Screenr - Instant Screencast for Twitter

I came across this cool free service from screenr.com that allows you to create a screencast and post it to Twitter. The Screenr program allows you five minutes of recording, pre-set or custom screen size capturing, integrated audio, and a bookmarklet to record anytime. Each screencast sits on an individual URL and the service provides you the embed code to share the screencast. The service provides a reTweet function to send the link out, but fails to capture the Twitter conversation.  I found the Screenr program easy to use and I did not need to download any software.

Here is a quick example of one of my screencasts from Screenr, http://screenr.com/r0S

Ad.ly Analytics - Analyze Your Followers

Ad.ly, the Twitter sponsor ads company, has released a new Twitter analytic tool that allows you to analyze your Twitter followers. The tool allows you to see the percentage of Twitter followers who actually view and interact with your tweets, the male/female breakdown of your followers, and global and U.S location breakdown of your followers. The tool also provides a nice chart that displays the time of day you tweet, you get mentioned, and get retweeted.

Now this is the free version of the analytic report, but they do offer an Advanced Report for $9.99.  It looks like you can sign up for $9.99 a month or at a yearly rate of $99.99. The Advanced Report will provide you sentiment analysis, a list of followers who engage with you, and a list of your top 20 most influential followers. Not too sure about the last two features, but the sentiment analysis report may provide some nice information about how you are being perceived in the Twittershpere.

TWITin by Buzzom - Twitter Account Managment Tool

I came across a Twitter account management tool called TWITin by Buzzom. This free tool allows you to manage you Twitter followers and offers several tools to help you grow your follower count. When you first log into the tool, the TWITin dashboard will display users that will most likely follow you back. It looks like most of the suggested users have a 1 to 1 follow ratio. The interface allows you to easily select all of the users or to pick and choose which ones you would like to start to follow.

The second tool they offer is the Flush. The Flush tool allows you to unfollow users who are not following you. You need to be careful to not go and follow a bunch of people ( i.e. 2000) and mass unfollow them and then repeat these steps. Twitter may suspend your account. You really want to throttle this. SafeUnfollow.com would be a better solution as it allows you to set the maximum number users to unfollow at a rate of 4 to 100 users per day.

The third tool they offer is the People Search. I really like this tool as it allows you to search bios, location, or recent tweets by keyword. This acts in the similar fashion as Twitter's search feature, but gives you the ability to easily follow the users.

The tool also offers a Feed Management section that allows you to post feeds to your Twitter and Facebook accounts. This tool provides the options to post up to 30 entries, set the post interval rate, allow you to repeat the post X amount of times per day, as well as add a signature to the tweet.

Finally, the Cross Follow tool allows you to find people who are following a particular Twitter account and provides the ablility to mass follow all of their followers. This could be a good tool to find like minded consumers that may share an interest in you product or service.

Goo.gl - Google URL Shortner

Google announced their new URL shortening service, goo.gl. This URL shortening service is available within the Google toolbar and within Feedburner. You will need to download the latest Google toolbar to get the Share feature. Currently the goo.gl URL shortener is not a standalone service from Google. So you can't use it to shorten URLs without going through the Google toolbar or through Feedburner.

A new feature for Feedburner is to use the new goo.gl URL shortening service to automatically post your latest blog entries to your Twitter account. This feature acts similarly to TwitterFeed, but is much more reliable. ProBlogger has a nice overview of this new Feedburner feature.

There has been speculation on how this will affect the most popular URL shortener, bit.ly. Some think that Google will release this as a standalone service (and they sort of mentioned it in the original blog post that this could happen) with enhanced tracking features. I for one would like to see a seamless integration with Google Analytics.

Now let me put on the tin foil hat. I think Google may struggle a bit with this service. Google is trying to capture user data from too many points and many people may feel that Google is the next Minoirty Report. I for one will not be jumping ship from bit.ly to goo.gl for my URL shortening services.

10 DoFollow Twitter Sites

Just because Twitter places a NoFollow tag on your links, it does not mean you can can not get DoFollow links from your Twitter profile. A lot of the third party development sites will pull in your Twitter profile (and bio link) and give you link love. So I have put together my first list of ten DoFollow Twitter sites.

• LocalTweeps.com
• Tagwalk.com/site/domain.com
• TrustedReferral.com/profile/username
• Twibbon.com/username
• TwitDir.com
• m.TwitStat.com/index.php?userid=username
• TwitterStates.com
• Twitter.Threadless.com/user/username
• Twittangle.com/username
• Twitr.org/user/username