-
1 week ago
The How, What And Why’s Of Twitter Lists
In November of 2009 Twitter rolled out one of its newest features to the general public…Lists. Since the initial launch Lists have seem to be mostly forgotten. In case you are new to Twitter or unaware of what Lists are, they are nothing more than a self managed group of individuals focused around a central topic and placed into an appropriately name List.
In order to understand how Lists could be beneficial for your use we should first look at we go about creating lists from within the Twitter website.
- Login to your twitter account
- On the right hand side of the Twitter site below the search you will see your lists. Click on “New list” to create a new list.
- After clicking on new list you will be presented with the following screen.
Enter a name for your list (something related to the users you will be adding to it) a description of what this list is about, the access level whether private or public and finally click create list. - To add users to your newly created list go the profile page of another Twitter user who you would like to add to the list. Click on the “Lists” button and you will see this:
Select the list you would like this user to be on and they will automatically be added to the list.
** You do not have to follow a user to add them to a List. - Repeat step 4 for each additional Twitter user you would like to add to your list.
Now that you know how to create your own Twitter lists let’s take a look at a five reasons to use lists and five types of lists you could create.
Reason To Use Lists
- Tracking The Competition – If you are in an industry where many of your competitors are on Twitter you can create a new, private list (remember the choice given when creating a List from step 3) that only you will be able to see and access and because you can add them to a List without following them your competition won’t know you are tracking what they do.
- Easy One Click Following – If you search the Twitter List directory Listorious you will be able to find a list in a niche that interests you created by someone you may or may not follow. After finding a list you want to follow you can then click on the Follow button and you will be subscribed and will be following that list of users without having to go to each one of them and clicking follow.
- Trust – If you are unsure if you should be following a particular person because of spam or other concerns check there Twitter profile and look for the “Listed” below their profile name. Chances are if they are Listed on several different lists you can trust them.
- Gaining More Followers – As you gain in popularity you will eventually be added to Lists yourself and as these Lists become followed you may gain followers from users who decide to follow the individuals who are on the Lists they themselves are currently following.
- Easier To Unsubscribe Than To Unfollow – If you use lists to track and monitor a niche or an event the use of Lists make it is very easy to unsubscribe from the list once you are done tracking the niche or when the event is over by simply going back to the list and clicking unfollow. If you weren’t using lists and had went to each profile and followed them manually you will now have to go into your followers list and unfollow each user you had previously added to remove them. This of course could take quite a long time depending on how many users you had followed for that particular event or niche. Lists can save you time.
Types Of Lists
- Location Related Lists – You can create a list of users from your City/Town/Province/State etc…and can keep up on local news and happenings usually before it hits traditional media outlets.
- Connect With Fans Of Your Favorite Sports Team – You can create a list of those who are fans of your favorite sports teams. Use search.twitter.com to easily find those who are talking about your team and add those who are fans to your list. I currently run an Edmonton Oilers List where I keep track of fans of my favorite hockey team the Edmonton Oilers.
- Official Employee List – Create a list of all official employee Twitter accounts and then share and promote this list so others are aware of who is officially communicating from within the company.
- VIP Lists – If you are attending an upcoming event or are hosting an event create a list that contains the Twitter names of all those who will be in attendance. Share this list with all those that will be in attendance as it will help put a face to the tweet.
- Peers And Experts – Create a list of peers and experts in your industry. Share this list with those in your industry to make it easier for everyone to find peers without having to go through the process of creating their own list.
Of course there are far more than five ways to use Twitter lists but hopefully these five give you a place to start.
Please leave a comment below letting me know how you are using Twitter lists and if you find this at all useful; consider clicking the Facebook icon to share it on Facebook with your friends or click the Retweet button to share it on Twitter with your followers. -
1 week ago
Don’t Forget The “Social” Part Of Social Media
Business and brands need to think of their social networking efforts as extensions of their physical/virtual stores. If someone walks into your store with a question do you ignore them? The same rules apply for social networks and social media, in order to be successful you have to be social.
-
1 week ago
Avoiding The Initial Social Media Mistakes
One of the mistakes that I’ve witnessed many new brands and individuals make when first entering into social media is their attempt to bring their old media way of thinking along with them. This traditional way of thinking and attempt to squeeze into a different medium will eventually lead to failure.
Instead of joining a social network, listening to the community and determining how that particular community works, quite often instead they will instead join and begin quickly aggressively pursuing the members of this social network with their look at me and buy this now message. The community whether it be Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or some other community will eventually turn its collective back on the brand as abuse will only be tolerated for so long.
What brands and businesses new to social networks should instead be doing is:
- Join the social network using a real name or the business name
- Upload a real picture of yourself or your product
- Use the search tools to discover individuals who are already talking about you or your brand and friend or follow them
- Listen to the conversations that are currently taking place and learn what is and what isn’t appropriate conduct on that particular social network
- After gaining followers and have learned the rules begin to socialize with those in your network. It is after all called “social” networking.
- Answer questions, ask questions and offer genuine help to those people who may be interested in your product/brand/business
- Repeat
To put the above into perspective I present you with two very different scenarios:
- You’re at a party and there is someone there who’s had far too much fun already and is harassing everyone he/she encounters with loud drunken talk and push behavior. Eventually he/she is dancing on the table and puking in the planter.
- You’re at a party and there is an individual there who is walking around making small talk with all those in the room. He/she is asking questions, telling jokes, sharing stories and listening to what others around him are saying. This is an articulate individual who is facilitating conversation among the group and everyone seems to be drawn to him/her.
How do you want your brand/business to be remembered amongst the social networks? Do you want your reputation to be that of the loud drunk or that of the articulate well spoken individual?
-
Notes: 1 / 2 weeks ago
The Great Blog CMS Showdown: Wordpress vs Tumblr vs Posterous
Although I have been extremely happy with the use of Tumblr as my blogging platform I can’t help but feel a little jealous of the Wordpress users and their never ending supply of free themes and plugins to enhance the look and functionality of their blogs. Lately I have been thinking of leaving Tumblr and going back to running my own self hosted Wordpress blog but in order to decide if moving my blog from Tumblr elsewhere would serve my needs best I decided to do a little pro and con comparison between the more well known blogging sites of Wordpress.com, Wordpress.org, Tumblr and Posterous.
Wordpress.com is the commercial half of Wordpress.org and is a fantastic blogging solution for anyone looking to get into blogging. It gives users the power of the Wordpress CMS while taking away the hassle of upgrading the Wordpress software. The downfall of this system is it costs you if you wish to use a custom domain name or your own CSS for styling your site.
Pros
- Easy to set up account (takes under 5 minutes)
- Runs the powerful CMS Wordpress
- Choose from 81 different available themes
- Can activate the ability to use a mobile theme when users visit using a mobile browser
- Widget support
- Change themes with the click of a button
- No hosting costs as bandwidth is covered by Wordpress.com
- Free to use, unless you choose to purchase upgrades
- 3 GB of file hosting
- No maintenance or upgrading of software is required
Cons
- Must pay to edit the CSS of your theme at a price of 14.97 per year
- Costs 9.97 per year to use a custom domain
- Have to pay to remove ads from your site
- Only Wordpress.com is allowed to run advertising on your blog. Only special case sites are allowed to run any advertising besides what Wordpress.com already runs.
- Limited to only the themes they provide
- Limited to using only the widgets that have been pre-selected by Wordpress
- No plugin support
- Admin suite could be seen as overly complex for some users not familiar with a CMS
Wordpress.org is the freely available open source software that powers many of the world’s largest blogs and while very powerful and customizable with its thousands of free and premium themes and plugins it does require that you have your own hosting and are comfortable either installing the software yourself or paying someone else to install and configure it for you.
Pros
- Thousands of free and premium themes to choose from
- Thousands of great plugins and widgets to enhance the usability and feature set of your blog
- Open source so you can make changes to the software as you see fit
- Easy to install on most servers. Many hosting plans include a one click install for Wordpress
- Wordpress is more than just blogging software and can be used as a really powerful CMS
- Can import your old blog into Wordpress with one click
- Spam protection on comments using the
AkamiAkismet plugin - You can set up your blog to accept multiple authors
- Automatic pinging
- Large community and well documented so you can find answers to most questions quickly
Cons
- Requires that you have web hosting
- Must be comfortable FTPing files and creating a database on your host so that you can install the software
- Some security flaws due to poorly coded plugins
- Admin suite could be seen as overly complex for some users not familiar with a CMS
- Must always ensure to upgrade to the latest version of Wordpress to ensure your software contains the latest security fixes
- Plugins must be upgraded to ensure they have the latest security fixes and features
- Upgrading to the latest version of Wordpress could break your theme or plugins
- If something goes wrong you are the site admin and must take care of the issue by searching for the answer
I currently host my blog on Tumblr and find it to be an extremely easy to use micro-blogging platform that is not only free to use but allows for a great amount of customization. The Tumblr admin panel is broken up into categories that make it easy to decide where to place your content but this simplicity comes at a price as you do not get storage space and the expandability afforded with Wordpress plugins is missing. Premium theme development seems to be missing with Tumblr as well making it difficult to find a developer willing to create custom themes for you.
Pros
- Free to use
- Account setup is quick
- Custom domain hosting for free
- Admin area is extremely easy to use
- Theme support and template customization
- Well written API
- Great social media features such as Like, Reblog and Follow
- No maintenance or upgrading of software is required
- Auto-post to your Facebook and Twitter feeds
- Hosted by Tumblr so no additional hosting costs
Cons
- No built in commenting system
- No file hosting
- Can’t install or configure plugins for additional features
- Have had speed issues
- Not a large selection of freely available themes to choose from
- Almost no premium themes to choose from and hard to find developers who do custom themes
- To customize your theme you must be familiar with html/css/javascript
Posterous describes themselves as the dead simple place to post anything and their claim is mostly true. Unlike other blogging platforms you don’t create an account but instead by simply emailing in your fist post an account is auto created for you. Again, unlike other blogging you post your content by emailing it from your email program of choice instead of creating it from within an admin panel. This is a unique and easy way to post content but unfortunately I also found it confusing after being used to using an admin panel in other blogging CMS’s. Posterous allows for theme customization but there are very few themes currently available and the lack of javascript support from within the themes is also an annoyance.
Pros
- Create an account simply by emailing them
- Auto-posting to a ridiculous amount of other services
- Custom themes
- Ability to have group blogs
- Accepts almost any file you send to it and converts it to the most friendly web format
- Creates iTunes ready podcasts out of MP3 files you send to it
- Free custom domains
- Ability to import from other blogging platforms
- Hosted by Posterous so no additional hosting fees
Cons
- No account creation instead an account is created when you email them. This was a little confusing at first and I think others may be confused by this as well
- Expected to post by email instead of an admin interface. Found this confusing at first as well
- Only 1GB of file storage
- Very limited theme selection
- No javascript support currently for themes
- Must use the Posterous commenting system and can’t change to Disqus, Echo or IntenseDebate
- Ability to auto-subscribe those in your email contact book to a daily digest of your blog
- Post by web is limited in functionality and features compared to other services
This is by no means a complete feature list for each of these blogging platforms but I do hope that there is enough information provided to help new bloggers determine which blogging solution may be right for them. As with all blogging software you run the risk of finding out after the fact that don’t like the software after using it for some time and then you run into the issue of exporting your content out of the CMS and into a new CMS. This is the current position I am in as I decide whether or not a custom Tumblr theme is the way I wish to proceed with my blog or if it would be better to move back to a self hosted Wordpress installation.
Let me know in the comments below which blogging software you currently use. If I didn’t include the blogging CMS you currently use let me know the pros and cons of it in the comments as well.
-
3 weeks ago
Could Google Buzz Be More Than Just A New Social Network?
Google launched its new social networking platform Buzz about five days ago and it appears Google has been listening to user feedback and has been able to close up some of the privacy concerns users had been voicing since its launch. Despite the fact Google has been attentive to its early adopters I am still not convinced that Google Buzz is a social networking platform and instead may actually be a real-time blogging platform.
Google has already built many blogging features into its Buzz service currently implemented by many of the other blogging platforms either by design or via a plugin system.
Features found inside Buzz that are similar to other blogging platforms include:
- Buzz pulls in all your content from around the web (Flickr, Picasa, Reader, etc…)
- With the major exclusion of Facebook Buzz is able to pull in most of your social graph
- Buzz allows for long form content to be posted where Facebook and Twitter both have limits on the amount you can post
- Built in commenting system
- Built in sharing system
- Built in upvoting system
- Tight integration with its mobile platform
So, what would Google need to do to become a real-time blogging platform?
- Allow customization/templating of your Buzz/Profile page
- Ability to use your own domain instead of the profile url
- Facebook integration into the connected sites
- Text formatting tools like those already found in Gmail
- Third party tools for posting
I don’t think it’s Facebook and Twitter that have anything to worry about as they have already reached a massive audience that will be hard to win over, but instead if I were Tumblr and Posterous I would be looking over my shoulder at the Google giant that is about to strike.
What do you think? Is Google Buzz a new social network or could it be more of a real-time blogging platform? Who should be most worried about Buzz? Is it Facebook and Twitter or Posterous and Tumblr?
Like hockey? Check out the hockey social news network: IceColdNews.com
Connect
Following
