social media
Grab Your Vanity Facebook URL On June 13!
Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 | Facebook, Marketing, News | No Comments
Starting at 12:01 a.m. EDT this Saturday, June 13th, you can finally get an easy-to-share username for your Facebook account! Facebook explains the process that will start once their countdown page – www.Facebook.com/username/ reaches zero in a recent blog post on their site.
No longer will you have to copy and paste your profile link (which just consists of a string of numbers representing your user id) when sharing your online profile with others, now you can give your Facebook account it’s own vanity URL. Not only great for sharing but it has it’s own obvious SEO benefits which is why I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a large amount of “username-squatting” come Saturday! Below you can see an example of what the search results for that username would pull up on Google.com.
With Facebook.com being a high authority site in the search engines, this has the potential to benefit your brand and/or campaign if used correctly. In the meantime get ready to see a whole gaggle of variations on www.Facebook.com/people/Lose-Weight-With-Our-Diet-Pills/234234324 addresses pulling up in the SERPS.
New Twittercut Worm Targets The Desperate
Wednesday, May 27th, 2009 | Hack, News, Twitter | No Comments
A new twitter worm is running rampant through the microblogging community infecting those who are easily enticed with the idea of gaining more followers. It’s actually very simple, all it does it tweet out to the infected hosts followers, “OMG I just got over 1000 followers today from http://twittercut.com.” Anyone who visits the site will be prompted to enter their twitter login credentials in order to “access the twittercut tool” however upon submitting the info it then just goes and mass-tweets to all of your followers and the cycle continues. Playing of the desperation many seem to have when it comes to becoming ‘popular’ on the network, A twitter search pulled up thousands of folks who fell victim to this trap.
If you see one of your friends twittering “OMG I just got over 1000 followers today from http://twittercut.com”, you might want to tell them to change their password ASAP before it’s changed for them.
So the source of twittercut apparently is a Twitter user named JordanEmbry. It’s also the same name used on the whois records for the twittercut.com domain. Twitter has already disabled his account but using the Google cache you can still see the profile + recent tweets. You’d have to be a moron to use your real info on a scam like this, so I can’t imagine this is really the culprit.
He’s hosting it on free-webhost 110MB.com, so I just sent them a message letting them know about the TOS/Abuse Violation… hopefully they’ll take the site down soon.
Tracking Twitter – Directory of Brands on Twitter
Friday, March 6th, 2009 | Business, Marketing, Mashup, Tools, Twitter, WebApps | No Comments
Brand management firm ElectricArtists just recently launched Trackingtwitter, a site that tracks media, entertainment and consumer product accounts on the microblogging site.
Trackingtwitter follows Zappos, Whole Foods, Starbucks, Jet Blue and Comcast, among others. It broadcasts the brand category (”sports,” “television,” etc.), the Twitter usernames, number of followers, most recent tweet and any personal notes they may have collected about the account.
Add SEO Friendly Social Media Links To Wordpress
Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008 | Blogging, Hack, Open Source, Promotion, SEM, Tools, Twitter | No Comments
Jeff from over at Perishable Press has just posted a handy guide to adding code to your WordPress theme that will enable you to offer SEO-Friendly, fully validating social media links for each of your pages or posts. If you want the easy way of adding social media links to your blog, there are countless WordPress plugins that will do just that, this method is for those of you who want to use as few plugins as possible (a real lean mean blogging machine!)
He gives the code for Delicious, Digg, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Technorati, Blinklist, Furl, Reddit and AddThis (with more sites provided in the comments).
Here’s an example for Digg.com:
<a rel="nofollow" href="http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=<?php the_permalink(); ?>" title="Submit this post to Digg">Digg this!</a>
In order to add the code to each post, edit the single.php and paste in the appropriate code before the comments PHP tag. So you’d paste it before:
< ?php comments_template(); ?>
To add the code to your pages, edit page.php and paste the appropriate code after the PHP tag for your page content. So depending on your theme you’d paste it after:
< ?php the_content(); ?>
To have the links appear on the homepage after the end of each post, edit index.php and paste the appropriate code after the content PHP tag, though it might differ depending on your theme. So you’d paste the code this time after:
< ?php the_content(__('Read more'));?>
Go check out the full post for more examples.
Top 15 Twitter Power User Tools
Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 | AIR, Beta, Hack, RSS, Tools, Twitter, Utilities, WebApps | 2 Comments
With the hundreds of Twitter applications, websites, bots and scripts out there designed to do just about everything under the sun for you and your Twitter account, I decided to compile my own list of the top 15 Power User Twitter Tools that really provide the most value. Speaking of which, if you like this list or feel that something is missing from it, follow me on twitter – @brentter and let me know.
This is my latest addiction. It’s a free service that sends you an email update whenever someone un-follows your twitter account. I don’t know why, but I figure they send you an email when someone starts to follow you, they might as well send one when they leave.
Pretty much this is Twitter for those of you with too many ‘groups’ or followers. It lets you break down your ‘tweets’ into separate feeds that you determine. These can be based on a specific topic, affiliation, location or any other attribute you manage to dream up. It’s also an Adobe Air desktop application that’s still in beta, so there are a few bugs from time-to-time.
Here’s a service that tracks all the links posted on Twitter and ranks them based on the number of recent appearances. There are then many different filter options you can run on the list to narrow it down and even an export function to grab it as an RSS feed.
Twitterfeed takes any RSS feed and posts it to your twitter account. Made specifically for auto-updating your twitter account every time you post a new entry on your blog, Twitterfeed can easily be used to post new entries from in just about any RSS feed (i.e. baseball scores from espn.com).
Now here’s a unique new service that’s still in beta and aimed at those trying to utilize Twitter as a marketing tool. With EasyTweets you can manage multiple Twitter accounts, schedule future tweets (i.e. special announcements), post items from your RSS feed and more. It’s still pretty new but is shaping up to be a great utility for managing your brand identity on Twitter.
#Hashtags are a way to automatically add your tweet to a specific category, for instance lets say I wanted to create a single location for anyone to be able to add to and see what’s being said about NYE09 on Twitter. I would just go and create the hashtag #NYE09 and anytime that a tweet contained #NYE09, it would automatically be added to the hashtag.org website. The beauty of this service is each hashtag has its own RSS feed and usage statistics. To start using hashtags all you have to do is follow @hashtags and anything with a # in front of it will be added to that specific group.
These aren’t really a ‘must use’ but they are pretty neat. They’re icons that twitter accepts as valid characters in tweets. To use them, just copy and paste the desired icon into your message box and voila!
A free collection of unique background patterns for twitter. Pretty cool designs to choose from created by the folks from olivemanna.
Here’s a service that lets you email twitter updates to your account as well as gives you the option to have all your twitter replies emailed back to you.
Here’s a cool new service that monitors keyword density on twitter to show us what the ‘Hot Trends’ might be, or at least what is the most popular topic. It’s updated every 20 seconds and also has a widget & RSS feed for your own personal use.
Here’s a brand-spanking-new service that lets your monitor/track twitter for up to three separate terms in real-time. It also lets you narrow the results based on the users location. RSS feeds available as well.
It’s a URL shortening service that also lets you track how many times people click on your link. Works with both Twitter and FriendFeed.
This is a cool little tool that lets you compare trends in Twitter through a variety of different graphical methods. It also has the latest “Hot Before” and “Hot Now” terms sweeping across the Twittsphere. This may look familiar because it was used a lot to show the difference in social media mentions that Barack Obama received compared to McCain in the last few weeks of the election.
Graph your Twitter stats including tweets per hour, tweets per month, tweet timeline and your reply statistics.
Twitter Search (formerly Summize)
Real-time searching of what’s being said on Twitter. Each search provides it’s own RSS feed along with the ability to search for specific users (i.e. @brentter). Formerly known as Summize, it was purchased by Twitter earlier this year. One more thing to note, it auto-updates with each new addition your search.
So, what do you use to manage your Twitter account? Tell me on here or by following me at @brentter on Twitter.
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