If you are like me and trying to use Twitter as a marketing tool and to inform clients and potential clients of new changes, products and services you may be struggling with attracting visitors. Of course nothing attracts visitors like quality Tweets but are you paying attention to the experience users have reading your Tweets? Before I gave it any thought I was making great worthwhile Tweets and I had an ‘okay’ amount of Twitter followers, what was I missing? A good user experience. I did a little research and I found that users of Twitter that had Custom Twitter Backgrounds all had more followers than me and a light went off in my head. I needed a Custom Twitter Background to stand out from all the other Twitter users. Before, my followers were stuck reading my Tweets from a boring standard background but once I installed Custom Twitter Backgrounds I gave my followers something graphically pleasing to look at while they enjoyed my Tweets. I discovered it was all about usability. There’s something in the way humans are that subconsciously they are more compelled to look at and absorb content that is arranged in a way that pleases their eyes. I found that with the addition of Custom Twitter Backgrounds I gave my followers two things, the quality Tweets they were looking for and a great way to follow these Tweets. I recommend to all users of Twitter to get Custom Twitter Backgrounds, you will be truly amazed at what it does for your followers.
Archive for October, 2009
Custom twitter as a communicating channel
Thursday, October 29th, 2009Twitter is the beset one instant communicating and the messaging tool in the era of global presence. The popularity of twitter has been boost up as the companies globalize in their operation. it is indeed a great facility for the next generation. With the help of twitter the numerous subscriber get an easy accessibility to their audience and client on the real time basis. It becomes important part of the social media. It serves as the touch point for the users. Now the users can listen or express their desires and emotion without any intensive effort. They can broadcast facility for their important messages. Moreover they can be connected to the stakeholders via their desktop or through their cell phone.
Twitter is a definitely the next-generation instant messaging tool and the devoted Twitter users are discovering that Twitter can be used not only for keeping their friends, family and acquaintances up to date, but it is a terrific tool for establishing new business relationships and keeping customers up-to-date and informed.
As my friennd Jeremiah Owyang writes this week on MarketingProfs, Twitter is a tool through which subscribers can further reach their audiences, real-time. Users can hear and express thought leadership, broadcast their messages, connect to the influencers both on their desktop and through their mobile units, among other things. From a marketing prospective this is terrific, finally we have a tool to keep our customers (and potential customers) in the ‘know.’ Is it for everyone? Heck, no. (But what is?) What’s more, Twitter is a new and emerging platform that’s only now finding its footing: there’s a lot of junk you have to wade through, at times, and it’s sometimes unreliable.
But that said, Twitter has a real use for media companies and social-media-savvy brands. Here are 7:
• Extending the reach for those individuals or companies that already have a blogging strategy in place, and want to deepen or further ties. Good examples: Carnival Cruise Lines. The ScienceNewsBlog’s weather tracking updates. Andy Carvin’s PBS blog on education and technology.
• Retailers announcing sales and deals. Good example: Deals on Dells. Blue-light specials at Amazon.
• Increasing the ability for frequent updates to blogs or web sites or news. Examples: The NY Times, CNN, BBC, Adrants, and those of us here at MarketingProfs.
• Building consensus or a community of supporters. Good examples: Presidential candidates John Edwards or Barack Obama.
• Building buzz. Example: Scott Monty and CC Chapman introduce a new blog.
• Updating breaking news at conferences or events. Example: Jeremiah at the Web 2.0 Expo. Forrester seems poised to use it to update happenings at its upcoming Consumer Forum.
• Updating your network to shape your own personal branding: Example: Oh boy… there are zillions. Pick a face on Twitter. You’ll see what I mean.
Google Social Search: Twitter And FriendFeed Highlighted. What About Facebook?
Monday, October 26th, 2009Last week at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Google’s Marissa Mayer took the stage for two reasons. The first was to formally announce the Google/Twitter search deal, but the second was the show off a new product: Google Social Search. The on-stage demonstration was interesting, but left a lot of questions unanswered. Today, the Google Labs experiment goes live, and we’ll get those answers.
Social Search essentially pulls in information from social networks to augment Google search results. But a major question is: What social networks get pulled it? While the experiment isn’t quite live yet, it would seem that from the video below made by Google’s Matt Cutts, Social Search, at least at first, will be able to include results from Twitter, FriendFeed, Picasa, Blogger, and Google Reader.
The last three are obvious since Google owns all of those. Twitter seems obvious too because of the new Google/Twitter search deal. FriendFeed is an interesting one though since Facebook bought that service in August. As expected, it doesn’t appear that Facebook data will play a big role in Social Search (if any), as Google and Facebook continue their social profile stand-off. Cutts makes it clear that public data is the key to all of this, and Facebook doesn’t exactly have the most public information. That’s too bad since Facebook is, after all, the largest social network.
Cutts explains that the idea behind all of this is to utilize your “social circle.” The key to populating this social circle is your Google Public Profile. On this profile, the different social networking profiles you list yourself as being a member of will be a signal to Google to scour those networks for social data to serve up in its new results.
Interestingly, in the second video below, explaining how Google Social Search works, a Facebook profile appears in the lists of profiles. But again, in all the experiments, no data from Facebook seems to show up.
For its social circle, Google is going deeper as well. For example, if you follow 100 people on Twitter, Google will look at their public updates when you search for things, but it will also look at the friends or your friends for even more data. This is similar to what FriendFeed has done in the past to help surface other information that may be relevant to you. Google calls this your “extended social circle.”
Google also uses your Gmail chat buddies to build out your social circle.
Free Twitter Backgrounds
Friday, October 23rd, 2009It has come to the point where you are registered on Twitter and have discovered that you would like to spruce up your page. Not only do you want to spruce it up, but you want to do it for free. Not a problem! There are plenty of locations on the internet that offer free Twitter backgrounds.
It’s simple; let your favorite search engine do all the work for you. Enter the words “free Twitter backgrounds” and watch the magic unfold before your eyes. Your choices become endless in what you can choose from or even create your own custom design. You can choose themes from your favorite cartoon character to political views.
Free Twitter backgrounds are just as worthy as anything you would pay for on the internet. They are bright, exciting, creative, and full of life; however you decide to present yourself on Twitter, you will discover that the theme is probably available somewhere to be had.
There are a handful of sites that help you find your free Twitter background that are designed specifically for Twitter. These sites have you, the tweeter, in mind with all of their themes, gadgets, and images. Here are just a few I have run across.
- FreeTwitterDesigner
- TwitBacks
- TwitterBackgroundImages
- TwitterGallary
- Twitter Patterns
- Twitter Images.
Keep in mind that these are only a few free of Twitter background sites that I have come across. There is an endless amount of websites out there that are free and design custom pages for all kinds of different social networks.
Twitter hits tweenhood
Thursday, October 22nd, 2009It has 55 million users and no business model. But that’s a touchy subject.
(Fortune Magazine) — Ask Evan Williams whether Twitter ought to be trying harder to identify ways to make money, and the founder of the short-burst messaging network just laughs.
“It’s funny,” he says, in a mid-October interview in the young company’s warehouse-like offices in a gritty part of San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood. “People think we’re back here in the office looking around saying, ‘Where is that business model? Is it in the couch cushions?’ There’s a very logical process we’ve gone through, and you could say we’ve set the wrong priorities. But if you look at building long-term value, then generating cash isn’t necessarily the highest priority.”
This messy matter of moneymaking is polarizing for a company that has in every other possible way far exceeded anyone’s expectations. Twitter, the communications platform that launched in 2006, has become more than just a hot tech startup.
It’s a cultural sensation, having amassed 55 million unique monthly visitors worldwide and become a fixture of the international zeitgeist, from protesters in Iran to flood victims in the Philippines. Yet it hasn’t collected any meaningful revenue, nor is it in any hurry to do so.
Twitter’s top executives, Williams and co-founder Biz Stone — who together hold slot No. 5 on Fortune’s 40 Under 40 list — appear completely unconcerned that three years into its existence Twitter remains a pre-revenue company.
Critics in the tech industry are anywhere from baffled to outraged by this seeming insouciance. Even Google (GOOG, Fortune 500), whose business model wasn’t well understood for years, started collecting some cash almost immediately and never raised additional venture capital after a single, $25 million stake in 1999.
Twitter, by contrast, has raised more than $150 million — most recently a $100 million slug valuing the company at $1 billion — with nary a hint of what business it thinks it’s in.
If Williams and Stone are unrushed, perhaps it’s because they know the most about the beast they’re trying to tame. According to Williams, it’s far more important to build the site well than it is to hit up advertisers or other would-be customers who want access to the presumably lucrative stream of information made up of what Twitterers post in 140 characters or less.
It also helps that Twitter’s financial backers exude calm. “I’m way more interested in how we get 100 million or more people using it than how we make money,” says venture capitalist Fred Wilson, whose Union Square Ventures was the first VC firm to back Twitter. “It doesn’t cost much to operate the business, and we have a pile of cash now that funds the business for a long, long time.” Adds another early investor, Ron Conway: “You’d never collect $100 million from people if you didn’t think you could monetize. It’s understood.”
Those challenges make Williams and Stone tech industry tweeners. Having been around the block a few times — Williams founded early blogging service Blogger and sold it to Google in 2003 — they are neither fresh-faced college dropouts (though Williams did not, in fact, ever graduate from the University of Nebraska) nor seasoned executives who have run companies the size they expect Twitter to become.
However long it takes to get to 100 million users, Williams seems intent on scale first, profit later. “We are spending our time trying to create the best technology and product for as many users as possible,” he says. “That’s where all our value is going to come from.”
In other words, not from under the couch cushions. 
