Co-Tweeting Being Pushed Live on Twitter

Co-tweeting is when you have more than one person monitor and respond within a single Twitter account. Recently there have been sightings that Twitter is starting to push a new co-tweeting feature that will identify the author of the Tweet. Twitter is now adding a by-line to the post. So instead of "5:52 PM Mar 3rd via web" you will see "5:52 PM Mar 3rd via web by jennadawn". Some say that this may be a premium feature that Twitter will be providing for their business accounts. By including this co-tweeting feature, business accounts will be able to have a more personal feel. Here is a example from the official @twitter account.

Obessed Twitter Users Check in Day and Night

Retrevo Gadgetology's latest blog post, Is Social Media a New Addiction?, reports some interesting findings from their latest study on how people spend their time on social networks. Some of the highlights of the report:

• 48% of respondents check/update Facebook or Twitter whenever they wake up during the night or as soon as they wake up
• 42% check/update Facebook or Twitter first thing in the morning
• 16% under the age of 25 check Facebook or Twitter as their source for news in the morning
• 15% over the of 25 check Facebook or Twitter as their source for news in the morning

Where Do People Go After They Visit Twitter.com?

Hitwise recently posted, Twitter and News and Media Websites, that took a look at where Twitters go after they visit Twitter.com. The report found that almost sixty percent of them visit another social network (appx. 30%) or an entertainment site (appx. 30%). This was followed by search engines (appx. 7%), lifestyle sites (appx. 5%), news and media sites (appx. 4.5%), portal frontpages (appx. 4%), and then shopping / classifieds, business and finance sites, and email service (all appx. 3.5%). The report also looked at "down stream" visits to media / news sites versus all other categories. Visits to media / news sites increased by 54%, while all other categories increased by 138%.

#OMGConan Hoax Shows Social Irresponsibility

In Daniels Terdiman's latest blog entry, #OMGConan: The big Digg party Twitter Hoax, he writes about the recent hoax that was retweeted across Twitter about Conan O'Brien joining the Internet TV network, Revision3. The hoax was orchestrated  during the South by Southwest Interactive festival as a way to eclispe the biggest Twitter hoax to date, the death of Jeff Goldblum.

I am glad that no traditional media outlets were involved, as their credibility would have dwindlee down to the levels of  TMZ. Any ways, this Twitter hoax clearly displays the power of a few highly influential social indiviudals that have strong online credibility with their followers. With that power comes social responsibility in reporting or sharing information. But when individuals abuse this trust and post rumors or hoaxes, that trust erodes away. Will their followers think twice about retweeting their next tweet due to this hoax?

Twitter Quietly Rolls Out Own URL Shortner

Twitter recently posted, Trust and Safety, a blog entry that discussed the steps they are taken to prevent scams and malicious links on Twitter. This was in response to the recent Barracuda Labs report that showed in October 2009, one in eight accounts created were deemed to be malicious, suspicious, or otherwise misused. But at the end of the Twitter post there is mention that they are going to be redirecting links within Direct Messages and email notifications. It looks like they will be using the URL shortener twt.tl to do this. It seems to be open ended as whether they plan to roll this shortening service out to status updates.

Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land, put the Twitter URL shortener to the test to see if the tracking of the originial shorten URL would be lost. He found that there indeed seems to be NO impact.

Over 30 Percent of Twitter Accounts Never Tweet

A new study by Barracuda Networks, dubbed Twitter's Red Carpet Era, took a look at 19 million Twitter accounts to analyze frequency, user interaction, and overall activity of an account. The study produced some interesting stats on how people are using Twitter.

• 34% of Twitter users have not tweeted since they created their account
• 21% of Twitter users are classified as "True Twitter Users" (see study for definition)
• 17% of Twitter users have zero followers
• 36% of Twitter users have more followers than the accounts they are following
• Users with an average of 1000 followers actually tweet the most compared to accounts with less than 100 followers or more than 100,000 followers

The study uses the term "Red Carpet Era" to denote the period between November 2008 and April 2009 when celebrities started to join Twitter. The study shows how the impact of celebrities coming on board helped propell Twitter to a 20% growth rate in April 2009. The average growth of Twitter is about 0.34% per month.

Study Shows Twitter Followers More Likely To Buy

A recent social media usage study by Chadwick Martin Bailey and iModerate Research Technologies found that followers of brands are more likely to recommend the brand as well as buy their products. The study surveyed 1500 consumers (18+ years of age) throughout the United States. The key finds:

• 79% of Twitter followers are more likely to recommend brands that they are following
• 67% of Twitter followers are more likely to buy the brands that they are following
• Cconsumers believe that brands not engaging in social media are out of touch

Twitter Experiences a 347 Percent Jump via Mobile Browsers

ComScore released a new report today, Facebook and Twitter Access via Mobile Browser Grows by Triple-Digits in the Past Year, that looked at social networking access via mobile browsers. The study found that over 30% of smart phone users had accessed a social network via their mobile browser in January 2010. Twitter  saw almost 4.7 million mobile users access their site in January 2010. This was a 347 percent increase over the same period last year. Twitter still lags behind Facebook (25.1 million) and MySpace (11.4 million). The report also notes that these numbers do not include access from mobile phone users who exclusively use mobile apps. So these numbers may be a bit higher, especially the Twitter numbers.

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.