7 More Places To Syndicate Your Twitter Feed

This post is a follow up to my previous entry, 7 Places To Syndicate Your Twitter Feed, where I provided some online resource sites that allow you to add your Twitter feed while providing DoFollow links. So here are a couple of social network profiles where you can syndicate your Twitter feed.

• Chi.mp - This site allows you to create a free domain with the .mp TLD. The site will allow you to pull in your latest Tweets as well as other RSS feeds.
• Hi.im - A social profile site.
• Identoo.com - A social profile site.
• Iminta.com - A social profile site that will hyperlink the Twitter update back to the Twitter post. It will not link to any links within the actual tweet.
• My.Mashable.com - A user profile page on the popular social media news site, Mashable. The profile will allow you to add a RSS feed to display.
• Tabber.org - A social profile site.
• Profilactic.com - A social profile site.

How To Pick The Right Person For Your Sponsored Tweet

I recently had a client that wanted to venture into testing Sponsored Tweets (with a little nudging on our side). Now I can't go into specifics of the test, but I wanted to at least share some of the struggles and insight that I obtained going through the process of setting up the test account. For this test we choose to use the company, Sponsored Tweets.

The first obstacle (and it was a high one) was how do I choose which person to solicit based on my budget as well as my product? Well Sponsored Tweets provides the advertiser a couple of data points to filter their pool of candidates. One metric you can filter by is based off of Grader.com's TwitterGrader score. The score is betwen 0 and 100 (100 being most influential). They also provide a filter based on Klout.net's Klout Score. The score is between 0 and 100 (100 having the most clout). You can also filter by max cost per tweet, minimum number of followers, by the person's follower ratio (Followers to Following - typically want this number to be under 1), keyword tags, and by geographic location.

Once your results are filtered, you are presented with a list of matching candidates. On this results page Sponsored Tweets provides another metric to sort by called FAR (Follower Activation Rate).

"...measure of the Tweeters influence with their followers based on percentage of people who click through. The scale is 0-10, with 5 being the system wide average. The higher the number the better."

I took a look at several of these accounts with high FAR score and found that it did not correlate to the scale provided. I found a lot of candidates with a 6 were not very engaging. Again I found these accounts to contain mostly ReTweets. This could of been due to seeing a snap shot of the last 24 hours of their account.

So we started looking at a max cost per tweet of $2. What we found is that 99% of these accounts were non-engaging (some RT, but no conversations). These accounts also tended to be set up through a RSS feed in a "set it and forget" mode. Probably until we reached the $10-$30 range did we start to see better engagement within the candidate accounts.

So here are some important tips that we used to decide if we wanted to offer our ad to a particular person.

1. Take a look at the candidate's Twitter stream. Take note how ofter they are responding, versus just posting and ReTweeting. You do not want a wall flower.
2. If they are using Bit.ly links in their posts (not ReTweets). Take the Bit.ly URL and add the plus sign (+) to the end of it in a browser. This will show you the click stats on the link. This is a great measure of engagement. What we found in the range of $2-$30 was typically 15 clicks per link.
3. People can buy Followers, so don't always get hung up on the shear number of Followers someone has. Those with thousands of "real" Followers will be on the $50+ range.
4. Go to the candidates Twitter account and look at the byline at the bottom of each status update. If all of the "about X hours from ...." containTwitterFeed, HootSuite, or even Ping.FM this means that they are using a RSS feed to automate the posting to the account. So they tend to be very little engagement on those accounts.

Here is a nice Twitter advertising case study by Jeremy Schoemaker (but just know he was on Sponsored Tweets parent company, Izea's Advisory Board).

Hopefully this helps a bit. Let me know any strategies you may use.

10 More DoFollow Twitter Links

This is a follow up to my 10 DoFollow Twitter Sites post. I come across some additional Twitter API sites that will provide DoFollow links from the imported Tweets as well as from the Twitter profile. So here is Volume II of DoFollow Twitter links;

• Crowdeye.com
• Klout.com
• Plentyoftweeps.com
• Sency.com
• Twaitter.com
• Taweet.com
• Tweetworth.com
• Twiscounter.com
• TwitRak.com
• TwitReferral.com

TwitterPeek - The Ultimate Twitter Device

Are you addicted to Twitter or does you job revolve around Twitter, then the TwitterPeek handheld device is what you need. This dedicated Twitter handheld device allows you to keep up to date on your latest tweets. It allows you to send and recieve unlimited tweets (no Twitter jail for you), reply, retweet, direct message, view Twitpics, and read links. The service runs off of cell towers, so an Internet connection is not needed. There is no data plans or texting fees, because the product runs on its own mobile network. The product states that the battery life is around three to four days. The great part is that they offer lifetime service for just $199. The only down side I see is that you can only run one Twitter account on the device.

Most Effective Twitter Tactics Used By B2B and B2C

MarketingProfs released their The State of Social Media Marketing report that surveyed over 5100 marketing and business professionals about how they are using social media. From this report (that costs $599) eMarketing published an excerpt, What's Working for Social Media Marketers? and looked at some of the most effective Twitter marketing tactics used by B2B and B2C marketers.

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