Useful Sites For Finding People To Follow On Twitter

Here is a really useful list of sites to help find people to follow on Twitter. In addition to this list I would add the Twellow directory.

Of course the idea of following people, it to get followers back, and so you want an auto follow thank you message in place which mentions your site and message. You can set this up automatically for multiple Twitter accounts at Social Oomph.

Google Caffeine and it's Impact on SEO

Google fully rolled our their new web indexing system, Caffeine, on June 8th this year. But what are the implications for SEO and link building?

Distribute Tweets on Twitter in Advance

Just been setting up a new Twitter account for a client, Sygma Solutions, and came across a feature of Social Oomph (formally known as Tweetlater) that allows you to schedule the advance distribution of Twitter tweets.

I've already used Social Oomph extensively as a third party tool for manually scheduling tweets for a range of client twitter accounts, but I hadn't come across the 'Distribute Scheduled Updates' function before.

It appears to allow you to schedule a batch of tweets to be broadcast regularly at intervals of days, hours or minutes (if you have a lot to say!). You can also schedule your tweets to appear within set times and on specific days of the week.

Where did Twitterfeed go?

Twitterfeed, the online service which lets you send RSS feeds to your Twitter account, seems to be having some problems.

Their site appears to have been replaced with a spammy domain holding page. Maybe the owners have pulled the site down, or someone else has managed to renew it? Also, the feeds I had set up don't seem to be publishing.

Whatever the reasons this is a real shame - I've been using Twitterfeed for months now to send third party feeds to client twitter accounts, to help increase their tweet volume.

I've been looking for replacements, and am trialling http://rss2twitter.com. It doesn't seem to have all the same functionality as Twitterfeed, like scheduling of updates of the RSS feed, but we'll see how it works - at the moment its set up to send 3 rss feeds to http://twitter.com/dressingupideas.

Quote of the Week: New BMI Social Media Strategy

"We have designed our social media strategy to offer an exponential increase in added value for our customers who choose to engage online, whilst ensuring the sustainability of interaction through a newly re-structured digital team," said Callum Adamson, head of search and social media at bmi.

Now what on earth does that mean? Answers on a postcard, sorry - I mean on an online engagement.....

Creating yet another mixed Twitter account

This is getting to be something of a habit - I've just been working on creating another new Twitter account for a client, in this case www.zencartwebdesign.co.uk who sell Zen Cart e-commerce add ons, hosting, installs etc.

I firstly created their new Twitter account at http://twitter.com/zencartwebsites then I found some third party RSS feeds from Zen Cart forums and sites. I plugged these into my account at http://twitterfeed.com which aggregates them and pushes the feeds to the Twitter account.

Then I went through the client's website and pulled out 30 odd products and articles, and wrote a tweet about each one, with a link of course. Then it was off to my account at https://www.socialoomph.com where I pasted each tweet in, pre sent to publish one a day for the next month (I noticed that if you pay to upgrade to the Pro, you can create a reservoir of tweets and have it publish one a day randomly).

So now we have a nice new Twitter account publishing numerous tweets daily all on its own, with each tweet  packed full of keywords so they'll appear in searches on twitter!

Now I just need to submit to some twitter directories and start following some e-commerce twitterers to get the ball rolling.

Check out Tweetfeed for Building Quick Twitter Accounts

I'm currently a big fan of Tweetfeed, a free online tool for aggregating RSS feeds from different sources and then pushing them out to different Twitter accounts you manage.

This is a useful exercise because if you want to use Twitter to attract new followers and website visitors, the best way to think of Twitter is like a mini search engine.

A Bad Day for Facebook

Facebook has been plastered across the media today because of its use by a sex offender, Peter Chapman, who posed as a teenage boy to meet a young victim on Facebook, Ashleigh Hall, who he subsequently met and tragically murdered.

Its an awful case that has repurcussions for everyone involved - the local police force which lost track of Chapman for 9 months, plus of course the social networking site he used, especially as he has now been dubbed the 'Facebook Killer'.

Whilst Facebook can't be held legally responsible for the actions of it's users, it does just remind us all quite how easy it is to pose as just about anyone online - after all what identity checks does Facebook use when signing up?

It also reminds us all about the importance of reminding young people about the often overlooked dangers of social networking online. When I was running a focus group of 13 year old social networking users for the planning of www.kent.co.uk, we discovered just how little structured education these youngsters felt they received from either their schools, or especially their parents.

It will be interesting to see if/how Facebook and other social sites grasp this important opportunity to help educate web users.

(Then, just as the Facebook team thought things probably couldn't get any worse,  the site has been mentioned in another case of a man who murdered his former girlfriend, prompted it is claimed, by her entries on her Facebook profile.)

New Online Media and Advertising Rules on the Way

How up to speed are you about the forthcoming new rules about how businesses promote themselves online?

Last week the Advertising Association submitted recommendations to the Committee of Advertising Practice to extend the non-broadcast code to company websites and even branded Pages on social networking websites like Facebook.

It's been suggested that a refreshed version of the Code will come out in Autumn and will be enforced by the Advertising Standards Association, who already enforce the Non-broadcast Code (CAP Code) which already covers paid for online advertising.

My guess is that like most of us, this has one has crept up unawares, especially on smaller businesses. So I'll be reviewing both the current code and the new proposals shortly and will report back on the implications for websites, socil networking and online advertising.

Why Social Media Shouldn't Exist

I've just been reading about a one day seminar on The Future of Social Media, and it made me realise just how big a deal this sector of the internet has become. Just check out some of the 'big name' brands who'll be attending (and the price tag of course).

But then it got me thinking about the validity of Social Media - as a buzzword, a trend, niche, sector or topic. Is it possible to argue that Social Media or Social Networking as descriptions shouldn't even exist, because all our online activities should be social in one way or another?

Is it time to move beyond the Social Media catch all and start trying to integrate the pinricples of communication, interaction, dialogue, recommendation and opinion sharing into everyday websites?

For example, if the Boden website allows it's customers to post and share their own honest reviews (sometimes negative) of their produts, then surely the Boden site is social. Each review even includes details about the reviewer; gender, location, age, and frequency of purchase. It would be one simple step to enable Boden customers to actually find and engage directly with each other based on these criteria, on a social basis, or for users to see what else the reviewer bought or where they shopped just like the same principle of social bookmarking.

Maybe social recommendation by a site's users and customers will be the next evolution of Amazon's classic 'people who bought this also bought this....' sales tool, once that technique gets so overused it loses effectiveness (or users start to mistrust the recommendations of site owners).

It certainly makes a case for websites to start engaging users in a more active way, through the creation of user generated profiles integrated with internal transactional and buying behavoural data... think Facebook for ecommerce shops.