MegaTweet - SuperTweet on Steroids

Once again @pageoneresults has out did himself. He originally brought us the SuperTweet. Now we have the MegaTweet, a concatenated SMS. A concatenated SMS can consist of up to 255 separate SMS messages. Here is a screenshot with the explanation.

Brand Your Tweets - What Every Brand Manager Needs To Do

One of the first steps to brand your Tweets is to use a custom URL shortener. Coke is a great example of how they created their own branded URL shortner, http://cokeurl.com/. This reinforces their brand, gives credibility to the shorten URL, and ensures that they have no broken links if a URL shortening service goes belly up (read about tr.im). There are several resources to find a URL shortening script, but make sure you read Danny Sullivan's article, URL Shorteners: Which Shortening Service Should You Use?, to understand what you should look for in a URL shortening service.

When you post from an application like CoTweet, TweetDeck, or Twitterfon, the tweet posts a statement containing the date of publication of the tweet and at what source you have posted the message from. So in the above Coke example you will see that they posted this tweet from CoTweet. The actual text "CoTweet" links back to the CoTweet.com site. So why not do what all of these other applications do and create the tweet from your own domain?

If Coke was forward thinking they would have created a Twitter application on their own domain and thus have the capability to brand this "from" link. This would totally brand the entire tweet. Why allow these third party apps to get all the glory?

Now your are asking do I need to put in the time and resources to create my own Twitter application? Well not exactly. A French programmer developed a PHP script to allow you to set up a brandable Twitter "from" link. The translated article can be found here. Now the script requires PHP5 and an Twitter oAuth account. This script was originally designed to exploit the fact that these "from" links were DoFollow links. Not sure if this script was the reason why Twitter recently closed that loop hole and started to noFollow these "from" links (first reported here).

I recently tested this script and here is a screenshot of my Tweet.

FavTwit - Announce Your Favorite Twitter User

Just launched is a new Twitter Application that asks the question “Who’s your Favtwit?” FavTwit allows users to announce who their favorite twitter user is. People can do this at the Favtwit website or by direct messaging Favtwit.

Dennis Dornon, the creator of FavTwit, calls it a "Silly Twitter App”

Although he calls it a "Silly Twitter App" I do see a couple benefits of such an application:

First, once it’s in full swing you will be able to tell who’s popular among other users of FavTwit and these users could be worth a follow.

Secondly, by using the Top Friends report you can find twitter users who actually interact with others.

The site uses Twitters OAuth for security but if you still can’t be bothered logging in you can send a DM to @Favtwit with @username and it will post both to the site and to Twitter.

Take a moment and pop over to Favtwit and answer the question of “Who’s your Favtwit?”

Characteristics of the Top 5% Most Active Users on Twitter

I came across an interesting Twitter study, Inside Twitter, by Sysomos. The study looked at over 11.5 million Twitter accounts. Since this study found that 5% of users accounted for 75% of all Tweets, Sysomos went a step further and looked at the characteristics of the top 5% of active users on Twitter.

The biggest finding in the new study, An In-Depth Look at the 5% of Most Active Users, is that they found 32% of the top "users" were actually bots. They extrapolated this data and found that 24% of all accounts on Twitter were bots. Now Twitter bots are not all spam there are some useful Twitter bots (here is a short list of top Twitter bots).

Some other interest stats:

• Over 60% of top active users reside in the United States. Followed by UK (6.9%), Japan (4.7%), and Canada (4.3%)
• 33.7% of top active users joined Twitter this year
• 16.5% of top active users Tweet more than 10 times per day
• Retweets accounted for 5.06% of top user's activity versus 4.02% for overall users