What is Twitter Spam

Spam: You may not use the Twitter service for the purpose of spamming anyone. What constitutes “spamming” will evolve as we respond to new tricks and tactics by spammers. Some of the factors that we take into account when determining what conduct is considered to be spamming are:

• If you have followed a large amount of users in a short amount of time;
• If you have followed and unfollowed people in a short time period, particularly by automated means (aggressive follower churn);
• If you repeatedly follow and unfollow people, whether to build followers or to garner more attention for your profile;
• If you have a small number of followers compared to the amount of people you are following;
• If your updates consist mainly of links, and not personal updates;
• If you post misleading links;
• If a large number of people are blocking you;
• The number of spam complaints that have been filed against you;
• If you post duplicate content over multiple accounts or multiple duplicate updates on one account;
• If you post multiple unrelated updates to a topic using #;
• If you post multiple unrelated updates to a trending or popular topic;
• If you send large numbers of duplicate @replies or mentions;
• If you send large numbers of unsolicited @replies or mentions in an attempt to spam a service or link;
• If you add a large number of unrelated users to lists in an attempt to spam a service or link;
• If you repeatedly post other users' Tweets as your own;
• If you have attempted to "sell" followers, particularly through tactics considered aggressive following or follower churn;
• Creating or purchasing accounts in order to gain followers;
• Using or promoting third-party sites that claim to get you more followers (such as follower trains, sites promising "more followers fast," or any other site that offers to automatically add followers to your account);
• If you create false or misleading Points of Interest;
• If you create Points of Interest to namesquat or spam.

via support.twitter.com

 

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Pay with a Tweet - A social payment system

Sell your products for a tweet.

In today's world the value of people talking about your product is sometimes higher than the money you would get for it. ‘Pay with a Tweet’ is the first social payment system, where people pay with the value of their social network.

It’s simple, every time somebody pays with a tweet, he or she tells all their friends about the product. Boom.

Click here to create your download button.

via paywithatweet.com

I really like this business model.   It seems really obvious too.   Content producers or coupon creators could promote their other products and business by charging people with a tweet.  You can create a "sell" button that will allow tweeters to download content - but I would like to see this model extended to other things.

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dlvr.it - You Publish. We Deliver

Deliver It! - can take any of your RSS feeds and route them to any number of social sites including Twitter, Linkedin, and Facebook.   You can filter, schedule and plan what goes out and where it goes.  This a well thought out tool that gets your material out into the social grid right away.  I can see small business using it to promote their business - by doing quick mini blog articles using Posterous or Tumblr.   Catch the wave at http://dlvr.it

 

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SmarTweeter - Smart Tweets for better SEO

SmarTweeter is a new tool to help small businesses promote themselves on the web.   SmartTweeter will create tweets out of every page on your website.   You can edit the twitter messages and can schedule the tweets to be sent out automatically - or you can do it manually any time you like.   You can optionally use avoo.net to shorten all your urls.   All you tweets can be saved as they go out into a Tweets Directory - giving you some extra link juice.   SmarTweeter makes social media objects out of all your web pages without having to do anything.  In the near future SmartTweeter will place the outgoing tweets on content rich topic pages maintained by SocialPulse.com.   This will be a powerful way for a business to promote themselves - on Twitter and also have their webpage links placed on well visited pages.  Give it a spin at http://SmarTweeter.com

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Twitter Search Operators

Search Operators

You can type these search operators directly into the search box. (Alternatively, you can use the advanced search form to automatically constuct your query.)

Operator	Finds tweets...
twitter search	containing both "twitter" and "search". This is the default operator.
"happy hour"	containing the exact phrase "happy hour".
love OR hate	containing either "love" or "hate" (or both).
beer -root	containing "beer" but not "root".
#haiku	containing the hashtag "haiku".
from:alexiskold	sent from person "alexiskold".
to:techcrunch	sent to person "techcrunch".
@mashable	referencing person "mashable".
"happy hour" near:"san francisco"	containing the exact phrase "happy hour" and sent near "san francisco".
near:NYC within:15mi	sent within 15 miles of "NYC".
superhero since:2010-04-14	containing "superhero" and sent since date "2010-04-14" (year-month-day).
ftw until:2010-04-14	containing "ftw" and sent up to date "2010-04-14".
movie -scary :)	containing "movie", but not "scary", and with a positive attitude.
flight :(	containing "flight" and with a negative attitude.
traffic ?	containing "traffic" and asking a question.
hilarious filter:links	containing "hilarious" and linking to URLs.
news source:twitterfeed	containing "news" and entered via TwitterFeed

via search.twitter.com

 

Allen Bonde's 10 Steps to a Practical Social Media Business Strategy

1. Create a mission statement -- What are your top-level objectives for applying social media and Web 2.0? And how will you achieve them? Ideally, this can be boiled down to one statement, articulating both the vision and where you aim to focus in terms of specific strategies. Don’t skip – or skimp on – this one; it’s important.
2. Assign owners – Who will take the mission, build the team, secure the budget, identify the tools needed? And who will own each channel, like LinkedIn, Twitter, your blog, etc., as you scale up the program? In about half of the organizations we have looked at, marketing owns social media, but this is mostly because early social business tended to focus on marketing or online commerce first.
3. Outline employee policies -- Do you have a corporate social media handbook, with policies, style guides and guidance for employees looking to participate (on behalf of the company) in public forums and social sites? And as you roll out new social business tools, beyond creating awareness – see below – how will you encourage new behaviors and even innovative uses for these social tools?
4. Identify existing communities -- Where are discussions taking place now? For consumer products, they may take place on Amazon or Facebook, while business topics may originate on LinkedIn or internal forums. But it’s also likely that most discussions will span multiple social (and traditional) channels and involve both user-generated and enterprise content. Your social business strategy will need to address all of these!
5. Create a marketing plan -- How will you promote and roll out your new (or existing) social capabilities? Will word-of-mouth marketing be sufficient? Also, a training plan, incentives and recognition programs for frequent posters to communities and moderators will be needed.
6. Develop individual channel strategies -- Depending on which channels best fit the goals of your social business strategy, it’s important to look at the “role” and “tone” of each, think about cross-links (e.g., Facebook promotion back to your corporate blog) and leverage monitoring and benchmarking tools for tracking discussions, sentiment and your current “influence.” For example, Twitter Grader is a good way to see how you stack up in the world of Twitter.
7. Develop community strategies and programs – How will you support existing communities via new social business tools and encourage the widest number of users to share, publish and comment on information, whether it exists inside or outside the enterprise? In addition, what is needed to measure reputation and enable a trust model that scales across all communities?
8. Develop your platform strategy -- As companies look to integrate social channels with core business processes, a growing number are turning to social business software (SBS) platforms like those from Jive, OutStart or RightNow via its HiveLive acquisition. In evaluating these options, it is important to outline enterprise requirements (built-in expertise location, mobile access, etc.) and dependencies to help you scale from individual communities to enterprise collaboration and social networking.
9. Create a social business dashboard -- What metrics will you use to show the ROI for your programs? In the customer service arena, reduced costs from avoided calls or email and higher customer satisfaction are two proven measures to start with. For enterprise use of Web 2.0 in other areas, improved information sharing and lower communication costs are additional benefits that could be measured and tracked.
10. Publish an action plan -- What tactics are needed to fulfill your social business vision over the next 12 to 18 months? Typically, these plans start with management activities (steps 1, 2, 3 and 9), marketing-oriented tasks (steps 4, 5 and 6), content and community development (steps 4 and 7) and technology rollout (steps 7 and 8). Ideally, for each tactic, you want to articulate specific skills needed, timeframes and dependencies, and field trials to test assumptions and readiness for proceeding with subsequent phases.

via searchcrm.techtarget.com

How to Link Facebook Wall Entries to Twitter

You might be wondering how you can automatically post your wall entries on Facebook to Twitter.   You want anything new happening on your fan page to be shared on Twitter.  Its really quite simple.  First go to http://www.facebook.com/twitter  You will see a simple page that directs you to make the connection.   After clicking you will be taken to a page showing all of you fan pages that you have control over.   Find your fan page and click the button that says "Link to Twitter". 

This takes you to the standard page where you get to "Allow" or "Deny" access to Twitter.  You have the option here to login to Twitter or signout and login into a different Twitter account.   If you are Twittering for a business - you will want to log out of your personal account and sign into the target business account. Once that is complete you will return to your list of fan pages and you will see some check boxes.  If you dont want to share new photos then uncheck that box and save your changes.

I havent found a way to control the format of the tweets going out on Twitter from Facebook.  Sometimes you want to customize your tweets by adding hashtags so your followers can find you. 

Another issue that I find troublesome is that wall posting is shared on Twitter using bit.ly with the shortened url pointing back to the Facebook page.  This is OK some of the time but when you just want to share your new blog from your website you want to be able to post only once to Facebook and then let Facebook autopost to Twitter without your visitors having the intermediate stop on the Facebook page before getting to the blog posting. 

Another thing to notice is that when you share a link in Facebook it will include a nice thumbnail and text without you entering anything.  However when this gets sent to Twitter - only the link is visible.  Meaning that you need to add some text that does show up on Twitter.  I would advise playing around with this a bit to get the hang of it and make sure you are happy with the result.

Chris Brogan's Online Ecosystem

Facebook: connect with friends and family.

LinkedIn: share professional networks.

Twitter: communicate in real time, and find the new good stuff.

Google Wave: work on the future.

Blog: think and muse and share and publish.

via chrisbrogan.com

I thought this was a good summary of the uses of online tools. Many people struggle with how to use these things. I say "nicely put"

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How to Update Status on Twitter and Facebook

Its quite easy to provide a link that creates a twitter status update for something you are promoting in your blog.  Same for Facebook.   You dont want them to just go to Twitter but you want to help them out by filling out their status promotion for them.  Usually in your blog software you can highlight some text and select the link icon which will pop up a small window and allow you to insert a target url.  All the information is in the target URL.  
 

In order to understand whats happening you need to know a little bit about how parameters are passed to a URL.  Parameters are passed in key=value pairs.  The first parameter is preceeded with "?" and subsequent parameters start with "&".   I know its geeky - but little technical knowledge can help you understand whats going on.

For Twitter we just specify the http://twitter.com/home directory and specify the key=value pair of "status=what you wanna say and which links you wanna specify"

http://twitter.com/home?status=How to Update Status on Twitter and Facebook - http: //jeffreyblake.posterous.com/how-to-update-status-on-twitter-and-facebook

For Facebook we do something similar when "u" is the url parameter and "t" is the text parameter.  These parameters are passed to the PHP method http://www.facebook.com/share.php.  One thing I have noticed is that the title field gets overridden if you have a meta title (html title) set in your page.  Someone might want to verify that.

http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=<url>&t=<title>

 

Advantages and Disadvantages of URL Shorteners

 

URL shorteners are everywhere now.  I cant keep up with them.  Im talking about url shorteners and redirectors as tinyurl.com and bit.ly among many others.   It doesnt take a lot of reflection to understand that controlling links is a money making venture.  I think there are still opportunities in how the url shortener uses the links.

Some of the advantages of using one are:

• Short URLs - duh.  With the rise of Twitter and the need to keep tweets under 140 characters having a long URL is a detriment.
• If your provider allows custom short urls - this is a great way to create a url that is both short and memorable and reusable.   For example I have a custom url that I use to point to the google map of my house - as an example it might be http://tinyurl.com/myhouse which points to a long google map url.
• You can reuse the short url just like a normal url but your provider can accumulate statistics about how many times the url was visited.  This can be quite useful.  I use HootSuite and I often reuse a ow.ly shortenedd url if I can - so that I can see the numbers on it.
• A good shortener will pass along the page rank to the target page by using 301 redirect.  This is good because your link gets the google mojo. 
• A shortener is a great way to obfuscate the original url.   If you have an unsightly url (whatever that is) - then you can use a convenient url shortener to redirect your link.   The bad people also use this to hide the fact you will visiting a site you dont really want to go to.
• I have heard that some shorteners provide access to their database of links using an API - Ill have to do some research on this.  But you can imagine the wealth of information that could be leveraged if you cross Digg with Tinyurl.
• I am seeing more and more - the use of embedding target pages in a frame leaving the encompassing page to be branded or become an ad - Hootsuite, linkedin and Facebook all do it.  When I share a link in Twitter on Hootsuite - its nice that I can send along a bit of my own brand.

So there must be some disadvantages:

• As I mention above - short url nicely hides the original url.  This is a common practice among Phishers.  I want to send short urls but then I read the result I want to see the target url.  We will probably be seeing more of this.
• Tiny urls are meaningless and dont compell anyone to click on it for the most part.  On Twitter there is no link text and context so you just see the link.  The assumption on Twitter is that the accompanying text provides the context.
• In the coming year we may be seeing a shake out of the url shorteners - and when the one you have been using goes out of business - so will your link.
• The tiny url unless it has been customized has no natural keyword to attract and compell a person to click.

How to Add Twitter Feed to Facebook Fan Page

Many people wonder how to have your Twitter updates go to a Facebook Fan page.  Its pretty easy.  The basic strategy is to add a RSS feed to the Notes tab and let Facebook post naturally to your Page Wall.

1) Go to your Twitter page and click on your Profile so that you see only your updates.  At the bottom of the right side you will see an RSS icon and "RSS Feed of <YourID> Tweets".   You can right click and "Copy Link Location" or just click on it to view it and then copy the url up in the browser address field.

2) Go to Facebook and navigate to your Page.   What we are going to do is add the Feed to a Notes tab which will automatically display on your Page Wall.   If you havent created a Notes tab - do so now.    Click on "Notes" and then on "Write a New Note"  and then on the icon looks like a piece of note paper. (Yes Im confused too!).  You should a "Notes Setting" and a link that says "Edit Import Settings".   After you click on this - insert the url (rss feed) that you saved from Twitter.  Then press the "Confirm" button.  You should be good to go.   Facebook will periodically get todays tweets and shove it out to your Fan Wall..

Ok Now you might ask - What if Im already feeding my blog to the Notes Tab?  Well there is an easy solution.  What has to happen is that you must use a RSS Feed Aggregator so that you specify a single feed to Notes.

1) Create an aggregate feed by using http://xfruits.com    Just login and create an RSS aggregator.  This is quite simple.  Just add any number of RSS feeds.   I just used the url to my blog and twitter pages and it seemed to figure it out.  You can also use the Google Reader to create an aggregated feed.

2) Take the aggregate feed url and just place it into the Notes settings page as described above.  voila

How To Use Twitter For Small Business

Twitter is a powerful tool to help businesses.  Now that tweets are being indexed at Google - Twitter is becoming a powerful search mechanism.  Its no longer necessary to have a large following to get some reach. 

• Its a great idea to twitter events that happen on your web site. 
• Enable users to tweet almost every page. 
• Make sure you use some good keywords or #hashtags to allow your tweets to be found.
• Use keywords that get retweeted - search around for these list - I have found that "free" and "jobs" are quite powerful for example. 
• Make a short compelling statement. 
• Use a url shortener to conserve space on links back to your site.  Limit your tweets to 120 characters to allow re-tweeting. 
• Dont place urls at the end of a long tweet - they will be truncated on retweet. 
• Think about including your website domain name with ""www" - to allow Twitter to make it into a link and get it cataloged in google. 
• Register your customers twitter handle @name and add it to some tweets to get them recognition. 
• Use something like twitterfeed.com to automatically send out a tweet for new blog entries.  Dont forget to thank your followers. 
• Use Twitter to monitor your business brand online.  There are a million free tools out there.
• Prevent "brand trashing" by engaging early if someone says something negative.  
• Make sure your tweets are authentic and make small conversations with your customers to build trust. 
• Only follow people that provide valuable information
• And for the love of God - dont twitter spam me.

How to Brand A Small Business Website

Branding of your website is important because it contributes to the long term value of your business.  It creates a sense of customer confidence.   For a small business - your brand is the niche value you bring to the market.  Its the expectation of value in the customers mind about your product.  Part of building a brand is creating an impression in the market.   There are a number of ways you can do that with your website.

• Memorable Logo - a logo is not a brand although it represents one.  All great brands have a memorable logo.  Your website should have one too.  Its not the most important thing - but it can symbolize the value you bring consistently.
• Email List - You have to have a way to engage your customers.  Email is one of the easiest.  You can start having a small relationship by sending short emails to your customers.
• Press Releases - You should publish anything of interest about your brand as often as possible.  There are many free online press release sites.
• Free Content - Give away something of value.  This could be an small e-book or a pdf file.  The kinds I appreciate the most are things that are of real value - not just sales pitches.  Many online businesses use free content to get email addresses.  I personally lean toward just giving material away without requiring an email address.  You might try a combination if you must.
• Blogging - Having a blog is a great way to demonstrate your brand.  Google loves blogs and indexes the pages quickly for blogs that are updated regularly.  
• Twitter - Twitter is becoming a premier search site.  If you have a truly unique offering - making updates about it on Twitter can drive traffic to your website.   You can set up a Twitter account for your business.
• Compelling Content - You will have to be prepared for your visitors by having interesting pages.
• Newsletter or Ezine - Offer to your email subscribers a periodic newsletter.   Your logo and brand slogan should go out with the email if you can.  Try something like MailChimp.com
• Auto-responders - Send an email out to any one who requests it - night or day.  Most hosting companies provide this.
• Domain Name - Use your domain name everywhere.  Make sure its in your email signature and all your correspondence.

Twitter Tips For Personal Branding

I have been reflecting on how to be most effective on Twitter – and to use Twitter to convey my brand. Since my primary trade is a software architect – I immediately recognize what I think are best practices – in fact are probably patterns for success on Twitter. So here they are:

• First start with an interesting design. You can customize the Twitter page using what Twitter gives you. Or you can upload a custom background. I uploaded a simple image of the ocean – an image large enough to cover the entire background even when the browser is enlarged. Many others seem to upload images that have a lot of personal information about themself. See Chris Brogan’s page for example. Try viewing the background image to see what he is uploading. Im not entirely certain how these images are actually created. I have to report back later.
• Include a concise (Ha Ha Ha) profile that describes your brand. Make these words count. Sometimes, I use these words to make entire judgments about fellow Twitterers. Expressions like “Having Fun, Hanging Out” do not promote your brand. Say something significant so that others can follow you easily.
• Customize your Twitter ID. Mine is http://twitter.com/jeffrey_blake. I recommend that you use your own name – but without the underscore. (There seems to be some other jeffreyblake out there who grabbed it before me). So it behooves you to capture your name sooner than later. This is good advice for all the social networking sites. You are the brand – use your name or at least your tagline.
• Enter your real name so that when you are listed people don’t have difficulty identifying you.
• Upload a clear professional image of yourself. As a rule I don’t follow people who have goofy avatars or don’t wear shirts in their image – In fact, just like on linkedin I have a habit of removing those connections to protect my brand.
• Dont protect your updates. I think its important to share your ideas and fully take credit for them.
• As for Tweets – say something pertinent. Have a conversation. Add value when you can. Have a hundred relevant comments before you tell me what you are having for dinner.
• Follow everyone relevant to you. I started twittering because of Guy Kawasaki after hearing him talk about his new company alltop.com. Ideally, have real conversations with these people. In time these connections can expand to Linkedin or Facebook and beyond.
• Learn the Twitter Etiquette whatever that is. I enjoyed this one which had some relevant points.
• Cross advertise yourself in your blog, your website or in your social net profiles. Add your twitter address into your emails.

Go forth and converse!