The Wall Street Journal has reported that Twitter are in advanced talks to acquired TweetDeck. It was announced back in February that TweetDeck was acquired by UberMedia for $30 million, but now we arent so sure!
Now it seems like Twitter and UberMedia are fighting over TweetDeck for an acquisition price of around $50 million.
TweetDeck has long been the major Twitter client of choice, so its no surprised that Twitter are very eager to acquire the startup. Twitter is missing their own native desktop PC client, so an acquisition of TweetDeck or Seesmic makes a lot of sense.
Are you a “tweeter?” You are not alone; millions of people are. People use Twitter for hundreds of different reasons, from talking to friends and family to following their favorite celebrity. People appreciate the sense of community and belonging they get following those with similar interests, while having others follow them.
Twitter seems fairly harmless, with its 140-character limit. However, even Twitter can have the inherent dangers of Internet insecurity if we are not wary. Twitter is similar to Facebook in that we can often share too much information with people we do not know. An identity thief needs a small portion of information to infiltrate your existence. Of course, there are methods to protect your private information, and here are a few that you should keep in mind as you “tweet”.
• Be careful with what you share. Twitter’s format allows people keep track of you and follow your feed. However, if someone isn’t following you, that doesn’t mean they can’t see your feed. Your feed is public by default and anyone can find and read your feed. Your posts can easily be re-tweeted as well, meaning that your off-hand comment could ultimately be viewed by hundreds of unscrupulous individuals. Furthermore, companies tend to perform background checks on current and future employees. Your public tweets can give background check companies just what they need to start their investigation. As a rule of thumb, if it’s something that you wouldn’t say to a stranger on the street, then don’t “tweet” it.
• Keep track of who is following you. They could be people you know or just spam tweeters, but either way, you should know who follows you. This goes back to remembering how far your tweet can reach. Everyone uses Twitter, including your boss most likely. Still think that tweet about skipping work to play basketball was a good idea? If you don’t know one of your followers, check their feed and see what interests them. Most people are harmless, but it only takes one that isn’t to cause you problems.
• Watch out for short URLs. Most people sharing links on Twitter need to shorten them because of the character limitations. That makes it harder to tell if a link is valid, or just a hack attempt. You never know what is behind that anonymous link until you click it, and by then it may be too late. The easiest way to judge a link is in whether or not it is from someone you are familiar with and trust. An added advantage is the “Tweetdeck” app that Twitter has, which gives you a preview before clicking a link. It’s not a completely foolproof system, but it helps.
• The only way to assure total privacy is to go totally private. Twitter offers the ability to privatize your feed. At this point, only approved followers would be able to view your postings. This can be somewhat limiting, especially if you are using Twitter for networking purposes, but you will have to weigh the options for yourself on this one. However, if you are truly trying to lock things down, then this is the only foolproof way to do that.
It has been noticed that Google seems to be experimenting with Google Adsense interactive Twitter advertising. These adsense units are rich media ads, that just happen to push Tweets as part of the ad. So far it has been noticed that these types of ads are only related to the Windows 7 twitter accounts.
What do you think of this advertising idea? Will it push more people to follow you on Twitter?
It seems like everyone is now on Twitter. Are you interested in increasing your Twitter followers. You want more people reading your messages. It’s not difficult to build a prominent profile but I think it’s important to start with the right understanding. This is the first thing you need to know: It’s not really about how you tweet, what you say or who you talk to but who you are.
Take a look at this list of Twitter users with the most followers and you’ll see that almost everyone on it is famous or well known for reasons other than Twitter. For example, you’ll notice that the top 10 users are mainly all people who own popular websites/businesses and brands or have established a reputation through their involvement in different activities.
Run your eyes down the list further and you’ll notice the same thing: these Twitter users built their large audience through their already established popularity. They didn’t start from the ground up: it’s likely that they started with a decent amount of followers and will continue accumulate them passively through the strength of their reputation or personal brand.
Darren has written some useful articles about Twitter on his site but he built his following mainly because he has a very popular blog and not because he was inherently entertaining or helpful as a Twitter user. In other words, he grew his large subscriber base because he cleverly integrated his brand/blog with his Twitter profile.
This doesn’t mean that you can’t develop a strong Twitter following if you are not famous for something online or offline. It can be done but in my opinion, building a Twitter following has little to do with how you use Twitter. I don’t believe that in order to get a sizeable audience, you need obsesses about specific tweeting etiquette.
I’ve never written any articles on how to use Twitter because I don’t think there’s an ‘optimal’ or best way to use Twitter, nor am I interested in regulating another person’s lifestream. Even if you’re purely using Twitter as a broadcast tool to increase your online influence, how or what you tweet is not really the thing you should be focusing on.
So let’s talk about what I think will help you to get more Twitter followers.
Maximize Visibility: Treat Your Twitter Profile Like Any Other Website
The first step is to understand that your Twitter profile is like any other website. You should treat it no differently from your own blog or a free opt-in newsletter. This means that if you want to increase your Twitter subscriber base, you just need to do one thing again and again: Drive web traffic to your profile. The more targeted the traffic, the better.
This sounds obvious but many people overlook this fundamental principle and focus instead on less relevant details like Twitter usage times/frequency. I’m sure that causing controversy or learning to tweet a certain way might get some extra exposure to your profile but in my opinion, the benefits are minimal. How, when and what you tweet is not crucial.
When you want to catch as many fish as possible, use a large net and spread it as far as you can. The guideline to remember when building your profile is just one: keep working on sending visitors to your profile. People can only follow you when they know you exist.
With this in mind, you can play around with a myriad number of marketing strategies, just like how you would promote a website. Think in terms of incentives. Why would someone want to follow me on Twitter? How will he or she benefit from it? Assuming that someone doesn’t know who I am, what would motivate him or her to subscribe to my Twitter profile?
Here are just some examples of traffic-driving strategies (there are many more):
- Create a tool/application and promote your profile alongside it.
- Buy a banner ad to target tech-savvy audiences, link it to your profile.
- Use Twitter as a tool for tech/customer support.
- Organize a contest through your Twitter profile
- Include links to your profile in email/forum signatures.
- Evangelize Twitter on your blog/other blogs and include a link to your profile.
- Connect your blog and other social media profiles to your Twitter page.
- Learn to pitch Twitter influencers with articles relevant to their interest
- Explicitly ask another user to recommend your profile or exchange recommendations.
Apart from these strategies, there’s also another sure-fire way to increase your Twitter followers and this simply involves the act of following other users. Lets look at this in detail.
Mass Following Twitter Users: The Favorite Methodology of ‘Spammers’
Twitter is similar to many other social networks in numerous aspects, particularly when it comes to friending behaviors. Like Myspace, its possible to befriend a massive amount of users, some of whom will add you back as a friend. Continually adding Twitter users as friends allows you to increase the amount of followers you have.
This is a strategy that has worked remarkably well for early adopters when the Twitter was still a relatively new phenomenon. For example, I know a marketer who followed over ten thousand users and got thousands of followers in return. He then cut down the amount of people he followed and changed his username to make the account look legitimate.
Nowadays, the Twitter community has grown more aware of these ’spammers’ and many tools like the Twitter Blacklist and Twerpscan have been developed to help Twitter users weed out people who try to follow many users in order to build an large audience. Still, a portion of Twitter users (perhaps the new ones) tend to add anyone who befriends them.
Take for instance, Osen Komura. A fake profile set up by another Twitter user in February 2008 as a social experiment. The Osen account followed 41,798 Twitter users in one month and 7,847 users added him as a friend, a 17%+ follow-back rate.
And Osen is not only the only profile out there with thousands of followers all derived through mass user following. The question is: Should you consider using the same strategy?
Apart from the risk of being labeled a Twitter spammer and increasing the noise on your Twitter stream, this method still works. However, know that following so many users inevitably reduces your ability to keep track of individual users since they are drowned out by other updates, unless you conscientiously keep track of your Twitter stream or use RSS.
Scoble has suggested that it’s beneficial to follow many Twitter users because you get more access to information and it shows that you’re listening and more open to communication or meeting people. Perhaps so, but I would recommend increasing the people you follow on Twitter gradually, while making sure that you’re maintaining conversational interactiveness.
Most Twitter users don’t like it if you’re simply following him/her to broadcast a message and if you don’t monitor them equally in return or engage them in conversation. Unless you’re a popular celebrity of some sort, one-way attention doesn’t work very well for Twitter.
In any case, only viewing Twitter as a broadcast platform to drive traffic to your websites is a limited perspective, especially when your Twitter followers offer a wealth of knowledge, connections and opinions you can use to improve your business and personal skills.
Personally, I prefer building up an online reputation and driving traffic to my Twitter profile. For me, the benefits of Twitter come from using it as a conversational/networking tool, so I’m more concerned with whose updates I’m receiving daily and hence, the people I follow.
All in all, it depends on your goals and how you use Twitter. Feel free to share this article with your Twitter friends. I’ll love to get more feedback on this topic.
And yes, of course…follow me on Twitter and say hi!
It seems as though Twitter biting the hand that feeds it. Twitter seemed to grow quite quickly due to a lot of third party developers jumping onto the platform. Now, Twitter is saying to developers not to build Twitter clients.
Twitter’s Ryan Sarver states: “Developers ask us if they should build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience. The answer is no.”
Sarver says: “Our user research shows that consumers continue to be confused by the different ways that a fractured landscape of third-party Twitter clients display tweets and let users interact with core Twitter functions. For example, people get confused by websites or clients that display tweets in a way that doesn’t follow our design guidelines, or when services put their own verbs on tweets instead of the ones used on Twitter.”
Twitter will now hold their party clients to extremely high standards.
Have you ever wondered where what font some of your favourite internet brands use in their logo’s? Well HongKiat has let the world know. Logos such as Google, Yahoo, NewsGator, Skype, Digg, Twitter and more. You can now find out which fonts they use and then download and use that font.
Twitter is growing daily and controling your Twitter account is becoming easier than ever before. Here are some of the best Twitter applications to help you control your Twitter accounts and streams.
Chromed Bird (Chrome) – Free
Installing Chromed Bird adds a little birdie to your Chrome toolbar. It covers the essentials: timeline, mentions, DMs, favourites and even lists. Unlike most Twitter clients, it hides away when you’re not using it.
DestroyTwitter (Windows, OS X, Linux) – Free
DestroyTwitter is a multi-platform client which supports additional services including Foursquare and Gowalla and handy filters to get rid of unnecessary tweets. The default interface is a bit hard on our ageing eyes but themes enable you to completely customise DestroyTwitter’s appearance.
Sobees (Windows) – Free
The desktop version of Sobees is developed in .NET so only for Windows machines. Sobees supports Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn as well as multiple Twitter accounts.
It was rumoured that Twitter has received a $450 million investment from JP Morgan Chase for a 10% share of their company. It turns out that Twitter co-founder Biz Stone is denying the rumours.
Stone told Reuters that the reports were “made up”, but did admit to discussions with Facebook “a couple of years ago … (but) nothing formal since and it’s mostly rumors all the time”.
JP Morgan is in the market for investing in social media startups, because recently they raised a $1.22 billion fund to do just that. There isnt an investment in Twitter at the moment, but it would make sense for JP Morgan to invest very soon. biz stone
Andreessen Horowitz has just invested $80 million in Twitter by the way of secondary markets. The news, reported by All Things D, is a surprising development considering that Twitter just closed a $200 million round of funding in December led by the senior firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Andreessen Horowitz did not participate in the round. That round put Twitter’s valuation at $3.7 billion.
With Twitter now estimated to be worth $4 billion, Andeessen Horowitz’s $80 million stock buy equates to roughly 2% of Twitter.
Twitpic has just added a new video sharing option. Users will be able to add videos and followers can comment in the same 140 characters (instead of having to head to YouTube, etc).
At this time users can’t show their videos directly on their Twitter web interface, however thumbnails will show up and Twitpic Founder Noah Everett says they will work with Twitter in the near future to have an integrated solution put in place.
