Managing Your Twittering Schedule

I am having fun with Twitter, however with my schedule I have no time available to even consider tweeting at anytime during my workday. So a month or so ago I discovered hootsuite and all my problems have been solved. 

Here is why I love hootsuite and why I think a Tweeter with a hectic schedule might too. 

1. Pre-schedule tweets: I am an early bird and I am typically with coffee in hand a 5am most mornings reading my news and blog feeds from Google Reader.  I am of the belief that pushing multiple tweets out to your base one right after the other is overkill and a little annoying. I select what I wish to tweet about and then schedule to push out those tweets across the day. I like to do at least one per hour. 

2. Tweet Stats: every time you tweet hootsuite will shorten the url with ow.ly allowing you to track how many click each tweet received. I love playing with this and learning what tweets grab peoples attention. So far in the month of March my tweets have been read and clicked on 711 times. It really is  fun to get this feedback. 

3. Most Popular Tweets: While in stats you can check how many clicks each tweet received, hootsuite will also show you your most popular top ten tweets. I really like this one. 

 

4. Clicks by Region: So with lots of people in the twittershpere clicking away on your tweets, you can also see what countries these clicks are coming from as well as the top referring sites.

Its saves time, you can track the success of your twittering, the charts and graphs look great and are easy to understand and it keeps twittering fun. If you have found something better than hootsuite I would love to hear about it. Happy Tweeting. 

 

Whats Your Twitter Rank?

While my worldwide Twitter rank is 10,250th, I was pleasantly surprised that I was geographically ranked 4th by followers in 'Providence, RI. I feel special. 4th is good right? 

So if you have not already checked out your twitter rank, go to Twitterholic enter you twitter name and have fun checking where you are.

Flush, Grow and Reciprocate.

So how many followers is enough on Twitter? Do you mind following more people than follow you? Well, n0 matter what your feelings on this, here is a great way to manage to your twitter following/followers expectations. 

Managing your Twitter following/followers is all about flushing, growing and reciprocating. 

Flushing refers to unfollowing those who you have followed but have not followed you back. There seems to be a 'twitter code of ethics' that if you follow someone they should follow you back. It’s the polite thing to do right?

Growing is just what it says, adding the people you know who already have twitter accounts including adding as many complete strangers to those who follow you in order to project a sense of the masses that wait on your every drop of wisdom. 

Reciprocating is all about keeping your end of the 'twitter code of ethics.' When someone has followed you, you need to do the right thing and follow them back.  I didn’t make this up it just seems to have become the accepted polite behavior. 

So this all sounds like a lot of work, tweeting, flushing, growing and reciprocating. Well thanks to InRev Twitin  the whole process of flushing, growing and reciprocating has been automated for you. At the click of a button (three buttons to be more precise) you can automatically:

Flush - 50 people you have followed but have not followed you back (They will never know)

Grow - 25 complete strangers will be added to the loyal masses who follow you

Reciprocate - 50 people who have followed you but you have not followed will now be justly rewarded.

You can give repetitive commands for each action so you can go crazy flushing, growing and reciprocating. 

 

 

 

 

 

Twittering: Catching up or leading the way?

While I have known about Twitter for some time, its only in the last 90 days that I have joined the 'band wagon'. So I am trying to figure out how early or late I am arriving to the party. I know I am not an innovator here, maybe an early adopter or could I just be part of the early majority. So I did a little research to find out how many people are on Twitter and heres where my arrival fits in. 

A February 2009 Compete.com blog entry ranks Twitter as the third largest social network (MySpace would be second and Facebook would be the largest in the world^[3]), and puts the number of users at roughly 6 million and the number of monthly visitors at 55 million.^[3] I am going to take the 6 million users number and think only about the 300 million people in the U.S., that will alllow me to fairly assume that 0.2% of the U.S. are Twitter users. When a technological innovation is introduced, not everyone adopts it at the same moment.  Rather, there will be innovators and there will also be laggards.  Based upon the examination of a large number of studies in innovation diffusion, there is a proposed a method of adopter categorization.  

• the first 2.5% of the adopters are the "innovators"

• the next 13.5% of the adopters are the "early adopters"

• the next 34% of the adopters are the "early majority"

• the next 34% of the adopters are the "late majority"

• the last 16% of the adopters are the "laggards"

So while I feel I have come late to the Twitter party, I do feel good knowing that I am probably somehwhere in between an innovator and an early adopter.