The sheer amount of tools out there for twitter offering different services is practically insane. From running a poll, to posting pictures, to… I’ll just get on with the list of tools and let you find out for yourself.

1. TwitPic: Where there’s social media, there’s pictures. TwitPic lets you share pictures on twitter. There’s no sign up and no program installation. All you have to do is sign in with your twitter username and password and upload pictures and post them. They’ll send a tweet from your account about the photo. Easy peasy.

2. TwtPoll: Twitter followers are great for polls. If you’re running a poll on your website, running a similar one on twitter can get you more participation and help you gather more data. Using TwtPoll is a breeze. Enter your username, post your question, list your options and click on ‘Create Poll’. It’ll give you options of posting it on twitter, Facebook or your website. Choose the one you want and your followers are ready to poll!

3. TweetLater: If you’re an avid twitter-er or are working on a marketing campaign where you want to tweet regularly through out the day about something then tweetlater is for you. You can schedule tweets through it – so even when you’re sleeping, tweetlater is tweeting your preset tweets for you. Keep in mind not to schedule one promotional tweet an hour to avoid becoming a spammer. Remember, just one.

Tweetlater also lets you track keywords (my favourite), send automated DM’s (my least favourite), and also gives you the option to auto follow your followers among others.

4. Qwitter: The nifty little service catches your twitter quitters. After you sign up for this service (only requires your twitter username and email), qwitter will send you an email every time someone stops following or un-follows you. Not only that, it will also tell after which tweet of yours did the follower quit on you.

It’s a great service and lets you find out which tweets of yours offend people but don’t get obsessive over every single quitter. Of course, if you lose 50 followers over night, then it’s something to look into.

5. TwitterFeed: You’ve RT’d enough tweets and promoted countless links by tweeting about them. It’s only fair that you promote your own blog. Enter twitterfeed. Submit your blog URL in twitterfeed and let it post a tweet for you every time you update your blog. Depending on your posting frequency, you can set up a timer for the service to check if you’ve published your blog. This blog post will be tweeted about 30 minutes after it’s published.

<6. TweetVolume: Tweetvolume lets you put in specific words and runs a search to tell how many times the words have been used in twitter stream. The time period is since twitter’s birth. Tweetvolume is a good tool for keyword comparison and a great way to find out how much ‘buzz’ there is about a topic, brand, campaign, person etc.

Check out the comparison I did between freelance, writing, blogging, social media and clients.

7. Tweetag: This tool let you browse the twitterverse according to the most popular topic. Their homepage lists the 40 most frequently discussed topics. So if you want to know what the buzz is about at twitter. You can also search for any topic you want.

A search for ‘Twestival‘ (tell you later what it is) came back with 1518 results out of which 695 tweets had links in them, 164 were questions, 779 were replies and 171 were retweets.

8. BubbleTweet: If you’re a video blogging fan, you’re going to love this one. Bubble tweet lets you add a video message to your twitter profile in the form of a very manageable bubble size. It’s an excellent way to add a voice and a face to your profile and overcome the limitations of the bio line in your profile. There are currently only 651 tweeple using bubble tweet, so if you use it, it’s still going to be unique.

9. TwitterSnooze: If you follow a lot of people, there is bound to be someone who is a little too ‘verbose’. So if their chatter is distracting you or hindering you from following other conversations or tweets, twittersnooze lets you mute their tweets out for a specified period of time.

All you have to do is enter your username, password and the username of the person you want to hit the snooze button on.

However, twittersnooze has a downside to it. Every time you unsnooze a person, it sends them an email alerting them that you’re following them again. Not so feasible if you want to mute people out quietly.

10. Twellow: Want to find people in your industry or area of interest? Twellow lets you search users according to categories. Freelance, blogging, Photoshop, SEO etc are some of the categories of interest to me. Unfortu
nately, searching through category had little success for me, but searching under ‘all people on twellow‘ yielded very interesting results.

To turn up in searches in twellow it would be better to get listed there. A search for my username brought back a tweet from 3 weeks ago and still lists my followers as 155 whereas my followers have grown since then.

It isn’t the best of services, but it has the potential to be a great one. I’d be keeping my eye on this one to see if it better develops.

For a service as simple as twitter, tools like these add all more value to it. These are just 10 of the countless twitter tools/metrics out there.

What twitter tools do you use? How do they add value to your twitter experience?

Technorati Tags: Social Networking, Twitter, Twitter Tools

Starting out, we all struggle to find work. Whether it’s giving up a job to freelance or being fresh out of college desperate for our first break – paying jobs are hard to find. Which is why the saga unfolding at the My Punch Bowl blog piqued my interest and reminded me of how it feels to be desperate for work.

Background:

My Punch Bowl posted an ad on Craigslist for a marketing intern. They received dozens of applications. Matt Douglas, founder and CEO, was going through the applications when the subject line of an application caught his attention. As he opened it, he realized that there was a typo in the in it. On principle, he could not consider the candidate but she had a great resume. On a whim decided to send the applicant an email telling her why he was rejecting her as he wanted to see what her response would be.

The Applicant’s Response

The reply he got to his email was something he probably wouldn’t even have dreamed of. The hopeful applicant sent him a scathing reply and blasted him for ruining her chances because of a typo.

Matt instead of getting up on his high horse, liked the spunk of the girl. Even though she’d been rude, disrespectful and downright unprofessional, something in her email resonated with him and he emailed back inviting her for an interview.

The Interview

The interview went well but she had to do a 24-hour test and send in a blog post response explaining her side of the story and respond to the numerous comments that had come in when Matt posted about the incident.

The Decision

The jury is still out on the decision but Matt posted the applicant’s response.

Regardless of how this story ends, as struggling freelancers, this incident has brought home a few things.

What are your view on this? What lessons have you derived from the incident?

According to Twitstats, about 32% of twitter users tweet through their browsers. All of us start off by using twitter through a browser. Its only as we follow more and more people and engage in more conversations that we start to feel the need for an application as the browser can no longer keep up with the constant updates.

For those who’re still twittering through a web browser, figuring out shortcuts can make their twittering lives extremely easy. Even though the scale of tweets makes it viable for us to twitter through app’s, there are some things that twitter does best through a browser.

1. @ Replies

The first and most common function of twittering is replying to a tweet. In a browser you have the option of clicking on an arrow to reply to a tweet. Typing @ before the username of the subject does the same. There is no space between @ and the username. Example: “@username This is how your reply would look”.

Note: @username is counted in the 140 characters. The longer the username the lesser number of characters you’ll have to type your message.

2. Direct Message

Popularly known as a DM, direct messages are private messages sent to you or vice versa. They are also 140 characters long and can only be seen by you and the user they’re between. Instead of clicking on the DM option on the left sidebar menu on your twitter homepage and the selecting the username, it’s easier to send a DM directly from the message window.

To send someone a direct message, type d, hit space and then type the username before typing out your message. It would look like: “d @username type your message here”.

3. Re-tweet

If you’ve been on twitter for more than a day, you must have seen tweets starting with ‘RT’. RT stands for retweet and is a way of promoting someone’s tweet. To retweet, type RT followed by @username and then copy paste the tweet you’re retweeting. Once done, it would look like this: “RT @username paste your tweet here.”

4. # Tags

Hash tags took me the most time to figure out. Twitter is pretty basic. You can’t group together users, or turn your followers into groups. One way of separating tweets about a particular topic or by a particular user is by adding # in front of it.

If you’re talking about cricket and/or a certain tournament, adding a # before cricket would form a group. Now every time someone would tag cricket, the tweets would be grouped together. A hash tag for cricket would look like “#cricket”.

To keep track of your hash tags, follow @hashtag. It will automatically follow you back and start tracking your tags. For more information, check out the Twitter Fan Wiki.

5. Twitter Search

Not only does twitter bring you in contact with people outside of your immediate circle, it lets you search it for specific topics too. Twitter Search is a great way to find out who’s talking about the topic of your interest in real time. You can also search for hash tags through twitter search.

6. Following conversations

Twitter offers three options regarding the @ replies.
@ replies to the people I’m following: This is the default setting and only lets you see the tweets between people you follow. For example If A & B are having a conversation, you’ll be able to see it because you follow them both. But if A was talking to C, you wouldn’t see that conversation because you don’t follow C.

No @ replies does not show any @ replies at all.

All @ replies: This option shows you all the replies of people you follow. If they’re replying to people you don’t follow, you’ll see those too. All @ replies is the way to go if you want to be effective on twitter. It’ll let you follow different conversations and help you discover new people. It will also make you more visible to the followers of the people you’re conversing with.

To enable All @ replies go to Setting –> Notices –> Show me all @ replies.

7. Twitter Backgrounds:

Twitter offers the option to change backgrounds to make your profile more interesting. Go to Settings –> Designs. Choose from any of the 12 designs already available on twitter. You can also change your background image to one of your own and customize the colors according to your preference.

8. Twitter With SMS

If you’re going to be away from your computer, twitter lets you stay connected by sending tweets via SMS. This option is less feasible as texting rates apply. Also now there are twitter app’s designed for cell phones but when twitter first came out, this option was very popular as it lets you receive tweets on your cell phone too. If you want to enable this option, go to Settings.

9. Twitter Badges

If you have a blog or social networking profile (and I really hope you do) then you can publish your tweets on them through twitter badges or widgets.

10. Public Timeline

Want to know what the twitterverse is talking about at any given moment? Find out through the public timeline. To be honest, this one seems like a cool idea till you realize that people are tweeting in other languages too. Ones that I don’t understand.

If you’re a twittering noob, I hope you found this helpful. My next post “10 Twitter Tools” would be up on February 11th. If you have any questions and would like an answer to them, feel free to contact me.

Technorati Tags: Social Networking, Twitter, Twitter tips, Twitter tricks

Another week is at an end and it’s been excellent so far. Somebody decided to give The Base a boost by stumbling a post Thank you, whoever you are.

This week I’ll be posting links to better customize your blogger blog through widgets and other ways.

• ‘What Would Seth Godin Do’ is a great WordPress plug in. What’s even more great about it is that there is a blogger version of WWSGD too – which I installed today. What does it do? WWSGD monitors your cookies and lets you put up a welcome message. And not just a welcome message, it lets you set up separate welcome messages for new and returning users. How cool is that?

• On my WordPress blog, I use the Sociofluid plug-in for social bookmarking options on every post. Even though it has a blogger version, I couldn’t figure out how to put the icons in every post. The widget was putting the icons on my blog but not in separate posts. So a search led me to Blogger Plug-ins where I found my perfect answer.

• The past couple of weeks, I’ve been thinking about removing adsense ads from the blog (homepage) and adding them to my posts. Since I’m a novice in all things designing and customizing, I had no idea how to do it. Even though I haven’t yet made the decision of adding ads in my posts, I found my answer in How to add Adsense inside single posts only. It’s not a widget but it’s definitely worth knowing.

• A lot of WordPress blogs have tabbed navigation in their blogs. It saves sidebar space, makes for easy navigation and looks very professional. Blogger Buster has a tutorial on how to add tabbed sidebar navigation in your blogger blog.

• While it’s easy to optimise WordPress blogs for SEO through plug-ins, Blogger blogs have no such widgets to help. Reading SEO Tricks in Blogger Blogs and Blogspot and SEO takes care of this drawback to a great extent.

If you have a Blogger blog, and keep thinking that it’s very limiting, you might want to reconsider that after reading these. I know I am! Hope this week’s themed links help you as much as they have helped me!

Technorati Tags: Blogger, Blogger widgets, Wordpress

I started Twittering after attending an online writing conference. Everyone there was giving out their twitter id for contact rather than email or website/blog! So I dusted out my old twitter account which I had forgotten I had and started following people. Suddenly, people were recognising me from the conference and I had conversations going on.

Great Writing Exercise

It wasn’t until I got active on twitter that I realised what a great writing exercise twittering is! It can be the perfect case study for concise writing. Having just 140 characters to get your message across in an effective method is not an easy task. Yet, millions of people are doing it every day.

Productivity Booster

If you’re looking for something, tweeting about it can have great results. As a writer, I find I can’t work on one article/blog post etc at a time. When I’m writing, I have at least a couple documents open so that I can jump between them. Working out of MS Word made too much of a clutter from having too many windows open. So I tweeted,

‘I wish there was a text editor that would open up docs in tabs! Working 5 inter related articles and it sucks to have so many windows open.’

In a short while, I had a lot of replies telling me about programs that had the tabs option in them. Most of them were for Mac but someone recommended ‘IBM Lotus Symphony’. I looked it up and it was everything I needed. Working has been so much easier and faster since then!

Promotional Tool

Twitter is a great promotion tool. It also helps us discover the best of the web. When people tweet about blog posts or websites they found interesting or helpful, droves of users click on it driving traffic to the site. Similarly when people publish posts on their own blog, they tweet about that too (it’s only fair) which drives traffic to their post. This results in a lot more feedback in the comments and more readers.

It has also been used to promote products and campaigns. Social Networking is effective. More so, twitter is effective. A big reason for Barack Obama’s successful campaign was social networking. His team knew how to work the Social Media and for a long time (at least till it counted) he was the most followed person on Twitter.

Finding People In Your Geographical Location

I moved to UAE early last year. I had no family here and no friends. Through twitter, I started discovering people who live in Dubai or Sharjah and suddenly I know people! I’m making friends and finding out about events of my interest. Since my bio states ‘Freelance writer in the making’, people from the publishing industry have found their way to me and through them I discovered even more. Of course, it could just be because there are so few twitterers from UAE that we tend to find each other… but it’s good to see social media alive in companies in this part of the world.

Giving Back What You Receive

For any social networking medium to work. It has to be a give and take relationship. You can’t just keep expecting people to answer your call of help if you don’t help them back.

• Make it a point to engage in conversations with people
• Answer questions that are asked
• Re-tweet an article if you like it or simply if someone asks
• Share interesting links often – at least twice more than you do your own
• Tweet about blog posts of your readers
• Make it a point to send direct messages to your followers. Stay away from automated welcome DM’s though.