My Twitter Apps

There are a lot of odd acronyms floating around Twitter. Apart from urban slang, and weird Web 2.0 website names (i.e. Squidoo, Kirtsy), there are “hashtags.”

A hashtag is a word or set of words with a “#” in front of it. This was originally designed so that when you are looking for a specific topic on the Twitter search engine ,  it was possible to find quickly. An example of this is the place name “San Diego”. If you look it up without a hashtag, you get everything with those keywords including source material (names of publications) showing up. With the # in front, #sandiego, you can get the exact subject you are looking for.

Of course, this assumes that everyone on Twitter remembers to use the hashtag. Many do not, and others make up their own hashtags as they are writing their tweets. So, in order to figure out what peeps are talking about, I recommend using the site What The Hashtag? .

This website gives you the trending hashtags, active tags, and a word cloud of tag categories. It is free to create an account, and they now have a set of tools that can help you figure out the odder tags.

There are also a lot of chatspeak acronyms that show up in Twitter. Many of these were originally used in chatrooms, and then in text messages  (SMS) on mobile phones.

The best list I have found so far for these is on the QQ Chat Dictionary. Most of the main ones are here. If you still cannot figure out what someone is trying to say, I suggest finding the nearest teenager and asking them.

Have you seen some of those cool backgrounds for Twitter? How do they do that?

TwitBacks has a number of categories for backgrounds and lets you put in your contact details as well. They let you put links on your background to your social networks, and will help you promote your Twitter profile. They also offer a customized background for $99.

FreeTwitterDesigner also has free backgrounds. I really like their easy to use interface. These are straight graphics without any bells or whistles.

You can just use a graphic image to use as background as well.

When Twitter first started, a lot of people thought that you could judge a person by the number of followers they had. In other words, a person would be considered popular if they has a large number of others following them.

As Twitter usage has grown, this has become less and less important. It is not the number of followers, but rather how much the person engages those followers.

Let me give you an example. A certain person on Twitter has 37,000 followers from using one of the many auto following programs. This software automatically follows people for him, waits until they follow back, and then unfollows them.  This results in a huge following, BUT none of these people really know who the main person is.

The person in question does not engage any of these followers. He tends to schedule his tweets in advance, and never stops to actually talk to anyone, nor does he RT other people’s posts. IMHO, he is little more than a robot here on Twitter, which does not make me want to follow him, nor to ask questions.

Twitter is all about engaging your followers, your prospects, and your customers. Why else would you want to be active here? Many of us share information, ask and answer questions, and even repost (ReTweet) other tweets. (Just don’t get me started on people who protect their updates! That is a whole ‘nother post.)

Many of us who have been on Twitter for longer than a year understand this. People like @ChrisBrogan, @iamkhayyam, @debng, and myself (@searchguru) have worked hard to build up their followers by talking and sharing with them.

Try it. Reach out and share information, or a pleasant thought with someone else. It doesn’t hurt.

There is a feature on Twitter called Favorites. You can make a tweet a Favorite and share it with others, or just go back and read it later.

One of the problems with this is trying to sort through all your Favorites at once. If you are like me, you tend to mark tweets as Favorites so you can come back to them later. As a result, I have pages and pages of them.

I have just discovered that you can see your Faves as an RSS feed. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. If you are older than 30, think of those electric ticker tape signs. If you are under 30, you probably know what it is.

Simply type into your browser,  http://twitter.com/favorites/(your Twitter name).rss . That will bring up all your faves in an easy to read stream of links.

Tweetabix interviews Twitter users as to how they use Twitter, whether for fun, community or business. Richard McKay (@holeinhiseye) runs this site and asks each person what they think about Twitter and its future.

This is a great resource for newbies and the general public to learn about Twitter.

A lot of people are using Twitter as a broadcasting tool to get the word out about events in their local cities. Unfortunately, many of these tweets get lost in the general Twitterstream.

Happn.in is one solution to this problem. This site allows you to follow your local Twitter feed, see what the current trends are, and even advertise to the local Tweetstream.

Using the hashtag #hi_, the site allows you to find your location on a Google map (the sites currently covers Western Europe and the US), and click on the pin. A small window appears with a list of the current words that are trending, a “town crier” -someone from the area who has tweeted the most about the local events that week, the latest posts with the hashtag and a way to advertise to that particular area.

If you click on “More  [city] Detail” it leads you to a page where you can not only see what is happening, but Happn.in even lets you rate the tweets.

This information is already very valuable to marketers, and retailers. Happn.in has hit upon a formula that will lead to a lot of great data.

Ever wonder how many tweets per day some people on Twitter are producing? There is an app for that! (sorry, couldn’t help myself) TweetStats shows you the statistics on anyone on Twitter. You can see how many tweets per hour, per day, per month, as well as when they are tweeting and what applications they are using to tweet with. The graphs also show who they are retweeting as well.

All you have to do is put in their Twitter name to get the information.  The app also lets you see the stats in a Word Cloud, and what hashtags are being used.

In addition, you can see what is trending on Twitter in real time, and what the day’s trends were. All in all, this is a very useful app.

If you are following more than 100 people on Twitter, you know how hard it is to keep track of who said what. The best application I have found for this is TweetDeck. TweetDeck is an Adobe AIR application (which means you have to download the AIR software onto your computer) that lets you see in table form at least 3 columns. The default columns are “Friends”, “Replies”, and “Direct Messages.”  You can build your own column  as a Group (the tab is at the top of the application). Fo example, my Group are the followers I am most interested in. I named the Group, and then selected the Twitter names that I wanted in the group. The program does the rest.

You can also change the colors of the application.

I highly recommend this desktop app for keeping up on what is happening day to day on Twitter.

TweetBeep allows you to track a particular subject or mention of a website on Twitter. It will send you email updates when the topic or website you are following appears, even if a URL shortener has been used.

This service would be an excellent tool for companies that want to keep an eye on their brand, or for people researching a particular subject.

Twitter Alerts – TweetBeep.com.

A lot of questions are asked every day on Twitter ranging from the specific (what websites to use to book travel,  where to find program applications and tutorials) to the general (what’s the best place for dinner, what is a gerbil). Sometimes the questioner gets a direct answer, sometimes not. To help all of those in need, TweetBrain has appeared.

TweetBrain pulls out the questions from the tweetstream, and allows peeps to answer them directly in more than 140 characters. A link to the answer is then posted on Twitter, telling the person asking that an answer can be found and giving the URL. The FAQ on Tweetbrain is one of the best ones I have ever seen, explaining all the ins and outs of the application.

Tweetbrain is free to join, and anyone can answer questions. It provides an excellent way of sharing your expertise, and building your brand. I highly recommend this app.