1. Share with anyone in doubt of what you’re doing.
If you’re like me, and you tell those around you that you’ve decided to take the path of a big web idea, chances are they will laugh at you and think you’ve gone crazy. I’ve had countless co-workers, family members and such tell me I was a ‘dreamer’. As Lance Armstrong said after one win, “I feel sorry for anyone who doesn’t dream”.
A lot of people in this world assume. I believe life hard is because of misinformation. I mean, imagine a perfect world, if all things were accurate and truthful, finding solutions to problems would be as easy as grabbing your left and right sock, or chopsticks. But assumptions people make are not facts, and thus, add to our misinformed world. So to reduce this, you’re now the source, the truth, the authority to what you’re doing. If there are those that want to spite you, it’ll be harder for them to do when they see your app’s twitter.
2. Building your SEO
I’m assuming you will be busy posting your updates, getting the word out like putting your twitter link in your email signatures, making announcements in your social networks about following you, etc. But with all those keywords that are important to you, Twitter’ll be another external link with all of this content all indexed in mighty Google. Your twitter account will have a great pagerank when you start getting active too! Doing it for the SEO alone would be worthwhile!
3. Updated news
When building your web app, it’ll be one less functionality you’ll have to implement: the update section. Just use twitter! and use a plugin like Twitter Tool embedded in your wordpress blog for your main content. 140 characters should be enough to say ‘selection menu on blah page is now fixed, thanks steve‘
4. What are you doing?
These are the words that face you when you login to your twitter. It’s one thing if you’ve logged into your general account and you see this question. It’s another when you’ve logged in to your business’s twitter account and facing you is this question. In that sense, Twitter is like a virtual overbearing Steve Jobs boss! (without the following mental abuse!)
5. Motivate yourself
You’ve got followers now who probably won’t be customers. They’re following you for a different reason. Perhaps they want to see your tenacity and drive and lead by example. Energy flows back and forth and any source for pushing yourself is well worth it.
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Showing posts with label twitter updates. Show all posts
Showing posts with label twitter updates. Show all posts
Monday, December 22, 2008
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Twitter for Blog Promotion
Twittering, or using the twitter.com social networking site, isn’t just for fun (although it is terribly addictive). It’s also a great way to promote your blog. You can do that in a few simple and short steps:
Find like-minded people and follow them. Look in particular for people with terms related to your blog in their bio or name. You’ll have to be pretty general here since people don’t get much space on Twitter. Once you follow enough people like you, you should start getting people interested in your topic following you.
Encourage people who visit your blog to follow you on Twitter. This isn’t the only way to get return visitation (RSS feeds and use of sites like Feedburner are great!). But if you have a blog visitor who’s a Twitter junkie and likes your blog, they probably will click your Twitter badge and follow you.
When you have a new blog post, Twitter it. You won’t have room for much, but you can simply post your post header and the link.
Keep an eye on your referrals and see how effective Twittering is. If you find you’re getting even a few visits a day, it’s probably worth the effort. If you’ve actively sought out people who might be interested in your niche or topic, those are probably high-quality visitors who will visit your site again and might even comment.
Read More..
Find like-minded people and follow them. Look in particular for people with terms related to your blog in their bio or name. You’ll have to be pretty general here since people don’t get much space on Twitter. Once you follow enough people like you, you should start getting people interested in your topic following you.
Encourage people who visit your blog to follow you on Twitter. This isn’t the only way to get return visitation (RSS feeds and use of sites like Feedburner are great!). But if you have a blog visitor who’s a Twitter junkie and likes your blog, they probably will click your Twitter badge and follow you.
When you have a new blog post, Twitter it. You won’t have room for much, but you can simply post your post header and the link.
Keep an eye on your referrals and see how effective Twittering is. If you find you’re getting even a few visits a day, it’s probably worth the effort. If you’ve actively sought out people who might be interested in your niche or topic, those are probably high-quality visitors who will visit your site again and might even comment.
Read More..
Sunday, December 14, 2008
The End of Twitter?
If you work in an internet related field (programming, designing, administrating, etc) you’ve probably heard of the “micro-blogging” service Twitter. For those who don’t know what it is, Twitter is a social networking site where users share “Tweets” (140 character messages) with each other and the world at large. As is the case with many new internet technologies however, Twitter has it’s shortfalls, and it might not be long before newer micro-blogging services take over.
One such new micro-blogging service is identi.ca. Even though identi.ca doesn’t have as many users or features as Twitter (yet!), it does some things Twitter does not.
1) REALLY easy setup.
Identi.ca supports OpenID*. Since I already have an OpenID set up, I used it to register my new Identi.ca account. All I had to do was enter my OpenID, approve identi.ca, and choose a nickname. That’s IT! No adding mundane details like my name or e-mail address… all that was pulled from my OpenID automatically.
Of course, if you don’t have OpenID you can still register at Identi.ca normally, and the process looks simple and easy.
2) IM and Text Message support.
When I first started using twitter, I could “tweet” using an instant messaging program. Unfortunately, this functionality soon disappeared, with little explanation as to where it had gone or when it was coming back. Likewise, one of the strongest features of Twitter is the ability to receive tweets from people you’re following on your cell phone as text messages. In the USA this works fine, but here in Canada Twitter has had to disable the service due to excessive costs from the cell phone companies.
Identi.ca seems to have neatly avoided both problems. As of right now at least they have an IM service that works and they’re using e-mail to SMS for their text messaging. e-Mail to SMS doesn’t cost them anything - the fees are passed on to the user. I looked into it and for me it would be a $5 a month upgrade, or 15 cents per message received. This is a bit of a pain, but at least the option is there.
3) Interfaces with Twitter.
Identi.ca interfaces well with twitter, so if you’re switching over you don’t need to worry about people missing your Tweets. Just add your twitter username and password to Identi.ca, and anything you post to identi.ca is copied to Twitter. Win / Win!
4) Identi.ca is Open Source.
Rather than being a closed platform like Twitter, Identi.ca is built on open source software and works with an open source license. This, combined with support for FOAF files*, Microformats*, and OAuth* means that other webmasters can set up their own micro-blogging systems, and fully integrate back to Identi.ca.
In short, Identi.ca takes sharing what you’re doing right now to a whole new level, and its smart business plan and open licensing agreements mean that it will continue to expand long after Twitter has died. If you’re just thinking about getting into the micro-blogging world, take Identi.ca for a spin. As with Facebook / Myspace, sometimes in the internet world “the second mouse gets the cheese”.
Read More...
One such new micro-blogging service is identi.ca. Even though identi.ca doesn’t have as many users or features as Twitter (yet!), it does some things Twitter does not.
1) REALLY easy setup.
Identi.ca supports OpenID*. Since I already have an OpenID set up, I used it to register my new Identi.ca account. All I had to do was enter my OpenID, approve identi.ca, and choose a nickname. That’s IT! No adding mundane details like my name or e-mail address… all that was pulled from my OpenID automatically.
Of course, if you don’t have OpenID you can still register at Identi.ca normally, and the process looks simple and easy.
2) IM and Text Message support.
When I first started using twitter, I could “tweet” using an instant messaging program. Unfortunately, this functionality soon disappeared, with little explanation as to where it had gone or when it was coming back. Likewise, one of the strongest features of Twitter is the ability to receive tweets from people you’re following on your cell phone as text messages. In the USA this works fine, but here in Canada Twitter has had to disable the service due to excessive costs from the cell phone companies.
Identi.ca seems to have neatly avoided both problems. As of right now at least they have an IM service that works and they’re using e-mail to SMS for their text messaging. e-Mail to SMS doesn’t cost them anything - the fees are passed on to the user. I looked into it and for me it would be a $5 a month upgrade, or 15 cents per message received. This is a bit of a pain, but at least the option is there.
3) Interfaces with Twitter.
Identi.ca interfaces well with twitter, so if you’re switching over you don’t need to worry about people missing your Tweets. Just add your twitter username and password to Identi.ca, and anything you post to identi.ca is copied to Twitter. Win / Win!
4) Identi.ca is Open Source.
Rather than being a closed platform like Twitter, Identi.ca is built on open source software and works with an open source license. This, combined with support for FOAF files*, Microformats*, and OAuth* means that other webmasters can set up their own micro-blogging systems, and fully integrate back to Identi.ca.
In short, Identi.ca takes sharing what you’re doing right now to a whole new level, and its smart business plan and open licensing agreements mean that it will continue to expand long after Twitter has died. If you’re just thinking about getting into the micro-blogging world, take Identi.ca for a spin. As with Facebook / Myspace, sometimes in the internet world “the second mouse gets the cheese”.
Read More...
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