Over the past year, Twitter has moved into the mainstream, and it has taken certain services and tools like TweetDeck with it.  Most of us know the top 5 or so Twitter tools out there, but I wanted to share 10 more tools that will help round out your Twitter experience.

So let’s get started!

1. Swift FM

Let’s start with my favorite thing on Earth, music. I find myself always wanting to share songs with my friends and followers.  Swift FM lets you log in with your Twitter ID and either upload a song, post a link to it or search a vast database for the song you want to share. Pure simplicity. But if you don’t believe me, one of the founders can tell you all about it.

An Introduction to Swift.fm from Swift FM on Vimeo.

2. Tweetwally

They say 3 million Twitter messages are generated every single day. That’s over 2,000 tweets per minute! There’s no way you can possibly go through all of these messages, but Tweetwally helps you filter them.  You have four options: filter messages by hashtag, by keywords, by users that post the messages and by users that are mentioned. Messages are updated almost live, so you don’t have to refresh the page all the time. Plus, you can save your wall by signing in with your Twitter ID.

3. Snapatar

If you want to use your picture as a profile picture, but hate to go through the lengths of taking the picture, saving it and uploading it to your Twitter account, you can use Snapatar. A simple tool that will use your webcam to capture your face (or whatever you put in front of it, for that matter) and set it as your avatar in an instant.

After you snap it, you sign in with your Twitter ID and ta-da, your fresh picture is set as your avatar!

4. Chirps

Chirps lets you share a vocal message with everyone on Twitter.  Just record a sound bite and then, you can post it directly to Twitter to share with your followers.

5. Screen Jelly

If you like to help people or just give tips, this tool is for you. Imagine your friend has trouble with some piece of software and you know how to fix it, but don’t have the luxury to actually visit that friend. How would you show what you do on your computer, so your friend could follow the example? Record it and twit it! Screen Jelly will record every move on your screen and everything you say for 3 minutes. Save it and post it on Twitter (and other social sites).

6. Camtweet

What if you want to broadcast a live feed of yourself, wishing everyone a merry Christmas? Tweeple (yup, I hate this expression) could be a part of that by you using Camtweet. Sign in with… wait for it… your Twitter ID and tell everyone on Twitter that you are going to broadcast live and then the tool will do just that.

7. Twi.tt

Twi.tt lets you can upload virtually any file you want and will post a link to that file on Twitter. Upload a picture, a video, a document, an audio clip or ask people something through a poll. Sign in the way mentioned before and use a simple form to upload your files.

7. Amplify

Now, you know how to post virtually everything on Twitter, but lets say you find an interesting article that you want to share with your Twitter followers. What are you going to do? Sure, you could simply give them a link to the article, but maybe you want to show only specific paragraphs and a picture, not a whole thing. With Amplify’s bookmarklet, you can do that in just a few steps.

8. Free Twitter Designer

Free Twitter Designer lets you make a custom background for your Twitter profile without the need of Photoshop.  First you sign in with your Twitter ID and choose a background (a dozen of them). Then, you can add shapes, text and pictures, set all the colors and apply different filters. After all the tweaking is done, you can either save the outcome or export it directly to Twitter.

9. Listen To

I’ve already told you how to post your favorite music on Twitter, but the tool on Listen To is pretty useful as well. After you enter the information about the song and provide a link to it (mp3, YouTube or Meebo), it generates a page with the video and an option to tweet it immediately.

10. Listorious

Recently, Twitter added a list feature. Listorious gathers those lists and puts them into different categories. You can choose among art, news, sports, food, celebrities and so on. That way, you can find interesting people to follow, according to your interests.

Conclusion

There is a plethora of things going on in Twitterland, and there are tools to help make your experience the best it can be. I’ve shared tools that will upload pictures, broadcast live feeds, share your music or simply find someone to follow. These are only ten of the numerous services that are out there.  What are your favorite lesser known Twitter tools?  Share them with us in the comments.

Image by loop_oh

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It started several years ago when people started going to Google for information about your brand instead of your brand’s homepage.  Google search results became a billboard for your brand, and consumers associated whatever Google returned with your brand.  If you weren’t working on SEO, you may have lost some brand equity over the years by consumers seeing varying search results.

Today, social networks are now doing the same thing.  Consumers will search for your brand or talk about your brand, no matter if you are involved or not.  There are conversations and pages built around your brand, and if you aren’t there to speak to those conversations, someone else is defining your brand for you.

I’m sure you’ve probably heard all these things before, but Melissa referred me to a great video that has Adam Brown from Coca-Cola talking about this very issue.  It’s definitely worth a watch. The video and slides are embedded below.

No related posts.

Twitter has grown into a powerful microblogging platform and an extremely important tool for bloggers. Twitter lets us market our business in the fastest manner.

One defining characteristic of microblogging is the character limit. Twitter has a limit of 140 characters. This is one of the driving factors behind the popularity of Twitter, as the 140 character limit ensures that the message is filled with great content.

This character limit, although good, can sometimes get in the way of us sending our complete thought.  Now, there are no real ways to send more than 140 characters in Twitter, but there are ways to pack in more content within those 140 characters.

TweetShrink

TweetShrink can shrink tweets by using slang and abbreviations that are common in sms messages.  It works by replacing numbers in words with numeral numbers, and shrinking words like ‘over’ to ‘ovr’, ‘here’ to ‘hre’.

I really like the way it works, because there is very little loss in readability and people can understand the message just by reading it out.

Maxitweet

Maxitweet allows us to tweet more than 140 characters, but in a different way than TweetShrink. Maxitweet allows us to tweet in characters other than standard ASCII characters allowed by the Twitter applications.

Both TweetShrink and MaxiTweet are popular and free services.  The TweetShrink service is popular enough to be included in Seesmic Desktop.  Do you ever find yourself needing to use one of these services?

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Once a service gets big enough, it will start to become monetized in one way or another.  Over the past few months Twitter has gotten big enough to start attracting advertisers, spammers and everything else under the sun.  The founders of Twitter may still be searching for the best way to make money off of the service, but if you are a user with lots of followers, you can make money off of Twitter.

Of course, there is the big debate on whether you should advertise in your stream or not, but we aren’t here to discuss that in this post.  We are just going to tell you how to advertise and sell ads in your Twitter stream.  Let’s get right to the most popular services.

be-a-magpie

Once you sign up for be-a-magpie as a twitterer, you must allow the service to automatically update your account from time to time.  You can set an ad ratio like 5 tweets/1 ad or 10 tweets/1 ad. Be-a-magpie will target your audience and will update your status with the ad they get. However, if you wish, you can turn auto-update off and manually update the ads.

There are three types of ads: pay per view, pay per action, and pay per click. You can pick the types of ads you want to display on your account.  Be-a-magpie pays you via PayPal once your account reaches $50. You can also use your earned balance to become an advertiser and promote your own product or website. It also has an affiliate program which you can use to earn money by referring your friends to be-a-magpie.

Revenue Tweets

Revenue Tweets (RevTwt) offers from $0.04 to $0.20 per valid click on the ads you put into your Twitter stream.  You can control which ads to publish on your time line, and you can set ads to auto post in order to automatically tweet your ads.

You get paid via PayPal when your account balance reaches $20, or you can get paid by check when your balance is over $100.  Revenue Tweets also offers an affiliate program.

Sponsored Tweets

Have you heard of one of the biggest blog advertising networks called PayPerPost? If you haven’t, it is a service owned by IZEA Inc.  IZEA Inc. also owns the recently launched Twitter advertising service, Sponsored Tweets.

Here you can have a free account and set your price per tweet. Whenever a potential advertisement comes your way, you get options to either accept or reject it. You can also re-write the tweet. If you accept, the ad will be tweeted from your Twitter account and your account will be credited within 24 hours of tweeting.

As everyone else out there, Sponsored Tweets also has an affiliate marketing program. You get paid via PayPal only when your account balance reaches $50.

Ad.ly

Ad.ly is a completely new Twitter advertising service. It sends one sponsored tweet everyday on a week long campaign. That means if you get an opportunity from any advertiser, it will last for seven days. You will have to set the price per week. If you’re confused, don’t worry.  Ad.ly will suggest you a price that should be reasonable.

Steps are simple; you create an account on ad.ly, allow it to access your account, wait for an ad offer, and when someone offers you just accept or deny it. If you accept, the relevant ad will be aired on your Twitter account within 7 days. You can also tweet for charity.

Unfortunately, ad.ly haven’t mentioned the payment threshold; however, it pays via PayPal.

Conclusion

All four of these services are great options if you want to try your hand at making a little money on Twitter.  What do you think about advertising in your Twitter stream?  Have you done it?

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It’s easy to use Twitter to post messages and keep in touch with those you are following, but one can gather a lot of business intelligence by using Twitter’s search features to gather information. You might be asking yourself, “What should I be searching for?”

The possibilities are endless, but here are some things that might help you out: your business name, your competitor’s business name, the name of events you’re attending, the name of your industry, services you provide, or the city you live in. There are a few ways to use Twitter’s search features; let’s take a look at three basic methods of use.

Searching via the Web

Head over to search.twitter.com and enter your search term. You’ll see a list of results, and if you stay on the website you’ll be prompted to refresh as new tweets arrive that match your term. If you’re monitoring something in realtime and don’t want to bother with setting up a client, you can use the Twitter web interface from any computer and watch the results flow by.

Pro tip: Want to be a Twitter search genius? Be sure to learn the full set of Twitter search operators.

Searching with a Client

Many people use desktop clients such as TweetDeck, Tweetie, or Seesmic Desktop to interface with Twitter. Most of the clients allow for a search to be saved and then redisplayed.

For example, you could search for your business name to see what is being said about you and then save that search so that at any point you can see what folks are saying. Exact instructions on how to set it up will vary depending on your particular Twitter client, but all of the major players offer search of some sort.

Searching via RSS

While the web and client searches are great for realtime results, sometimes there might be a term that you want to monitor long term. Perhaps you want to know every time that your business name is mentioned. Maybe you want to setup a feed for your industry and location (if you’re a florist in Seattle, you might want to know everyone talks about florists in Seattle).

You can setup such a monitoring system using an RSS feed with your favorite RSS reader. Go to the Twitter search web interface and create your search query. After you submit the query and are viewing the results, click the “Feed for this query” link in the upper right to get the RSS feed for the search. Put that feed into Google Reader or another feed aggregator, and you’ll know every time that your term is mentioned on Twitter.

Twitter’s search features can provide a great insight to your world, as well as make you aware of opportunities for potential clients or peer networking. Learn to use the Twitter search features and become a conversation-monitoring ninja.

Image by JoshSemans

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Let’s look at two examples.  Recently, I made a list of all the authors at LostInTechnology, so we could better connect with our readers.  This list works much better than the post I put together just a few days before I found TweepML.

Now, this is a social media blog, so I have to have a social media list put together.  You are in luck, because I made a nice list of some of my favorite social media influencers on Twitter for this post.  This list doesn’t get close to covering the many social media influencers I follow, but it is a start of some of my favorites.

What I need from all of you out there is to list your favorite social media influencer(s) in the comments.  This will help me fill out the list and hopefully expose me to some great new people on Twitter.

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Twitter is a great tool to help people connect with friends, old and new. It is the fastest growing social networking site on the Internet, so there are lots of opportunities to be friendly with other twitter users and up your social.

1. Participate in Follow Friday! All of the cool kids are doing it, so why not participate, too? Simply list some followers of yours that you think are valuable to others and add on the hashtag #followfriday or #ff. Or mention one person and a compelling reason why they should be followed.

2. Introduce your followers to each other. Do you have two followers who are both into Macs? Or live in the same city? Introduce these tweeps (Twitter speak for Twitter-people) to each other.

3. Greet new followers with a tweet – Thank them for the follow and mention something about their interests or blog. This means you’ll have to actually read their profile and/or blog, but you’ll be letting your followers know you value them enough to read their profile or blog.

4. Encourage your followers to participate on Twitter! Don’t let a week go by without tweets from one of your followers. Ask them what they are up to or what they think about a current event or current trend on Twitter.

5. Write a blog post about your favorite tweets or Twitter users of the week. Link back to Twitter profiles and blogs of the featured tweets for extra social networking juice.

6. Compliment your followers or thank them in public. Twitter users can be some of the friendliest and helpful people in the world – so if someone does something nice or helpful for you, let the whole Twitter-verse know!

7. Reply to more tweets daily. Take 5 or 10 minutes a day to reply to tweets. People may not tweet for recognition, but taking out the time to recognize a great quote, a useful link or a funny story can help strengthen Twitter relationships.

8. Retweet (RT) frequently, but don’t go overboard! Retweets can be great for filling up your tweet-stream, but mix things up with your own quotes, stories, commentary and links, too. The purpose of Twitter is to share your thoughts as well as those of others.

9. Share your followers’ resources with everyone. Does one of your tweeps have a great small business, list of useful web applications or a knack for solving computer issues? Let everyone know.

10.Write about Twitter users who provide value on a niche topic. Into social media? Open Source Software? Stamp collecting? Blog about the gurus of the field who are on Twitter and some of the things they talk about on your blog.

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To start, just click on the link above.  Next, you will enter your Facebook and Twitter credentials.

Once you’ve logged into both accounts, all you have to do is just check all the friends you want to add.

There is one drawback to this application.  fb140 uses your Facebook friends’ website links to find a Twitter URL, so if you friends don’t have Twitter listed, fb140 won’t find them.

[via Inside Facebook]

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What are your favorite Twitter tips or tools?

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Most people probably don’t think about the strategy they use when they follow someone, but everyone has rules and standards for following other Twitter users.  Let’s get into the strategies and see which one you use.

The MySpacer

The MySpacer’s goal is to follow anyone and everyone that is on Twitter.  They believe that the true path to greatness is how many friends you have.  The key to this strategy is the auto-follow.  Many Twitter users will automatically follow anyone that follows them.

The MySpacer preys on this fact and adds people just for the auto-follow.  If The MySpacer doesn’t get followed back, they will loop back around and unfollow anyone not following them.  This keeps their ratio at a respectable level and makes sure that they don’t get marked as spam.

The Elitist

The Elitist’s goal is to only follow the people they deem important.  They want their ratio to look as impressive as possible (or they just don’t like very many people on Twitter).  It is near impossible to get these people to follow you unless you consistently RT their messages or tell them how great they are.

The Friend

The Friend will follow anyone that follows them.  This means that they have no idea who half the people they follow are, which would be bad, but when you compare it to the fact that The MySpacer doesn’t know anyone they follow, it doesn’t seem so bad.

The NonStrategist

The NonStrategist (I think I just made up that word.) is usually the type of person that is just on Twitter to talk to their friends or follow famous people.  The NonStrategist is usually someone that found out about Twitter from Oprah or CNN and just wants to see what all the fuss is about.

Conclusion

I have tried out all of the strategies above, but I now find myself somewhere between The Elitist and The Friend.  What strategy do you use?  Is it listed?  If not, make sure to tell me all about it.

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