Market Me Tweet: Yet Another Twitter Management Tool?
If you have been following this blog, you have probably realized that I am not a big fan of automating Twitter tasks. There are plenty of tools on the market that you can use to completely outsource your Twitter work. But what’s the fun in that? It’s similar to traveling miles to get yourself to a party and then decide to sit outside or in the corner without interacting with other people. Of course, Twitter tools do have a place for active Twitter users. Unfortunately, there are only 24 hours in each day, which means somethings should and need to be outsourced if you are to get the most out of Twitter.
I got familiar with Market Me Tweet on Twitter. There was a discussion about branding one’s tweets on Twitter, and that’s when Market Me Tweet comes in. It’s a Twitter management tool that allows you to brand each and every tweet of yours. But this tool is more than just about branding your tweets. You can use it to manage multiple accounts and monitor your replies, direct messages, and other people’s time-lines using this software.
Add Social Buttons To Your Blog with Digg Digg
Being involved in the social media is more than just writing about what you have had for lunch or posting your blog articles to Twitter and Facebook. You want to be part of the community and participate in a meaningful way. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t give your readers on your blog a chance to help make your blog posts go viral. That’s why having proper social media buttons before or after each and every post is essential. If you happen to run your blog using a CMS such as Wordpress, you are in luck. Plugins such as Digg Digg make it so easy to pick and choose what social networks you want to target and add their buttons to your posts fast.
There are three things that you need to consider to get the most out of your social media buttons. You want to make sure you are choosing the buttons that apply to your niche, are displaying them in the right place, and are using a design that doesn’t take away from your stories. That’s what you can accomplish with Digg Digg easily. This plugin enables you to choose the social networks you want to take advantage of on your blog and the site sections you want to display them on. You can even choose the compact model to save some space on your blog. (more…)
Google Challenges Facebook, Twitter with Google Buzz
In case you missed it (which you shouldn’t have if you have a Gmail account), Google has decided to start a new social media venture in form of Google Buzz. Google Buzz is designed to bring a whole new social meaning to your Gmail account. The service allows you to update your status and post multi-media content to your Gmail account just like you would on Twitter or Facebook.
What’s interesting about Buzz is the fact that your communications with your friends and followers shows up in your Gmail inbox. That certainly makes it easier to keep track of your messages per se. I also like the fact that the service integrates your content from Picasa and Google Reader. So your followers can see your activities on those sites as well.
4 Cool Tools To Automate Twitter Work
There are plenty of Twitter automation tools around. These days you can automate anything from sending messages, planning direct messages, and more with your Twitter account. Just because you can do it, doesn’t mean you should do it. There is such a thing as Black-Hat and White-Hat tweeting. Have you wondered why you get unsolicited messages on Twitter when you talk about topics such as VOIP or Web hosting? There are a lot of people who make a living out of selling these services to others, and Twitter is their next playground. Some have gone even beyond that and send you harmful links wrapped within an innocent @reply. So there are a lot of things that you shouldn’t automate or do no Twitter. But small businesses can certainly benefit from outsourcing some of their Twitter tasks. You don’t want to everything by yourself and lose sight of what really matters.
If you are looking to manage multiple accounts, vet followers, or find suitable people to follow, the following 4 Twitter automation tools come in handy:
Tweet Adder: one of the most powerful and controversial Twitter automation tools on the market. Let’s you do all kinds of research on Twitter and even find friends to follow fast. The controversial feature (auto-follow) is best left to black-hats. But there are a lot of positive things you can get done with Twitter including but not limited to deep research, account management, and friend management.
TwitterFeed: one of the best tools out there if you want to automate feeding your blog to Twitter. You can not only define how often your want your feeds to be posted, you can also define tags for your posts. Your clicks are tracked as well which is a big plus. It’s a free tool.
Humming Bird: comes with everything you need to manage multiple accounts, add friends, and find targeted followers. The service is quite smart and makes following and unfollowing people less of a pain. Basically, it helps you find and friend people who you have not unfollowed before and set yourself up as an authority twitter figure.
Social Oomph: a very handy service that enables you to manage your twitter accounts and connect them to your blogs easily. You can also use it to find people to follow, set up direct messages, unfollow people when they unfollow you, and much more.
If you are planning to abuse the above services, let’s hope you get suspended soon. But if you are truly interested in saving time and effort and build a real Twitter presence, the above tools come in handy. They don’t do everything for you, but they do save time.
5 Tools To Manage Your Social Media Identity
There are plenty of social networking sites and services that one can be a part of. Yes. We have Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, and Technorati. But there are plenty of more to be a part of. It all comes down to your niche. There are many businesses who have their own dedicated team of social media warriors who manage their presences across multiple networks. But if you don’t have the resources to hire your own team, you can always use social media tools to your advantage to get things done faster. Social media identity tools don’t do your updates for you, but they do let you find user-names and manage your profiles more effectively. So they do save some time in the process.
If you are looking for a set of tools to manage your social media profiles more effectively, here are 5 services you should try:
KnowEm?: a cool service that lets you find out and reserve your user-names across popular social networking websites. It’s much easier when you can do it all from one place.
Namechk: another useful tool that lets you figure out whether your favorite user-name is available on social networking sites of your choice. Of course, your favorite username should be your brand.
TwitterPeek To Debut for Twitter Junkies
The iPhone may be a killer smartphone, but I personally use it to manage my Twitter and Facebook accounts when I am traveling or where I don’t have access to the Internet. There is no question that iPhone is one of the most social media friendly smartphones on the market. At the same time, not everyone can afford paying thousands of dollars for a 2 year AT&T contract. And unlocked iPhone can cost you a good amount of money as well. That’s where TwitterPeek comes in. It’s a device designed for those who can’t get enough of Twitter, but don’t want to pay for a hefty wireless/data plan from AT&T.
TwitterPeek is not a device that will ever go mainstream. It’s a niche device made for Twitter junkies. If you happen to pick up the model with a life-time of service, you can use your gadget on the road (as long as you are in the coverage area) to tweet, respond to your followers, and track their activities as well.
7 Twitter Firefox Add-Ons for Tweet Junkies
Unless you have been using Internet Explorer for the past few years, you probably know that there is more to your browser than meets the eye. Almost all modern browsers come with additional enhancements that enable you to get more done on the Internet without too much hassle. If you happen to be using Firefox to surf the Internet, it’s even better. There are plenty of add-ons to choose from, and some truly can save you time and effort with your social media efforts.
If you are hoping to use Firefox to tweet more effectively, here are 7 Twitter Add-ons for Firefox that you should try:
EchoFon: makes it easy to keep up with your friends posts and updates on Twitter. You can also use it to post your own tweets.
Yoono: lets you access all your social networks and instant messaging on your sidebar. Great way to stay in touch if you happen to be active on multiple social networks.
Twinbin: adds Twitter to your sidebar and lets you keep in touch with your friends and followers on Twitter. You can reply, favorite, and more without having to open up Twitter.
Power Twitter: makes reading tweets on your browser a more dynamic experience. It puts your Twitter web interface on steroids. (more…)
SketchFu: Social Sketching
Sketching is one of the best ways to ideate and come up with new approaches for your business. There are a lot of things that you can’t capture effectively with your notes but can with sketches. So whether you are trying to have fun with your sketch or just want to map out a strategy for your business, sketching it all is very effective. The best way to sketch on the go and capture it all is by using a product such as LiveScribe Pen. But if you are not into spending $150 or so for a digital pen, you can always use SketchFu.
SketchFu is a very simple sketching service that lets you create and share your sketches with friends and colleagues online. They can then vote on your work and give you feedback on your work. The service is not created for heavy duty work, but it does handle simple sketching quite well, especially if you have a mouse that is pretty flexible to work.
Drawing using a digital tablet is obviously much easier. The service by itself is not earth shattering, but the concept is something to think about. I have seen a few bloggers that do use sketches to communicate more effectively with their readers, so it’s certainly something work looking at. The fact that you can share your work with others and get their feedback certainly makes SketchFu interesting. If you can draw well with the service, you may be get away with not owning a digital tablet. Otherwise, you may want to pass on SketchFu and get a Livescribe pen or other tablet solutions available on the market. Sketching is fun and a great way to capture ideas right at the exact time they come to you.
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.
5 Cool Firefox Plugins For Social Media Warriors
Firefox is the best browser for social media warriors. I know. A lot of you may prefer Flock, but I have found flock to be glitchy and sometimes annoying. With Firefox, you are in control of what you want to see on your browser. And thanks to the thousands of plugins that are available for Firefox, you can set up a killer system to tweet and mange your Facebook account right from your browser.
Using Firefox plugins to manage your social media accounts does help you stay more active on Twitter and Facebook and connect with your friends and followers in a more efficient manner. There are plenty of plugins to choose from, and there is no one size fits all when it comes to Firefox plugins. But if you are interested in managing your Twitter and Facebook accounts from your browser, here are 5 top social media plugins you should consider using:
Twitterbar: TwitterBar is one of the easiest plugins to use on FireFox. Instead of having your Twitter window open for tweeting stories, you can set up Twitterbar to tweet your stories in one click. Once you have found an interesting story, you can add your comments in your URL bar and click go!
Yoono: a wonderful add-on for Firefox that makes it so easy to manage your Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking accounts. Great way to share content with your friends and Twitter followers.
Friendbar: keep in touch with friends on Facebook and Twitter by using this plugin. You can also manage your social networking stream, reply, DM and do all kinds of neat stuff without having your Twitter window open.
Shareaholic: as the name suggests, it’s designed for folks who can’t stop giving back and sharing with their fellow community members. Lets you share links, videos, blogs, images with services like Facebook, Twitter, Digg, LinkedIn, Gmail, Yahoo. Great way to keep giving back to your network.
TwitterFox: simple but very useful. If you want to use your browser to keep up with your friends on Twitter and share your stories with them, TwitterFox is for you. It’s very simple but gets the job done.
There you have it. 5 cool Firefox social media plugins that let you manage your Twitter, Facebook, and other accounts right from your browser. If you like to be in control and manage your accounts on your browser the way you want, the above plugins come in handy.