Twitter - How to Manage it?

In the Current scenario Twitter is one of the most popular and effective social media site. As I have said in my earlier post on Twitter it is a micro blogging site and is pretty easy to join. Twitter has the unique facilities of blogging and instant messaging. Twitter is mainly based on the question "What are you doing?". In Twitter you find other people to follow on twitter and you can see and receive their status updates (tweets) in real time, and other people can follow you and see your status updates in real time.

It is always advisable to follow people with smiliar interest and from similar backgrounds. By doing so your followers will find your tweets interesting and informative and you would also feel the same for the tweets sent by your followers. For example if you are a movie freak and have just watched an interesting adventure movie, you can just tweet as " Just watched an Interesting adventure movie". It would be better if it is followed by your movie name. Twitter usually limits the messages to 140 characters. There is also the option to post links along with your tweets. People usually post links from their own sites, which seems to be interesting for their followers. But it is not a good habit to always post links from your site only. You can also post links related to your interests from other external sites, which may prove interesting and informative to your followers.

Apart from chatting with their online friends, many Tweeters have come up with creative ways to use their account. The company or organization can use twitter to provide updations on its products and other industry news to its followers. For example consider that Microsoft has a Twitter account. Whenever they release any new product and offer any updates, they can inform their users via Twitter network. So, the followers of Microsoft Twitter account will immediately get informed about the new arrivals.

Like with all the social media sites, many of the users are using Twitter in a spammy way and as a result the Tweeter may lose its reputation and may even get terminated. So there are many things which should be avoided in order to avoid spamming of your Twitter account. A spammy account will surely lose its followers and as a result will also lose its reputation. An example of Twitter spamming is that if you have a website which offers some free software which can be downloaded. So naturally you would get the tendency to post this download link in your Tweets and expect your followers to click on the link and download it. When you do it in an aggressive way it would become boring and would be considered as spamming. You must also take care that your postings are not boring, which may turn your followers away from your. For example if you are drinking a glass of water and if you Tweet like "I am drinking a glass of water" it would look boring. Such repeated and similar post would become boring and also create a negative impression among your followers.

Another case which leads to termination of your Twitter account is the mass following or following spam. This is the case in which you start following other Tweeters in a bulk regardless of who they are and what they are interested in. You just hope that they will follow you in reverse. This is actually spamming and you may get banned.

A good Twitter account must have a good profile information, such as a brief information about the user, a link to his / her website or blog etc, which would look attractive. It is also advisable to avoid the default twitter background. You should create a new background avatar, which makes your Twitter account look professional and attractive. It would also make a feeling that you are a serious Tweeter and worthy to follow you. Also try avoiding automated tweets, i.e posting tweets through any software or other automated programs. This may also harm you.

Social Media as a Marketing Tool

Social Media is fastly rising as a marketing tool and many business organizations are using it as a resource. According to Wikipedia, “Social Media is the online technologies and practices that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences and perspectives with each other. Social Media is mainly based on the Web 2.0 technologies and offers high user interactiveness. Social media is a form of internet marketing which seeks to achieve branding and marketing communication goals through the participation in various social media networks. Communication through social media is fast and offers high scope for user interaction. The social media sites can effectively be used for informal market research and researching the competitor performance. The Social media helps business in receiving comments from potential clients and customers.
Some of the leading social media sites includes Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook etc. These sites allows users to post articles or any other good content and share it through their network. They also other users to comment and vote for the postings, if they are interested.

Social media provides different channels for businesses to access potential customers, and it’s an interactive environment. The Social media can also be daunting if the customer is not familiar with the technology and how to use it. When using social media, business owners need to provide content from those who are familiar with the business. Even though the social media is more effective, it is time consuming and people need to learn to manage it without spending a lot of time on it.

Social Media can be used as a powerful advertising channel. Usually the marketers place ads where a large number of online crowds converge, in sites such as YouTube, Facebook, Linkedin etc. Social Media can also be used for the promotion of video, articles and other content which can be shared across the social media network. Social Media campaigns can also be enhanced by creating online communities or groups and promoting your product via them.

Social Media marketing helps in boosting your website traffic. It also helps in growing your brand or band building. Some of the major Social Media sites are listed below.

Digg
LinkedIn
Facebook
Mixx
YouTube
Del.icio.us
StumbleUpon
Meneame
Newsvine
Twitter
Flickr
Technorati
Reddit

Redefining Keywords in Google Analytics

95% of the Google Analytics users across the world just work on this tracking code, without being ready to make any customization in the code. There are many features in Google Analytics code which can be modified to get a more neat and customized report. One such thing that I would like to share is the redefining of the Keywords in Google Analytics report. This is one of the interesting features of Google Analytics which helps to filter the keywords to a great extend.

Usually in the Google Analytics repot there is an option to view the list of the keywords. Keywords are those terms by which a visitor enters a site after entering them in search engines. The Keyword report gives you the list of all the keywords that have brought traffic. This includes both relevant and irrelevant keywords and phrases. At times you might want to remove certains keywords or phrases from the keywords report list. In this case you just want to treat the traffic from the removed keywords or phrases as direct traffic. Such an option is available in Google Analytics.

For example, consider a user typing your domain name yoursite.com in the search engine and this search phase is listed in the keyword report list. Here you can use the _addIgnoredOrganic() method to treat that keyword as direct traffic. You can also use the _clearIgnoredOrganic() method to clear out your keyword ignore list.

The general syntax of this function is _addIgnoredOrganic(newIgnoredOrganicKeyword). This sets the string as the ignored term for the keyword report list. This function can be used to configure Google Analytics to treat certain keywords or phrases as direct traffic. When you redefine your keywords in this manner the search terms are still included in your overall page view counts, but excluded from the keyword reports. The final syntax will be like this pageTracker._addIgnoredOrganic("yoursite.com"), where "yoursite.com" is the term to be treated as direct traffic.

Track and Analyze Your Twitter Account

Another Interesting tool that I saw this week is the Twitter Counter. This is an amazing tool to track and analyze your Twitter Account. The major attraction of this Twitter tool is the graphical analysis of our Twiter activities. The graph shows the number of followers acquired during each day for a particualar user. You can access these information by logging on to http://www.twittercounter.com/ and entering your Twitter profile ID. The tool is absolutely free for now, except for some advanced features.

Another feature of Twitter Counter is the comparison tool. This tool helps to compare two Twitter Profile in a graphical manner, which helps to study and analyze two Twitter profiles. This tool also assigns a rank to each Twitter profiles based on certain parameters, which includes mainly the number of Followers. The Profile with the most number of Followers are more likely to get on the top rankings.

There would be a particular date from which the counter have started tracking your profile. Based on this the Twitter Coutner shows some intersting figures such as
1) The number of Followers the profile had on the date the counter had started tracking the profile stats.
2) The total number of Followers added since the day it started tracking your Twitter account.
3) The total number of Followers added since the last day.
4) The average growth per day.
5) Prediction on the number of Followers for the next day.
6) Prediction on the number of Followers for the next 30 days.
7) The Twitter Ranking for the particular Twitter ID.

More features are expected to arrive in this amazing Twitter Counter tool in the coming days. I request all of you to give the Twitter Counter a try. Just log on to http://www.twittercounter.com/ and enter your details.

Get Your Digg Statistics

Recently I found a good tool from the net which helps to give us some useful information and statistics on our Digg account. This tool is free and can be used online, so there is not extra need to download any software on to your system. This statistics data provided by this online tool givens useful information which helps in filtering our Digg network and making it worthy. To know more about this interesting tool you just log on to http://www.diggstatistics.com/ and enter your Digg user name in the text box provided. Once you press the "Analyze" button after entering your Digg username, you will be directed to a page which offers some excellent information on your Digg account.

The Digg Statistics Tool provides information such as
a) Which friend has Dugg your submissions most.
b) Which friends have Dugg your Submissions least
c) Which friends haven't yet Dugg any of your submission etc.
d) Which users in the entire Digg community other than your friends have dugg more than five of your Digg submissions.

Apart from this the tool will also show your last 10 submissions and the number of Diggs they have acquired. If properly used this tool can help in purifying your Digg network and making it more efficient. Some of the snapshots of the Digg Statistics are also given below.