose you’ll get your greatest return on tweets promoting the offer?

My guess as to a good approach (mind you I haven’t done any pizza-lover research outside of consulting my stomach) — I’d think about tweeting about it once around 4:45-5:30 (when people are leaving work or just left work), then around 7:00-7:30 mention it again in a different way (avoid I’m a robot syndrome). I’d also tweet something social or fun once or twice in between the two promo tweets. You don’t want to have your profile filled with promo tweet after promo tweet.

3. It’s also highly useful to align yourself and your message around what is relavant with current trends. And sometimes to have fun heading in the opposite direction from how others are doing it.

We want to be relevant with the current happenings in the world (seasons, holidays and even events with large media coverage or anything really high profile) but ideally to do so in a way that sets us apart from the rest.

A great example of this was a ski resort commercial I heard on the radio not long ago. They were promoting their social media presence on Facebook, Twitter and the like, but they did it completely differently and hit their target market square on the head.

The commercial was with the usual absurdly-booming voice declaring that they were now on “Twitbook” and “Faceplant”. It was a riduclous commercial and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I don’t snowboard or ski, so I didn’t go look em up; but I guarantee if I were into snow sports I’d have been there following them.

So this all relates to timing in that social media is now widely accepted as a marketing channel and promoted everywhere. But the message gets stale. Their ad was on target and also refreshing change from the usual “become a fan on Facebook”.

Can you think in different ways about your timing? Are there areas that could be improved? And what can you add to this conversation?

For more ways to think outside-of-the-box about social media for business or just to connect, follow me on Twitter or subscribe to this blog