How Smart Is The Suggested User List?

The feature is still being rolled out as we speak and it should be appearing on all profiles soon but it does have a couple of issues in that most of the people on the suggested lists that I have seen are people that I am very aware of on Twitter and have chosen not to follow as well as most of the suggestions being very localized in terms of their geographic spread. What I do like about this though is that for the first time in ages there are tons of people that I could start following to improve my stream and the UI makes it incredibly simple to click the follow button and start adding people. I’m pretty sure that the lists will start to get smarter as more and more people use them.

Discovery As A Whole Much Easier Now

Clicking on the find people now opens up a whole range of options to discover new people and that can only be a good thing for twitter and is probably why they have spent so much time developing this new set of features. I can now find people via email, via country or interests or just by simple search. Twitter really really needed to do this because I personally found that my own stream was getting tired and staid but I just didn’t have the time or desire to add new users but with these new features it changes everything.

Becoming More Like Facebook

Twitter is many things to many people including a breaking news tool and live search engine but ultimately it needs to be a social service and for a while that has been lacking because I just haven’t had an easy way of finding new users and people I know. Facebook have been the kings of connecting you with friends from the past, work and college friends and that has paid off so spectacularly. I love Twitter and find it incredibly useful at times but I have always found it fell down on connecting me with my real offline friends (mostly because they are not there yet). Hopefully this new suggested user list will spring Twitter on to the next level and make an incredibly useful tool even more powerful and engaging.

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]]> http://www.simplyzesty.com/twitter/suggested-friends-tool-twitter-incredibly/feed/ 1 http://www.simplyzesty.com/twitter/video-twitter-super-real-time/ http://www.simplyzesty.com/twitter/video-twitter-super-real-time/#comments Thu, 29 Jul 2010 14:16:14 +0000 Lauren Fisher http://www.simplyzesty.com/?p=10555 I just caught this video on The Next Web and had to share it with you. It shows you a version of Tweetdeck with real-time updates and it’s absolutely mindblowing. It comes following Twitter’s developer release of their new API. Tweetdeck are calling it the speed of wow, and you’d have to agree with them after watching the video below, from TNW :

Now this is certainly cool, and ultimately manageable if you have under 500 followers say, but is this just a little bit too real time?  The issue with this is that it becomes more about a stream of information, than the information itself. If you’re following a lot of peole on Twitter, then it does become unmanageable and you won’t really be getting much out of a service like this. You also need to think about how you’re accessing Twitter. With a service like this, in uber-real time, you need to be logged in there pretty much all the time or you miss out on content.

What I do like is the fact that Tweetdeck have extended this out beyond just tweets, and the service will also show you things such as new followers or favourited tweets instantly. This information can sometimes become a little lost.

This is an experimental version of the new service and if you’re interested in signing up then you can do so here. Not one for the faint-hearted, and I’d wait a while after eating before trialling! What do you think, is this too much of a good thing?

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The Pros

Firstly, why would you want to pay for advanced Twitter stats, when you can get so much from the free tools available? The advanced search options on Twitter Search provide you with a wealth of ways to find out what’s being said about your company, service or brand. The only drawback is the limited period through which you can search for tweets, currently set to 7 days.
Trendistic is a very nice tool that allows you to drill down into the associated tweets for a given day. The one negative of this site is that if you have a fairly niche term, it isn’t able to track for this.
The other benefit to paying for a Twitter analytics package, is that they can help you make sense of the numbers, through looking at the reach and influence of a tweet/tweeter.

The Cons

Price would be the obvious one here – why pay for something when you can get a fairly good service for free? But as you’ll see from the package outlined below, the prices aren’t sky high and could end up saving you money, and helping you gain a lot more insight into your Twitter activity.
Information overload. The drawback of paying for a dedicated Twitter package is that you get so much information that in the end makes little sense to you (or your client). It’s very tempting to get drawn into metrics that don’t really transfer into real world measurables, and you might end up wasting your time trying to improve a metric that isn’t going to give you any real value back.

Tweetmeme Analytics

There’s a handy video below from Tweetmeme that will give you an overview of how their service works, and there’s certainly some nice features. The site shows you how your web content is spreading through Twitter, as opposed to searching for a particular term or Twitter link. You get some pretty graphs that show you how a particular tweet has been trending, when it peaked etc.. But what I particularly like is the feature that shows you the visibility of users – so how many people saw your tweet, but also the most influential retweeters. This is something that’s incredibly valuable for a brand and is certainly not a job you want to be doing by hand.
You can’t doubt the depth of statistics you get, and I recommend you register for a free trial, but again I’d say don’t get bogged down in the detail. Looking at the source of tweets/retweets such as web, tweetdeck etc.. won’t really tell you an awful lot in terms of ‘real world’ information. Prices are from $50 per domain per month, which is certainly affordable.

There is clearly a future and money to be made in analytics, as Twitter have just bought analytics startup Smallthought Systems. The important thing when measuring Twitter (or any social platform) is not just to get drawn into the numbers, but make sense of them and ensure you’re tracking over time to see how you’re improving.

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Twitter Web Experience Can Never Compete

The Twitter website is not bad. It does the basics and there is no doubt that Twitter are making improvements to make it better (I wouldn’t be surprised if the current downtime was all about a massive new update and improvement to the site) but there is only so far you can go with Twitter.com. The real power of Twitter lies in the clients that have been developed for it and when I say clients I really only mean Tweetdeck and Seesmic.As you can see with the graph below the growth of the Twitter website itself has never been spectacular anyway and it has always been the clients that have seen such stellar growth.

Developers Can Be Annexed

There was a it of a hullabaloo when Twitter announced that it would be entering the iPhone and Android client market but to be honest that was pretty much confined to developers who felt that they had been marginalized. As Twitter has grown in to the mainstream the general public actually have no idea what a client is or who actually builds them. They just want the best user experience possible. There would certainly be a huge uproar for a couple of weeks on all the tech blogs around the world but Twitter hold all the aces now and they might decide that it is in their interests to won the client market.

Grabbing Market Share And Revenue Streams

I am at the stage where I would probably pay a small fee for Tweetdeck if I was asked to. I know I am a power user and need it for work but I think there are a lot of businesses and individuals who could not live without their Twitter client. Twitter could build a pro version of their client (something similar to Tweetdeck) and add in additional functionality that would appeal to brands and businesses. Imagine if I could access the stats for people viewing my profile or the geographical breakdown of where my followers came from. That is the short of information that makes Facebook so valuable and I think that Twitter will need to start doing the same with some sort of power dashboard for brands.

Twitter Starting To Own The Mobile Apps

Up until recently the Twitter experience on mobile was all about what other 3rd party developers would offer you. The experience and usability was nothing to do with twitter at all. Twitter changed that by either launching their own apps or acquiring others so as they now have their own apps for iPhone, Blackberry and Android. The main reason that they gave for this move was that they wanted to control the Twitter experience and keep the quality levels up. In truth I think they realized that they were missing out on a key part of the chain and they were starting to get marginalized themselves by providing all this brilliant information where so many others were getting the value of that information but not Twitter themselves.

Will They Do It?

A large part of the success of Twitter has been down to the developers around the company who have helped grow it in to the monster that it is today. Business is however not a sentimental game and we have already seen that Twitter had no problem coming in and taking their ball back from the other kids for their mobile apps. Coming in to the web client space would be sure to annoy even more developers and push some of them away but Twitter might just see it as a calculated risk that is worth taking. They might also look to take the route of buying somebody and I really see huge potential in them acquiring Tweetdeck. As I said before I don’t think Tweetdeck is far away from being something that brands and businesses would pay for and with some additional functionality and some Twitter Pro branding you could just have a huge new revenue stream for Twitter. I personally think that they have to take this calculated risk. The real power of Twitter does not lie in the website but in 3rd party apps and I think to unlock the real potential of Twitter and their own monetization they need to control the complete package from mobile to web to clients.This is the only place where they don’t currently have a presence so I would say expect to see them here very soon.

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]]> http://www.simplyzesty.com/twitter/twitter-build-web-client-buy-tweetdeck/feed/ 5 http://www.simplyzesty.com/twitter/stephen-fry-traffic/ http://www.simplyzesty.com/twitter/stephen-fry-traffic/#comments Tue, 01 Jun 2010 19:26:54 +0000 Lauren Fisher http://www.simplyzesty.com/?p=9177 So what’s a tweet from one of the biggest tweeters on the planet worth? Last week Stephen Fry sent a tweet recommending Pownum, a new service (set up by a good friend of mine), that allows you to rate and review organisations. The tweet sent traffic through the roof, affirming the power that one person can have online.

Stephen Fry has over 1.5 million followers, and that’s not a number to be sniffed at. And it’s interesting to see how that actually translates. Do you just have a lot of people reading what you say, or are they more engaged than that? The numbers show the power that one person can have online, to set opinion. The original tweet from Stephen Fry was retweeted over 100 times, and had a significant and immediate impact on the traffic. Pownum registered an increase of traffic after the tweet, of over 1,100% The site was also receiving ratings every few seconds, tracked as referral traffic from Stephen Fry’s tweet.

So what can a tweet from Stephen Fry do for your business? The answer is, clearly, a lot! But a word of warning though, for anyone that thinks a tweet from a Twitter celebrity is going to do all the hard work for them. Karl Havard, co-founder at Pownum said that it was a great spike in traffic, but this isn’t consistent and they recognise that there will be more triggers needed, for real word of mouth to set in. It’s also interesting to note how the traffic performed. While on average 20% of visits will be ‘active’ i.e. leaving reviews and opinions, for the referral traffic from Stephen Fry, this was lower at 15%. This is perhaps a reflection on the engagement level of Twitter traffic. You may be in a position to click through to a site, but the likelihood is that you have Twitter running in the background and don’t have time to register or leave a review.

The conclusion? A tweet is great for a quick spike in traffic, but don’t expect it to transform your site overnight.

About Pownum

Pownum is an exciting new service that combines reviews of organisations with, surprisingly, charity! Organistions on the site are given the power of the right to reply, in return for an annual subscription of £5,000 (or $8,000). Though this might seem a little on the pricey side, Pownum donates half of this fee to a charity of the subscriber’s choice. It’s an interesting approach that’s not really been done before, and I’m sure it’s something that would only resonate well with users and organisations alike.

Pownum is also available as an iphone app, allowing instant access to review or complain! Live right to reply?

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]]> http://www.simplyzesty.com/twitter/stephen-fry-traffic/feed/ 1 http://www.simplyzesty.com/twitter/twitter-stats/ http://www.simplyzesty.com/twitter/twitter-stats/#comments Wed, 19 May 2010 20:51:01 +0000 Lauren Fisher http://www.simplyzesty.com/?p=9077 I recently stumbled across this report by Edison, which looked into Twitter usage and general social media trends in North America. Among other interesting findings, one that stood out to me was the fact that despite  87% of people being aware of Twitter, only 7% used it. It’s right up there with Facebook for awareness, but is miniscule in actual use, compared to Facebookwhich had 41% usage. Despite Twitter growing in awareness in the public domain, largely thanks to high profile tweeters, it is still, comparatively, a small group of people that use it. I am unfortunately still viewed as a geek by by non-tweeting friends.

But what got my attention was the fact that 51% of Twitter users said that they follow a brand or company, compared to just 16% for all social network users. The discrepancy between the percentage of people following brands on Twitter compared to Facebook is interesting and for me, raises the question of whether this is simply a fact that a ‘follow’ is seen as less committal than a Like on Facebook, or whether this points to the actual usage. Is Twitter seen more as the channel for reaching businesses?

This is certainly encouraging for those businesses that are focusing their attention on Twitter and is obviously unwelcome news for those that focus their efforts elsewhere, predominantly Facebook. (Though I don’t think 16% should be sniffed at). So what is it about this medium that makes us more amenable to befriending companies? The immediacy of Twitter is probably one reason. I can quite confidently say that I have asked more questions to brands on Twitter than I ever have on Facebook, because I would expect to get an answer almost straight away. And it’s an easy process. I get a notification from Tweetdeck and my question is (hopefully) answered. With Facebook it’s not so smooth.

Let’s also put this into context. A poll conducted last year, found that Twitter was the most important tool for brands to master, at 30%. Facebook came in at 26% and LinkedIn at 22%. And did I mention that this poll was conducted on LinkedIn?? So even in the context of business-related tools, Twitter is still coming up trumps. These findings perhaps mark a shift in the way that we use Twitter.

So how do we use it?

Well, according to the Edison survey, 42% answered that they use it to learn about procucts/services. Twitter as a business tool certainly makes sense, it’s always been the place I would share and seek industry news and the integration of LinkedIn and Twitter last year would support this. It would seem that as ever, we’re still not willing to mix business with pleasure, with Facebook being seen as the ’social’ platform hence why we’re so unwilling to follow brands on there.

Even though Twitter may be seen as the tool for business, there are still wider findings to consider, around the businesses that are actually using these tools. Despite some excellent case studies and a clear appetite to communicate with brands, most small brands still aren’t using social media marketing. A whopping 81% according to a recent report by Citibank. Now this I find surprising. For all the talk of the accountants and business coaches setting up shop on Twitter, this shows that a large proportion of businesses still aren’t engaging in social media. A nice little reminder to take us out of our social media bubble.

There is clearly still a lot of work to be done to raise the awareness of online marketing to businesses. These findings show how important social media is to an organisation, but that there is still a gap between the companies that are using these tools, compared to the willing audience that’s out there. Let’s keep filling it

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]]> http://www.simplyzesty.com/twitter/twitter-stats/feed/ 5 http://www.simplyzesty.com/twitter/twitter-coming-age/ http://www.simplyzesty.com/twitter/twitter-coming-age/#comments Fri, 16 Apr 2010 13:44:30 +0000 Niall Harbison http://www.simplyzesty.com/?p=8739 Twitter has been making plenty of noise over the last week mostly around their own conference Chirp and it really stands out as a week where a lot of decisions that have been taken over the last 6 months seem to be coming to fruition. I think what we are seeing in front of our eyes is a business that has come through a tough year and is scaling right in front of eyes and introducing some key features and initiatives that will see it become an integral part of our social media lives over the coming years. Sure there are still going to be problems especially around the revenue side of things and the model may change significantly over the next 12 months but the good news for Twitter and their own long term success is that at least they have set sail on the course for turning an incredibly popular tool in to a fully fledged successful business that has a very bright long term future…

The Numbers Are Strong

There had been all sorts of speculation over the last six months that the numbers were stalling or that people were perhaps accessing Twitter only through 3rd party apps or even that a small percentage of power users were driving most of the tweets but Twitter themselves always held those numbers close to their chest until this week. Twitter announced that it had 105 Million users on the site and says its still adding 300,000 users per day. The other key number to come out of the chirp conference is that about 75% of the traffic to Twitter does as expected come through 3rd party applications which would explain some of the charts showing that Twitter growth had flat lined

Twitter Making Some Hard Calls

One of the main reasons for getting to where it has today is the ecosystem of developers that Twitter has built up around the company and by nurturing that community Twitter has been able to harness massive growth. There are 1000s of applications that improve the Twitter experience and as the stats show only 25% of users use the web interface. Apps are one of the main ways that people use the service (especially while on the go) and until now Twitter had no official presence in many app stores. With their acquisition of Tweetie they made a very brave call because although they made the app free and will improve it’s features further Twitter stepped in to the developers territory for the first time and fire shots across the bows of massively popular Twitter clients such as Seesmic and Tweetdeck. The last thing Twitter wants to do is upset it’s development community but it has clearly taken the hard decision that in order to control the service better and ultimately generate more revenues it needs official apps and that is why the also launched the less controversial official blackberry app as well. The storm over Twitter upsetting the developers will soon be forgotten and we will soon all be using official Twitter clients both on our mobiles and desktops in my opinion. This is tough for people who have built their whole business in plugging the gaps in Twitter’s product by offering apps up until now but they have to accept that the businesses they started were built on shaky ground in the first place and move on.

Revenue Models

I am still not 100% sold on the sponsored tweets format that Twitter is starting to roll out with selected advertising partners but the news that they have rolled out a revenue model has be seen as good news. There will be a lot of tinkering and Twitter themselves admitted that the ads will be confined to Twitter search results for now but with them announcing that users carry out 600 million searches per day alone you can see the huge potential in this area alone.

The wait for a revenue model has taken some time but this is the first tentative steps being taken and even if some users voiced some initial concerns about the ads the voices of disapproval have not been too strong with most people realizing that the ads need to be integrated at some stage. From what Twitter have been saying this only the start of the revenue generating featured that they will be including and the softly softly approach has to be admired in terms of trying to strike the balance between coming up with a cash generating system and not upsetting the users. It’s not the amazing advertising product that they promised but it is interesting and Twitter are generating some cash without upsetting users too much so a move in the right direction.

Solid Platform

Twitter has been doing some great work in the last 6 months getting the platform to become more solid and as a result you rarely see the fail whale up above that used to be so common on the site. In fact it is probably only older users of the site who know the whale well as it appears so seldom now and that is a real credit to the work Twitter have put in to stabilize the platform and scale it through their insane growth. The 100 million in funding that they have raise in funding is certainly being well used in terms of making a better platform and small announcements this week that further improvements are on the way including making Twitter real time and not having to rely on the API to update will only improve things further.

New Features

At the same time as stabilizing as a platform Twitter is quickly and efficiently rolling out new features that will help it to become and even more important part of our daily lives. One of the biggest was @anywhere which we wrote about a couple of days ago and allows you to add (check us @simplyzesty) Twitter features to your own site in very much the same way as Facebook connect does. It’s aim is clearly to become a fabric of the web and have Twitter as a key feature on websites all over the world. Another features that Twitter is rolling out to go along with their geolocation services is places which will help aggregate information about popular real world places based on the location of people’s tweets. This is very much in Foursquare’s space and although not a direct competitor to the popular checkin game I can see Twitter and their community of developers moving more towards location based features over the rest of the year.

Where To Next?

As we can see form all the sections above Twitter is well on it’s way to growing in to a multi billion dollar tech company along the lines of Facebook and Google and the future really is very bright for them. They have a huge user base which is growing very rapidly, they also have plenty of cash and crucially are stabilizing their platform and adding better features that improve the experience for all their users. They seem to be taking the hard decisions and taking ownership of the key areas of their business that they need to control but didn’t until recently and crucially they are rolling out revenue features that although not universally popular (when are they?) with users have not caused huge uproar either. I must admit that I thought the future was a little bumpy for Twitter about 5 months ago but they have come through a difficult phase of growth very well indeed and look like they are going to be around for a long time to come. They may even reach their goals of getting a billion users and becoming the “pulse of the planet”.

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]]> http://www.simplyzesty.com/twitter/twitter-coming-age/feed/ 0 http://www.simplyzesty.com/twitter/integrate-blog-website/ http://www.simplyzesty.com/twitter/integrate-blog-website/#comments Wed, 14 Apr 2010 23:21:31 +0000 Niall Harbison http://www.simplyzesty.com/?p=8706 So we have been hearing a lot of noise coming from the Chirp Twitter conference in the last couple of days about everything from Twitter having 105 Million users worldwide to the new promoted tweets ad system. One thing that has not been getting as much attention is the new @anywhere system which allows you to integrate Twitter deeper in to your site and is very like the Facebook connect system. The beauty of this is that it allows you to drop Twitter names in to the blog so for example you might want to follow me @niallharbison or my co-founder @laurenfisher or any of the staff here at @simplyzesty including @christianhughes @slkav or @niall_fagan I think you get the picture. There is a lot more to the service than simply creating hover over boxes and it will be interesting to see what people use this for in the future and to see if it does become the fabric of the web as twitter hopes.

Adding Anywhere To Your Blog Or Website

What I love about this is that it can be added to your site in less than 2 minutes and it is a simple piece of javascript that you can go here and grab. All you have to do is click on the image below and follow the simple steps and grab your piece of code and paste in to your site and then it is simply a case of typing the @ symbol in front of any hover boxes that you want to create. A very useful addition to any site and I think we will be seeing lots of @anywhere integrations in the near future. Special thanks to @thejetset for sorting this for me in record time.

Add Twitter Anywhere to your blog or website

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]]> http://www.simplyzesty.com/twitter/integrate-blog-website/feed/ 3 http://www.simplyzesty.com/twitter/charities-social-media-return-twestival/ http://www.simplyzesty.com/twitter/charities-social-media-return-twestival/#comments Tue, 23 Mar 2010 16:37:10 +0000 Lauren Fisher http://www.simplyzesty.com/?p=8007 Last year when Twitter was very much a new kid on the block a group of passionate people saw it’s rise as a great way to create a charity event called Twestival that spread all over the world and helped to raise money for charity. The time has come for the 2nd installment of Twestival and this year the main recipient of the funds raised by this great event will be the charity Concern who are based here in Dublin. We decided to have a chat with them and see how social media is changing their business model and how they hope to leverage social media around Twestival this year…

CEO Tom Arnold On Twestival

“An estimated 72 million children worldwide are not enrolled in school. Concern is committed to reaching those left behind and giving them access to learning and the chance to break out of the cycle of poverty,” said Chief Executive of Concern Worldwide, Tom Arnold. “Twestival Global is revolutionising the way concerned citizens all over the world connect to the poorest among us. We are thrilled to have been chosen, and we’re rolling up our sleeves to make the most of this opportunity.”

How long have Concern been embracing social media?

Concern embraced Bebo, MySpace and Facebook as soon as they were launched. We started using it to help share photos and maintain friendships among the groups that had gone on the Concern treks to Nepal. Acticity was mostly event-based such as Treks, Challenges and Concern Fast. Each of the regional offices did their own thing. The presences we have now on these sites is very different from the ones we started with. A lot has changed since then. Likewise, with YouTube, Flickr and more recently Twitter. Each was experimented with initially, and then we grouped our activities together and started using them in a better way. Our activity now includes Facebook, Myspace, Bebo, YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr and of course Twitter.

Do we raise funds through social media?

We are not alone in finding it hard to measure the financial benefits of social media. We certainly have evidence that people have read our blogs, watched our videos and then donated. Everyone understands the importance of social media in terms of brand and supporter engagement. However, as social media becomes more central to our communications there will likely be more pressure to justify the investment through financial outputs.

During Haiti Concern was able to utilise social media to get the message out immediately that Concern was on the ground, knew Haiti and was working to deliver emergency aid straight away. We had staff blogging and tweeting from Haiti alongside regular video updates. This combined with blog updates in the office and regaular updates on all Concern’s social networking sites meant we were able to show the impact donations were having. Social media was able to give depth, immediacy and reach to support the Haiti appeal email, the online marketing campaign and ofcourse all the offline activity. The fact that in the initial week 70% of donations came in online was evidence of impact of social media.

How is Concern involved in Twestival?

Twestival which takes place on the 25th March uses the power of Twitter to spread the word about a cause and rally people to meet physically to raise money for a cause. Hence Twestival’s tagline Tweet. Meet. Give. Concern is delighted to be selected to be this year’s Twestival Global partner. On the 25th March events will be taking place in cities all over the world to raise money and raise awareness about this years important cause of education.
All of the local events around the world are organized 100% by volunteers and 100% of all ticket sales and donations will go direct to Concerns education projects. 100% of the money raised will be spent on Concern’s work bringing education to the poorest children in the poorest countries. Concern’s education programs have a particular emphasis on reaching out of school children such as girls, orphans, street children, working children, children affected by conflict or children affected by HIV and AIDS.

Keep up to date with whats happening by following Concern on Twitter @concern. The Dublin event takes place in Odeon Bar on Harcourt Street this Thursday 25th March from 6.30pm.Or check out Twestival to find your nearest event.

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]]> http://www.simplyzesty.com/twitter/charities-social-media-return-twestival/feed/ 1 http://www.simplyzesty.com/twitter/vastly-improve-twitter-stream/ http://www.simplyzesty.com/twitter/vastly-improve-twitter-stream/#comments Thu, 25 Feb 2010 14:32:05 +0000 Niall Harbison http://www.simplyzesty.com/?p=7697 My Twitter stream had become a little jaded. It was full of people I no longer interact with (they don’t tweet or are too noisy or they no longer tweet stuff relevant to me etc) or people that have just left the service and I wanted to get some more relevant people to follow. At the end of the day I use Twitter to access information and it makes me more knowledgeable about what is going on in the areas that I work in and enjoy socially. I need that stream to be as strong and as relevant to me as possible but to be honest I have neglected it recently largely because it is a time consuming job thanks to Twitter’s own useless way of allowing you to manage your followers meaning that you have to scroll through hundreds of pages to find people you followed a year ago. Since I have taken the time to make the changes and remove the useless stuff and add good quality people to follow I have noticed a massive difference in the quality of links I am getting. It takes time to add the right people and it is something that should be done on an ongoing basis but it is something that is well worth doing…

Getting Rid Of The Rubbish

There are a couple of tools that will help you including UnTweeps but I have to say that this new tool called Manage Twitter is by far the best I have come across and using their simple interface you will be able to remove people who don’t follow you back, people you have no interaction with and people who have not tweeted in over a month. Within 2 minutes I was able to lose 50 people from my stream who were adding no real value.

Finding New People

I spent about an hour adding 50 new people to my stream and it has already dramatically improved how I use Twitter to digest information. The time I have to use Twitter during the day is very limited so rather than having a thousand people that I don’t have time to interact with and talk to I am trying to keep my stream at the 300 mark so as I have real top quality information that I can read when I do have the time to use Twitter. There are a million ways to find new people to follow but here are the ways I find most effective…

Find The People You Respect And Follow People They Follow

Piggyback on other people’s hard work. I often go in and see who the people I respect and admire are following. Chances are if they have taken the time to follow them and think what they have to say is worth listening to then you are on to something. Not all of the people they follow will be relevant but you will find some real gems in there.

Use Twitter Lists

Twitter lists have largely been unused by the vast majority of users and they do have a lot of detractors but there are also some great lists out there that people have taken time to build and curate and they are essentially doing all the hard work for you if you want to find the relevant people within certain niches and they cut out a lot of the hard manual work of searching for people. You’ll find loads of these and people like Scoble have taken the time to do some amazing work on tech lists.

Sugested User List

Twitter has had a lot of criticism for their suggested user list in the past but they have actually improved it vastly with different categories and it is a good way of finding more popular accounts like news organisations, celebrities and sports stars.

Find Your Real Friends

You get prompted at the very start to invite all your friends to use Twitter with you but when I did this at the very start there was nobody I actually knew on there so it was a little bit useless. I recently went back to try this out and was surprised when there were a load of new friends in there who had since signed up to the service. Head back in there and you will be surprised at who you find.

Blog Posts

If you are looking for anything from musicians to sports stars the chances are that somebody will have taken the time to group them in to a handy list on a blog post. You should be able to find a listing of people in your own niche by doing a simple search on Google. Here are examples of Bollywood actors, Premier league footballers, Models and Scientists. Basically if there is a list of people on Twitter that you want to find the chances are you will find it on a blog somewhere.

Listing Websites

There are tons of Twitter listings and directories out there that you can use people that have added themselves including Wefollow and Justtweetit. Many different countries will have a local Twitter listing so again do a Google search and you’ll be able to find people in your local area.

Hard Manual Work

No matter how many services there are out there I still find that the best follows I find are the people I pick up randomly along the way. This does take a lot of hard work and I will often see great Tweets or people to follow but I completely forget to add them. Building up your stream is hard work but the more effort you put in to it the better results you are going to get in return.

It’s Hard Work But Worth It

Building up a good Twitter stream is hard work (I sometimes wish they sold nice tailored solutions on Tweetdeck) and Twitter themselves have a very poor system for managing all the people you follow. Luckily with the tools in this list you should be able to build up your stream and get the best information and as much of it as you can actually manage to process in the time you have. As you can see from the answers below most people just find people to follow through other people they know and that is largely what I had been doing for a while but I can see how taking a couple of hours to pro-actively clean up your Twitter stream and get the best people in there actually helps in the long run, you should do the same too.

I Asked People On Twitter How They Found People To Follow?

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• Would you pay for Twitter stats?
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• What can Stephen Fry do for your traffic?

]]> http://www.simplyzesty.com/twitter/vastly-improve-twitter-stream/feed/ 4 http://www.simplyzesty.com/twitter/twitter-investing-search/ http://www.simplyzesty.com/twitter/twitter-investing-search/#comments Sun, 14 Feb 2010 17:57:07 +0000 Lauren Fisher http://www.simplyzesty.com/?p=7472 When it looked like the monetisation of Twitter might be through integrating search results on Google through the addition of ‘real time’ , it now seems that they’re investing in their own areas of search. This is good, as it could well secure the future of Twitter as a viable business and not just a powerful online tool. Louis Gray recently posted about how Twitter has hired search guru Krishna Gade (previously of Bing). It’s been clear from the start that Twitter has had a clear focus on search, since the acquisition of summize.com. Often though, their search experience is negligible.

The search capabilities of Twitter are huge, but is something that needs attention. There needs to be improvements made both for the way you can find tweets, as well as how you find people to follow. The ‘find people’ function on Twitter could certainly see improvements, as it is currently fairly limited and doesn’t provide a very insightful search experience. But what needs obvious attention is the search function for individual tweets. This rarely goes back further than a few days, unless you’re lucky and I’m often frustrated that information I know is there just isn’t showing up through their search engine. The ability to search by location is also confusing and can be easily simplified to provide a better user experience. Why, on advanced search, can I not just enter ‘Dublin’ as a location, having to opt instead for 5 miles, 50 miles etc.. within a location?

I expect that there will also be many changes to be made to Twitter’s search integration with other sites. Even though Twitter has an open API, I think there can be huge strides made in providing a more official presence for Twitter search – think along the lines of Google’s custom search bar here.

Room for improvement

The massive advantage Twitter has is that there are other search engines out there that are attempting to address the problems that Twitter search currently has and providing solutions, such as the ability to search only within the people you follow. What Twitter can do is learn from the people that have been out there answering our problems to search and easily integrate them with the site, providing a more intuitive search function that increasingly draws us into the site. When Twitter introduced their saved search option for example, I know that I used Tweetdeck’s search function less, appreciating the fact that I could access my searches quickly and easily no matter where I was logging on. This is the kind of thing that Twitter can turn to its advantage (provided they don’t mess things up like they did with their retweet feature).

What we’ll all be watching closely of course is how/if Twitter starts to support sponsored search ads, which is certainly an area that Krishna has experience in. Search has long been Twitter’s trump card, we just haven’t seen them really use it yet. The hire of Krishna could signal that Twitter are about to come out fighting and could just hit Google where it hurts, providing an ultimately different search function that takes all the good things about their site and what they do well and turns it into a profitable tool.

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• New Suggested Friends Tool On Twitter Incredibly Useful
• Video – Twitter in super real time
• Would you pay for Twitter stats?
• Why Twitter Will Either Build A Web Client Or Buy Tweetdeck
• What can Stephen Fry do for your traffic?

]]> http://www.simplyzesty.com/twitter/twitter-investing-search/feed/ 2 http://www.simplyzesty.com/twitter/twitter-add-conferences/ http://www.simplyzesty.com/twitter/twitter-add-conferences/#comments Thu, 04 Feb 2010 22:17:08 +0000 Niall Harbison http://www.simplyzesty.com/?p=7307

Robin Blandford speaking at TEDx conference

I was at a conference tonight and due to a combination of my phone being nearly dead and the fact that I’m trying to cut down on my Twitter usage (long story) it was the first conference that I have been to in a while where I actually fully concentrated on the speakers. I have a new habit at conferences (which nearly everybody has) of sitting there with my laptop on my knees answering emails and updating Twitter with interesting things I hear and even talking with other people at the conference on Twitter. Something changed tonight when I was watching the talks and giving them my 100% dedicated attention… I enjoyed it and left feeling inspired and uplifted (mostly thanks to Robin Blandford).

I don’t think it was the content of the actual conference but more the way in which I consumed it without distraction and really listened to the message. I like to think that I can multitask as well as the next person but how well can you listen to somebody and watch their body language when you have your head stuck in a computer screen or phone? Remember that most of what we remember is influenced by people’s gestures and facial expressions and people pay ticket prices to conferences to essentially watch a performance by the speaker rather than to learn new information as the facts that are shared are not always new or remarkable.

There is no doubt that Twitter can enhance the conference experience and it does add value especially to people who could not be there in person but I just wonder sometimes is it noise for the sake of noise? Do we really need to get a blow by blow commentary of everything that happens? I’ve seen so many conferences were it becomes a bunch of inane babble streaming past on Twitter and I very often have to filter it out of my stream as I try to find good content.

I know Twitter at conferences adds some value and I can totally get how it adds to the experience but I found out by accident tonight that you actually get a lot more value out of listening to what the person who has taken their time to prepare a meaningful presentation is trying to say. I am sure people will happily go on tweeting in greater numbers from conferences but I just think that I will go back to the old way that has worked for millions of years and sit there as part of a group and listen to the wisdom that people with more knowledge on a subject than me are sharing. Sometimes you just don’t need tools to enhance an experience and sometimes they take away from the reason why you showed up in the first place.

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• Video – Twitter in super real time
• Would you pay for Twitter stats?
• Why Twitter Will Either Build A Web Client Or Buy Tweetdeck
• What can Stephen Fry do for your traffic?

]]> http://www.simplyzesty.com/twitter/twitter-add-conferences/feed/ 3 http://www.simplyzesty.com/twitter/twitter/ http://www.simplyzesty.com/twitter/twitter/#comments Wed, 27 Jan 2010 15:33:11 +0000 Niall Harbison http://www.simplyzesty.com/?p=7117 I have been talking to different people in the last couple of days about the tools they use to access Twitter and have been blown away by the amount of different services, apps and tools that are in use. We are big Tweetdeck users here in the office and for all our clients but it seems to be a case of different strokes for different folks. With that in mind I wanted to carry out a little poll to find out what a social media savvy bunch like the readers of this blog would use. There are benefits to each service and what I actually find is that I end up using a couple like Twitter.com to access things quickly, the mobile when I am relaxing in the evening or on the go and Tweetdeck for more formal client work. What we are really trying to nail down on here though is which one service you use the most to give us a little interesting snapshot of where the Twitter client market is at and see how people use Twitter in general. Take the poll below and feel free to tell us about the benefits or dislikes of each one in the comments

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]]> http://www.simplyzesty.com/twitter/twitter/feed/ 6 http://www.simplyzesty.com/twitter/retweets-send-traffic/ http://www.simplyzesty.com/twitter/retweets-send-traffic/#comments Thu, 21 Jan 2010 23:33:57 +0000 Niall Harbison http://www.simplyzesty.com/?p=6938 I was looking through our stats this evening here on the blog and one thing really jumped out at me, just how little traffic comes to the site via Twitter. Twitter is often championed as a great way to share links and build traffic to websites but to be honest we really don’t benefit from it all that much. Like many sites we have a share on Twitter button from Tweetmeme on the top of each post so as people can easily share our content with their followers if they find it useful. If you flick through most of our posts they have a good few tweets each with some getting in to the hundreds of tweets and indeed I wrote this post a while back about Just how Much Traffic 800 Retweets Sends You. I think a lot of people think that Twitter is going to send tons of traffic to their site but I wanted to use our own blog to show down below why that is just not the case. Here is our traffic for the last month and where it came from…

Traffic To This Site In Last Month

No Spikes

Now during the last months we have had some posts that are a lot bigger than others like this one about small businesses (90 Tweets) and this one about social media blogs (105 tweets) that have clearly resonated more than normal with readers and had 5 times as many Re tweets as a normal story yet there has been no associated rise in traffic on the day they were popular.

Automatic Tweets

Any time we have been featured on big blogs like Techcrunch or Mashable what usually happens is that we pick up a couple more bots that just tweet our content out automatically. This may make it look like your numbers are higher than they are from Re tweets but the fact is they send little or no traffic and have no value whatsoever.

Why Keep The Retweet Button?

I was never really a big fan of the sharing buttons with all the social media profiles on them as I never used them myself but I do like the simplicity of the Re tweet button and how it works. I often use it on other sites myself to share content that I like and we get people from all over the world sharing our content with others because of the button. You are going to attract some random people who Re tweet your content which is not going to do you any good as we see above but you also have to remember that Google have started incorporating tweets in to their search results and you can be sure that the algorithm that determines search results is now starting to be weighted to include stories that get shared a lot through social sites like Twitter. The way they will weight it of course is by using the influence of people who Re tweet and with bots and spammers having little influence it all comes down to the amount of reliable authoritative people who pass your content on via social sites and the only way that will happen long term is by writing good quality, insightful and useful content.

Google Is Still The Big Daddy

This blog has only been running for 8 months and it has always been Google that sent the most traffic. We had some basic SEO done to the template at the very start and since then it has just been a case of writing 2 posts a day that people find useful and keep referring back to. It’s not a complicated formula but it does take a huge amount of time and one of the main reasons I had for writing this post was to show that getting traffic to your blog is not just a case of getting a blog post up there and hoping it is catchy enough post for a couple of hundred people to Re tweet it, that just won’t do anything much for you. I am sure that there are sites out there who get sent more traffic via Twitter but I think we have enough data here to prove that it is not as important as some people believe it to be and if you lift up the bonnet and look at the power of the Re tweet it might not be what it seems. Forget Twitter, Google is still where it is at.

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]]> http://www.simplyzesty.com/twitter/retweets-send-traffic/feed/ 15 http://www.simplyzesty.com/twitter/twitter-bring-cold-hard-business-drive-sales/ http://www.simplyzesty.com/twitter/twitter-bring-cold-hard-business-drive-sales/#comments Mon, 18 Jan 2010 16:56:35 +0000 Niall Harbison http://www.simplyzesty.com/?p=6839 We recently won a pretty large client very simply through Twitter and as I said on Twitter at the time “It helped me feel better about the hundreds of hours I had spent dossing on Twitter”. Nobody needs to preach to the merits of Twitter to me but one complaint that I do often hear people saying to me is Twitter really worth all the effort and will I get business out of it? Just last week we conducted an extensive interview with Loraine from La Cucina a business that is using social media effectively to bring real customers through the door and she said that Twitter was the least effective tool for getting customers to come to her shop although it was good for networking with other food bloggers. The thing with social media and Twitter in general is that it changes so quickly and trends can appear from week to week so I wanted to get a discussion going and run a poll and see what the majority of people out there thought. For what it is worth here are some of the thoughts that I have on the issue…

The Wow Factor Has Gone

As recently as six months ago being a small restaurant, bar or local business on Twitter was a big enough story on it’s own, you didn’t even really need to be doing anything innovative. Chances were that if you were sending out special offers or pictures of food etc people would have passed them on to each other and you would have been able to build a buzz on the basis that you were ahead of the curve. Those days are gone as all sorts of people or on the service and you now need to add real value to stand out from the crowd.

Is It A Customer Service Tool?

For bigger companies I would say Twitter becomes far more useful as a customer service tool rather than for making direct sales although many people have made money including Dell computers (apologies for using the most over quoted and obvious example of a business making money on Twitter but it does stand out). The real value is looking after your existing customers using twitter and providing them with the sort of customer service that will not only make them stay with you but also to spread the word about the positive way in which you look after your customers. In other words the sales might not come in directly from Twitter but they may come in an indirect manner.

Should A Small Business Have A Twitter Account?

If you had asked me this question a year ago I would have said 100% yes. I’m not so sure now. Is the return on investment there, I’m not so sure it is. There are too many small companies and businesses out there creating too much noise to really get yourself noticed. How many times have you followed a logo on Twitter? It takes time to build up personal reputation and business logos just tweeting links to content is not going to get a following. There are some great examples of small businesses using twitter well but it is very very hard to build a decent following from scratch these days and in terms of making cold hard cash from Twitter I would certainly advise smaller businesses to stay away from it if that is their only goal. If you are talking about cold hard measurable return on investment it is just not there. Bigger businesses who have larger marketing budgets to include competition giveaways and other innovative ways to use Twitter without needing to worry about the bottom line and return on ROI would still be advised to use it. I know loads of people will say “oh you are a social media agency and doesn’t everybody need to be on Twitter now?” but to be honest something like a leaflet drop or email marketing campaign might work better for you and increase sales. Twitter is not always the answer.

This Is Completely Foreign To Some People

I have given loads of training days and preached to people about how to use Twitter and when I am in the training days or selling them the merits and possibilities their mouths are open in amazement and they all vow to become converts of the service. What happens next invariably is that they dabble a little, get bored and never come back. I have seen this pattern repeated so many times and it is often because people simply don’t have the time. It is easy for me to use Twitter because it is part of my job. People like Pat Phelan have huge success with it as a tool because they live and breath the service all day long and can access it on mobiles and through fancy Twitter clients etc. Small business managers or people from a non technical background don’t think like us and we often forget that. Most people don’t know what blogs are yet alone read them so the whole notion of using Twitter is just alien to them, they only log in to their email once every couple of days never mind using Twitter clients. I think some of us in the industry forget that sometimes when we say Twitter is for everybody, it really isn’t, some people are far too busy serving at the counter or painting walls to even think of the computer.

Twitter Is Not Always the Option

There are hundreds of people out there advising people to embrace Twitter but these days I take as much heart advising people not to use it and look at more effective channels. At the end of the day business owners are usually pretty smart people so if after using Twitter for 3 months they have not seen a single sale through the service they will just stop using it and not employ you to advise them on social media strategy any longer so far better that you look at their business at the very start and see if Twitter is actually the right tool for them to be using rather than wasting 3 months of their time tweeting away and copying what the other cool kids and media are telling you to do.

What Are Your Experiences Or Opinions?

What about you, do you use Twitter for business? Do you think everybody in business should be on Twitter? Is it worthwhile?

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