Twitter for Dummies - Laura Fitton [68]
• Hubspot’s TwitterGrader returns lists of the top graded twitterers for given cities (http://twitter.grader.com/top/cities).
• Twellow’s Twellowhood feature (www.twellow.com/twellowhood/) lets you find twitterers by city using a zoomable map.
• LocalTweeps (www.localtweeps.com) lets twitterers sign themselves up by tweeting their zip code publicly.
Back up your data. Tweetake (http://tweetake.com) offers you a way to back up your Twitter data, including your follower and following lists, so that you don’t lose the data if Twitter ever crashes. The initial backup takes quite a long time, so be prepared to wait a little while.
Find out when you lose followers. TwitterLess (www.twitterless.com) and Qwitter (http://useqwitter.com) are two tools that alert you when someone stops following you. Depending on your outlook or your reason for using Twitter, you may want to know when you lose followers — but this information can also be quite the blow to your ego.
It’s just not encouraging feedback, and it’s a waste of energy to try to “determine” why someone left your stream. These tools are very much against the spirit of Twitter, where unsubscribing is really just a personal choice about the consumption of content, not a personal affront or rejection of the friendship. Laura has many business and personal contacts that don’t happen to be interested in the way she uses Twitter. It’s really no big deal. It’s probably not even a good idea to use these quitting services, especially as some are set up to imply that a certain tweet caused the unfollow. Use with caution!
Watch Twitter unfold, on a map of the world. You can use a mash-up application called Twittervision (http://twittervision.com) that displays the activity on Twitter in real time on a Google map. When each tweet comes in, it’s associated with the actual, physical location from which it came, as well as the specific Twitter user, on a live, constantly updating map. Twittervision is certainly not an efficient way to find new people to follow, but it can be entrancing to watch. We’ve heard that someone who viewed the display at the Museum of Modern Art stared for a very long time and came away pretty breathless, saying, “I’ve seen God.” Far be it from us to pass judgment on anyone’s sense of reverence. It’s enough to say, you may find it kind of fun and mystifying to watch. Just don’t expect “utility” from it, per se.
You can take it with you
Depending on how you use Twitter, having your own copy of your tweets, relationships, and conversations may be a mere nicety, or it may have some very real economic and or emotional value to you. Laura frequently mentions her children’s milestones or captures meaningful moments in her life through her tweets.
One of the areas of likely innovation in the Twitter ecosystem is better publishing tools. You can take your unwieldy stream of tweets and extract out a few key moments, perhaps embellishing them with the videos and photos you linked to, or visual display of the conversations you were having at the time. Personal scrapbooks or annual reports (see Nicholas Feltron’s work) could be a really nice thing to have personally.
For a business, this kind of recordkeeping has even more obvious value — having the data in a format that you can search, parse, and analyze will come to be a business necessity as more and more types of business interactions take place on Twitter. We become what we measure, and measuring effectiveness will be a crucial reason to be able to get a copy of your Twitter data.
Part IV
Knowing Why We Twitter
In This Part . . .
In this part, we ask the big questions: Why are you on Twitter? As a business, how can you use Twitter to build and stabilize your brand? As a not-for-profit, what can you do to make people evangelize your cause? What should you say? Whom should