Cotags – Signature Tags For Co-Tweeting

I was just introduced to two new Twitter terms, “cotags” and “co-tweeting”. Let me first explain what “co-tweeting” means. Co-tweeting is when you have more than one person montior and respond within a single Twitter account. It looks to be derived from CoTweets.com, a Twitter platform being used by companies to engage their customers through Twitter. So the term cotags refers to the way you sign your tweets when you are co-tweeting through a shared account. The cotag standard is the caret sign followed by your first and last name intials. So my cotag would be ^BN.

Here are a few examples from several co-tweeting accounts:
@campaignmonitor

@twitterapi

@teathis

@fordfiesta

Sponsored Tweets - Interruptive Advertising

Izea recently launched Sponsored Tweets, an advertising platform for Twitter. The Sponsored Tweet service is similar to their blog advertising service, Pay per Post.

Sponsored Tweets is currently in "double secret beta", but is allowing Twits to sign up for the service. The Sponsored Tweets service provides several option to handle how you want to display advertising in your Twitter stream.

First, they allow you to choose between "I'll write" or "Advertiser writes" ad unit. You have to be leary about letting the advertiser write your Tweets. People follow you to hear your thoughts, not those of a third-party advertiser. It also looks like they will provide you the opportunity to review the sponsored tweet before pushing it out into your Twitter stream.

Secondly, the Sponsored Tweet service allows you to select a related category for your account. I am assuming this will help match up advertisers with Twits. They provided nine categories: Business/Finance, Entertainment, Family, Food, General, Health, Marketing, Technology and Travel.

In addition to selecting a relevant category, the service allows you to include 10 keywords to tag your account with. Again, it looks as if this will help advertiser match up with Twits.

The service provides two methods of payment, Charge Per Tweet or Charge Per Click. The Charge Per Tweet is an amount that you will make for each and every tweet. The Charge Per Click is the minimum you will be paid on a per click basis. There is an formula being used to determine the Charge Per Tweet and Charge Per Click. These payouts can differ great by the number of Twitter followers the account has. I tested it with a couple of accounts which had around 150 followers, 4,000 followers and one with 10,000 followers. The 150 follower account had a $1.00 Charge Per Tweet and a $0.15 Charge Per Click. The 4,000 follower account a $10 Charge Per Tweet and the 10,000 follower account had a $28 Charge Per Tweet. I don't have the Charge Per Click on the last two, but those accounts were significantly higher then $0.15.

The last setting, "My Content Rating" allows you to select whether your Twitter account is G-rated, NC-17 rated or R rated. I am assuming that R rated accounts were meant for porn related accounts (when Twitter gets to that point).

Izea is all about disclosure, as they should be. They are recommending to append #spon to the tweet to signal that the tweet is sponsored. While this is necessary, the majority of Twits are unfamiliar with what a hashtag is. So there is a gap in educating the casual Twit on what the #spon tag really means. A positive thing for a standard hashtag for these sponsored tweets is that scripts can be created to filter such ads out of your Twitter stream. We saw this when the Twitter advertising platform Magpie launched last year. One developer created a greasemonkey Ad Blocking Script.

There are some concerns I have in regards to Sponsored Tweets. The first one is what controls are there for how often a Twit posts an advertisement. I am going to see 3,5,25 ads being pushed into my Twitter stream from a single account. Multiple this by the 25 or even 100 accounts that I am currently following. This could get really annoying and clutter up my Twitter stream pretty quickly.

Not real sold on the Per Tweet Charge. As any seasoned "Twitter Marketer" knows that you can buy followers for pennies. So just because I have 10,000 "bought" followers, doesn't justify that I should get paid more if I had 500 home grown active and engaged followers. So as an advertiser I would be opposed to a Per Tweet Charge.

As a marketer I do believe that all advertising platforms should be tested for ROI. As a consumer I am not thrilled about the service.

When Is the Best Time to Tweet?

The recent "State of the Twittersphere" report had some interesting data to report this month. The report provided data points for the distribution of Tweets-per-Hour and Tweets-per-Day. They found that business hours during the business week in the US are the most popular. Their graph shows Tweet volumes spike between 9am -10am, 3pm-5pm, and 11pm-12pm. The most activity occurs at 11pm. The data does not provide the timezone.

Days with Highest Tweet Volume (highest to lowest):

1. Thursday
2. Friday
3. Tuesday
4. Wednesday
5. Sunday
6. Monday
7. Saturday

I can see why Monday would be a slow day to Tweet, due to the start of the work week. It seems as if more people are Tweeting towards the end of the week when they have less work to accomplish.

Why You Need to Modify Your @ Reply

On May 11 Twitter removed the ability to see @ replies from your Followers to another Follower that you do not currently follow (confused?). If I followed @someone and @someone replied to @sometwo I will no longer receive the Tweet from @someone in my Twitter stream since I myself do not follow @sometwo. There was quite an uproar about the removal of this reply setting. It was a great way to find and connect with new people as well as gain additional followers. This is only affected when the @ reply is at the beginning of the Tweet. There has been a trend of using the ".@" reply so that everyone sees your replies. It is recommended that you use the ".@" reply until Twitter remedies the issue.

Read the blog threads on the official Twitter blog about this issue.

• http://blog.twitter.com/2009/05/whoa-feedback.html
• http://blog.twitter.com/2009/05/we-learned-lot.html
• http://blog.twitter.com/2009/05/replies-kerfuffle.html

Twitter Squatter - How To Handle a Sqwitter

I was recently asked about how to obtain a Twitter account that uses a company name as their Twitter user name. A Twitter Squatter or Squitter, can be handle through several steps, but the Twitter Squatter account needs to meet certain criteria laid out by Twitter's Terms of Service and Rules.

• Attempting to sell or extort other forms of payment in exchange for user names will result in account suspension. Now this has been circumvented by @cnnbrk, where CNN hired the account holder as a "consultant" and had him transfer his account to CNN (see article).
• If an account has been inactive for six months Twitter "may" remove the account. They state that they will not released the removed account unless their is a case of infringement. Twitter notes just because an account has no updates or no profile picture or has not shown any intent to mislead does not constitute infringement.
• Account was created using a news feed from a third party. If someone is Twitter Squatting on your company name using your news feed, you may be entitled to that user name.

To report Twitter Squatting send a reply to @twitter with the user name of the squatter. They strongly suggest using the word "squatter" in your tweet for a faster response to the Sqwitter.

Another suggestion is to actually start following the Sqwitter account. Once you have started to follow them, I would try and send a reply to the account to start the conversation of acquiring the account.

Here is information on Twitter's Trademark Policy:

• Using a company business name, logo, or trademark protected material in a manner to mislead or confuse may be considered trademark infringement. If this is the case then you need to submit a support ticket Twitter via their support form (will need a Twitter account to log in).

Twitter Follower - Auto Follow Your Way To The Top

Well I am not a big fan of auto following on Twitter, but @johnchow released a new free tool called Twitter Follower. The tool allows you to join a list of Twits who have auto follow enabled for their accounts. You can easily go down the current list of Twits and start following them right from the Twitter Follow site. Twitter Follow also provides another free tool to mass un-follow those who are not following you back. It is a pretty simple process that only takes seconds.

I also came across another Twitter auto follow site called Twitter Auto Follow. This site provides a list of current users that have auto follow enabled on their Twitter account. To get added to the site you will need to send an email.

Twitter Local Directory List

Even though Twitter allows people to network with other people from around the globe, there is an emerging demand for local networking. While local social networking on Twitter is starting to pickup steam I did some quick research in locating Local Twitter Directories.

GeoFollow is a location based Twitter directory that allows users to search by city, state, zip, country, tag, name, username, or keyword. The site suggests to get listed early, so your profile will be listed higher for your particular city and state. Note that the Twitter profile link and the bio link are NoFollows.

Loaded Web's Local Twitter Directory is another local Twitter directory that serves the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand. The current directory lists 1300 twitters from the United States. At the city and individual level, the site pulls in the top Hashtags as well as the top URLs being tweeted in the last week and for the month. Note that the links on this site are NoFollowed.

LocalTweeps features local Twits from the United States and Canada. The local directory results provide a DoFollow profile and bio link.

WeFollow directory (started by Digg's Kevin Rose) allows users to tag themselves with a city. As this is one of the more popular Twitter directories there seems to be a fair amount of users tagging themselves by city. The site does provide a DoFollow profile and bio link, but removes links from the profiles lastest Tweet.

Twitr is a clone of the WeFollow directory. You can leverage this directory by adding a city tag. Looking at a sample of users, most do not tag themselves with a city. So the validity of this directory for local networking may not be effective. The site does provide a DoFollow profile and bio link.

Twibs is considered a Twitter business directory, but the search feature allows one to search by city and state. This site does provide a DoFollow profile and bio link.

Twellowhood by Twellow.com provides a search feature that allows users to search by location. Currently Twellowhood includes only United States and Canada in their local Twitter directory. The site provides a DoFollow profile and bio link as well as social profile links.

Other Local Twitter Sites

ChirpCity provides the latest tweets from cities around the United States.

CityTweets provides "near" real-time tweets from and about individual cities. They only have around 23 cities listed from the United States, Japan and Brazil. They do allow you to grab their source code to create your own CityTweets.

TwitterLocal, while not a local Twitter directory, it is a desktop tool that allows you to watch Twitter streams based on a specific radius around a particular location.

On a side note, Lee Odden wrote a nice post on the Top 12 Twitter Directories to Find Brands and Companies on Twitter. Worth the read.

TwitterSplit.com - Send External Links to Your Site

Twittersplit is a cool tool I found on BirdsAll Social Media. Twittersplit allows you to send external links to your own URL. Yes, send external links to your own domain. Twittersplit requires that you install their script to do this. Basically it auto-frames every link you post to Twitter. Here is their example, http://budurl.com/flyingman.

This can be a really good tool for branding purposes. Since you are sending the user to your domain, but I caution that framing someone 's content on your site may not be the right thing to do.

Unscheduled Maintenance Error Picture

No Fail Whale, but...

Twitter's Status..Err...Site Issues

Twitter has become a little more transparent in that they are now displaying a status update of the health of Twitter at http://status.twitter.com. The Twitter Status blog is being updated more frequently to display the latest site issues. It looks like the blog has been running since May of last year. Interesting to note that the blog is being hosted through Tumblr while their company blog (http://blog.twitter.com) is host through Blogger.