Posts in Twitter

Happy Birthday, Twitter!

March 21, 2012

Yes it’s Larry the Bird’s birthday today (shame on you for forgetting). On this day six years ago, Jack Dorsey, co-found of Twitter, tweeted the now famous phrase ‘just setting up my twttr’ – the original codename for the social networking site back in those days. What followed next was a worldwide success with over 500 million users all embracing the 140 character social network. Fast forward to 2012, and now you can’t go anywhere without hearing the word ‘trending’ or seeing ‘hashtags’ plastered all over newspapers, magazines or your television screens. It’s safe to say, Twitter is a part of all our lives (whether you like it or not).

In celebration of the micro-blogging six candles, here are five key facts.

1. Alexa ranks Twitter as the 9^th most popular website worldwide with over 5 and a half million sites linking to it
2. The musical superstar known as Lady Gaga is the most popular person on Twitter with over 21 million followers
3. Twitter is valued at around $8.4 billion dollars and recently received a $300 million investment from the Saudi Prince listed as the 26^th richest person in the world
4. Super Bowl XLVI set the record for the most tweets  received during a sporting event, with an overage of 10,000 tweets sent per second during the final minutes of the match between New York Giants and the New England Patriots
5. Charlie Sheen holds the record for the fastest time taken to reach 1 million followers at approximately 25 hours and 17 minutes in March 2011

So there you have it; some facts and figures that define Twitter.

Happy birthday Larry. Try not to eat too much cake. We’ll see you this time next year!

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Simplifying Community Management – Social Media Tool Battle (Part 2)

December 30, 2011

Continuing in the Social Media Tool Battle Series, now that I have shared my top 3 favourite tools for Managing your Twitter Community, I would like to continue talking about efficient Twitter tools, this time using  a more analytical approach.

Analysing and Improving Your Account 

Measuring and analysing statistics and data from your account can be a key element in the decision making process of your strategy.

As much as you can make your community grow by managing your friends and followers, in order to keep them interested and engaged, you have to take into consideration their expectations of you and the content that you share. To help you do that, I recommend using tools that will analyse your Twitter activity and enhance what is working best (or not working so well) for your community.

Here are some of my favourites. (more…)

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Is the #NewNewTwitter Redesign A Step Forward or Back?

December 23, 2011

In the past month or so there have been big changes in the social world in terms of website layouts and functionality. Several big fish including YouTube, StumbleUpon and Delicious have all revamped their designs. However, the site that is getting the most attention is Twitter – yes, we were kind of shocked too. The welcome changes come as Twitter tries to increase their usability and relevancy with the year coming to a close and the first quarter of 2012 set to commence.

On December 8^th, the über popular microblogging site released their first redesign in a staggering five years with 21 global companies. Dubbed the ‘new new Twitter’, the changes were made with the intention of making the social platform more user friendly and a ‘compelling destination’ for brands – an attempt to try and tackle Facebook’s Pages. The changes brought in a new tabbed style layout where all the Twitter functions were spilt into separate island boxes to make everything easily accessible. (more…)

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Simplifying Community Management – Social Media Tool Battle (Part 1)

December 14, 2011

If you are a Social Media Community Manager (like me) you’ll already know that there are hundreds of add-on tools available to help us manage our Twitter accounts more efficiently. However, with new tools and apps being launched every week, it can often be difficult to stay up-to-date with the tools that enable you to get the most out of your account.

The objective of this series of posts is to share some of my favourite Twitter tools; the ones I use on a daily basis and that really make a difference when I need to track and analyse account activity, measure sentiment and manage friends and followers to help improve Social Media strategies.

Oh, and the good news is that these are completely free tools – although most offer upgraded plans if you wish to use advanced features. Why not experiment with all of them to decide which you like best and which are most helpful for you and your community management team? (more…)

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