Posts Tagged ‘social networking’
Twitter ranks as one of the best platforms for:
- Seeing what friends and business contacts are up to.
- Communicating either publicity or privately (via direct messages)
- Tunneling through to someone on their iPhone or other device, set to receive tweets
- Concise and to-the-point communication because everyone is limited to 140 characters
As a “micro blogging” platform, Twitter has gained sufficient critical mass that enough people are on it (like MySpace was in 2006 and Facebook was in 2008) to make it a viable and useful platform. (Sadly, other platforms like LinkedIn and Plurk have not achieved sufficient critical mass to be considered ubiquitous at this point).
Despite the benefits of Twitter, inevitably some marketers are going to be flexing their e-peen by sending frequent tweets about how they’re hit 5,000 followers, 20,000 followers or are in the top 50 on the top Twitter groupies list.
In my opinion, talking about the size of your community in a bragging fashion is disrespectful to the people who are following you. In a very real sense, you ARE reducing them to a mere number – one of 50,000 nameless faces who have chosen to take their time to read your potentially useful content.
Instead, why not spend time getting to know your community/followers.
Instead of going on an ego trip, can you say you know most of your followers?
On another note, twitter is not your platform to send a string of product launch announcements or to send your affiliate links out to some hapless n00b who happened to follow you.
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Now that we’ve defined the “ego” type posts, what falls into the non-ego/useful content basket? For me they fall into (more…)
I saw Heather Paulson twitter about MrTweet yesterday and decided to check it out.
One of the potential pitfalls about Twitter is to make a snap judgement that the more followers you have, the better position you’re in. While this might be true in some cases, I think twitter followers are just like any other type of online traffic – quality massively outweighs quantity any day of the week.
That’s one of the reasons why the new Twitter tools which (more…)
Independent blog InsiderFacebook has recently mentioned that Facebook users have topped 140 million, up from an earlier 130 million at the start of the month.
With an estimated 700,000 new users joining the social network each day in recent weeks, it appears that Facebook has achieved critical mass.
Raw numbers don’t tell the entire picture though.
Anecdotal evidence from affiliates suggests that the FB Ad review team are working doubly hard to slap down new ad campaigns in response to user complaints. In particular a common refrain is that new campaigns which are similar to existing campaigns are being rejected.
This is happening while older ads which seem to violate (more…)
Facebook has recently revamped the layout of its user profiles, introducing a ‘tabbed’ interface to navigate through your own or your friends profiles:
The advantage of a tabbed interface is that you’ll gain more screen real estate and your content (more…)
There’s a little brouhaha brewing on the blogosphere with bloggers Duncan Riley and the folks over at Mashable calling out John Reese for advocating Twitter as a branding/promotion mechanism to aid their marketing efforts.
And John has posted a response at his income.com blog.
So what do the bloggers think about Jason Calancanis’ twitter posts that he has 9,000 twitter followers?
Is he “gaming” twitter?
I would think that since Jason’s post is appearing in their “related posts” widget, it’s an implicit show of support for the post.
And correct me if I’m wrong, but if you’re following thousands of your followers, I’m pretty sure you’re not reading EVERY update.
And if you’re not reading EVERY update, isn’t that insincere to follow them in the first place?
But back to John Reese “breaking” twitter.
Blaming John for the abuse of twitter is like saying handguns are responsible for killing people.
Last time I checked, people were responsible for killing people. Twitter is just a tool.
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On another point, I think John is wrong when he calls the 2 bloggers “journalists”.
Journalists reporting news create content based on facts and attempt to present a balanced perspective.
At best, the reply pieces are opinion/editorial pieces, which give you license to go outside editorial objectively and present a wholly subjective view.
I’m not the greatest fan of John’s other project, BlogRush, as you might tell from my previous posts. It’s just a tool, a piece of technology, not any kind of miracle cure by any stretch of the imagination.
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I don’t think John’s tactics are going to break twitter, but there’s certainly a lot of FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) being sowed on the blogosphere.
The Twitter team has been working overtime with fixes intended to resolve the growing pains associated with the microblogging service, with regular updates at the Twitter blog and the Twitter status blog.
I am a little surprised and disappointed that several core Twitter features have been disabled in the interim.
The loss of private messaging I can live without (for the short term), but what happens when you are handicapped in your ability to follow conversations?
Witness the page for Jeremy Palmer’s Black Ink Project:
The pages show the twits originating from Jeremy, but the “With others” tab which you could click on and see the 2-way conversation is now missing.
If you want to track the conversation, you’d have to hit the “in reply to” hyperlink.
[At least that’s how I remember how I used to track conversations…]
So if you’d like to follow an active Twitter user, you’d be hitting the “in reply to” link pretty often and opening up a bunch of windows and study the timestamps and figure out the chronological sequences.
I may be wrong, but I thought the purpose of these technologies was to make things easier, rather than give me some weird sudoku-like puzzle to figure out what goes where?
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Having installed the latest version of the Flock social web browser (based on the Mozilla code, which Firefox is based from), I noticed that there’s an integrated Twitter module.
Take a look at the left (more…)
