Building Twitter Primetime

I initially planned on developing this myself, since it’s not overly complex, but I just have too much on my plate. So hopefully someone will read this, feel inspired, and develop it (or someone will inform me that I need to do more research, because there’s already something that does this).

Twitter Primetime would be a service that, after authorizing your twitter account with the service, would pull all the tweets from people you are following based on a specified range of time. It would then analyze these tweets, and, you guessed it, tell you what you what times had the highest “viewership” – or which times were primetime.

Having this information, just as with Facebook, would allow individuals and businesses to know when the best time to send out their tweets are, as to reach maximum impact.

Twitter Primetime By Industry

Another advantage to creating a process that determines the primetime per user, is to apply that same process to industries. Once the process has been established, you can define an industry by popular keywords on Twitter, and then run searches to run the process through. This way, for example, you could determine the best time to start tweeting about “Brittan Spears” when her new virtual gifts on Facebook began to go live.

These are just two possibilities of many. If you know of any twitter app that does this, please, let me know! If you’re interested in partnering to develop it, let me know. And if you develop this, let me know that too and I’ll promote it here : )

Before you begin, you need to answer the question on what you’re objectives of using Twitter are. These services are used in conjunction with each other to achieve maximum impact on a targeted audience of followers who might be interested in the information being tweeted (whether it be blog posts, promotions, or just personality filled tweets).

Setting Up Your Twitter Profile

Extended Profile – Before you start tweeting, you want to make sure your profile looks as good as it can. This means taking the time not only to upload an avatar, but to also create stronger branding on your Twitter profile page via creating an Extended Profile.

Twitter Landing Page (TLP) – The Twitter Landing Page is a unique page you create on your website that greets those users who come specifically from Twitter. Once you’ve created your TLP, you can begin using it by pointing your Homepage URL on your twitter profile to your TLP.

How to build followers on Twitter

I think it’s very important to manage your Tweets, especially as you work on building followers. You want to make sure you’ve got a good reply to tweet ratio, meaning if someone were to look at your last 10 tweets that they’re going to see an @reply to someone in there. Think of your Last 10 (L10) the same as it is in sports. It’s you recent activity or track record. Your L10 shows you’re a human, and there to interact, not just add to all the noise that’s already on there. A good ratio is going to be dependent on your audience.

Twellow – A well organized Twitter Directory, Twellow is a great tool for finding new followers and seeding new accounts. It works great in conjunction with Mr. Tweet if you Twellow users first, then run Mr. Tweet to help you find more followers based on your Twellow results. Twellow is one of my first steps in seeding a new twitter account. Seeding your account helps with social proofing.

Mr. Tweet – One of my favorite tools, Mr. Tweet gives you suggestions on who you should be following based on your current followers and twitter habits. It also gives you a means of finding followers without past activity which helps for seeding new twitter accounts you can utilize .

Twollow – Auto follow those that tweet a particular keyword you enter (For example: Your company name). This is another resource for building up followers on Twitter. This can be a great tool if you spend some time researching those keywords that most apply to your business or topic on Twitter. The more specific you can be with your keywords, the higher potential you have to make a connection with someone who is interested in what you have to say (which is really what you want).

Twitoria – Tells you what friends of yours haven’t tweeted within the time frame you specify. I’ll be honest, I’m still working on integrating this into my twitter process. Using Twitoria requires a fair deal of account micro-management. As it stands, and I could be wrong, the only reason I see using Twitoria is if there is a drop in the follower or follow-back percentage for people who are above a certain follower threshold (eg: more than 1,000 followers). If there isn’t (and if anyone has done some studies, please let me know!) then there’s not much point in pruning your followers besides personal reasons.

Tools to help you make more effective tweets

TweetLater – A great tool for scheduling your twitter messages (tweets) to be send out while you’re away. TweetLater also has other functionality, such as Auto-DM (though I would encourage you to proceed in that area with great caution). TweetLater works well for planning promotional campaigns, or organizing messages across different social media properties.

Bit.ly – Bit.ly is a URL shortener. There are a lot of them out there, but I use Bit.ly because in my opinion, it’s the best. It provides the proper redirects (301), it provides tracking, it’s low on domain character usage (giving me more space to send messages), it doesn’t have a framebar, and it has venture capital funding so it’s unlikely it’s going anywhere. There’s a great article by Danny Sullivan that provides a detailed analysis of all the different URL shorteners and which one is best (Bit.ly).

Tweet Deck – TweetDeck is a Twitter Client so you don’t have to go to their website to get replies, direct messages, or Tweet. In my opinion, it’s the best client for twitter, allowing you to group followers, search, and a lot more. They also recently added in support for Facebook Updates (very cool!).

Sideline – Developed by Yahoo!, Sideline runs off of Adobe’s AIR platform (just like Tweet Deck) and helps with tracking tweets that are pertinent to you. A very new, but cool tool. Definitely worth learning (it’s simple).

Twist – A great tool for Twitter trend analysis. You can use it in conjunction with sideline, or to help with the keyword research mentioned before that helps with using Twollow. An example on using it would be observing that “LOST” has a spike every Wednesday night (when the show airs). If you create a follow strategy to start a relationship with some of those individuals, you can create an opportunity to connect, and you also know the best time to market to them. Eg: Maybe you should time your Tweets for after LOST (similar to airing new TV shows after the prime time)?

If you’ve got any comments or suggestions on how to use Twitter like a pro, please feel free to let me know!

There are 80+ people confirmed for the blogger social.I am super excited to get to meet them all. Mark Goren put together a neat promo video for the event.

( Feed readers can click through to view the video )
You can also see everyone who is attending in list form. A neat list of attendees!
Susan Bird, Tim Brunelle, Katie Chatfield, Matt Dickman, Luc Debaisieux, Gianandrea Facchini, Mark Goren, Gavin Heaton, Sean Howard, CK, Valeria Maltoni, Drew McLellan, Doug Meacham, Marilyn Pratt, Steve Roesler, Greg Verdino, CB Whittemore, Steve Woodruff, Paul McEnany, Ann Handley, David Reich, Tangerine Toad, Kristin Gorski, Mack Collier, David Armano, Ryan Barrett, Lori Magno, Tim McHale, Gene DeWitt, Mario Vellandi, Arun Rajagopal, Joseph Jaffe, Rohit Bhargava, Anna Farmery, Marianne Richmond, Thomas Clifford, Lewis Green, Geoff Livingston, Kris Hoet, Connie Reece, CeCe Lee, Toby Bloomberg, Seni Thomas, Darryl Ohrt, Joe Kutchera, Paul Dunay, Marshall Sponder, Chris Kieff, Tara Anderson, Jason Falls, Paul Soldera, Roberta Rosenberg, Saul Colt, Todd Andrlik, Ryan Karpeles, Mike Sansone, Jennifer Laycock, Neil Vineberg, Cam Beck, Mike Arauz, Matthew Bailey, Heather Gorringe, John Rosen, Cathleen Rittereiser, Tamar Weinberg, Rita Perea, Linda Sherman, Matthew McDonald, Kaitlyn Wilkins, Terry Starbucker, Jennifer Berk, Jane Quigley, John Wall, Scott Monty, Kevin Horne, Virginia Miracle, Amanda Gravel, Susan Reynolds, David Polinchock, Shashi Bellamkonda, David Berkowitz, and Vahe Habeshian

I’ve been holding onto this link of examples of how non-profits use twitter for a little while now as I planned to write a bit more on it. I will write more later, but as of now, I shan’t horde it the link any longer! Some really great examples of how Twitter can be used are present there.

I’ve been trying to optimize my blog a bit more (ironic given my recent crunch on time, I know). I found these 7 tips from ProBlogger to include a few things I hadn’t read before.

Lastly, for those who are wanting to keep up with interesting tech stuff, but like to go a little more in-depth, or are into startup type stuff, hat tip to DoshDosh for linking Hacker News in Twitter. It’s a service similar to Reddit. The comments are gold as well. Great discussions and valuable links getting shared.

Update #1: Apologies to those who saw this post and then saw it get taken down. WordPress’ WYSIWYG editor has issues with embedding YouTube video, apparently. Embedding the video botched my entire site, so I took the post down until I could figure it out (which is now).

Think of Twitter like a big lounge. It’s the lounge at some gigantic cocktail party. Ideally the kind with lots of comfy couches. I hate it when they remove seating to make more room for “socializing”. Maybe I socialize sitting down, dammit! I digress.

The lounge is filled with people whom you’ve decide that, at least currently, are interesting. Because of this, you’re following all of these people, and thus their conversations. Some people happen to be talking about politics. Others asking some sort of question. Still others about the names of their pets (maybe it was even the same person talking about politics). It’s an eclectic and joyous group. The catch about all this, however, is just because you’re following all of these people’s conversations doesn’t mean they’re following you. Likewise, just because you say something at (@) them doesn’t mean they will respond.

As for the question of “Does Twitter add value to what I do?”  Not to be arbitrary, but really it depends entirely on how you use it. I personally follow an assortment of people. I find it rounds out the information I get through Twitter rather well. I have a mix of personal, professional, and general people I follow.

Some ways I have used Twitter:

• To have a question answered
• To keep up with the latest in a specific industry
• To keep up with conversations that are going on in general
• To learn more about people I have met through blogging
• To share links I think others may find interesting
• To help others find the answer to their question
• Some people are funny. I enjoy that.
• It can be used by companies as a communication tool

And the list goes on. Twitter, like most social media properties, will give you a return based on what you invest in it. If you need a concrete example, Twitter for me opened my eyes to the large amount of social media activity going on in North Carolina (specifically Raleigh, Durham, and Charlotte). But that was only after I started dedicating at least a half hour every day to using and learning it.

If you’re on Twitter, please don’t hesitate to add me.

Bonus Link
Rafe Needleman has a good post that takes you through the steps of how to get started with Twitter.

Bonus Info:
Unfortunately, the ‘conversations’ in twitter are only text. In my opinion, one of the most interesting inroads into creating a picture version of twitter is Twitxr. Apart form having a horrible name (in my opinion) they were smart in creating a native iphone application that allows you to take pictures and add them to their site very easily.

Sidenote:
For those curious as to how people can possibly be “addicted” to Twitter. I would venture to say it’s due to the random, variable re-enforcement that occurs when someone does reply to a statement you made. It is also most likely a bi-product of the frenetic pace of the people you follow updating their ‘conversations’ frequently. Imagine following 20 conversations in real life. It’s kind of like that, except you can thankfully scroll.

Twitter is a simple, open communication platform (not just a micro-blogging tool). That simplicity creates a communication platform that allows user to utilize it as a tool for communication however they see fit. It is sometimes difficult with open platforms to see the value of such a tool or to figure out how to develop a means to really benefit from its use. As such, I have come up with one such method.

I am on the leadership team as the technical overseer for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship at UNCW. I work within the “Large Group” team that focuses specifically on our “Large Group” meetings that happen once a week (akin to a church’s Sunday sermon). As I’ve been involved with this, I’ve noticed that the beginning setup phase for the majority of our big events is frantic. People come in at various times based on scheduling, instruments are being setup, sound is being setup, and other technological things are being setup in preparation for the event. Different pieces of different things come from different people. While part of the issue is unifying it as a business process, the other part of the equation is communication.

That’s where Twitter comes in. If every person on our Large Group team had Twitter setup on their mobile phones (we all have texting) and followed, with text notifications, each other person on the Large Group team, things could go much more smoothly.

Examples of how Twitter can improve communication within a ‘stage setup’ or event environment:

• When someone just gets out of class and is on their way, they tweet it. This allows everyone on the team to know that they’re on their way to the help setup the event.
• If a piece of equipment is not working or was forgotten, it can be tweeted. This tweet will notify those who are not yet on site and they can quickly respond with a tweet notifying everyone they will take care of it (or cannot).
• People are not always in the same room at the same time, so periodic status updates can be sent out. Eg: “Sound check is complete.” or “The band is ready”.
• Guest speaker arrival can be tweeted to ensure proper greetings and experience.
• “Welcome” personnel (those students who volunteer to be outside welcoming new students before “doors open”) can also follow these tweets so they can accurately wrap up conversations, moving the flow and the environment more toward the event as “Go time” approaches.
• If technical difficulty occurs and personnel need to leave the site for other tools, they can keep up with the status of the event (and be notified about other things) to avoid having to be brought back up to speed.

These are just a few ideas of the many more that are possible. If you have any ideas on how Twitter can be used to communicate in settings similar to this or in other settings, I’ll add them to my list here :)

I read a very interesting differentiation recently on Traditional Marketing versus Social Media Marketing by Chris Borgan. In his post, Chris makes an interesting separation describing social media as the tools and marketing as the discipline. Chris goes further to state (with a pretty solid argument) that social media is more about listening, about getting to know the people on the other side- the people that aren’t you. I like that.

Keeping what Chris said in mind, I want to help make more sense (and use) out of Twitter and the recent development of Hashtags for companies (or journalists, etc) that may be looking to embrace the mindset of getting to know us (the people on the other side) better. I think that explaining a process and getting you involved is one of the better ways to increase the understanding.

Step 1: Searching Twitter Updates
There are two services that allow you to search through Twitter updates, each with its pro’s and con’s. I personally use Terraminds, but I outline both below if you want to experiment.

1. Terraminds -Terraminds is a smooth experience and feels much more ironed out. Its index of Twitter updates (tweets) seems to be about every 30 minutes to hour or so. While Terraminds doesn’t index Twitter’s updates as fast as TwitterSearch, it makes up for it in the interface and by the fact that you can create an RSS feed of your search term. Because of this, I use Terraminds over TwitterSearch.
2. TwitterSearch – TwitterSearch is a bit clunky and feels hacked together. It does its job, though. TwitterSearch will return public updates (tweets) as recent as 15 seconds (possibly even more recent).

You use one of these services in the same way you would use Google with keywords that bring up pertinent information on your company or product (Likewise, there will be some refining of keywords). In this case, however, we are looking for broad terms and narrow terms that pertain to your company. We do this because we are trying to find user created topics that may involve your product (these topics are called Hashtags).

We want to be broad because it increases our chance of finding a topic that may relate to your product without being about your product directly. For example: If you were in the cafe business, we would look for something like “#coffee” or “#starbucks”. #Coffee is broad and #starbucks narrow, but we want to track both as both would be important for us to track (being a cafe biz).

Once you have found search terms that give satisfactory results, I would encourage you to subscribe to those terms with your RSS reader (I use Google Reader) so you will be notified of any new results.

Step 2: Identifying Trackable Topics From Our Twitter Results
As I mentioned above, a user created topic on twitter is called a hashtag. You can spot these topics pretty easily as they are denoted with a hash symbol ‘#’ before the word (spaces in hashtags are replaced with a ‘+’). These topics are primarily what we are looking for in our Terraminds Twitter results. The other thing we should be keeping in the back of our minds are terms that are used consistently (not interchangeably) in Tweets that aren’t hashtags yet but have the potential to become hashtags (since they can be seeded hashtags as to start tracking early). We should be creating a list of these terms and topics as we find them for use in our next step.

Step 3: The People Behind The Hash[tags]
This step is pretty simple. Once we have our list of tags, we head over to Hashtags.org. There are 2 things that we can analyze here. The first is the information pertaining to the hashtag (topic), the second is the information pertaining to the people who have tweeted about a topic.

The Topic

1. The number of Tweets that have been recorded on a given topic, in this case, there are 15 Tweets with #music.
2. This is when the last Tweet on a topic was recorded, in this case, 5 hours ago someone Tweeted about #music.
3. This is the topic (hashtag) itself, as we can see, it is denoted by a ‘#’

The People

1. The number of Tweets the user has posted that uses this hashtag, in this case, 2 tweets using #music.
2. The day the Tweet was posted, Dec 21.
3. The user who wrote the Tweet.
4. What the user’s Tweet was.

After gathering the information on the topics we wrote down and the users on those topics, you can begin the process of understanding the people who are actively using your product or service. Don’t forget to subscribe to the hashtag’s RSS feed (and mine if you haven’t ;) ).

Briefly thinking past what I described above, hashtags are also a step in quantifying what is being said and who is saying it on Twitter. You can see who has really been talking about your product and down the road potentially engage them. For example, an enhancement of how Hugh MacLeod has been using twitter for micromarketing.

Update: TweetScan is another Twitter Search engine that allows you to search through all the conversations. From what I’ve seen, I like it better than the ones I’ve described above.

Hashtags, if you don’t know, is the inserting of the hash ‘#’ symbol followed by whatever word it is you’re wanting to create as a topic (referred to as a tag). For example, tweeting something like “on my way to california, cant wait to watch the #sharks play” would create the topic “sharks” that anyone can track (and be a part of) on the hashtag website. Multiple word hashes are created by adding a ‘+’ in place of a space. For hashtag tracking to work, you need to be following @hashtags.

Second up, as I was looking at hashtags, I also found Terraminds. Terraminds is a neat engine that allows you to search through public twitter updates (and also find people on twitter). You can also create an rss feed of the results (yay! will probably add this to my Pipes search later).

You should care because if you’re a company, this allows you to follow and find those who are saying meaningful things about your company or product. Want to know how your new product release is going? Chances are people are tweeting about it. If you’re not a company, well, these tools allow you to find and track things that might interest you (or be a creepy stalker, but I condone that a lot less).

Facebook First
The Facebook Status is something that’s pretty widely used in very much the same way as Twitter. This means that a large number of college students are learning, or have already learned the joys of life streaming. I would also bet that Facebook Status has more users who keep using Facebook Status once they start compared to new Twitter users who start using it then stop. Perhaps this is because Twitter is a focused version of Facebook Status and because of that, it’s more difficult to see the value of only life streaming whereas Facebook Status is but a feature of a larger value platform (the social network itself). Or, stated differently, MySpace (technically Friendster, I suppose) showed the value of social networks when the initial reaction was quite similar – What’s the point? Facebook focused in on a niche of what MySpace was providing. Whats if the same was true for Twitter?

Twitter Re-Loaded?
The first explosion happened at SXSW 2006. Twitter got hot… and fast. So I wonder, what if there is a second explosion waiting for Twitter? With Facebook giving value and teaching people to life stream, will Twitter gain the popularity as a niche focus like Facebook did with MySpace (obviously in a somewhat different way)? Will there be a point where Facebook users “graduate” from aspects of Facebook (or FB entirely) and move on to Facebook Status’ big brother, Twitter? Or a different question: Is there a way for Twitter to capitalize on this market that already understands the concept of their service but isn’t geek, and thus hit the social tipping point?

Maybe Twitter will thrive like Digg and Del.icio.us, a bit beyond the geek community, or maybe it can reach a social tipping point and become the life stream hub of a great many people’s social life. Given their recent feature addition of tracking, I would say their current path is geek. I’d say a more interesting idea would be what if this “life streaming” was built into e-mail?