Image via CrunchBase

A lot of people use third party applications to tweet with, rather than going directly to Twitter. The ones I use include HootSuite, TweetDeck, and MarketMeSuite.  If you look carefully at these apps, you can see what other peeps are tweeting with.

On TweetDeck, look at the lower line where it gives the name of the person and the date. It also says “via [app name]“.  HootSuite has it directly under the name of the person (this is also true for the mobile app), and MarketMeSuite places the app name at the top. All of these names are links that will take you to the application website.

When it says “Web” for the name, it is referring to the main Twitter website.  This is also true if there isn’t an app mentioned.

Some of the different apps I have seen include: Visibli, TwitterFeed, FourSquare, LinkedIn, Tweet Button, Timely, CoTweet, Twitter for iPhone and Twitter for Android, and SocialOomph. I will be reviewing these in later posts.

Image via Wikipedia

There are no hard rules on Twitter. Just because someone follows you does not mean you have to follow them back.

I tend to be picky about who I follow on Twitter and Facebook. Here are 10 reasons for not following people on Twitter.

1.    Your avatar, (photo), doesn’t exist, is a cartoon character, is half dressed, or is nude. If you haven’t yet bothered to put in an avatar, Twitter shows you as an egg. This tells me you’re either very new, or you don’t care. Using a logo or a cartoon character tells me that you don’t want people to know what you look like. And finally, the only avatars that should be semi-nude, are those people who sell lingerie. I find it very hard to trust people whose avatars are wearing undershirts, bikinis, or other nonprofessional attire. Avatars that are naked women tend to represent spammers, or robots (fake Twitter profiles).

2.    You haven’t tweeted in 30 days or more. Are you still alive? There are a lot of people on Twitter who seem to abandon their Twitter accounts after a month. It is hard to tell this unless you go back and look at their last tweet.

3.    All your tweets are quotes. While quotations are useful in certain situations, if all you’re doing is tweeting somebody else’s words, then you obviously aren’t very interested in talking to others on Twitter.

4.    You have protected your Twitter updates. This shows that you completely miss the point of social media. Social media lets us engage with people and show two sides of the conversation (yours and others). Some people seem to think that protecting ones’ updates equals privacy. This is a fallacy because we can still see your profile.

5.    You use foul language in your profile or tweets, (continuously). Unless you are a third grader, civilized conversations don’t require profanity.

6.    All your tweets are advertisements, you selling something, or spam. This is one of the biggest mistakes made on Twitter. Think of Twitter or any social network as a cocktail party. You wouldn’t go up to the nice-looking girl by the punch bowl and say “You really need to buy my new book about weight loss.” That would probably get you a slap in the face. Instead, what you would actually do is engage the person in conversation, win their trust, and then lead the conversation to something about your new book. Twitter is the same. This includes automatic direct messages (DM). Talk, engage in conversations, and then lead into products.

7.    All of your tweets are forwards (RTs) of other peoples’ tweets. This is the same problem as using all quotations. Where are your thoughts? Or is it that you don’t have anything important to say? This sort of behavior leads people to think that there is no real person behind the Twitter handle.

8.    You tweet the same tweet over and over and over again. This is against Twitter’s guidelines, and again leads to my assumption that you are a bot (robot).

9.    Your profile has nothing on it. You need to give me something to go on, your interests, where you’re located, or what you do. Be careful of the location section of the profile. Writing, “Planet Earth”, or “Everywhere”, is useless to most of us.

10.    And the big one: if you are following more than 10,000 people, (and you’re not @GuyKawasaki, or a celebrity), my assumption is that you’re using one of the automatic Twitter follower programs. I doubt very much that you are following the conversations of all 20,000 people, or even engaging any of them.

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• How To Plan Different Facebook And Twitter Strategies (allfacebook.com)

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Twitter know lets you see what the trending topics are on your Twitter home page. However, many of us do not have a clue what these topics actually are.

What the Trend? to the rescue! This application (by Matt Mayer) explains what the topics are, when they started and the last time they were tweeted about. If you click on a trend, you can see the tweets, any news or photos (from Flickr) about the subject as well.

You can also follow @whatthetrend on Twitter.

Visible Tweets lets you see tweets as a tag cloud, animated, or as rotating letters. While it is very pretty, I do not really see the usefulness of it. Since Tweets are read, not audio, most of us can do the visulaization ourselves.  The tag cloud part might be useful if you are not sure what part of the tweet is a subject….