Tag: Twitter

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Growing Your Twitter Following Base Update

This past Friday I published a blog post about how to grow your Twitter following base. Here’s an update on our project. First, I prewrote that article on Saturday February 6th. On that day we had five people following AskKeebler. Our fan base grew all last week and as of today (when I am writing this – Saturday 2-19), AskKeebler has 60 followers.

Our plan this week to additionally grow our spokesdog account is to interact with followers and retweet their updates this upcoming week.

This is what I do personally, and it works to grow an account. Using HootSuite on a daily basis, I will review my home stream, they I will review the status updates of my followers. I will additionally review the stream of those I follow who are not necessarily following Keebler. Then I will choose pertinent updates to comment to, choose those updates that are funny, cute or informative to retweet, and click in to various Twitter accounts to find out more about people who had good updates. I will use the scheduling function in HootSuite to spread these interactions out over the day.

If someone had a good update, I will click in and either send a direct message or @ message (depending on if they are following me) with a question or to thank them for the information they have posted. I will also be looking to share pictures of Keebler doing some funny things this week and browsing for doggie videos on YouTube to share.

The bottom line is that I am looking to connect! Last week I asked a number of dog trainers for some help with Keebler’s incessant running around the kitchen table (God lover her), and got some great suggestions. I will go back to those people and report what I did and am trying, to say thank you.

When you look to connect more than vomit out spam about you and your services on Twitter, others respond by following you. I find that it is hard to initially build  a good following base. There simply is no short cut, but you can end up with a rich interactive community that makes your time spent on Twitter really fun.

If you haven’t followed our Spokesdog on Twitter yet, what are you waiting for? Our goal for this month is 150 followers. Click and and just follow AskKeebler to join the fun!

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HootSuite Introduces Bulk Upload Option for Pro Accounts

If you have the HootSuite Pro version then you may have already tried this option. If you are using HootSuite Free then this may be the reason to upgrade, and if you are not using HootSuite at all, this may be the reason you take a look.

HootSuite is an online Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, FourSquare, and Facebook Page update and status scheduling tool. I have used it for team management and self management of small accounts. Just this last week I checked out the Pro account version Bulk Upload of status update features.

First although HootSuite offers a sample .csv file to review and to use for your own updates, I found that Excel kept changing the date format and did not offer the date format they wanted for load, and so I moved to Notepad to do my list creation.

This is the format to use:

09/02/2011 09:00,”Check out our blog writing prices and blog clients on this page.”,”http://ow.ly/3S5ru”

Note that the date format is day first, then month, then year followed by time on a 24 hour clock. The update must be wrapped in quotes, and then the URL wrapped in quotes. Each of these three fields is separated by a comma.  You may be able to leave your URL as pointing to your own domain, but to be safe, I shrunk my URL ahead of time.

Of important note is that HootSuite will not allow duplicate updates. So you can not load more than one version. Additionally the Bulk Upload feature allows for 50 unique updates to be loaded maximum at a time. I found that the load creation was time consuming, but was able to be used on multiple accounts and as I saved the document, will allow me to use and re-use this load anytime I go on vacation for coverage.

When you go to upload your text file, you will put your select your social network from the icon list, then put your cursor in the message field. The box opens and allows you (for Pro accounts only) the option to bulk upload. Browse to your upload file then click Okay. You will then see all your updates appear in the pending stream column.

I think this is a great new feature for HootSuite. Social Oomph offers this same feature for Professional accounts as well but without duplication restriction. Please note that if you click the links in this post and purchase either Professional level accounts from these suppliers that they will pay me a commission which will allow me to buy lunch at McDonald’s. Thanks for your support and try out these two applications they may end up being big time savers for you too.

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HootSuite and Seesmic Reviewed

If you are involved in social media using Facebook or Twitter you will want to be using one of these applications for posting your updates. In this post I will be reviewing HootSuite and Seesmic.

HootSuite
I use this product and own two Pro accounts. I have been using the HootSuite product since it came out and like it. I have four team members using one account and write for over 10 client social networks using the application. This is what I personally like about the product:

  1. The Pro account allows me to add unlimited social networks and easily helps me to link Facebook personal pages, Facebook Business Pages, and Twitter accounts.
  2. It is very simple to add team members to my account. My team members only see in their personal control panel the accounts that I have given them access to and not all client accounts.
  3. When I have several team members working on one account, I can see in my master control panel who has done what, who has responded to a comment, and who has posted which update.
  4. I like that I can schedule updates for future dates. Some of our writers work several days ahead or at night and set up updates to publish the next day. When you work on the volume of clients that we do you need this flexibility for your staff.
  5. HootSuite Pro account have a bulk upload option. Although I don’t routinely use this option, it is there and allows for greater flexibility to feed out content over time.
  6. Reusable updates. This is one of my personal favorites. I like the feature that I can save an update and then reuse is and schedule it to be sent on days I select. Where we have something very important to get out for a client this feature is valuable.

If you want to check out HootSuite, you can for free. If you use my link, set up an account and upgrade to the Pro Account HootSuite will pay me a small commission.

Seesmic
I don’t use this product routinely, but am always on the look out for new applications that can make our work easier. Seesmic is great for a single user or for someone is just managing Twitter account. Seesmic does support Facebook, but only the Facebook personal profile, while HootSuite allows you to post to Facebook personal profiles AND Facebook Business Pages.

The Seesmic interface is easy to set up, but not as intuitive as that of HootSuite. You do not have the option to show columns for each account such as pending for one Twitter account, but you can see the pending updates for all accounts in one column. I set up my Seesmic account with three Twitter accounts and two Facebook accounts. I could not however set up or send to my Facebook Business Page.

Seesmic has a control panel for each account on the left side bar instead of tabs like HootSuite has at the top. This could be an issue if you were managing many Twitter accounts as you would have to scroll up and down to interact with accounts near the left bottom as your account list grows.

In Seesmic you can see, for Twitter only, retweets, mentions, sent, favorites, and searches but not pending. Remember pending appears as a column on your screen and is not sorted by account but rather by date. For Facebook you don’t have any options other than the home feed.

I feel that for professional users HootSuite is a much more usable product. For small accounts Seesmic certainly is an alternative to HootSuite. If you have more than five social networks you have to upgrade to the Pro Level in HootSuite but with Seesmic you are still at a free level. I think that as an alternative to HootSuite for do it yourselfers on a budget, Seesmic certainly is a nice choice, but not one that I would want to work with everyday, day in and day out as a power user.

That being said for clients that want to watch what we are doing and to respond to tweets, I think that a Seesmic account would be fine for them as this solves the problem of having to add them as a team member in HootSuite. They can’t see pending updates with this approach, but can see what has been posted after the fact. I will look forward to improvements as Seesmic grows and tries to establish its market share. In some ways it is similar to Sendible.

Seesmic has not paid me for this post and I do not make a commission on your use of the application or download.

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Should Local Selling Businesses Start Using Twitter

With the real push from search engines to integrate social network activity into your personalized search results Twitter for local selling businesses has become meaningful. The best feature with Twitter is its totally viral nature. Follow people of interest, write interesting tips and news, get retweeted widely and you have just tapped into a huge social network that spans both locally and nationally.

With search engines now showing reviews, the location, and status updates from those in your network in your search results, getting retweeted or even mentioned is now more important than ever for local businesses. You can’t harness the power of this social networking tool if you are not in the game!

So how would you use Twitter for a local focus? I would recommend first looking to follow people particularly in your geographic area that are on Twitter. If they retweet your information or tip, you may be tapping into a whole local network driven by this one local user; neighbors, friends, colleagues, family members.

Use hashtags to focus attention on your location and service category. You just never know if someone will search on Twitter for a resource or review. Additionally, as search engines figure out how they will use Twitter in their search index, early embracers of Twitter may find themselves way ahead of their competition because they have established a better “SocialRank” based on the number of followers and the authority of who these followers are.

We are not exactly sure what the search engines will be doing with Twitter, but we do know for sure they are carefully considering how to implement Twitter results in their indexes. With the link sharing benefits of Twitter and ability to build a viral base, Twitter may end up being the best new link building, web authority register that search engines will choose to utilize as part of their organic placement ranking. One thing we know for sure is that full social integration with search engines is coming and Twitter is a very important part of the social mix.