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In the Eastern Conference Finals series on Tuesday night, the Boston Celtics beat the Magic on the road in Game 2, taking a 2-0 series lead in the best of seven. Shortly there after, a mysterious tweet appeared on PaulPierce34 twitter page saying: “Anybody got a BROOM?” Obviously the tweet sent the media flying off the handle. They even asked Dwight Howard of the Magic in the postgame conference for his thoughts on Pierce’s post. Howard was visibly upset and said no comment before saying “Pride come before a fall.” Even though that tweet got Howard riled up, Pierce’s online representatives are saying the account was hacked.
“Pro Basketball Talk” quickly came to his defense saying that Paul Pierce’s twitter page come via text or the web. While the now infamous “broom” tweet was made through a program called twitterific. Pierce’s internet handlers even have more evidence indicating that there was a hacker: “RT @taramanis @athleteint I saw [Paul Pierce] talking to other reporters when these were sent… no cell in hand.”
So what do you do to protect yourself from being Twitter-jacked like many others such as Rick Sanchez from CNN, Britney Spears, Bill O’Reilly, and even our “Commander and Chief”?
- Have a strong password eight characters or longer, combination of lowercase and uppercase letters, numbers, and symbols
- Change your password often
- Don’t use the same password over multiple accounts
- Remember that Twitter is public, so unless you set your account to private, anyone can view your updates and anyone can see who you are following
- When you leave Twitter, always sign out of your account and log off of the computer
- Take precautions when using Twitter’s third-party tools because they will have full access to your Twitter account once the login credentials are provided
- Remember that you can possibly be exposed to phishing scams or viruses through Twitter’s TinyURLs.
These simple rules not only apply to your Twitter account but all across the internet – so stay safe out there!
TW Influence works much like Twitter Grader. Both will do a benchmark test on the health of your account – your followers, your tweets, your re-tweats, your mentions, etc…
The score that Twitter Grader is based on there own special algorithm and takes into account:
- 1) The number of followers
- 2) The power of those followers
- 3) Number of updates you post
- 4) The frequency of your posts
- 5) Follower / Following ratio
- 6) Engagement (re-tweets and mentions)
All things considered, if you were to get a score of 90%, this means that only 10% of the Tweeterers out there (that graded themselves) scored higher.
As far as TW Influence goes, it will do a far better job of analyzing your Twitter account AFTER THEY WORK OUT THE KINKS. It will do everything the Teitter Grafer does, but goes one step further. It runs the same kind of test on all of your follower. Therefore, if your followers get a high grade your score goes up. If you follow a hundred thousand dead ends your score goes down. It measures your influence 2 levels deep!
As great as that is, these is a limit to the number of requests that the Twitter API will allow. So the second level calculations do not work most of the time. BUT THEY ARE WORKING ON A FIX. For that reason I wanted to at least make you aware of it. I will post about it again when the upgrade is complete.
Well, yes – it is another Twitter cloud site, but Twitter Sheep lets you analyze your users BIO box 
If you’re trying to reach the CEO of mid-sized firm, but your tag cloud has terms like “dogs” and “pet care,” chances are you’ll be reaching the wrong people. If you are in the proverbial “dog training” niche, those may be exactly the tags you wish to see. (My tag cloud tells me that my typical follower is of the social media / marketing flavor with a little real estate mixed in).
There are a lot of neat tools and resources to find targeted followers, and you’ve used them to grow a healthy list. Now wouldn’t it be nice to see what the general topics are that your followers are discussing? One handy site that helps with that is My Twitter Cloud. No need to join or hand over password for API approval. Just enter your user ID and it will poll the last 200 tweets in your time line and return a cloud of #Hashtags:
Granted that I like to interject posts about recycling and being earth friendly, but what this tells me in a heart beat is that it has gotten as much attention as my twitter tips… not a big deal but now I can adjust accordingly.
At the bottom of that image is another button more for fun. It will take this same information and spice it up with a few dozen different graphic representations. Something like this:
I got to tell ya though. I’m not sure how “bride” and “ugly people” got in there.
As you may have guessed, Twittorati comes from the same fine folks that delivered us Technorati. Should you be in search of the elite of the ‘who’s who’ on Twitter, that is the place to go. The site tracks the Twitter exercise of the top one hundred bloggers on the Web, as decided by Technorati. The site also tracks what links are being Tweeted by the top influencers and the top Twitter hashtags. How can you use Twittorati?
< Hourly most popular #hashtags
First, you can regulate these prime hashtags. Should you Tweet about healthcare reform you’re doing yourself a huge disservice in case you aren’t using the #hcr hashtag — but you wouldn’t know that if you happen to aren’t monitoring the top tags. Additionally, as Twittorati crawls more of Twitter’s most influential members, you’ll be able to work on getting in contact with that “super influencer” — by first determining just who that individual is.
Accounts that automate Twitter might just be a bad plan, if overdone any way. People that are legitimately just hanging out and socializing with their buddies will not likely run into this problem, however, if we are trying to apply Twitter as a advertising and marketing system it can only bring failure if you over do it. Automation might work with various other areas of web marketing such as, article submission or social bookmarking. Social marketing is just that – social, while bookmarking is more like merely letting people know that you’re around willing to hook up.
Like I said, a certain amount of Twitter automation will be fine and sometimes essential as long as it is not over done. As an example, the whole concept of marketing and advertising with Twitter is to acquire a huge follower base – but what good is it to build thousands of followers if they are college students and single parents when you’re marketing marriage counseling? 400 targeted followers is much better the 50,000 untargeted followers. For that reason, mass following or blasting software will be a bad idea. Sure they might add thousands to your account, but half of them are usually not interested in you and the other 1 / 2 have sense disappeared and not been on Twitter in many weeks or years. There are many paid services that will allow you to enter key phrases and then they’ll go locate targeted followers on your behalf and add them. On that note, twollo (dot) com will let you add 2 keywords at no cost. More then 2, you pay.
The manual alternative to the paid sites are sites like ‘Justtweetit’ ‘Twellow’ and ‘Whoshouldifollow’. Manually plug in a keyword and get plenty of possibilities. Not automated, but a bit of hard work can get you a sizable TARGETED follower base.
The 2nd most tedious aspect of a Twitter account will be keeping track of the newest followers, following back, delivering welcome messages, finding those who un-follow and also keeping a balance between followers and follow’ies. In other words – account maintenance.
This is one of those ‘must have’ automated Top twitter tools. One well liked service is SocialOomph. Once known as ‘TweetLater’ this site allows you auto follow and auto un-follow people. This alone is a huge time saver. At the same time it enables you to immediately deliver a direct message to your new followers. This brings up another judgment issue..
What ought to be the initial tweet I send my new friends?
Consider this. In real life, would you walk up to a fresh possible client and start showing them all the neat goods you want to sell? Yeh, you might, but probably not still have a job as a salesman very long. Direct Message manners will go something like this:
• Never: ‘Thanks for following me, now go have a look at my $hit @ . . ‘
• Maybe: Offer a free gift by directing them to your squeeze page
• Better: Offer a free gift without any optin form – let the e-book steer them to you websites if they’re interested.
• If all else fails: Don’t send out a message at all! Like my mama used to say.. ‘If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.’
Personally I’m in favor of the last two possibilities.
( Part 2 of this report can be found HERE.. )
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In part 1 of “Automated Twitter” we talked about the proper way and the wrong way of automating followers and dealt with a little Direct Message etiquette. Here we will finish up follower maintenance and automating tweets for a well rounded automated Twitter account.
You can perform Twitter searches and follow folks over and over (1,000 everyday max, 200 – 400 each day recommended) but at some point you will hit Twitters 2,000 follower limit. At the 2,000 mark, they have some sort of secret algorithm that requires you have about a 200 person difference between followers and the ones you follow. Or 10% or something like that depending on your tweet record – it’s a secret. So sooner than you think you will have to tweak your list.
One very well known tool is Twitter Karma. You’ll be able to list people that are not following back. It’ll display those who have not tweeted in 2 or 3 weeks or many months. Un-follow them. It will also show who is still an active twitter-er but for whatever reason chose to not follow you back. They can go unless it is someone you want to track. So from that 2,000 level forward you are going to have to keep an eye on it.
Another site I like even better is Manageflitter. It will let you sort the non followers, the lively followers, the non-active, the silent and the active. Even lets you sort the people which are too lazy to add a photo.
Now then, unless you intend to spend half your waking hours tweeting you life away, you’re going to need a little help. There are many services online that you are able to schedule tweets with but definitely the most effective I’ve found is Twaiter. It’s the first and only website that I’ve found which will still let you place reoccurring tweets for free.
There are numerous desktop programs that you can fill up with scheduled twitter updates with so being able to schedule tweets is no hassle. I already have a free tool that you could import hundreds of one liners (tweets) and at random have them post at random time intervals. The challenge becomes doing it in a way that will not cause you to seem like a bot. Keeping that in mind, you don’t want to use Twaiter to post the same thing at noon every day. A far better option would be to come up with seven different variants of the same ad and schedule each once a week.
Important thing is this:
There are hundreds of websites and applications to help you with an automated Twitter account, maybe a dozen really worth a hoot. Not one of these tools can help if you do not take an active role in group contribution. A rough guesstimate is that automation should not account for more than 50% – 75%. You must respond to legitimate direct messages, you must re-tweet, you must interject hash tags, you must see who’s talking about you and become part of the group. If you don’t change up your tweets and have interaction, at some point you turn into a spammer and no one likes spammers. Twitter will close you down.
( In case you missed part 1 of this report, It can be found HERE.. )
Related Blogs
Power Twitter is an add-on for Firefox that enhances your time on Twitter. Its many brilliant feature is being able to show videos and photos that users post as thumbnails rather than text links.
Furthermore, it expands URLs by looking beyond the shrunk URL and showing the final destination, and it has a handy shorten link button option that you can use to shorten links without having to leave Twitter.
Another neat feature is being able to “peek”. Basically, you can click any avatar of your friends, and Power Twitter will show you recent tweets from them, there follower stats, favorites, list, bio, etc… without having to leave your page.
Power Twitter’s ability to post photos is a fantastic addition to the Twitter interface. You can choose a picture and upload it to popular Twitter-sharing websites like Twitpic, Tweetphoto, YFrog, or Twitgoo. Power Twitter’s Top Friends function lets you go to any of your friends’ Twitter pages and make them a “Top Friend” by clicking on the “Add to Top Friends” option that shows up in the Twitter menu on the right side of the user interface. This application also helps you keep up with your Facebook friends and will show you recent tweets from your friends. Maximizing the Twitter experience with add-ons and interfaces like Power Twitter is part of the fun of Twitter.
There are plenty of URL shorteners out there but of the dozens I’ve looked at, bit’ly is the most versatile and widely accepted. Not only does it do a fine job of shrinking URLs and tracking clicks… with the API key at your side you can go about anywhere. bit.ly is teamed up with some of the most powerful marketing resources on the web when it comes to social networks. Among the partners it has teamed up with you will find places like:
- Tweet Deck – your personal browser for staying in touch with what’s happening now, connecting you with your contacts across Twitter, and Facebook.
- bit.lify - by Ubiquitous Systems integrates bit.ly into your BlackBerry browser enabling you to easily to shorten and share urls on the go.
- Seesmic Desktop – Twitter support, multiple accounts, in a Mac+PC Adobe AIR desktop application.
- Tweetie for iPhone – Twitter client for iPhone allows you to handle multiple twitter accounts, view your timeline, replies, direct messages and favorites.
- Qwitter – an accessible Twitter client designed for access by the blind, providing an innovative integration between Twitter and a user’s screen reader.
- Shareaholic – a free browser add-on that enables easy sharing via multiple services.
- IEShortURL – an add-on for Internet Explorer that lets you shorten and share URLs with one click.
- Last.fm Love / Twitter Mashup – After signing up, any track that you ‘love’ on lastfm will automatically generate a tweet from you that has the track’s artist and name, as well as a link to it so your followers can give it a listen.
- plus many more
But my favorite by far is TwitterFeed. Mainly just because I love Twitter feed! Yes, every one knows it can take a Google Alert, Yahoo Pipe or blogs RSS feed and pump it directly into Twitter using the shrunken bit.ly URL. But you probably won’t find to many people taking full advantage of the lesser know Ping.fm . MAybe it’s a bit intimidating or scary, but instead of going “RSS feed > TwitterFeed > Twitter“ what if you went “RSS feed > TwitterFeed > Ping.fm > 40 different social networking sites” ? (including Twitter).
The possibilities are endless!
For the more advanced marketer, Twitterfeed has also adds special ‘UTM’ tags to each post that it publishes. Google Analytics can read these tags and integrate the information into its reporting. You’ll be able to understand how people clicking on your posts from Facebook differ from those clicking from Twitter and track the complete path of their visit to your site.
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