FollowBase: Customer Support Via Twitter
Being involved on Twitter is more than posting philosophical quotes or retweeting what others have to say. Twitter is an extremely powerful tool for businesses who know how to use it. There are plenty of ways that businesses can get value out of Twitter. They can listen to what people have to say about their niche and pick up ideas for future ideas. They can also track their reputation on Twitter. Best of all, they can provide real-time support to customers via Twitter. That’s where Followbase comes in. It’s an interesting service that lets you get in touch with other companies’ support teams and get help via Twitter.
FollowBase is pretty simple to work with. It’s essentially designed to help people get the support they need via Twitter. If you happen to be a business owner, you can just add your company by entering the Twitter account for your business. The fun part starts when you claim your forum on FollowBase. That will allow you to communicate with your customers more effectively and keep the spammers out as well. (more…)
Sponsored Tweets: Getting Paid for Tweets?
You know it was bound to happen. Twitter has been looking at multiple ways to generate revenue and take its business to the next level. So are tweeters. Sponsored Tweets is a cool service that brings advertisers and Twitter publishers together and let tweeters make money from their sponsored tweets while enabling advertisers to reach out to influential users in the community to push their message out. Here is how the service works. Advertisers create opportunities and tweeters take advantage of these opportunities to make money on Twitter. You will need to disclose that you are being sponsored by someone so the transparency is there. Here is a demonstration of how this service works:
When I first heard about this service, I was very skeptical about it. I am by no means a big fan of advertising on Twitter with my own tweets. Twitter is not a direct revenue channel for me or my business, but it is a great traffic driver for our products and the content our company produces. I have to say I was surprised by the number of celebrity and popular twitterers who are taking advantage of this service to make a few bucks online. If you happen to be into advertising on Twitter, this service can certainly come in handy.
Think about it. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could get the message out about your product to thousands of folks on Twitter by partnering up with a Twitter user who has 200,000 followers? Maybe you want to work with someone who has millions of followers. Those sponsored tweets will cost you but just think about the number of people who will instantly check your product and may even give you feedback on your work. (more…)
Twitter Retweet Feature Draws Praise, Criticism
Those of you who have been on Twitter for a while have probably realized the need for a retweet button under each tweet. It’s not too inconvenient to copy and past tweets and add RT information to them. But it’d be much fun if you had that ability on Twitter. In truth, you are going to get that ability on Twitter soon. The company has been testing the “retweet” feature for a while now, and if you happen to be one of the lucky ones to have the feature activated on your account, you can test the feature by yourself.
So here is how the feature works. You see a story that you want to retweet, you click on the retweet button, and Twitter asks you whether you want to retweet the story. Twitter does the rest for you.
The Retweet feature is certainly convenient and fun to play with. Keep in mind that it’s a new feature so it will take some time for Twitter to get everything right. But while many are excited about the introduction of the new feature, there are people who are upset about the way Twitter has implemented the feature and for a good reason. Twitter does not allow you to add your own take on these stories when you retweet a post. So essentially, you post a piece of article with all the attributions but without your take on it. It’s also regrettable that you can only see RTs from the people you follow. So if you are not following the top dogs in your niche, you are not going to see the stories that they like.
The first issue is not something that can’t be fixed. The way Twitter has implemented it can certainly make things get done faster. I do believe that Twitter needs to add another option to the above pop-up to allow us to add our own take to stories. Maybe we will see that when the feature is released to everyone. The 2nd feature and the way it’s been implemented are actually something I do agree with. If you are not following someone on Twitter, you probably don’t want to hear from them. Besides, you don’t have to be following everyone to get those top stories on your timeline. If you are following people who truly provide value in your niche, there is a good chance they’ll catch the top stories and tweets from other top people around the world. So you don’t have to follow everyone in the world to see those top retweets. If those who you follow catch them, you will as well. That’s why you should only follow people who provide real value. There are just too many folks who follow a lot of people in hope of getting followed back. That’s not what Twitter was designed for. So I wouldn’t put any blame on Twitter for how it has implemented the second feature.
The good news is that we are finally going to get the retweet button on Twitter. It may need some work and not everyone is going to agree with everything, but it’s a nice step forward.
What’s your take: do you have an issue with how Twitter has implemented the retweet feature?
Gelato: a new kind of dating
I have to admit. I have never tried dating, and I am not so tempted by services such as eHarmony and Chemistry. But there are people who have used these services to find a date and even start a serious, long-term relationship. But when I first hear of gelato, I thought it’d be interesting to see what it’s all about. gelato is not your everyday dating site. It’s a social-media based dating service that lets you find people based on their information on Twitter and Facebook. So unlike eHarmony and other top dating sites, gealto lets you figure out what people really talk about. The system can probably be gamed but that is the case with other dating sites as well.
In order to get gelato to work, you will need fill out a short information sheet. You basically let others know what you are interested in and what you want gelato to pull from your social networking accounts.
Should You Use Twitter Friend Adder Tools?
Everybody wants to have more friends on Twitter. Twitter was originally designed for people to share information and find like minded people to mingle with. But spammers, marketers, and even the average Joe have become obsessed with having more followers. For spammers, it’s really the case of working the numbers to your favor. If you are getting 1 victim out of 1000 people who follow you, then you try to get more people to increase your chances. For marketers, it’s not only about pushing offers, but also showing others what you are capable of as a “twitter expert.” Even the average Twitter users have become obsessed with having more friends. At the end of the day, the more friends you have, the better off you are, right?
Twitter is not about having more friends. It’s about having quality friends. There are a lot of folks who get more out of their 100 tweeps than top marketers do from their 10,000 followers. So quality is really important when it comes to following and getting followed on Twitter. That hasn’t stopped people from using Friend adders to get more followers on Twitter. While I am not a big fan of automating the friend finding process, if you approach it the right way and follow people for the sake of expanding your network in a quality fashion, you may be able to save some time with these friend adders.
Humming Bird and Tweet Adder are both decent tools to follow a lot of people automatically. By decent, I mean they let you find quality friends and follow them in batches instead of doing it by hand one by one. These tools are designed to help you automate the process of finding and following friends on Twitter. It’s not tough to see why a lot of people look at these services and discount them as a spamming tool. I am not going to argue that the potential is there to use these to spam people. But there is a right way and wrong way to use any tool. Even Google can be used to pull off some Black Hat tactics.
Boost Your Twitter Productivity with Social Oomph
There are a lot of people who are social media junkies. They spend hours on Twitter and forget to take care of things in their real life. A lot of experts argue that people who are into the social media might end up spending more time staying at home and tweeting than engaging in social interactions. One reason for that to happen is when you are struggling to keep up with your daily tasks and managing your social media accounts. The key is to get more done in less time. That’s where Social Oomph comes in. It’s an innovative service that is designed to help you manage and schedule your tweets, track tweets by keywords, and manage your direct messages. These are all tasks that can take a lot of your time but with Social Oomph you can get them done without too much trouble.
The main reason that I use Social Oomph is for its excellent task automation services. I am not talking about scheduling automated tweets. But I do use Social Oomph to manage my follow/unfollow and direct messages. If you have more than just a handful of followers, it’s going to be extremely difficult to manage direct messages. With Social Oomph you can do it easy. You can also use the service to track keywords and set up Google-like alerts. That way the data comes to you instead of you going and searching for it.
Create Your Twitter Lists with TweepML
Let’s say you work for a company that has a whole lot of tweeters, and you have been asked to create a list of all these folks and put them on the corporate site for others to see. Or maybe, you just want to display the list of your favorite Twitter users on your website. You can all this by hand or you can use a tool such as TweepML. TweepML is a simple but very effective service that lets you create groups and mass follow people easy with one click. Take Mashable List for instance. The group contains a list of major players on Mashable. As a visitor, you can follow all the members of this group in one click.
You can also follow the creator of the list as well. That’s why I love TweepML. You can create so many killer lists using Twitter users, and you can share them on your blog and social networking websites. As people follow those famous or power users in your list, there is a good chance you might get followed as well. That means, TweepML can help you build a following on Twitter. (more…)
6 Best Android Twitter Clients You Should Check out
Android phones are getting more popular by the day. It’s true that the iPhone is still king, but Google has done a great job pushing Google Android, and with the platform coming to netbooks and other devices, you can expect Android to gain more traction and become more popular than ever before. Android is not only a decent piece of software, but it’s social media friendly as well. There are plenty of clients that let you manage your social networking account. After all, why would you want to buy an Android phone if it doesn’t allow you to manage your tweets or Facebook on the go.
If you are looking for an Android Twitter client to manage your account on the go, here are 6 clients you should check out:
Twitroid: one of the best Android Twitter clients available today. It’s super easy to use and comes with a lot of features for Twitter power users. If you own a G-phone, you got to try Twitroid.
TwitterRide: one of the coolest Twitter clients for Android phones. It comes with super useful account management services that let you keep track of your replies, messages, friends, and more. It’s certainly going places.
TwitterDroid: an attractive Twitter client for Android phones that lets you manage your tweets, mentions, and direct messages easily on the go. It still need a bit of work, but it’s an interesting concept. (more…)
5 Netbooks To Tweet/FB On The Go
Netbooks have been getting a lot of love from shoppers lately. The netbook market is growing so fast companies are going out of their way to get their own netbooks out in front of consumers. So why are netbooks that popular? It’s mostly due to the fact that they are super portable, energy efficient, and powerful enough to let people produce and consume content on the Internet. So if you are a serial twitterer or just can’t get enough of Facebook, netbooks can help you stay on the top of things and get your work done on the road.
When choosing a netbook, you want to make sure you buy a wireless service for it as well so you spend less time searching for a WiFi hotspot and more time on producing killer tweets and content on the go. With that said, here are 5 best netbooks for Twitter junkies:
Lenovo Ideapad S10 Mobile Broadband 10-Inch Netbook: will cost you $99, but you get AT&T’s wireless network on the go. Lenovo Ideapad S10 is very solid and portable. It’s a twitterer’s dream netbook (as far as subsidized netbooks are concerned). Here is what you get:
- 1.6 GHz Intel Atom processor, 160 GB hard disk drive, 1 GB RAM (1.5 GB max), 54g Wi-Fi LAN (802.11b/g)
HP Mini 1151NR Mobile Broadband 10.1-Inch Netbook: a wonderful netbook meets a good wireless provider. If you are not into AT&T, this is a decent Verizon netbook. Here are the specs:
- 1.6 GHz Intel Atom N270 processor, 16 GB solid state drive, 1 GB RAM, 54g Wi-Fi LAN (802.11b/g), 10/100 Ethernet, Bluetooth, 3-Cell Lithium-Ion Polymer battery
Acer Aspire One 3G 10.1-Inch Netbook: This is another cool netbook that is not only lightweight but also powerful. It’s fairly energy efficient as well. Very good netbook for Twitter and Facebook use:
- 1.6 GHz Intel Atom processor, 160 GB hard disk drive, 1 GB RAM (1.5 GB max), 54g Wi-Fi LAN (802.11b/g), 10/100 Ethernet
8 Cool Twitter Clients for Blackberry
I don’t know about you, but I don’t go anywhere without my Blackberry. Sure. I still have my iPhone too, but I use my Blackberry to manage the business side of things. But even when I am on the move, I still feel the need to be involved on Twitter. I am just addicted to it. Thankfully, there are a few cool Blackberry apps for Twitter that let you manage your status on the go without too much trouble. Just because you are traveling, it doesn’t mean Twitter conversations will stop going on. So it’s essential to be involved on Twitter as much as you can and get the word out about your brand and projects as well.
With that in mind, here are 8 cool Blackbery Twitter apps you should try:
TwitterBerry: the most famous Twitter Blackberry app around It’s very easy to use and makes it so easy responding to your followers or start new conversations.
Twibble: it’s a super app designed for folks who want to get more from their Twitter account on the go. You’ll be constantly updated on what’s going on Twitter and comes with lots of short-cuts and power user features.
UberTwitter: UberTwitter is one of the best Twitter clients for Blackberry. The folks at UberTwitter are bringing Twitter to many different platforms, and Blackberry is one of those.