Spy Blogger » Twitter

Twitter Launches a Twitter 101 Guide for Business

SpyBlogger — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 07:45:16 +0000

Yesterday, Twitter released Twitter 101 for Business, a guide for getting started and establishing your business using Twitter. It covers all basics of Twitter, how to get started, terms, keywords, and includes case studies. Here is what Twitter says about their business guide:

Every day, millions of people use Twitter to create, discover and share ideas with others. Now, people are turning to Twitter as an effective way to reach out to businesses, too. From local stores to big brands, and from brick-and-mortar to internet-based or service sector, people are finding great value in the connections they make with businesses on Twitter.

This business guide would be a really important move as a big number of Twitter starters are quitting to use Twitter.

How To: Create Twitter Backgrounds

SpyBlogger — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 08:39:12 +0000

Twitter background images have become an important part of user profiles. Background images really help users build their own brand. On limited platform like twitter, backgrounds are the best way to communicate a little out of the box.

Twitter also offers some delicate simple background designs for all user profiles. But if you are to establish your personal brand, add some more contact info, personal expressions, pictures, and other important links to your profile then creating your own Twitter background image is the best way.

One way is to spend some good time while creating these backgrounds, where you can best utilize it if you happen to be a good user of designing tools. But if you are not familiar with how to use design tools or do not want to spend time creating one, this HOW TO Guide is for you. We can get such pre-built background from many resources growing each and every day. These resources offer free, and self-customizable paid backgrounds which are pretty easy to use and usually are installed direct from these websites.

In case you decide to build your own background image for twitter, there are few things you must know. Your background image should be large enough not to tile when installed on your twitter profile. To achieve this, the total image size should be around 1600px wide by 1200px tall. Also, if you build a left-hand column, make sure that it covers the central Twitter content.

Here is a list of websites which can help you:

TwitterBakcs : Twitter back provides you a big number of free and paid background images. They also allow you to download customizable templates in PSD format. They are also my personal favorites; can you guess which twitterback theme is installed on my twitter profile?
TweetStyle : Tweetstyle offers free custom twitter backgrounds.
MyTweetSpace : This site is offering cool themes and Twitter profile badges for free. If you want a highly personalized Twitter profile promoting your product or brand, you have to pay a minimal amount.
Twitter Background Images: Big Cool collection of twitter background images.
KillerTweets : offers some of the coolest Twitter backgrounds. When we say cool we mean, the gothic-artsy-kind of cool. And it’s relatively cheap as well at $9.
TwitBacks : They offer an tool for creating background images. This one specializes in left-hand column-based background images.

There are many websites who are offering such free and paid services, but we are listing just a few good of them. If you know some more good sites, please do add to comments.

Twitter updates Following and Followers Pages

Spy — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 17:30:48 +0000

Twitter has updated their pages with some new cool features. These pages, which you get to by clicking following/follower counts on any any user profile now show more details about other Twitter users.

A much needed functionality, to check who is following you is available. Twitter now shows a check mark of the people you follow back. There’s a drop-down menu that includes options for direct message, sending them an @ mention, following them or blocking them.

Meanwhile on the page listing people you follow, there are options for sending them a mention, unfollowing, or if they follow you, sending them a direct message.

This was a much needed feature, now its very easy to keep track if someone is following you or not.

The most interesting Twitter has launched within this update, these options are not only available on your profile but also on any profile you visit. So, you can check any friend or co-worker’s profile and check the same for them. In all, it appears that Twitter is more focusing on user desired features.

Twitters blogs: Another Twitter Phishing Scam

Spy — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 16:02:06 +0000

Another scam to attempt to steal our social networking passwords is underway this week. This time the target is Twitter, and this scam invovles fake Twitter blogs.

Tweets saying “omg!! is it true what they wrote about you in their twit blog?” are going out from effected user’s profiles. These scams are linking to sbudomain of the site twitterblogs.com in tweets. When clicked, the linked site looks exactly like Twitter’s homepage. In case, you enter your user id and password it tweets out the message mentioned above, and scam spreads.

On Saturday, Britney Spears tweeter profile also got hacked and it posted a tweet saying “Britney has passed today. It is a sad day for everyone. So the last week was quite fun.

However, it appears like tweets for Twittersblogs have stopped but be aware for any similar scams.

Twitter Marketing

SpyBlogger — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 15:23:35 +0000

A few days earlier twitter has announced in their blog that all twitter users now can only follow 1000 other users each day. This dicision is based upon the regular scam spread on twitter these days.

This dicision may not matter to normal users who just use twitter to get in touch with their family and friends but it will definately matter to marekters or self-promoters to rapidly increase their Twitter follower count by following many people. Because the strategy of following excessive number of users does matter really. Unlike many may expect people do follow you back which is a positive sign for marketers.

People among who follow such methods are social media enthusiasts or consultants, some are internet marketers or bloggers. All of them are people who want to get something in return. Major focus of all such people are the following things:

Money. The goal is to monetize Twitter users by linking and recommending products or services, either their own or others if they are an affiliate. They do this by tweeting out links and sending automated direct messages with the same offers when someone follows them back.
Build their Name/Brand. Such followers aim to improve their reputation and build their brand. If you have thousands of followers on twitter that also gives the impression that you or your theme is popular. People tend to follow such people more. They also use their followers to boost their prominence on other social arenas like Digg or Facebook.
Get more visitors. Followers = Visitors, more visitors means more subscribers, readers and contributors to your website. Once you have all these things, you do have a successfull website and more money.

It’s a simple strategy. The more followers you have, the more people listen to you, and the easier it is to spread your messages.

But do you really need a large number of followers to promote yourself successfully on Twitter? The answer is no. Not at all. But many people still persist in mass following users. Let’s look at some of the reasons why you don’t need to use this marketing tactic.

More to Follow ……..

Twitter to launch Verified Accounts(beta)

SpyBlogger — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 15:49:31 +0000

A lawsuit was the final thing required to push twitter into launching verified accounts now. Twitter has been dealing with a lawsuit from St. Lous Cardinals Manager Tony La Russa. The lawsuit is about an individual impersonating La Russa on Twitter. Twitter still does not have any systematic way to verify if any tweets were real or bogus.

This seems to be the reason that Twitter has announced verified accounts beta program so they do not have to handle any future lawsuits for such reasons.

Twitter Accounts Beta

Yesterday, Twitter stated the following on the La Russa case:

Reports this week that Twitter has settled a law suit and officially agreed to pay legal fees for an impersonation complaint that was taken care of by our support staff in accordance with our Terms are erroneous. Twitter has not settled, nor do we plan to settle or pay.

Actually, Twitter did not settle on this case but it pushed them to announce for these verified accounts program.

So what and how exactly will this verified account system will work? According to the Twitter blog, there will be a special seal on any account that is verirified by Twttier as being authentic. You can see this very seal in the image above, will appear at the top right of profile pages. This is targeted towards public officals, public agencies, athletes, celeberities and other high-profile indviduals.

As to how actual verification will work, it seems that Twitter will look to see if an official channel of the person in question links to his or her Twitter account from a place like an official website. This is a perfectly logical way to verify accounts, in our opinion. Details are scarce on the full plan, though.

The Verified Accounts program will begin as an experiment this summer and will expand as Twitter gets more feedback. We’re glad to finally see a system in place that will hopefully put an end to impersonators and expensive lawsuits.

China Blocks Twitter

SpyBlogger — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 15:17:21 +0000

News have come that Chinese authorieties have further added more sites to there blocked website list on 2nd June 2009. Let me also tell you that there is a big list of social giants already blocked in china’s great firewall

Twitter is the one happens to be blocked this time. According to early reports on Twitter and on Blogs it appears that chinese authorities badly want to quitet down the entire majore social networking and social media part of the world.

Furthermore Flickr, Bling, Live.Com, Hotmail.com and many other sites like WordPress, YouTube and blogger are already blocked in China

As far as solutions for evading the block go, Twitter may be working on such issues if you’re using third party apps to access it, such as TweetDeck.

Facebook Vs Twitter

SpyBlogger — Sun, 31 May 2009 19:02:48 +0000

What is twitter? What is so good about tweeting? Why it is popular? Is twitter the future? These and many more are normally the questions my friends are very keen to know these days and when I explain them the tweeting concept, they ask start comparing it to facebook

Well, the answer is not as simple as many of you may aspect. Both have very strong impact on social media. Facebook therefore is superior I would say right now as compared to twitter.

Facebook has a bigger picture; friends and family members use it to reconnect with each other, share pictures, videos and what they are doing whenever they want!

Twitter on the other hand, encourages you grab ideas in byte-size chunks and use your updates as jumping off points to other places or just let others know what you’re up to at any given moment.

Twitter is social marketing
twitter is news reporting
twitter is social messaging
twitter is blogging

Why People Love Facebook

Facebook is definitely the one which brought heaven to social animals that are addicted to make new acquaintances and stay in touch with people. People now don’t even bother to write emails, they just do facebooking!!!

Facebook addicts prefer a single social platform to stay in touch as compared to other social portals, AIM, Yahoo, Windows Live Messenger, Gmail etc This largely explains the explosive growth Facebook continues to experience and why the company reportedly invested $200 million in data center upgrades last year to keep up with demand!

Why People Love Twitter

Twitter is not readily as obvious to some people as facebook but trust me its more addictive once you get the taste of tweeting you get response more quickly and it seems to live somewhere between the words of email, instant messaging and blogging. It builds up constant linking between people. People like to update their status more on twitter than they do on facebook.

But if we compare both in terms of the fame, twitter has grown faster than the facebook. Actually in a way, anyone with something to promote seems to find twitter extremely valuable. It can be a cause, business or anything!

Twitter addicts claim it’s like the old fashioned water cooler, where people can gather to shoot the breeze on whatever topic is on their minds. Twitter is like a communications stream you dive into for an invigorating swim.

So Which Social Network is the Best?

Well as different people have different opinions about both of them so it’s very hard to decide which one is better. It depends which one suits your mood more….Both have some advantages and disadvantages which I am going to discuss in this blog later.

Twitter started as a very simple concept of sharing status and staying in touch with friends in august 2006. So Which Social Network is the Best?

Spy Blogger » Twitter

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