TwitNine

Social media guru, Chris Brogan, created a really good list of 50 Twitter Power Tips. For those of you who prefer audio-visual media, as opposed to print, the list has since been turned into a video, which you can watch: here.

At Twitnine, we think that sometimes the best tips are the most obvious ones:

• A lot of @replies shows a lot of humanity/engagement. – In other words, give back to your followers. Don’t just plug your site or product. Make Twitter a two-way communication tool.
• Everyone does it their own way. You’re doing it wrong, too – to someone. – Tips and tricks can be useful and are a great way to help us learn. But it’s good practice to come up with your own ideas and methods. Do what works for you!
• A non-standard background and face avatar means we believe you may be human. – Never underestimate the power of a well filled-out bio and avatar!!!
• Spamming us repeatedly is okay. We just unfollow you. – Every tweet should offer something to your followers – whether you are expressing an opinion or asking a question. Make every tweet valuable!
• Start thinking in 120 characters (remember? save 20). Every bit of this advice is tweetable. – At first, it is difficult to limit yourself, but aim to deliver concise information to your followers. Remember: Quality over Quantity!

All of these tips are great. They are really useful tips for any new tweeters out there and also act as great reminders for the seasoned Twitter user.

I think it’s important to always remember that whether you’re using Twitter to try to sell a product or promote a website, Twitter is first and foremost a social media platform. You can plug your site or product to your heart’s content, but do not forget Twitter’s primary purpose – do not forget to network with your followers.

For some individuals, following 50 people on Twitter can be quite an ordeal. If those 50 people post 10 tweets per day, that’s 500 tweets to read! It makes you wonder how people who follow 100s, 1,000s and even 100,000s of other people sort through the mass of tweets that they must see every day.

Well, fortunately, there are quite a lot of applications that help us sort and filter tweets from those who we’re following.

1. Filttr: This is a web basted Twitter app that allows you to filter tweets based on keywords. It is a very versatile filter, which gives you the option to blacklist and whitelist key phrases. I found it a bit confusing, as it started blocking some of my contacts before I had even given it any keywords. I’m not sure why – maybe it just didn’t like them?!
2. Mixero: Mixero claims that it will reduce the noise. And it does a good job of delivering. It allows you to create and sort your contacts into groups – which might be quite time consuming if your contact list is big! You can create an active list of users who you find to be the most interesting so you can easily follow their tweets. You can create all kinds of different filtering systems for your contacts and tweets. The good thing is that it’s very easy to learn and simple to use.
3. MicroPlaza: This is a link sorting tool – it works on the premise that it will show you the most popular links being tweeted among your followers, as these are the people that you are interested in. Therefore the links that they are tweeting and re-tweeting will most likely be of interest to you.
4. TweetDeck: This allows you to put your friends into groups so that you can essentially slow down your Twitter stream. It makes it easier to follow tweets from family, friends, work, etc. There are quite a few other apps that have a similar function. Other apps you might want to try are SeesmicDesktop and PeopleBrowsr.
5. TwitIQ: This tool also lets you sort your contacts into groups. It also can track URL clicks. The fact that the interface looks like Twitter makes it easy to navigate around!

There are probably enough tweet-filtering tools out there to write 20 posts on, and this article barely scratched the surface of that list! Let us know if you have a favorite tweet sorting method, or if you have tried one of the tools listed above! Happy tweeting!

The more you use Twitter, the more you’re going to want to find quicker ways to do things. Conveniently, Twitter has included a number of shorthand codes that you can use to perform almost any action directly from the What Are You Doing? box. These codes are particularly useful when you’re working from a mobile phone by sending your tweets to 40404 (or your local shot code) using the Twitter SMS (Short Message Service) gateway.

D – direct message

You can send a direct message right from the Update box by using the following form:

D username message

In this message, username is the username of the person whom you want to direct message, and message is any message that you want to send. So, if you want to tell us how great this book is, you type in the What Are You Doing? box:D dummies I am really enjoying Twitter For Dummies! Thanks for the help!
Many users opt to have direct messages sent straight to their cellphones via SMS and/or e-mail, so you can frequently use direct messages to reach someone instantly even if you don’t have a cell number or if you know that he’s an active Twitter user who may not be online at the moment. Some make heavy use of this while traveling and at events and find it much easier to coordinate on the fly.

F – follow

No matter what application or interface you use to tweet, you can quickly add a twitterer to your feed just by sending an update to Twitter. Say that you decide to follow the updates of Evan Williams (@ev), Twitter’s cofounder and CEO. Just send this message to Twitter:

F ev
Alternatively, you can type the word follow to do the exact same thing:
follow ev
When you add someone using the follow or f command, you both follow them and opt in to receive their individual device updates (only when your account is set to receive device updates). When you follow them using the Web site Follow button or most Twitter clients, you connect only via the Web site, not also via SMS device updates.

@ – reply

We cover how to reply to users in Chapters 3 and 5, but the @ symbol is really a shorthand for referencing another Twitter user. The difference between this command and all other commands is that there is no space between it and the username of the person you want to reach. Want to say something to Leslie? Write

@geechee_girl hiya!

Twitter makes sure that the message ends up in Leslie’s Mentions tab.

If you want to access your Twitter history after you use the service for a while, you may find it a challenge, especially if you’re a frequent tweeter. But you can get your whole history from Twitter in a few ways:

TweetScan (www.tweetscan.com/data.php): A service that can pull Twitter history for any username. Unfortunately, TweetScan only goes back to December 2007, and if you’ve been on Twitter since it first hit the streets in 2006, you probably want to go back farther. Joined since then? You can get your entire Twitter history.

Twistory (www.twistory.net): A cool little application that imports your Twitter history into the Web-based Google Calendar app so that you can view your tweets like a diary. If you tweet a lot, you might feel overwhelmed by so many tweets crammed into such a small space.

Profile page: You can use the old-school way of seeing your Twitter history by going to your Twitter Profile page and clicking the More button over and over again until you see the tweet you’re looking for. This approach definitely takes some time, though. (And if you really just want
the one tweet, searching (http://search.twitter.com) might be a lot easier!)

Aggregator: If you’re a new Twitter user, you can have an aggregator, such as FriendFeed (http://friendfeed.com) or Social Thing (http://socialthing.com), save your history. Aggregators simply combine your Twitter feed together with any feeds you might have on other social sites. Do you share photos on Flickr? Then there is a feed of your pictures. Videos on YouTube? Same thing. It’s kind of like double posting, for insurance purposes.

You can also keep track of some tweets by marking them as favorites with the little star icon on the web interface. A drawback to favoriting tweets is that you can’t search within them on Twitter, and Twitter’s team hasn’t said anything about creating a means to do this search. Instead of using the Twitter Favorites feature, bookmark your favorites by using a tool such as Delicious (http://delicious.com), Shareaholic (www.shareaholic.com), or FriendFeed. You may find using an outside tool a little more inconvenient than the Favorites feature at first, but you can findthe tweets that you mark in more than one way later. Some people even do Favorite Tweets Roundup posts on their blogs every few days, which you can do much more easily by using a bookmarking service, such as Delicious.