TweetReports

Essential Reading: Facebook Marketing Articles

Michael — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 16:33:47 +0000

Collection of articles helpful for learning how to get the most out of using Facebook marketing, fan pages, advertising and privacy options.

Articles are listed in chronological order and list is updated as we discover new resources.

Facebook Marketing

Facebook Fan Pages

Facebook Advertising

Facebook Privacy

Essential Reading: Facebook Marketing Articles is a post from: TweetReports. Signup now to receive a free beta invitation!

Essential Reading: Reputation Management Articles

Michael — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 16:33:38 +0000

Collection of “essential” social media articles covering reputation management. Please feel free to suggest an article, report or experts in the field you think we may have missed.

Reputation Management Articles

Essential Reading: Reputation Management Articles is a post from: TweetReports. Signup now to receive a free beta invitation!

Essential Reading: Twitter Marketing Articles

Michael — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 16:32:39 +0000

If you’re looking to jump into social media and marketing with Twitter, we’ve compiled a collection of articles to get you off on the right foot. Please feel free to suggest an article, report, or experts in the social media field you think we may have missed.

Articles are listed in chronological order and updated as new Twitter marketing articles and resources are discovered.

Twitter Marketing

Using Twitter for Customer Service

Essential Reading: Twitter Marketing Articles is a post from: TweetReports. Signup now to receive a free beta invitation!

Essential Reading: Social Media Marketing

Michael — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 16:32:29 +0000

Collection of social media marketing articles we consider to be “essential reading”. Please let us know of any additional articles or resource you feel should be added to this list. Thanks.

Social Media

Social Media Best Practices

Social Media ROI

Social Media Certification

Essential Reading: Social Media Marketing is a post from: TweetReports. Signup now to receive a free beta invitation!

The Twitter Clock. Real-time Twitter Growth Statistics.

Michael — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 22:11:56 +0000

When it comes to social networks, Twitter users are extremely active. They create, share and comment on content at high rates. According to ExactTarget, they are three times as likely to upload photos, four times as likely to blog, three times as likely to post ratings and reviews, and six times as likely to upload articles. View this chart.

Twitter users are sharing their thoughts, opinions and experiences they have about the businesses, services and products they use.

“… we live in the age of social media and instant backlash.”– Danny Brown, dannybrown.me

If they tweet about a bad experience with a business, it can quickly (within minutes) snowball into a Twitter backlash and a public relations nightmare.

But when a company is actively monitoring Twitter for mentions about their company/brand, can take immediate steps to resolve an issue.

Additionally, according to Invoke Solutions, 31% of Twitter users follow a brand or company’s Tweets. So companies that monitor Twitter also have an opportunity to engage and foster relationships with brand advocates — which encourages advocates to promote the brand even more.

And although some companies have chosen to either ignore Twitter and the power of its network, or believe it’s a passing fad, statistics prove otherwise. So to help businesses comprehend how quickly Twitter is growing, the depth of content users are generating and the impact a single tweet can have on their bottom line, we created The Twitter Clock — a real-time statistical resource on Twitter’s growth indicating the importance of monitoring your brand on Twitter.

Registered Twitter Users:

Twitter Updates:

Brand Mentions:

Brand Recommendations:

Brand Recommendation Requests:

Twitter Search Queries per day

Statistics from The Twitter Clock have been mathematically calculated based on information TweetReports has gathered over the last two years. And we will be updating The Twitter Clock as new information is released.

Let us know if you’re interested in displaying The Twitter Clock statistics on your site (with or without graphics). We’ll be releasing a script soon. We can also provide statistical forecast’s upon request. Thanks.

The Twitter Clock. Real-time Twitter Growth Statistics. is a post from: TweetReports. Signup now to receive a free beta invitation!

TweetReports First Client Is A Former Heroin Dealer

Michael — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 17:15:56 +0000

TweetReports has officially contracted with our first official non-beta client. He’s a former heroin dealer who once shot up a room with an Uzi, spent six years in jail, isn’t using TweetReports for what we intended at all, and isn’t paying us a dime.

We couldn’t be happier.

Some of the best client’s come from the most unlikely places

Rev. Victor Williamson (not his real name, more on that later) is a Pastor in one of the more stereotypically violent neighborhoods in one of the largest cities in the world. As a kid growing up, he was part of the bad element — thus the drug dealing and prison time — but since turning over his life to God has turned a new chapter in his life, and the life of his community.

He’s one of those anomalies in life; someone who truly exists to make the world around them better. One of his main focuses in his ministry is working, preaching and dealing with the neighborhood kids who are living the life he used to. Rev. Victor tries to get them to put down their guns and to walk away from a conflict — usually by standing in between two groups with deadly intent.

Somehow he was able to discern that most of the gangs where he lives use Twitter as means of communication instead of cell phones. Rev. Victor was spending six to eight hours a day reading Twitter feeds to try and figure out where the next attack was going to be happening, so he could get there first and de-escalate it. Nobody needs to be arrested, nobody needs to be killed, everybody just needs to go home.

I called him on a lark several months back and offered him a trial service just to see if it would be helpful. Michael (TweetReports CEO) and I agreed that if nothing ever came of it for the company it wouldn’t matter, it was still a good thing to do and hoped for the best. We started working with him as a full client in March.

Since March, using the TweetReports monitoring service, Rev. Victor estimates:

His search times have gone from 6–8 hours/day to 20 minutes daily, allowing him to do more outreach and spend less time in front of the computer.
He’s used our reporting analysis tools to determine that there are two times during the day when the gang activities are the highest, so he can have more people on call to help with the violence de-escalation.
He’s used our alerts and daily reports that he gets sent to his blackberry to be less in the office and more on the street, talking to gangs and keeping the community safer but still being informed.
He has been able to find and stop at least a half-dozen “skirmishes”. That’s his term, not mine. I wanted to know what he meant by that once, so I did some searching myself. Turns out he stopped a gang from doing a drive-by shooting at a house party where there were 40 people. Who knows how many of those people might have died had he not gotten that information ahead of time.
He said the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me the other day: “Because of you and TweetReports, I have eight more guns in my office.” I did ask for clarification: he meant that we helped get guns off the street; he wasn’t arming in case we stopped by for a visit.

We’re not working with Rev. Victor just for charity or for philanthropic reasons; we get a lot of great ideas from him about product improvements as well.

We showed him a full demonstration of the advanced TweetReports search features, including Follower Analysis reports so you can know who are the influencer’s following you, what they’re talking about and when.

He thought about that for a second, and responded “Well that’s cool. What would really be helpful for me is if I could do a search within the people I’m following so I can see what the conversation is within that group too.” We stared straight ahead for a few seconds and one of the developers said “Uh, we… we never thought of that.” So with a few hours’ work and a great idea, a completely new and unique advanced search feature was born. And thanks to Rev. Victor, you get to use it too.

As you can probably tell we have a great affection for the work that he does and that he generously includes us as part of his overall effort, which is why we have not given his real name or his city here.

I recently did a presentation for a community leadership coalition in his neighborhood to explain how Rev. Victor was utilizing the technology to be more informed and using the monitoring features as an intelligence-gathering tool, so that he could help more kids, stop more incidents, and take more guns off the streets.

After the meeting I asked him how it went; he told me all but one person thought it was fantastic and was really supportive of the effort.

We found out later that the one holdout was a relative of a gang leader who left the meeting and promptly told that gang leader that Rev. Victor was monitoring what they were saying. Most of that gang changed their usernames and profiles almost immediately, but they kept talking. Despite what is being said, Rev. Victor’s mission is a peaceful one and so keeping them talking us an unfortunate necessity.

It also makes our job at TweetReports that much more important: you better believe law enforcement agencies are monitoring social media sites just like employers are. So if Rev. Victor’s information is slower than anybody else’s, somebody’s going to the emergency room and someone’s going to jail.

That simple yet undeniably frightening concept keeps us up at night thinking of new ways to be faster, better and more efficient.

TweetReports lets the user look for what is being said, not who is saying it — so it didn’t affect Rev. Victor’s efforts. But it did remind us of an important lesson: You can’t monitor and track something that isn’t being said.

Monitoring and tracking isn’t limited to brand management. The value of what information can bring to you is potentially limitless, especially if you can harness what people are actually talking about, not just a poll or statistics.

Rev. Victor uses the information he gathers and monitors to try to keep kids from making catastrophic mistakes. Knowing what is being said about a particular word or phrase opens up a wealth of possibilities to use information to plan, to save, to review, to imagine.

How can information and the power to know help you?

Note: While we didn’t reveal Rev. Victor’s real name in this space, if you are touched by his story and want more information, want to donate or want to help in some way, please contact me at trygve@tweetreports.com and I’ll pass all messages along to him.

TweetReports First Client Is A Former Heroin Dealer is a post from: TweetReports. Signup now to receive a free beta invitation!

Why I Don’t Get My News From Guy Kawasaki Anymore

Michael — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 02:18:58 +0000

Let’s face it, Guy Kawasaki (@guykawasaki) puts out some good tweets — albeit if you’re on Twitter as much as I am you do see redundancy (you can read about why here).

The problem is that Guy Kawasaki is just one source and even the all-powerful Holly Kaw! himself can’t hear and tweet about everything.

The next alternative is subscribing to RSS feeds. Although they work great to aggregate information so you don’t have to manually monitor every blog and news channel, you’re still faced with the impossible task of trying to determine which of the hundreds of news stories and articles are the most important — the stories you need to read right now. And if you’re anything like me, you can spend countless hours delving into your favorite topics and never get to the breaking news.

Sure, you might chance across a nice article or two, but how do you know what’s on people’s minds right now? What are the top stories they’re reading and linking to? Those are the stories you need to read first. And one of the best ways to do that is with TweetReports.

How to Quickly Discover Top News Stories

Log into your TweetReports account (or sign up for a free account here).
Search for the twitter username of the news website you want to track such as CNN, mashable, techcrunch, rww, VentureBeat, etc.
Look at the stories listed under “Top Links” in the sidebar.

When the Twitter search results are displayed, TweetReports will list the most popular stories under “Top Links”. You no longer have to guess what’s popular because TweetReports will tell you what people are linking to most.

TweetReports tells you the top stories for each Twitter search.

To zero in on the best-of-the-best links, use “Filter Results” options to only display tweets that contain links and have been retweeted.

Use Filter Results options to quickly refine your Twitter search

To make this short process even faster, save your search and you’ll be only one-click away from the hottest real-time news stories.

That’s it. Instant access to quickly discovering the top stories people are talking about (and Retweeting) right now.

Bonus tip: To know which social media news site has the hottest trending story, try a new search for two Twitter usernames such as; mashable techcrunch and you’ll get real-time results for whose stories are most popular.

Why I Don’t Get My News From Guy Kawasaki Anymore is a post from: TweetReports. Signup now to receive a free beta invitation!

How to Search Twitter Even When Twitter Search is Offline

Michael — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 04:50:25 +0000

Last night, June 14, 2010, Twitter experienced some extensive availability issues due to failed enhancement of their timeline cache.

In short, It was almost impossible to access or post updates to Twitter — including trying to use search.twitter.com.

Twitter says, Something is technically wrong.

On the upside, anyone having a TweetReports account was able to continue searching and retrieving updates (tweets). An example of which was captured on March 17 (St. Patrick’s Day) when a very similar situation occurred.

How to Search Twitter Archive

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlFlHbwDArU

The reason TweetReports is able to continue providing search results is because our system automatically saves and stores tweets — even when no one is conducting searches. So even during the smallest of Twitter outages, you can conceivably get tens of thousands of results — like the example shown in the video. That’s a pretty significant benefit to any business requiring on-going intelligence gathering and research.

How to Search Twitter Even When Twitter Search is Offline is a post from: TweetReports. Signup now to receive a free beta invitation!

Twitter Retweet Best Practices

Michael — Tue, 18 May 2010 17:07:44 +0000

The common method to spread a Twitter message (or update) is to “Retweet” the message. And for those new to Twitter, a “Retweet” is a method for republishing a message to your followers that gives attribution to the Twitter user who published the original message. In essence, it’s a simple way to help a message go viral.

The problem is that there are different methods for Retweeting a message and many Twitter users may not know which methods are acceptable best practices — and can help to spread a message — or that other methods such as using “r/t” can all but eliminate any chances for the message to spread further.

How To Make Sure Your Retweets Get Found In Twitter Search Results

Let’s look at some of the ways people Retweet messages.

RT (Best practice)
Twitter’s native Retweet option (Best practice)
via (Best practice)
r/t or R/T (Don’t use — bad for search)

Of the methods listed above, the two most common best practices for Retweeting a message is to use the widely accepted “RT” and Twitter’s recently integrated native Retweet support. The following video shows how to Retweet a Twitter message using TweetDeck (many other Twitter applications also use a similar process).

www.youtube.com/watch?v=KV4I826Dtaw

Aside from being an acceptable best practice, the primary reason for using “RT” to Retweet is to make the message easier to find when people are searching on search.twitter.com and TweetReports. Considering that over 6 million Twitter searches are conducted every day, you can understand how important it is for messages to be found and displayed when users are conducting a Twitter search — especially when their search includes “RT”.

The third most common method for Retweeting a message is by republishing the message and giving attribution to the original publisher using “via”. This is generally accomplished by adding the “via” to the end of the message followed by the originator’s Twitter username. Such as; “/via @username” or “via @username”.

A common reason why people use the “via” Retweet method is because the person Retweeting the message wants to spread the information but either edits or entirely rewrites the content while still giving attribution to the original publisher. Both of which still allow the tweet to be found when filtering messages to show Retweets.

Of all the Retweet methods, using “r/t” or “R/T” is the worst because the slash “/” symbol is interpreted by Twitter to represent different things.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGNVrR6fSIA

For example, if you conduct a search for “r/t”, not only will the results include tweets that are actual Retweets (those that include “r/t” and “R/T”) but it will also include tweets that include “R T”, “R.T”, “R-T” etc. that aren’t Retweets. Which means Twitter searches are diluted with inaccurate results. And, as you know, accurate search results are imperative to successfully monitoring your brand on Twitter.

So if you’re looking to Retweet a Twitter message, using the three demonstrated best practices are the best options for spreading information and generating good will on Twitter.

What’s your favorite Retweet method? Which do you like best and find easiest to use?

Twitter Retweet Best Practices is a post from: TweetReports. Signup now to receive a free beta invitation!

Priority Flagged Tweets

Michael — Mon, 17 May 2010 05:23:33 +0000

Monitoring your brand on Twitter is only part of the equation. Once an important Twitter message has been identified, you need the ability to save and prioritize the message as an actionable item. And Priority Flagged Tweets is the perfect tool for the job.

Save, and notes and prioritize tweets as actionable items.

Easily add notes to track conversations
Upgrade or downgrade the priority
Search within your flagged tweets with three powerful search options;
- View by Date
- View by Priority
- Fee form Boolean search.

Please watch the following video demonstration.

How to Save and Flag Actionable Tweets

www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZdKS-aaOXw

Priority Flagged Tweets is a post from: TweetReports. Signup now to receive a free beta invitation!