Thursday, May 28, 2009

Tweefind - search results by influence



Tweefind works differently than Twitter Search in that the results are sorted by tweets of people who have more followers, meaning more influence. So if you search on Ding Dongs and Ashton Kutchner or Guy Kawalski have tweeted about it, their tweets are going to be at the top of the search results list, with the people with fewer people in descending order after that.

This can be useful if you are a company with a product and you are looking to see who is talking about you and what kind of influence they have.

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Localtweeps - finding people close by

Twitter is used all over the world, and it is a great way to extend your business's reach, but sometimes you may want to reach local customers. Localtweeps allows you to list your Twitter account in their database and attach a zip or postal code to it. You can look for users in a certain locale by zip, or browse by city, state (or province). Conversely, users looking for your particular service can enter a zip code and find you!

In addition, you can connect with other local businesses in your area for networking and partnership opportunities, etc. Right now the service is only supporting the U.S. and Canada , but they plan to expand service to include other countries in the future.

Get listed and get found!

Friday, May 22, 2009

Follow Friday - what's it all about?

Follow Friday is a way of recommending people you follow to other people in your sphere of influence. Recommendations take away the pain and gives everyone the chance to give their friends a chance to interact with more people.

Instead of just tweeting a list of people to follow, give a short description of why you think they are of intersts to others, whether it be their niche, that they are nice, that they live in Paris, whatever, just put context around why you are recommending them.

This concept was started by Micah Baldwin as a way to allow the "little guys" to get exposure. You can read about it here.

There is also a website where you can see the real-time stream of Follow Friday, that is, anyone putting #followfriday in their tweet.

How to do it:

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

DoesFollow?


As simple tool that does one thing: let's you know if the person you’re following is following you back.

Check it out at http://doesfollow.com/

Thursday, May 14, 2009

Tweetlater - Essential Automation and Tracking Tool

If Tweetdeck is the quintessential Twitter tool, then TweetLater is like your Twittter production house. It is the ultimate in automation. This is a free tool (there is a professional version, but with the free version being so robust, it is unnecssary for me). There are a ton of things that you can do with this tool, it is very powerful with helping you:

  • Scheduling Tweets that can be sent at a time when you are unavailable, even while you are sleeping or on vacation.

    > Sharing value-added content is an incredible way to raise credibilty with your followers who are also potential clients? Got a whole list of articles or books that you think are good resources? Spend an hour creating individual tweets about them and schedule them out for once per day (or as often as you like) for several days or weeks.

    > Got clients all the round the world? Make sure you stay top-of-mind by Tweeting when they are awake (while you may be asleep!)

    > Going on vacation and still want to stay top-of-mind by Tweeting while you are sipping that mai-tai? Prepare and schedule out your tweets while away and you followers may never know you were away!

  • Set up Keyword Digests (reviews)

    > This is a great tool, much as I described for Google Alerts. If there are words, keywords, or topic conversations that you are interesting to "listening" in on you can set up a keyword digest and get them emailed to you as often as every 4 hours.

    > I sell a social media gadget called Poken. So I have set up a keyword alert for Poken so that I can understand the trends around what people are talking about it. It works really great, one word of caution though - make sure to select for English only, otherwise you will get may too many results!

  • Get a digest of all of the @replies you have received

    > I think that Tweetdeck is more useful for following your @replies, but having it emailed to you is also a good prompt if you are not in Twitter as often as you would like.

  • Manage unlimited Twitter accounts

    > If you have multiple Twitter accounts, this is nearly the only tool that allows you to view and manage all your accounts all in one location at no charge. A nice feature if you do have multiple accounts.

  • Automatically “return-follow” your new followers or "return-unfollow" people who unfollow you

    >It is convenient, but I am not a big fan. I don't think you should automatically follow every person who follows you. There are a lot of "get rich quick" people out there who you just don't want to follow. Also, you have a follow strategy in place for your buiness which dictates that you only want to follow people within your particular niche. Whatever the case, I think that following and unfollowing should be done by you.

  • Automated DM's

    >The one thing it does that I highly discourage my clients from doing is the creation of automatic messages when have new followers. This is the "thanks for following me, please buy my product" or "thanks for following me, I can help you make millions online!" These are awful and so spammy! If you really want to welcome new followers, do it individually with a customized message applicable to that user, or don't do it at all!

There you have it, TweetLater, a very powerful automation tool that can help you keep your tweeting strategy on track.

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Twellow - Finding others in your niche

Looking to find people in your specific niche and industry? Twellow is great Twitter directory that can assist you with connecting to the right people for you. It is basically The Yellow Pages for Twitter. Twellow searches and analyzes millions of public tweets and associates them back to the owners, they then take the owner (user) and categorize them by topic.

You can browse their site by topic looking for whatever peaks your interest, or you can drill down further into a specific category and find a more refined search results. For example, if I just look under the Green category, you will see there are more than 17,000 people, but if I look for people talking about or associated with Pets (in the Green category), than comes back with 49. That is much more manageable. After that you can scan people by location, what they are saying etc.

Don’t forget to add your profile as well. To do that first make sure you are not already there by entering your Twitter username in the search box. If it is there,make sure to complete your profile. If it is not there, add it by following the step-by-step process outlined on the Twellow site.

A very easy tool to use, so get out there and let your twingers do the walking!

Friday, May 8, 2009

Tweetdeck - the Quintessential Twitter Tool

my Tweetdeck screen

To start this blog, I wanted to begin with what I think is the quintessential Twitter tool, Tweetdeck. If you use no other tool, use this one. If you are going to be stuck on a deserted island and can only bring one Twitter tool, choose Tweetdeck.

This tool gives you a wonderful dashboard that breaks down the components of Twitter. You can have up to 5 columns of information available to you at all times, I usually use 4 unless I am doing something specific with groups (more on that later).

You can have a screen for "All Friends" - that's everyone that you are following. It is a constant flow of what everyone (that you are following) is saying. So if you are following a lot of people, but that can be a lot! But unlike viewing this stream on the web, you don't have to keep refreshing the screen, it does it on its own (although you can force a refresh if it is not fast enough for you!).

Next, you can have your "Replies" column (@replies). This is when someone talks to you or uses your name in a Tweet in public. This allows you to keep track of who is talking about you or with you. Of course, you can also do this from the web, but...not all on one screen. Remember, these are public tweets.

Next is DM's. These are Direct Messages. A message from one Twitter username to another. These are not public. A lot of people "auto-DM" when they get new followers. This an automatic message that goes out, something like "thanks for following me, buy my product". [By the way, I discourage my clients to do these, if you can't tell.] So if you follow a lot of people with these, you may got a DM column that is full of "junk mail." These can be deleted. I just mention it because you may miss authentic DM's if you don't pay attention.

Last on my dashboard is Favorites. These are tweets that I have tagged as a favorite for one reason or the other. I don't think most people use this one, so I will tell you about what most people do use, and that is either Groups or Search.

You can customize a group of people you follow. You can have several groups. If there is a group of industry people you want to watch, you can call it "Twitterati" (or whatever), add the people you want and you will see just their tweets in the Groups column. You can create a group of girlfriends, celebrities, whatever. The group allows you to have a filtered list of a subset of the people you are following.

I sell a social media gadget called Poken. So sometimes I use Search to see if people out there are talking about it. With the Search column, I can enter the word or phrase I am interested and see the results of anyone mentioning this term, and not just people I am following. It's great for companies looking to see who is talking about them.

Before I leave you, I just want to mention a few things about the Tweetdeck header.


From here you can enter your next tweet, shorten a url, upload a photo, open or close columns, as well as decide if you want your tweet to appear as your Facebook status. (I like this control rather than having every tweet show up on Facebook, I think it annoys people, it certainly annoys me!)

TweetDeck is an Adobe Air-based application that runs on PC or Mac (it requires that you install the software first).

And that's pretty much it! It is a global view of everything that is going on in your little Twitter-world!

Monday, May 4, 2009

Welcome and About this blog

As a social media coach and owner of Your Online Go To Gal, I receive a lot of questions about Twitter and how to use it. There is a TON of information on the internet about exactly that topic. Every week there is a new (and longer) list of tips and tools to help people use this social media tool to its best advantage.

The problem is, who has time to search that out, digest it all, and come up with the best ones to use?

I do! ...Okay,maybe I don't have that much time, but I certainly have the passion, so I am more than happy to figure it out for you!

Have you seen those lists of the top 25, 36, 48, even 100 Twitter tools? Do your eyes glaze over and head roll back when you reach 21 and 1/2? Me too! I decided the best thing to do about that is to take them one at a time. And that's exactly what I am going to do!

I have launched this blog, it's a place where I will go through and describe one tool or tip at a time.

This will be in small digestible amounts so neither you or I will get overwhelmed!


Look forward to sharing with you.

Best,
Andi Fisher
Chief Go To Gal