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Twitter® Tools and Tips

one of my favorite Twitter tools. I'm just gonna bring up. It's called Trendsmap. Let me just get this starting in the background while I'm talking. If the global Internet is interesting Teoh and you've never seen Tran's map, it really will blow your mind. Are you guys familiar with Trendsmap? I'm always surprised. Sometimes I shortened people. Yeah, I got another people like, What is that? As I'm moving around, this is the world right now in real time. What's being tweeted around the globe. So yeah, of course, they want me to do more, but this is a free tool. You can go here and just kind of see, Yeah, I'm kind of taking a risk putting this online video without screening. And everyone saw you get kind of strange things coming up. Not sure why Beyonce is trending right now, but somebody could probably tell me that if they were paying attention to the news, it can be Uh oh. You were watching the news of break. Uh huh. Go ahead. I've been a little distracted today. What's going on? Appar...

ently Beyonce and Jay Z. We're in an elevator with salons, which is Beyonce's sister, and they had some kind of altercation in the elevator, and there's like surveillance footage of it. So everybody's like courtesy about it right now is up on Twitter. And aren't you guys in the No predicted it? That's awesome. One of the reasons that people share stuff like that is because they want to be in the know and they want their friends to know they're in the know and we all want to one up. Did you hear this yet? Did you hear that yet? That's one of the things that makes social media work. So if you're tapped into that and you're really good at that, that could be a very powerful social media strategy. Here's going went to the hairdresser when mobile phones were still relatively new to have the smartphones, and I noticed that every one of them had a smartphone sitting next to their station, and I was getting ready to do a talk on this kind of trend and smartphone adoption, and I want if I said you know, why do you have a smart phone? And she said, Well, you know, I have all my contacts and you know what their hair preferences and all that stuff, she said. But the main reason I have it is so I could stay up on all the celebrity gossip right up to the moment. So I know what to talk to my clients about because they all want to talk about celebrity gossip. I encourage you to be strategic about it. Celebrity gossip is not my thing, and it's not really I don't know. Maybe it's more my audience, this thing that I realize, but that's part of why I missed that one. I'm a little distracted today, like I fit, but But I am kind of a news junkie. So you know what's going on in Ukraine and things like that is more my fascination, and I've been there recently, so I'm paying attention to that. But if you know that your audience of you know women who want their photographs taken or creative professionals or people who love your blog's also love that kind of detail than working that into your feet as a regular thing can be a very powerful way. Teoh build their loyalty because not only will they be learning something interesting or having fun with you, you'll be helping them keep up in the loop because you stay up on this stuff in a way that they want to be upon the stuff with their friends. So if there's an area, even if it's a little 10 gentle toe what you usually dio, I'm usually photographing rock stars, but they're all interested in celebrity gossip. So the fact that I post that before most people gets them all checking out my page, any of you have, ah, passion like that that you think might tie into your core business, anything you think of put me on the spot there. So as ah, place to kind of gauge what's trending around the world, what's emerging as a topic? What celebrity gossip did I miss today? Trendsmap is a pretty interesting place to go. Do that, and you can go anywhere in the world with it and see obviously the language specific to that area so you'll actually see the trending tweets from the area, and you can zoom in on things so you can go pretty close out or in to see more or less detail off what people are talking about in a particular area. So what's going on in Miami today, you can get down and see that celebrity gossip is a big deal there for sure. Where did that elevator incident take place? At the stand with Standard Hotel. I'm not sure. Where does Los Angeles? Maybe I don't I don't know. You guys at the heart of the things you learn on creativelive, huh? Boy, Somebody should be tweeting that right now and looking cool. All right. Anyway, trendsmap is just kind of a fun social media tool that I enjoy using. There's another one that's a little more. Um, you say practical. And it's called just unfollowed. And the idea behind just unfollowed is me. See if I can assume in just a little more so you can see that I don't really want to go to the live site, because sometimes we have a little You never know for sure what you're gonna see on some of these live sites. But if you got to just unfollowed dot com, you'll find a service that, like many Web services, has a free and premium service. And it allows you to identify and to break down your followers on Twitter based on who you follow. That doesn't follow you. Um, who on followed you and don't Don't get your feelings hurt if you get unfollowed. It is a rather controversial technique of some people who are trying to make it look like they have more followers on Twitter to follow a whole bunch of people hoping they will politely follow them back. And then they go on unfollowed them because all they really wanted was for you to follow them in the first place. Because what they're trying to do is get their Twitter follower ratio up right. If you look at my Twitter profile, you'll see that currently I have about 3000 followers and I'm following about 2000 people, so I have more people following me than I follow. But I follow back a lot of people. I don't follow back everybody, and sometimes I unfollowed people if I don't really like what they do, and there's some people that I follow that don't follow me back because they're good sources of information and even if they don't know me, I want to do that. But in general, most people will judge your audience on Twitter, in part by this ratio of followers to people people you follow to people you're in following. So somebody sends a fall if somebody starts following me, and I'm considering whether I should follow them back. If I got other profile and they're following 5000 people and only 10 people have followed them back, that's probably a sign that they may not be the best person to follow right, that there may be erring on the side of spam or they're falling more people than they could probably keep track of themselves, and they're not getting many followers back. They don't have much engagement. So you want to try and look for people that have more of a healthy balance between followers and following that might be 20 people they follow in 10 people who followed them back, that that might be OK or 20 people who follow them and 10 people they follow. You can have a few people. It may be a 1,000,000 people that follow them and only ah 100 people that they follow. That's a different kind of ratio. Some people are all about broadcasting, you know, CNN celebrities. A lot of them have millions of followers and they can't possibly follow everybody back. Or how would they manage all those tweets, Right, so they tend to be more selective. But because some people are very conscious of this ratio and because many people that you follow will judge whether to follow you back based in part on that ratio would say part of your overall Twitter design. Part of your overall kind of presentation on Twitter should be a thoughtful consideration of that ratio. And one of the ways I found a help manage that is to go to just unfollowed dot com once in a while and look and see. Are there people who followed me just unfollowed me or other people who just decided that maybe I'm not the right connection for them? If I look further, maybe they weren't the right connection for me, and that's okay. We can agree to part ways, but I don't want to end up with thousands of people that I'm following who aren't really of interest to me, aren't really a value to me and who are throwing off that ratio. So it makes sense. I'm open to other comments from the the Internet world because there's like most things, there's not an absolute to this. But I would definitely say that if you're following thousands of people and Onley, hundreds of people are following you back. That's usually a bad indication. Um, the other thing about followers and following again. It's not all about volumes. Some people have a couple 100 people they connect with on Twitter and have a very rich Twitter experience. Some people do figure out how to manage tens of thousands of followers with lists and careful organisation, and that works very effectively for them. It takes a lot of time to do that, but you can get a lot back in return if that's how you use Twitter. One of the things to watch out for is if you get if you start getting followed by people that only have a couple of followers and looks like the profiles pretty new. That's often a sign that it's potentially a spammer. Unless you know the person you know, they just came on Twitter and you want to help him. That's great, but it's not unusual for people to create a whole bunch of Twitter profiles that have just a couple of followers and use them to kind of do spammy things on Twitter. And so one of the indicators that I use when I'm trying to decide who to follow back is did they have more than a couple of people? And have they been around long enough to show that they're probably a good citizen on Twitter? We got a comment from PK Harmon, who says Twitter has limits on how many people you can follow in a day. Apparently, it's a bit of a moving target. If you go over the limit, you can get suspended. That's really a stewed. And the moving target thing is, is not not unintentional. I mean, it's a cat and mouse game in the world of Twitter, the same way search engine optimization is a cat and mouse game. There's money to be made. There are influences to be made, and as soon as that's true, people start to try to use that. Do you know you can actually buy Twitter followers? I don't recommend it. Um, the the practice tends to mean that there are a whole bunch of these sort of fake profiles out there, and then you pay for Twitter followers, and you basically get all these fake followers. In fact, there's a website all about identifying fake Twitter followers. If you have a friend that says, Oh, I have 100,000 followers and you're like, Really, how did you do that? You can go find out how many of them are probably fake by using just Google fake followers on Twitter, and you'll find some tools that help identify that by looking at the activity. The history, the ratio of followers to following that indicate whether they're probably fake or not. But it is a whole business to sell Twitter followers. Um, one of the reasons I see not to do it is not only does that obviously not offer a lot of value in the world in terms of trying to connect with people, but if you're trying to build a legitimate following and you're starting to get traction and you're starting to have hundreds or thousands or God bless you, tens of thousands of people I wish for you on Twitter. May they be people who really want to follow you. And if you get to being a really high profile influence around Twitter and I do some research and find out you bought half of those followers. But you just lost all your credibility that you may have worked very, very hard to get. The legitimate followers than not legitimate followers can really take that credibility away. There's actually a story in Los Angeles I can't show here on TV cause I don't want to name anybody who might soon be someday but ah, candidate fora for a pretty high level office in Los Angeles, in the district Attorney's office, no less who was discovered to have bought YouTube views on his videos. And he was just He was trying to look more popular than he was, and he was actually a very serious candidate for district attorney. You think we might want a little ethics and kind ability in that office, but, um, I won't say that's the only thing that cost him the election, But I certainly think it was a factor. So even at the highest levels, people have gotten caught doing this kind of practice. I'd rather see you with 20 followers that are legitimate than 200,000 that you purchased. It doesn't it really doesn't serve you to do that. Some so watch that So just unfollowed for me is just a way for me to check in. And if you use it, if you use just on follow, you'll find that they're free. Level of service runs out after a certain number of following people and unfollowed people and stuff like that will say Okay, you reached your limit for the day, and then you have a choice of either paying their fee or waiting till tomorrow and doing it again, So I'm getting ready to sign up for it. It's a service. I've used a lot, and I want to support it. But if you just want to use it every couple of days, you'll never have to pay for it. And it's just a way to kind of manage your list of followers and see who's there and also helps you find, like, inactive followers. So, you know, I followed some people a couple of years ago, haven't posted in a year and 1/2. Do I really want them in there or not? Um, the flip side of that is, if they really are people, you know, and you want to be able to do direct messaging one of the way things that Twitter does have a restriction on. I can follow anybody unlike Facebook, where if you friend me, I have to friend you back to solidify that connection on Twitter. I can follow you. You don't have to follow it back and I'll get your tweets. But I can't send a private direct message to you until you follow me. And so if somebody follows you and you don't follow them back and they're trying to direct muscles, you it can be a little frustrating. So you also want to kind of watch for your friends, your colleagues if you're going to a conference and people are all following each other so they can chat at the conference, one of the ways to stay up and be part of the cool club is to make sure you go in and follow back all the people that you want to be able to direct message privately. So just some some things about kind of keeping that, um, that twitter ratio and those healthy relationships on Twitter. Okay, So how to tweet? I know some of you have never tweeted. Really? It's all right. You don't have to admit it. Public. You could just quietly say I'm just gonna watch much. Indian says, um, you can have Ah, you could have Hashtags for events you can have. Um, in fact, I'm gonna change these. I have done this, but let's make this here it creativelive they would have Janine live as a hashtag today. The capitalization is optional. Uh, you might have at creative lives, so you could know what them and you might have at Janine Warner. And each of those is going to do something a little different. So the pound sign is how we indicate a keyword makes it sort of a searchable element. The at sign is how we indicate another person or another user. So at creative lives specifically refers to the user name of Creative Live on Twitter at Jinan. Warner is my user name on Twitter. But pound Janine live is a key word that created live uses to indicate that my classes live right now and if you're tweeting about it and they want to follow it, they wanted their own hashtag to indicate that hashtags, by the way, were created by Twitter users. Not by Twitter there a construct completely designed by the users of Twitter but hashtags and generally used for keywords. And you can search for different keywords with that hashtag. So if you want oh, keep track of everything that relates to photography power. You know, hashtag photography will get you tweets related photography where anybody has pulled out that word, put the hash tag and wanted to make sure that you knew that this tweet was about that topic. And that's true of any topic. So at Twitter name to identify a person in a tweet hash tag to identify a keyword, uh, topic and then hashtag sometimes get used just kind of to add emphasis. So you might put three other day when I was tweeting with, um, the guy whose surreal profile image I used and at the end of a tweet, back to my put pound You got talent and I just kind of put you got talent, always one word in a pound that it was just kind of ah Adeboye putting extra attention to that. So sometimes hashtags are used not because it's a keyword. You want people to search, but because it's a word you kind of wanna call out and bring attention to. So then you get things like R T Tweet. What's a retweet? My Twitter friends? J D. What does it mean to retweet somebody? And why would that be the highest compliment you could give on Twitter? Um, it's just like copying their twitter and re posting it yourself. Yeah, he can add stuff to it. If you want to get Sorry, that's a That's a modified tweet. No, that's perfect. So if you just click the little icon that says Artie, well, it's too little arrows. It will retweet. It will just take whatever that person tweeted and tweeted to your followers. So if creative live tweets about this class and I want to share with my followers, I just hit that little icon and it puts exactly that with the name Creativelive on my feet, and everybody who follows me gets what they tweeted. If I wanna edit it along the way, then you do the M Tweet MT. That's a little bit advanced in tutor acronyms, but empty is modified tweet. That means I edited it a little bit before I put it up, and sometimes we'll edit things because we want to correct a date Or sometimes we'll edit it because you get 140 characters. But if I retweet you, some of those characters are gonna get taken up by your name being included with your tweet. And if your tweets 139 140 characters that may end up cutting something's off, I may have to delete a little bit or edit down your tweet a little bit in order to make it fit. And at that point I'm gonna put an empty. So, you know, I changed it or I might want to put it at a boy at the front of it, or some other minor adjustment that any good retweet or M tweet stories you want to share all practices? No, she says. Twitter is not here. It's okay. I don't mean to put you on the spot. I actually I have a question because a lot of the time, um, I post from Facebook and that auto posts on my Twitter. And it's frustrating because, you know, I don't want toe look like him tagging people on Facebook for Twitter because it just doesn't cost pop. So why do you do that? Why do you do the cross posting? Cause I'm lazy. Well, that's loutish. And I used to do it for exactly that reason. But I stopped doing it for the reason you just suggested, um, you know, you you can go on and on about how and when to share these things that make him efficient. Aaron was talking earlier Aaron Manning when she post something on Twitter, and then she puts it on Pinterest and Pinterest automatically puts on that. Facebook and Facebook automatically put Twitter. And on the one hand, that's a pretty efficient workflow in terms of ultimate automation. On the other hand, she doesn't do that all the time because she knows that the different audiences have different vocabularies, have different ways of communicating, have different ways of connecting, and a lot of us have at least some overlap from one to the other. So if I just post the same thing all those places, I'm kind of spamming my followers with the same message over and over again. So when I first signed up for Twitter, I set up the same thing that auto Facebook and Twitter connection. You can go either way with it But I undid that over time cause I found it didn't let me take best advantage of the two, and especially because I can say so much more on Facebook. Another workflow I use a lot is I'll create a post for Facebook, where I'll say everything I want to say, and then I'll copy it over to Twitter and edit it down to the colonel that I need to get it to fit within the small space on Twitter. And a lot of times I'll try and space them maybe half on hour, an hour apart. So even if I do have some of the same people in Facebook and Twitter, most of us are not watching those feeds constantly. So most of us are gonna miss some of that. We're gonna miss him of each other's posts. So if you want to do the post the same thing four times a day, that can help you deal with different time zones. But you could also think about posting at slightly different times on different social media sites, where you may have some of the same followers in different places, but they're more likely to see it if you're posting it, and they're less likely to feel spammed by if it wasn't at exactly the same time. And it wasn't exactly the same words. So maybe I'll use a different take. Or maybe I'll quote somebody I really admire on Facebook and use a different quote by the same person on Twitter goes with my theme of the day or something like that, and that can help to kind of spread that around and deal with us. Multiple, different ways of connecting. Um o h overheard. I don't see a lot, but it's just kind of out there. F f follow Friday that one gets used a lot. What's follow Friday about to know? JT. I do. Um, it's a great d. Ah, it's where you kind of post out the different people that you follow on, admire and try toe. Say these were great people to follow and pass on. Good people. Teoh be interested in yeah, So follow Friday is a wonderful Twitter tradition tradition that's basically about doing shoutouts to people you think are cool, and your followers should follow to um, and it's again, one of the highest compliments you can give to other people. and that's a great way to get yourself noticed. Most of us who used Twitter very often have set it up to notify us every time we get mentioned. So if somebody doesn't ff at Ginny Warner, I got a note that says, Hey, somebody just said other people should follow you. Boy, I'm gonna go look at your profile. If I'm not already following you back, that's probably enough to get me to do it. Um, that's another best practice. If you tweet about me, if you share something, I tweeted If you follow Friday me, I'm gonna take the time to go look at your profile and probably gonna follow you back for that. If you're just spamming me with information in response than I, Mayon follow you for it. But that's that's the car kind of balance of Twitter is, I think, the more you're thinking about, how do I find ways to support and complement and call out and connect other people using these hashtags using RETWEETING using direct messaging? It could be a very powerful tool for turning total strangers into great allies quickly. And in some ways I think more than any of the other social media sites. Twitter has done that from enough people that the followers and the fanatics of Twitter are serious followers and fanatics because it is really powerful. So so that's a little bit about how toe kind of understand the vocabulary and all the strange symbols of Twitter There a few of their intricacies. But those are the main things that intimidate most people, is just the difference between the outside and the hashtag and stuff like that. Twitter now is on a really interesting campaign. This is from Twitter, and this is phone something. Twitter's really pushing right now, and it's clear that Twitter's trying to better compete with Facebook. Instagram etcetera by moving up the images and another thing to think about. And, you know, there's the design of the top of Twitter and all the challenges we talked about and making that design work. But then there's also how do your tweets look in aggregate and the photos that you tweet that end up on the side. So if you've never posted a photo on Twitter, you're missing opportunity. If you've never thought about including video on Twitter, it might be time to do that. and Twitter is definitely pushing this. This is straight out of a Twitter email that's really trying to help you see that you can tagger friends now and you can change mood and, you know, add filters. So they are really pushing this idea that Twitter is so much more than words. It's their new campaign. So I share that with you because, yeah, they made that banner bigger, and they're definitely trying to go for a more visual look. They may have made it more complicated for us, but they definitely trying toe, you know, make it more design herbal. And they're also really trying to push this idea of doing more visual tweets, more animated or video tweets, that kind of stuff. All right, let me just a couple of Twitter design tips. Radically different display on Desktop versus Mobile Devices It's just the biggest take away you should get from this. If you haven't looked at your Twitter from your new wonderful Twitter profile on an IPhone or an IPad, or you haven't got a template or something that you can use as a gauge, like some of the images I was showing, you really may be running the risk that it just doesn't work. And as I showed at the beginning, 77% of Twitter users use mobile. So that's a really high indices. Twitter is particularly high on mobile. That header photo that cover photo in the middle is really the most important thing so that you know how it looks in that long display matters. But if you're gonna optimize for one thing over another, optimize for that preview window for what it looks like when you're looking at Twitter, um, in the smaller see, I get there without I'm trying not to just bring up random social profiles, uh, camera here cause you never know what you get on Twitter or Facebook. Um, what you see over here is pretty close to this kind of ah ah view or the one that has the words at the bottom of it. I can go back to the screenshot that shows it. But if you're optimizing your design optimized for that small cover area display, that's really the most important. Okay, let me, um just get back to the template from it. So again, the way that this template can help you with that is this red zone in the middle is the sweet spot. That's the part that will be visible no matter what. On any of these devices, the profile photo will be in this area. The text overlaps in different ways. But if you've got something that has good imagery here and good imagery here to the left and right of where that profile photos gonna move, that's those air really the hot spots in the new Twitter design. And that's what this templates trying to show you. If you want to have something that looks good on desktop like I have that extra image that only shows up on desktop or the image that has a whole nother section to it on the desktop, then these areas to the left and right are nice bonus areas. When somebody sees it there, it's nice to have something there. Just don't rely on that being there