We’ve all heard people say “I won’t follow you back if you don’t have a link and bio” etc. But do people really mean it? Does having a bio and website link in your Twitter profile really make a difference in the number of followers you have? The answer is yes.

I dugg back into the data we’ve collected from Twitter Grader. We have a bunch of different information on over 1.6 million Twitter accounts, including bio, link and follower data.

The first “aha” moment from this slice of data is the sheer number of users without bios and links. Almost two-thirds of users don’t have a bio or link listed on their Twitter profiles.

Looking at the average number of followers shows a very distinct trend. Users with a bio have over 8 times more followers on average than users without a bio and users with a link have over 7.5 times as many as users without.

Beyond sheer number of followers, power users are even less likely to follow you if you don’t have a bio and link. (Power users are Twitter users with high Twitter Grades.)

Users with a bio have over 15.5 times more power followers than those without a bio. Users with a link have over 22 times more power followers than without.

And of course your Twitter Grader score is effected strongly.

The bottom line here is that if you haven’t already specified a site and a bio for your Twitter profile (and lots of you haven’t) go do it now.

by Web Designer, Copywriter and Author Sherice Jacob from iElectrify and Get Niche Quick (follow her at @sherice).

Who would’ve thought that a service like Twitter could help you not only reach more potential clients, but also help make your day more organized? Here are 10 “must have” Twitter applications and plugins to add to your marketing arsenal. Start using any one of these Twitter tools and watch your productivity (and your customer list) grow by leaps and bounds!

1. TweetDeck - TweetDeck not only shows you the last 200 tweets made by your followers and followees, but also organizes @ replies directed to you, direct messages, search terms and the latest news in the Twitterverse all into manageable columns.

2. Twhirl - Twhirl works similarly to TweetDeck, except it lets you access multiple Twitter accounts directly through the software. With Twhirl, you can keep your business and personal accounts separate without losing track of either of them.

2. Ping.fm - While not exclusively a Twitter tool, Ping.fm lets you broadcast Twitter tweets to other popular social networks including MySpace, Facebook, Hi5, and dozens more. Using ping.fm keeps everyone up-to-date on your current projects and widens your “social net” to attract more customers to your networking base.

3. Twitter Tools - Integrate your Wordpress blog with Twitter and vice versa. You can turn your blog headlines into tweets and your tweets into content for your blog. It’s also widget-friendly, so you can simply drag it to your Wordpress sidebar to display your latest tweets to your blog readers.

4. Tweetburner - Shorten, send out and track links sent via Twitter. See how many clicks your latest blog or article has generated. A great way to gauge the popularity of your content. See the most-clicked Twitter links on the Tweetburner homepage. Also works with FriendFeed.

5. GroupTweet - Perfect for when you only want certain messages to go out to a group of your followers, friends or family or for when you’re working on a web development project and need to send or receive client-confidential information. Registering is as simple as creating a group name and making its settings private in Twitter.

6. Twittercal - Integrate Twitter with your Google Calendar. By simply adding @gcal as a friend, you can tweet events, to-do’s and reminders directly to your Google Calendar and have it checked every minute.

7. Twitter Timer - To get reminders directly through Twitter, follow @timer and send a direct message to @timer as simple as 10 order pizza. It will remind you to order pizza in 10 minutes.

8. Tweetbeep - Get Twitter alerts whenever someone mentions any keyword you want to follow. Use it for your name, company name or to find potential clients (by getting an alert for the term “web development” for example). Tweetbeep works even if the original poster uses a URL shortening service like TinyURL.

9. Qwitter - Find out when you get un-followed by using Qwitter. Qwitter will not only alert you as to who is no longer following you, but they’ll show you the tweet you posted that (may or may not) have caused the person to unsubscribe.

10. TweetLater - TweetLater lets you schedule your tweets for a later date/time, saving you from being glued to Twitter. Also emails you keyword alerts, sends “thank you” notes to new followers and handles multiple Twitter accounts effortlessly.

Give these Twitter tools a try to help simplify your social networking while getting more exposure with half the effort. Reach more clients, free up more time and stay organized. Once you start using these Twitter applications and plugins, you’ll never know how you got along without them!

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.

by Chris Allison (@Chris_Allison) CMO of Centsports.

A few days back, for no particular reason, I started thinking more about how to search for useful information on Twitter. Then Twitter announced they were integrating search.twitter.com with the main platform, so the time to learn has never been better. Not only am I interested, but it seems the hive mind has deemed it important as well (you know all this micro-blogging is turning us into a hive mind don’t you?)

The Advanced is Basic

I set out to learn more about the search feature, which is what so many are saying will be where Twitter makes its money, and found all of my advanced theorizing led me to a pretty basic page that held all of the answers. Props to Twitter. If you go to http://search.twitter.com/advanced you can literally see all of the different ways you can search the hive mind.

I’m pretty sure these advanced features aren’t going to be obvious options in the integrated version so it wouldn’t hurt to know how to use these advanced functions by just typing them into the box so you don’t have to revisit these pages every time you want to search. Twitter gives you the information you need to run these searches from your integrated search box at http://search.twitter.com/operators.

The Operators

Instead of detailing every operator you can use, I’ll pick out some of the specifically useful ones you should get comfortable with to make your search experience on Twitter better than it is on Google (that’s right, I said it!) As an aside, Google is a hive mind too, but their data is often collected as a side effect of user action, whereas the majority of Twitter’s “thoughts” are genuinely created and intentionally produced- carrying on.

• Hashtags
• Minus sign
• Near
• Since
• Until

Creating and Searching Niche Subjects using Hash tags

The hash tag is probably the most important function of Twitter search, and the most used. The chances are you probably already use the hash tag (#), but if you don’t here is a brief run down. The hash tag enables Twitter users to create searchable subject groups. Simply by adding a phrase to a tweet a user makes it easier for that tweet to be found in a relevant search. An example would be, “I like Pepsi, but I don’t really like this commercial #superbowlads”. Then anyone can search Twitter for #superbowlads and find this Tweet along with any others tagged the same.

Pro: The power of the hash tag is that it creates very specific sets of content. If you want to know what other people think of the superbowl ad that just came on you can find it much easier by searching for the hash tag than by searching for something similar in a normal search engine.

Con: The downside of the hash tag is that if you’re not an especially active twerson then it’s likely you won’t know the hash tags for all of the subjects you are interested in searching; however, if you stay plugged in you can see the hash tag groups forming right before your eyes- heck, why not create your own!

Making Your Search Clearer using Minus Sign:

The minus sign is very simple, but useful. If you have a search that you know will probably bring up irrelevant results you can filter out the irrelevant results by using the minus sign. The example that Twitter uses is if you search for beer then you might want to include –root, to prevent results about root beer from coming up.

Depending on what you are looking for a search for “beer” probably isn’t a very good search. The power of searching Twitter is plugging into the hive mind and finding real time thoughts and news. Thus, searching Twitter for beer or even “root beer” (quotations tells the search engine to only search for that exact phrase) is a waste of time- you’ll get lots of results like “mmm I could use a beer right now” and “damn that beer was good”. When searching Twitter, try to be as specific as possible, that is where its strength lies. In this scenario try searching for the exact company or type of beer you are interested in.

Finding New Friends using Near:

This is where Twitter really shines. It’s also the beginning of the operators I didn’t know about before exploring Twitter’s advanced function page. The near function lets you search for tweets coming out of a specific area. There are two very powerful applications of this function.

1. Find locals
2. Access the hive mind and see what it’s like to be at an event

I found this particular operator very interesting because I found out there are many more people in my town using Twitter (only about 100,000 people where I live) than I expected. A simple search for near:CollegeStation produced the tweets of many locals. I’ve been thinking about hosting a tweetup, and now that I realize there are more people tweeting out there, maybe I should! One thing to note: don’t put a space after the colon, and if the city name is two words make it one.

The other use of the near function is to see what’s going on at an event, or what it feels like to be there in person. I’ll go into more depth on this a little further down, but suffice to say if you want tweets from people at the inauguration rather than just news from people watching it then adding “near:washingtondc” could be very useful.

Searching Time Periods using Since and Until:

These functions let you narrow down your search to a specific timeline. If Twitter had been around for 9/11 then you might want to search near:NYC since:2001-09-11 until:2001-09-12 if you were looking for local and real time tweets, or add since:2008-01-01 to the search if you were looking for a more broad retrospective view of what people think about the event now. The options for personal interest and scientific research are both wide open with these functions. The hive mind is a powerful a thing.

Putting It All Together:

I hope you’ve enjoyed learning a little more about what you can do with Twitter search. Here is an example of putting it all together using #inauguration, near:collegestation , since:2009-01-20, until:2009-01-20.

You can see the results here.

Note: Twitter’s servers went all crazy eyed when I did this search near Washington DC, my guess is they’re just overloaded. I went ahead and submitted a note via their help form so hopefully they’ll look into it. Either way, the power of the search remains the same; it’s only a matter of Twitter getting their servers more prepared for larger searches; when they do, you’ll be ready.

Happy searching, welcome to the hive mind.

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.

by John Haydon (follow him at @johnhaydon) from Corporate Dollar

It’s not about you. I know, sounds cold but it’s true. It’s really not about you. It’s not about the number of followers YOU have on Twitter. It’s about how much value THEY gain from following you.

But in some ways, it’s not about them either.

In many ways it’s about your 2nd and even 3rd degree network - the folks who follow your followers.

It’s all about reach.

“But I have 7,357 followers on Twitter! Certainly that would mean that I reach more folks than my next door neighbor who has only 987 followers.”

Maybe. But maybe not.

Like my junk?

What’s powerful about Twitter is the potential for your message to be exposed to thousands of folks way beyond your immediate connections. This happens when your followers retweet something you posted or the followers of your followers (2nd degree folks) retweet something the your followers retweeted. There are a few tools that can measure this potential reach, but let’s focus on two:

1. Twinfluence

Twinfluence will show you four useful measurements of your Twitter network:

Second-Order Network: The number of folks that follow your followers. These are the folks that are exposed to replies and retweets from your followers. The more useful and/or *interesting your posts, the more likely your second-order network will retweet to their followers. Your 1st degree followers plus all their followers equals your reach.

Velocity: The average number of followers and second-order followers attracted per day is velocity. The larger your Twitter network is, the faster it grows. Again, posts that are useful and/or interesting.

Social Capital: The degree to which your followers have a high number of followers themselves determines your social capital. A user whose followers have an average of 200 followers each has a much more limited reach than another use whose followers have an average of 2,000 followers. Even if these two users have the same number of followers, their potential reach (the real story) is completely different.

Centralization: This indicates the degree to which you converse with a only a few other users. If, for example, you converse with only three users who each have 5,000 followers, your network is considered “fragile”. If one of these three users unfollows you, it could have a huge impact on your overall reach.

2. Twitter-Friends

Twitter-friends is a data geeks wet dream. A lot of very useful data that’s worth spending time understanding. For now though, start with these three measurements:

Network overlap: This graph shows you the level of two-way conversations you have with folks. As you become more “popular” on Twitter, it will be hard to tell how many replies from folks that you’ve missed. In my case, you’ll notice that the amount of incoming posts to me (@johnhaydon) is larger than my outgoing replies to folks. However, the overlap of these streams shows a fairly healthy two-way dialogue.

Conversation Quotient: This indicates the level of “spaminess”. The Twitter-Friends FAQ states, “People with a high CQ are using Twitter to have direct conversations with other users. People with a low CQ are using it more for broadcasting links or status messages.”

Retweet Quotient: This tells you how useful your junk is ;-). And we all know that long term success with any social media is driven by sincerity and usefulness.

An understanding of your Twitter network’s strengths and weaknesses will give you a good starting point in the direction that you want to go with Twitter.

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.