Topify - Twitter Email Notifications

I came across Topify which notifies you via email when someone follows you or direct messages you through Twitter. The email notification provides some nice insight into those that start to follow you.

Topify lets you know if you are already following that Twit. If not, you just hit the reply button in your email application and you start to instantly follow that person. The Topify email notification also provides you with the Twit's Following to Follower ratio (a signal used to see how influential that person is). The notification also pulls in the data from Mr.Tweet. Mr. Tweet's data shows how engaging the person is and how many recommendations they have (another signal for influence).

In addition, the notification provides the ability to quickly block the person, unfollow them, or even report them to @spam directly from the email. I find this service very useful as it alerts me to new Twits that are worth the follow (or the block). I recommend signing up this service. It is currently in beta, but they are pretty quick in providing an account.

Twitter Group Lists - Create, Manage, and Share

I came across this interesting site called TweepML. TweepML allows you to create, manage, and share Twitter group lists. This service provides the ability to easily create a Twitter group by either searching on a specific website that has Twitter user names listed on it or allows you to manually enter a list of Twitter users. You then can manage the list, share the list or even embed the listing into your web site. Once the list is completed TweepML provides the ability to also follow the entire list of Twits or choose the individual Twits you would like to follow. The service is free and currently has around 1500 lists created so far.

Twitter Click Tracking Being Implemented

Noticing today that Twitter has implemented click tracking on all links. I think this is part of their bigger plans for business accounts, but could also lead to some type of tracking report for all accounts. You will not notice the tracking link until after you click on a link, but go back and hover over the link and you will see the tracking URL. Here is an example:

/link_click_count?url=http%3A%2F%2Fshorturldomain.com%2Fu1BluI&linkType=web&tweetId=3679734683&userId=9726112&
authenticity_token=1bc57cbc4fb242b0b920ebd8901027d4b221772e

So you will notice that it tracks the outbound link, the type of link (in this case from the Twitter web site), the specific Twitter post id, the account id and some sort of authenticity token.

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

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.