Quick Online Tips » Twitter

How to Unfollow All on Twitter?

QuickOnlineTips — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 18:05:42 +0000

Do you want to remove everyone you’re following on twitter? Now there is a powerful mass unfollow Twitter tool that promises to remove all people you are following in minutes.

So why would you want to unfollow all people Twitter? On Twitter, when someone follows you, you follow back to reciprocate the gesture. If you are in the Twitter followers number game, then you could end up following thousands of people, not knowing who they are. This will lead to hundreds of Direct messages, spam and this will not let you follow people you know, all the while filling your Twitter page with Tweets you do not want to read. So you just want to start anew… its better than deleting your Twitter account.

Want to make a fresh start? John Chow has launched his new tool called UnfollowAll – but remember, it is irreversible so be absolutely sure what you are doing.

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Miley Cyrus Quits Twitter, Sings Rap Song!

QuickOnlineTips — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 18:30:14 +0000

As more celebrities join Twitter everyday, Hannah Montana star Miley Cyrus decided to quit Twitter, but she did it in style and made a rap song to tell her fans why!

If you hear the Miley Cyrus rap song, some reasons she suggests are she wants her private life private, and wants to put a stop on gossip sites buzzing news of every tweet she makes. She wants to stop pleasing people and admits she is too busy. Naturally Tweeple are tweeting our loud which gets the topic trending at #mileycomeback.

Celeb sites are analyzing if Miley Cyrus boyfriend provoked her to quit

And many Miley Goodbye videos are emerging all over the web

Did you know that the top 10% Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets and its not surprising that 60% twitter users quit within first month! Did you quit Twitter?

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5 Twitter-Like Microblogging Sites for Blog Traffic Building

QuickOnlineTips — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:41:39 +0000

Guest Post by Alan Liew
Twitter has popularized the concept of microblogging. It has changed the way people use the internet and has increased the time they use the computer. It provides many online activities from internet marketing, online diary updating, affiliate marketing, blog traffic generation and a lot more. It has made people busier but provided many opportunities not only to big online entrepreneurs but most especially to small online businesses and individual bloggers.

What is microblogging? It is the process of posting short information with at most 140 characters per post. Updates about various topics can be posted. This has paved the way for online marketing and generation of free traffic to blogs. Twitter is currently the most popular microblogging site online. However aside from it, there are also other microblogging sites that have their own poll of members and great services.

This article will tackle 5 of these microblogging sites online. These sites are Plurk, Sweetter, Microblogger, Yammer and Tumbler. Discussed in detail below are the site’s functions and special features.

5 Twitter-Like Microblogging Alternatives

1. Plurk
The updates or tweets (as it is called in Twitter) are called plurks. Members can send plurks to other members in the form of links to their blog posts or other sites and short messages. Plurk gives you a chance to create your online journal and share it with your friends and family. Using Plurk will help you network with other people who have the same interests as you are. This site is a combination of social networking and microblogging and the services it provides are simple yet very useful and not only for ordinary internet users but most especially for those who wish to connect and market with other people online.

2. Sweetter
Quite a unique name for a microblogging site. This open source microblogging site provides a lot of fun stuff. Sweetter like Twitter allows you to write what you are doing and updates your friends about your activities. You can write everything you want to write about. Following other members is also possible and they can see what you post on your page and vice versa. Replying to another member’s post is also possible (@user). Sweetter uses a TODO system where you can send someone a list of things to do. This site also applies the voting system where members can vote your posts which causes for your karma to go up or down. The karma ranges from -50 to 50 points. Members can vote up the posts that they like while vote down those that they don’t want to appear higher in the index page. Updating your profile is also possible where you can either change your avatar, your personal URL or your location.

3. Microblogr
This microblogging and social networking service allows instant collaboration with friends from the network using their SMS feature. It allows instant communication with members and newly found friends. Once you send a message to your friends, they can receive it on their index page and also on their mobile phone if this service is activated by them. Tracking of messages as well as those of your friends is also possible. For example, if you want to meet up with your friends in the network, you can just send a simple and short message and all those from your network will be notified either through their microblog account or their mobile phones.

4. Yammer
Yammer is a great tool for companies and organizations to update them of their member’s activities and answer a simple question, “what are you working on?”. Everytime an employee answers this question, a feed is created to all its members which enables co-workers to discuss different ideas, ask relevant questions, share news, links and other information. Every employee at Yammer has a profile and accessing past conversations for reference is possible. Yammer is a great service for companies and other organizations. The privacy of every member and the company is secured as those who can access are only those with a valid company email address. Yammer service is free, however, if a company would like to claim and manage their own network, they can just pay a minimal amount.

5. Tumblr
Tumblr tweets are called tumbledogs. These tumbledogs can be short blogs less than 140 characters which can be links, quotes, photos, videos, music and dialogues. Anybody can freely express himself using these tumbledogs at Tumblr. All members can also customize their own page or even have their own domain names. Tumblr provides great service and joining takes only a few seconds. You can join at anytime and explore the simple yet very functional service of this microblogging and social networking site.

Guest author Alan Liew has been a blog marketer for about three years. He writes and shares topics like Internet marketing, blogging, make money online, affiliate marketing in his blog. You can also write a guest article and share your favorite Twitter tools.

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5 Smart Twitter Tips to Find Shopping Deals

QuickOnlineTips — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 13:32:45 +0000

Guest article by Jessy Troy.
How to find shopping deals with Twitter? The Holiday season is coming, the wisest of us are already getting ready for it to avoid last year’s holiday rush. More and more people choose to escape mall queues by shopping online and thus are looking for ways to spot a timely Internet deal. Twitter has turned into an awesome tool to do almost anything: you can use it to track news, keep in touch with your friends, find a job and save some money.

This post is about shopping with Twitter to use the micro-blogging platform to develop a smart shopping strategy.

1. Use Twitter Search

Check what people / sources you trust have to say about the product / seller you are considering: Twitter search has a few nifty advanced operators – one of them allows to find all updates tweeted by someone:

[apple from:CNETnews] – allows to find all news and reviews of Apple products tweeted by Cnet.

2. Use Comparison Shopping

TinyMassive is a Twitter bot allowing you to compare product prices while on Twitter. Just tweet your product search to @tinymassive and the bot will get back to you with the search results generated by the site itself.

Thus, the Tweet will contain:
1. The Twitter user name who has requested the info;
2. The search results count;
3. The minimum price found;
4. The link to the search results.

3. Follow Your Favorite Money-Saving Site

If you are an experienced shopper, you should be keeping an eye on a couple of coupon aggregators and deals directories. You might be monitoring them via email or RSS. But you’ll be happy to learn, there are more ways to track them.

Some of these sites have an associated Twitter accounts where they post coupon updates from the site. Here’s a quick example of how this can be useful:

My favorite coupon aggregator, Cheap Stingy Bargains tweets coupons here, so I follow it;
I use Seesmic Twitter desktop application which is awesome because it allows to sort your friends into groups. So I create a separate group for “Money saving tweets” and categorize it there. So each time there’s an update, Seesmic will update me.

4. Use Twitter-Based Tools

There are a couple of online tools searching Twitter and aggregating all the tweeted prices. Cheap Tweet is my personal favorite. It lists all tweeted prices in a Digg-like interface allowing users to upvote deals by clicking “It’s cheap!”. It also enables the user to quickly share the deal on Twitter (Share link) as well see all the Tweeple who have Tweeted this deal (Details link):

5. Contact Customer Service

Plenty of sellers are on Twitter – what you need to do is to find them there, see what they Tweet and who they follow as well as try to get in contact with them via Twitter. Here’s the most comprehensive list of customer service agents on Twitter I was able to find.

Quick tip: try @search on Twitter to see what people are saying about the seller. Example: [@zappos]

The guest post is written by Jessy Troy, an Internet enthusiast striving to discover plenty of web hacks and creative DIY gadgets. You can also write a guest article and share your favorite tools and services.

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10 Most Useful Free Twitter Tools for Bloggers

QuickOnlineTips — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 16:20:38 +0000

I present to you my list of 10 most useful free Twitter tools for bloggers that we use daily and find of the most practical use in our blogging routine. I am sure you too would want to grab all these tools for your blog. Check them out.

Best Twitter Tools for Bloggers

1. Twitterfeed – This amazing tool will let you publish updates from any RSS feed to your Twitter account. You can decide how frequently you want Twitterfeed to check your feed updates and how many updated articles to post to Twitter so that you dont overwhelm your twitter followers with tweets. If you follow us on Twitter, you know we direct our blog feed, photoblog feed, new jobs feed, delicious feed all via Twitter feed and keep updating our Twitter account automatically.

2. Tweetdeck - I know there are lots of Twitter desktop clients out there. For one fact, Twitstats says Tweetdeck is the most popular Twitter client in the market. Next it allows you to keep control of multiple Twitter profiles and keep regular track of your tweets, profile mentions, replies and direct messages – all on one screen. For me, it is the best way to keep using Twitter like a pro. Another popular alternative is Twhirl.

3. Twitpic – Simply put, TwitPic lets you share photos on Twitter. Now most popular Twitter clients have inbuilt support for Twitpic. This a valuable addition to make your tweets interesting. If you want to share videos, its worth taking a look at Twiddeo or Vidly.

4. Tweetmeme Button – this nifty button has emerged as the most popular way to get your articles retweeted. Supporting various blogging platforms and websites, a Tweetmeme button is the best way to get retweeted and make your article go viral across Twitter for extra site traffic. We use the Tweetmeme Wordpress plugin on our blog and you can spot the green retweet button on this page and our feed.

5. Twitter Counter - is a statistics tools which allows you to show off your Twitter followers count on your blog. It will also show you how rapidly your followers are increasing (or decreasing!) over the week or months. See how our Twitter follower counts looks like. You can also add their Twitter Remote widget to your blog sidebar for more interaction. If you really want to look for the most popular twitter users, catch them Twitterholic.

6. Wickett Twitter Widget – As seen on many blogs on WordPress.com, it displays tweets from a Twitter account in the sidebar of your blog. It is by far the easiest, lightest and best way to add Tweets to Wordpress. Here are more tools to integrate Twitter with Wordpress.

7. Twitter Search Widget - Official Twitter widget which provides a cool custom interface to display your own profile search results in your sidebar. An excellent way to show how popular you are on Twitter as hundreds of your profile mentions and replies scroll across your blog every second. There is an official profile widget also if that suits your need better. Here is an official Twitter badge for Blogger.

8. Twibbon – lets you add a logo of your website or a cause you support to your twitter profile avatar. This also enables your supporters to add the same logo to their profiles and show support for your blog or cause and is great to develop a community of supporters and get lots of publicity.

9. Twitterberry – is a popular Twitter client for Blackberry mobile phones. It helps me stay connected with my Twitter account anywhere in the world and on the move. I can access my Twitter followers, get replies and post tweets without my computer. My friends with Iphone and ipod Touch will like Twitterific or Twitterfon. Other mobile phone users can check the official mobile version of Twitter.

10. Twitbin – is a firefox extension that allows you to keep up with all of your Twitter conversations right from your browser sidebar. This really helps you stay connected with your followers while you are busy blogging. Or open Twitter 100 in a tab and keep following latest tweets from 100 followers on one screen.

What are your most useful tools which you use on a daily basis? Post in comments and I will add to the article. Image by mark.benton

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5 Tips To Get Your Links Retweeted Like Crazy

QuickOnlineTips — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 15:54:36 +0000

Guest Post by Anand Srinivasan
You read about how Twitter is the next big thing on the internet. Blog gurus rave about how their websites were choked with traffic as their blog articles got retweeted. You spend a few months on Twitter building a huge followership. Finally you realize that nothing that you post on Twitter get your followers interested. Where did things go wrong? Here are five tips to help your blog articles get more traffic from Twitter through retweets

Get Retweeted: Get Free Twitter Traffic

1. Install the retweet button

A lot of people realize the importance of an article when they read it. But most people need to be told the importance of an article before they realize its significance. When your articles are engaging enough, your blog visitors tend to form an opinion for or against what you have written. Either way is fine, but ensure you instigate their thoughts to make an opinion. Such a visitor shall surely be looking to put his point of view forward to his group, and the retweet button reminds him to do just that – retweet your link.

2. Cater to the Ego

Let us suppose you write an article on “Most beautiful cities in the world”. No matter how much time you spent in researching your subject, all that the reader wants to know is whether his city has made it to the list or not. A tweet on this post mentioning the title of this post with a link to your blog might get you casual visits, but then that is not enough to make them hungry to retweet. To do that, soothe or hurt their ego. A tweet that reads ‘Detroit better than New York in beautiful city list’ is sure to make both Detroit and New Yorkers read your blog and either praise or curse you while retweeting. And people from other cities are always going to visit you to see where their city stands!

3. Find the maven

While growing your followership is important, the quality of your followership is important too. There are the ‘absorbant‘ kinds – those who read all your tweets but don’t care sharing them to others and the ‘dispersant‘ kinds – those who retweet anything mildly interesting. Study the behavior of twitterers, and follow them. Retweet interesting links they have posted (Why? Read Point 2). Reply to their tweets with your opinion or suggesting better reads. They are sure to follow you. They matter a LOT!

4. Direct message with link

If you blog about “pets”, keep following all that people tweet about “pets”. You can do so by simply following the Twitter search RSS feed for that particular keyword on your RSS reader. Study the kind of things people tweet about. A lot of them could be people tweeting queries on the subject. Check back on your blog to see if you have written about those queries. If not, write down a quick post and reply to the twitterer with this link. Do this to a few people a day and you will have people following your blog posts blindly and retweeting every article you post.

5. Put it in perspective

Statistics are great. People like them a lot. But you need put your statistics in perspective to get them ‘retweet’ interested. “200 people infected with Swine flu” is a good article to tweet about. But what does the reader want to know? 200 people – Is it too many people or less? But suppose you tweet ‘Swine flu has affected 50% more people than SARS’- now this is something that will set the reader thinking. He is definitely going to retweet to alert his followers on the danger posed by this new flu!

Guest blogger Anand Srinivasan writes an interesting blog on Internet statistics, tips and news at TechCrunchies.com. You can also write a guest article and share your expert tips.

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How To Download All Your Twitter Updates

QuickOnlineTips — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 13:30:10 +0000

Guest post by Akmal Wardak
How can you download all your Twitter Tweets? Your Twitter updates appear in your profile pages, so you always have access to all your tweets. However, once you’ve posted a few dozen updates or more, it’s a hassle to slog through a bunch of different pages in your profile to find the post you want. You can use the Twitter search engine to track down the post, but that’s a bit of a hassle.

Download Tweets

If you want easier access to your tweets, and you want to preserve a local backup copy of your updates, then you need to download your updates to your computer. You can do this right from your Web browser by entering a special address that uses the following general syntax:

http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/account.xml?count=n

Here, replace “account” with your Twitter username, and replace “n” with the number of tweets you want to return. If you want to return all your updates, log in to your account, check your total number of updates (it’s available on both your home page and your profile page), and then plug that number into the above address as the count value.

What you get in return is a page full of data in the XML (extensible markup language) format, as shown in the screenshot below.

Now you save the data by choosing File > Save As, choosing a location and file name in the Save As dialog box, and then clicking Save.

If you’d prefer to receive your tweets in the slightly more friendly comma-separated values (CSV) file format, check out Tweet Scan, which offers a download feature. It requires you to enter your Twitter username and password, but it’s safe because it doesn’t store your data.

Analyze Tweets

If you have Excel, you can import the XML file into a worksheet for easier viewing, searching, and so on. Here’s how:

In Excel, click the Data tab.
In the Get External Data group, choose From Other Data Sources >From XML Data Import. The Select Data Source dialog box appears.
Navigate to the XML file location, click the file, and then click Open. Excel tells you it will create a scheme for the file.
Click OK. Excel prompts you for a location to import the data.
Click the cell where you want the data to appear, and then click OK. Excel displays the XML data in a table.
Choose File >Save As, and then use the Save As dialog box to save the data as an Excel workbook. Consider using the Save as type list to choose the Excel 97-2003 file format for maximum compatibility. Screenshot below shows just such a file loaded into the Mac version of Excel.

Update Tweet Downloads

Downloading your tweets is easy, but this method suffers from a glaring problem: as soon as you start posting tweets again, your backup becomes out of date, so you need to perform regular downloads. However, it doesn’t make sense to download all your tweets each time. You could adjust the count value based on the number of updates you’ve sent since the last download, but Twitter offers an easier way.

If you examine the screenshot above, you see that each tweet is given a unique ID value. You can use the value to download just those tweets you’ve posted since your last download. You do that by using your Web browser to enter a special address that uses the following general syntax:

http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/account.xml?since_id=ID

Again, “account” is your Twitter username, and “ID” is the ID value for the latest tweet in the previous download. For example, in the screenshot above, you can see that the latest tweet in my @AkmalWardak account has the ID value of 3354513509, so I could download every tweet since that post by using the following address:

http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/akmalwardak.xml?since_id=3354513509

Guest blogger Akmal Wardak writes on AkmalWardak.com – A blog about social media, software reviews, how-to tutorials and Wordpress tips. You can also write a guest article and share your tips and tricks.

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Sell Sponsored Tweets: Make Money with Twitter Ads

QuickOnlineTips — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 03:56:46 +0000

A new form of advertising in set to rock Twitter. Izea brings you Sponsored Tweets, an online marketplace that allows advertisers to buy sponsored conversations on Twitter.

Tweeters who wish to join the advertising program can set their own price, category, and keywords; then chose to accept or reject offers from advertisers. If you accept an offer, your account will be credited within 24 hours of your tweet, and you can cash out after gathering $50.

Now they stick to some ethical rules. Which means that there is a 100% mandatory disclosure that it is a sponsored tweet. Twitter users stay in full control of their account, and they will not auto-inject ads. Since they pass via Twitter’s OAuth process, your login is safe. Every tweet must be manually reviewed and approved by each tweeter, and they decide how the tweet ad format should be. This video explains how disclosure is done.

It seems they have managed to get some celebrities to join the program like Holly Madison, Bethenny Frankel, Kendra Wilkinson and some web celebs like Chris Pirillo, Jeremy“ShoeMoney” Schoemaker, and “Aloha” Arleen Anderson.

Will you be selling Sponsored Tweets on your Twitter account?

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How to Add Icons to Twitter Profiles

QuickOnlineTips — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 15:19:36 +0000

Lots of Twitter profiles now feature icons supporting social and charity causes. Twibbon is a cool service which will let you overlay icons of your choice on your Twitter profile for free.

Twibbon is now the easiest way to promote awareness of your cause on twitter, by overlaying a support icon over your Twitter profile. There are hundreds of causes to support and there is surely one you are passionate about. Just click on the cause you like, it will make you login via Twitter (which is safe), and your profile is changed. You can also revert back to your original profile by selecting your original icon from your unique profile page (like mine).

You can also create a new Twibbon, but you will first need to log in to Twitter to get started. I had made my Twitter avatar green earlier, and if you follow me on Twitter, you will know which Twibbon I am showcasing right now.

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Download TweetCraft: Twitter Client for World of Warcraft

QuickOnlineTips — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 10:03:49 +0000

Want to tweet while playing the game World of Warcraft? TweetCraft is an in-game Twitter client for World of Warcraft which will keep you connected with Twitter while you enjoy the game.

World of Warcraft or WoW, is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) by Blizzard Entertainment. With millions of monthly subscribers, World of Warcraft is one of the world’s largest and most popular MMORPG.

If you use TweetCraft with WOW, you can:

Send/receive Tweets in-game
Queue Tweets to send
Upload in-game screenshots using TwitPic
AutoTweet when you log in, enter an instance or get an achievement
AddOn authors can register messages or events to AutoTweet

Watch this video which displays the usability of this Twitter tool.

Download Tweetcraft and stay connected during World of Warcraft gaming.