by Doriano “Paisano” Carta

One of the most demanded features for Twitter has been the ability to create groups, allowing members to focus on different sets of people they’re following. For example, you could create groups for all of your fantasy league friends, colleagues at work, friends in real life, family members, and so on.

Because Twitter still does not provide any group feature, it has opened the floodgates for countless third party solutions. There are many different ways Twitter members can create virtual groups. Here is a roundup of some of the most popular methods employed today.

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Use Twitter to market your homebased business.

You’ve probably heard of Twitter, even if you aren’t sure what it is. Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service–think public instant messenger stream. From your mobile device or computer you send updates called tweets, which are text posts of up to 140 characters. Your tweets can be read by others, and you can sign up to follow the messages others write so that you can get short, quick updates from them.

As a homebased entrepreneur, Twitter gives you an open door to connect not only with other entrepreneurs but also other companies, marketing experts and more. As homebased entrepreneurs, these tips, connections and opportunities can spell great marketing options for you.

The bottom line is Twitter can help you grow your home business.

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by Alexander Moya Barquero of Tecnovits (Spanish). Follow him @twivits.

Image by respres

Twitter tools have emerged all over the web, as this great service offers many ways to get in touch with people that really matter to you. However, safety is another of those things that matter and not all Twitter tools are trustworthy.

But don’t be alarmed, not all the tools out there are after your twitter identity! Let’s have a look at 11 twitter tools that don’t require your password and are still very useful and powerful:

Statistics:

TweetStats: Statistics for your Twitter account, this tool graphs the amount of hourly and monthly tweets of your account, the amount of replies and the interface that you use the most.

TwitterFriends: One of the most complete Twitter statistic tools, with just your twitter username you can find out very impressive statistics, but don’t just take my word for it, Darren wrote a more complete review of this tool: TwitterFriends - A Useful Twitter Metrics Tool

Ranks:

TwitterGrader: If you’re into ranks and grades, TwitterGrader will grade your account from 0 to 100 based on your account’s followers, following and number of tweets. You will also be given a rank, this will measure the impact of your account on the twitter sphere.

Are you in the Twitter Elite for your country? Use the tool and find out!

ReTweetRank: This tool ranks your account based on the number of retweets you get.

Tweeple Discovery:

NearbyTweets: Want to find tweeples near you? This tool finds people who tweeted near you, great tool for discovering new members to follow.

Twubble: Tired of subscribing to other accounts just so they can recommend people to subscribe to? (Yes @mrtweet, I’m talking about you.) By just filling out you twitter username, Twubble recommends user to follow based on your friends following. [Editor's Note: Update - Twubble does indeed ask you to log into Twitter's API with your username and password. - Lara]

Tweeple Unfollowing:

Twitoria: As time passes by and your “following” list becomes longer, there are bound to be a lot of spammy, unwanted, not used accounts, this tool tells your which of the accounts your following hasn’t updated recently in the last week, month or year and other time spans.

Qwitter: Besides having a very funny name, this tool will notify you by email when someone stops following you, and it only requires your username and an email address to send the notifications to (it also has a moving hand, so there’s another reason to use it).

[Editor's Note: Qwitter has been known to be pretty unreliable in terms of timely notifications. People have complained that they hear nothing for weeks or months, and then all of the sudden get 20 or 30 emails all at once, saying someone unfollowed them after their most recent tweet - when in reality, they may have unfollowed weeks ago, after a different one. - Lara]

FriendOrFollow: Find out who isn’t following you back with this tool.

Miscellaneous Fun Tools:

Tweetwasters: How much time do you spend on Twitter? This tool will tell you and only requires your username.

TweetWheel: This tool lets you find out which of your friends know each other, planning a party or going out for a movie? Find out who knows who with tool and avoid awkward moments.

Know other good Twitter tools that don’t require your password? Share them with us!

Get more tips and tutorials like this. Subscribe to our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter.

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.

by Mickey Mellen from Mt. Bethel Church of Marietta, GA. Follow him @mickmel.

Many churches and organizations are feeling like they should be on Twitter, but they’re not sure how they can use it for their cause. Here are a few techniques we’re trying at Mt. Bethel that may give you some ideas on how to get started:

• Showcase your staff: On your organization’s “staff” page, give clear links to those that are on Twitter. This is also a good place to link to their profiles on other social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. Here’s ours as an example



• Summarize your staff tweets: Zappos does a great job of showing off their employee tweets. Kent Brewster has a script that can be plugged into almost any site to create a similar thing. To make it work, create a new twitter account and have it follow all of your staff members (and no one else). Plug that new twitter account into the script, and voila!
• Show live chats from events: A simple hash tag can go a long way. At a recent youth event, we enouraged people to use a hash tag when discussing the event, then we pointed parents to the Twitter search results page for that hash. It was very popular, but you run the risk of a bad apple saying some inappropriate things, and it can’t be cleaned up if you’re using this method.
• Find how who else related to your organization is on Twitter: If you have an e-mail database of your users/congregation, you can import that list to a new gmail account, then have Twitter search that account for active members. Follow them to see what’s going on, and many will follow you back.
• Tweet from retreats, events or mission trips: A great way to keep the people at home informed is a Twitter account dedicated to that event (like our current mission trip to Ecuador). The advantage to this over a hash tag is that parents and other concerned parties can subscribe to that user can get updates on their phone.
• Post weather-related news: If you have ongoing weather-sensitive events, such as outdoor sports, create an account dedicated to field conditions. Our recreation update account is often very quiet, but it’s worth gold on rainy Saturdays in the summer. It saves a LOT of phone calls from wondering parents.
  
• Post your blog entries: While the best Twitter interaction is personal, some users are losing interest in RSS feeds and just focusing on Twitter. Point your blog to a Twitter account as an alternative to RSS and e-mail subscriptions (blog to twitter). If you use WordPress, Twitter Tools is an excellent plug-in. If not, then twitterfeed can do the job.
• Always try new things: We created an account that uses sitetweet to post user activity (”user reading xx blog entry”, etc) to a dedicated twitter account. I personally find it a bit overwhelming, but some of the staff (and a few members) think it’s a neat thing to watch.

What other great ways have you found to use Twitter for your church/organization?

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.

Entrepreneurs are finding the fast-rising microblogging site to be a useful tool for reaching out to customers

By Jeremy Quittner

Here’s what happened when Chris Savage, the chief executive of Wistia.com, searched for the phrase “private video sharing” on Twitter, a social networking site. One post he found read, “A teacher requested a private ‘video sharing’ Web site so that specialists can observe student behavior—can anyone refer one?”

That got Savage’s attention. He e-mailed back: “Still looking for a private video sharing site?”

Minutes later came the reply: “YES! It’s the first request for one—thought I’d hit up my tweets before [I] go digging.”

Savage: “Cool. You may want to check out Wistia.com. Full disclosure, I’m the CEO; -)”

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Since it was launched last fall, over 1.5 million people have graded their profiles using Twitter Grader.

But what does a Twitter Grade actually mean — and how can you use it to improve how you use Twitter?

Here’s the scoop: Your Twitter Grade is a measure of how well you’re using Twitter as a marketing tool. The number is a percentile score based on how effectively you’re following best Twitter-for-business practices, compared to all the other people that have been graded.

To give you a better sense of how you can improve your use of Twitter as a marketing tool, here’s a breakdown of a few questions Twitter Grader asks when grading your profile (as well as some of the thinking behind them):

1) How many followers do you have? Reach is important, and Twitter Grader puts some weight on the number of people following you. Offering interesting content and interacting often online will get you more followers. Also, those who have a lot of followers are frequently thought-leaders in the space.

2) What is the power and influence of those people following you? Choose your friends wisely, and build a network of people who have have large networks themselves. To have influential people follow you is powerful.

3) How many people are you following? If you are following more people than are following you, it reduces your grade a bit. This “poor ratio” often (although, not always) implies that a person is following too many people at once, instead of letting organic relationships naturally develop. Remember to build your network organically, step-by-step.

4) How often do you update and interact with your network? Being an active member of the Twitter community defineitly gets you points. Remember to consistantly interact with your network. However, tweeting excessively without reason can hurt your grade.

5) How often does your network engage with you? Twitter Grader thinks very highly of people who are tweeted at, cited in the context of a tweet or retweeted. To have people interact or reference you shows authority. Give people a reason to talk about you.

What do you think? Are there other best-practices Twitter Grader should be assessing? How do you use Twitter for marketing?

By Rochelle Paul

A couple weeks ago, I spoke with San Francisco area Social Marketing expert, Rick Rochon. Rick and I talked about the various ways to use Social and New Media/Marketing opportunities.

Rick’s expertise is to use nearly or totally free marketing options. Twitter is one such method. Providing a small business owner with another avenue (Facebook & LinkedIn being other options) to build relationships with customers and clients via a platform that allows you to target them, for them to chose to let you into their lives, and doing so in a free manner. Indeed, the biggest investment faced by the small business owner is time.

Let’s quickly cover the basics of Twitter.

Twitter is what is considered a microblog. A microblog platform provides the writer with the chance to write whatever they want, within 140 characters. That is characters. Characters include punctuation, spaces, letters, everything. A very short amount of space. About three sentences.

Twitter has grown by leaps and bounds since its beginning in 2006.

Rick calls it “the conversation”. If you post something on Twitter, it’s a “tweet”. The people following you, “tweeple”. The world you move through, the “twitishpere.”

Twitter is open to everyone, and every age, demographic, group can be found tweeting around. Unlike Facebrook and LinkedIn, where the participants have been traditionally one group (college students growing into everyone, or business people) Twitter seems to have, from conception, been targeted to and attracts, nearly everyone across the board.

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Written by Sarah Perez / March 26, 2009

Gartner released a report today that highlights the different ways that companies are adopting Twitter for business use. Although Twitter was originally intended for communication among individuals, a number of organizations have begun to actively participate on the platform. However, not all companies are using Twitter in the same way. Some are tweeting, some are just listening, and some really savvy companies are doing both.

Before any company employees start tweeting, it would be a good idea to remind them that the same rules that apply to other web participation (like blogging, for example) also apply to Twitter. “As Twitter is a public forum, employees should understand the limits of what is acceptable and desirable,” says Jeffrey Mann, research vice president at Gartner. “If organizations have not defined a public Web participation policy, they should do so as quickly as possible.”

Based on Garnter’s research, they have narrowed down the four different ways that companies are using Twitter today: direct, indirect, internal, and signaling. Here’s what those mean:

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You signed up for Twitter, added a short bio, uploaded an avatar and are Tweeting regularly, but still nobody’s following you.

Now what?

The way most Twitter users (especially new ones) build a base of Twitter followers is by following people themselves. Lots of people follow-back people who follow them, so by going out and following people you should be able to accumulate a lot of followers.

I recently spent some time using data from Twitter Grader to test this assumption. I broke up the database into “buckets” of users based on how many users they’re following. If you’re following around 100 users, you’re in the 100-user bucket, if you’re following close to 1000 users, you’re in that bucket.

The graph below shows the number of users in each bucket (the red line) and the average number of followers the users in each bucket have (the blue line).

The red line indicates that most users aren’t following a ton of people, which is expected given that most users aren’t Twitter-addicts. The blue line, however, tells a more interesting story: People who follow lots of people tend to have lots of followers themselves.

Let’s look at little closer at the follow-back assumption. The graph below shows the distribution of Twitter users at each following to follower ratio.

We see that most users have close to a 1:1 ratio of following to followers, meaning that many users follow-back those that follow them.

So does that mean you should go nuts and follow tons and tons of people? To answer that question, let’s look at how your following/follower ratio is related to the number of people that follow you.

The graph below shows the average number of followers of users based on their ratio. A ratio of 0.5 means that you follow half the number of people that are following you, and a ratio of 2 means you follow twice as many people as are following you.

This shows that users with a low following to follower ratio tend to have a high number of followers. That means that if your goal is to build a Twitter account with lots of followers, and we assume these factors have some sort of causal relationship, you should try to keep your ratio near or under 1 (following the same number of people as follow you or less).

Conclusion

The data shows that the best way to build a robust Twitter account is via a stepped approach. Follow a few people (a few of them will follow you back), then follow a few more. Don’t go crazy following thousands of people. Do it slowly and build up your followers gradually.