Marketing-tool

Get Free ReTweets: TwitFever!

We all know how important it is as a blogger or a business owner to connect with people in the right way on social networking sites these days. These social sites are easy tools to get out messages to your customers..and also to listen to their feedback.

The Problem:
To reach out to as many people, in as less time as possible.

Our Solution
To help you spread your message to a wider audience, we have built a tool called TwitFever, which lets you help each other(members).

How it works?
We accept people who have atleast 1000 followers.
If you get at the least 10 tweets, then there is a minimum chance of your message reaching to
10 x 1000 = 10, 000 people minimum.
The chances are almost endless.

Update: You must have atleast 199 followers to become eligible.
[ Changed this after a lot of requests. ]

Rules
1. Do not tweet about sales pages and affiliate links.
2. Make sure to submit those tweets which contain informative and interesting content.
3. DO NOT retweet the tweets which contains promotional stuffs, and affiliate links in it.
4. Please make sure to visit on a regular basis and be a active member.
5. You must have atleast 1000 followers. ( Can’t help it. It is in place to help you get maximum value out of the tool. )

YOU Are Special
TwitFever.com is still in its early beta, but I’m inviting YOU( Technotip.org blog readers ), as you are special and a priority.

Some Insider Story
I’m making use of Twitter API for this app, so the loading may take some time, if enough people start using it. But I’ll be upgrading the servers soon, so that will not be a problem.

If you find any errors, bugs, please take a screenshot and post about it on our official forum at Technotip.com under TwitFever Section. Your suggestions and queries are highly appreciated. Our forum is open and waiting for you!

I’m passionate about building these kind of web applications that help solve problems. Along with that I also need to consider the reality that I will have to pay the bills, of server, domain, coding cost, my time. ( My Mom will be really angry if I don’t take care of all these bills / expenses myself. )

As a matter of fact, I can get a lot of businesses which could be interested in sponsorship. But honestly, I want to concentrate only on coding and other stuffs that I absolutely love. Finding sponsors, negotiating, getting paid and recursively doing this month after month..will take considerable amount of time and energy.

So I’ve decided to have 1 adsense ad inside the app, which I hope could compensate a bit. And a big thanks to you all for understanding.

Features:
1. You can retweet others tweets.
2. Submit your own tweets.
3. See the number of retweets.
4. See who retweeted the tweets.
5. See a separate list of tweets submitted by you so far and its retweet count and the people who retweeted it.
..lot more features coming soon, stay tuned, stay active and participate regularly.

Recommendation
Spend some time ReTweeting others tweets, use the pagination to browse through more tweets.

I would love to see people take maximum advantage of this smart marketing tool, which will save you a lot of time.

Being Smart in your marketing approach, is always better.
Invest your time more on the things you really love and on things that matters the most.

Using SEO to Build Authority and Traffic

This is a guest post by Jeff Gross. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guest post guidelines.

If you are putting content on your blog to build traffic and authority, SEO needs to be calculated into your effort. It does not matter if you put out 150 word blurbs on social media sites, full websites, or blog posting. SEO is the primary way the usefulness of information posted is interpreted. Therefore, it is logical to conclude that anyone wanting to be found would want to enable search engines to make that interpretation easy.

The Finer Points of Blog Content SEO
Many of the tactics from building SEO friendly websites hold true on a blog. Appropriate use of keywords will provide the markers that spiders need to accurately interpret the work. A blog post that is overly long will actually be more of a hindrance than a help. There ends up being too much other text that ends up getting into the mix that the spiders can interpret as relevant even if it is not. Other points to consider are…

400-500 words is a good target length. Readers are not interested in encyclopedic blog posts. If the subject is bigger than that, simply turn it into a multi-part series.

Appropriate density of any keyword falls between 2% and 3%. Try to avoid saturating the text with buzzwords or industry-speak to broaden your appeal and keep the text readable.

Your title needs to command attention while being descriptive. It should also include keywords relevant to the text. The first sentence is important in that regard. It should also contain any keywords important to the text.

Blogging software packages will often allow you to add relevant tags to a piece of work. This is useful for using additional terms without saturating the work. For example, how would a blogger who doesn’t know anything about SEO locate this post? They may search up a phrase like “how do I get a bigger audience for my blog?” Even though terms like “bigger audience” aren’t used in the text, you can still aim towards that individual through appropriate tags.

The Quest for Greater Authority
The most useful goal you can pursue for your blog is establishing your authority. Prove your blog is giving good information and it will take hold and spread from there. Easier said then done though, right? Any good approach is going to take time. However we can hasten that process by keeping a few things in mind.

If you post junk posts, that’s how your blog will be viewed. Your blog should be used to demonstrate your unique perspective on the relevant interest. A writer that does not have the time to sit down and proof-read their work, spell-check, and make sure it’s readable will not be getting their work read. If you do not have that kind of time, take advantage of a ghost-writing company to generate solid work for you.

Depart from how the rest of the world is portraying a topic. Sometimes, it’s impossible to do. However, when you can, you want to take advantage of your unique experience, perspective, and knowledge to make your work stand out from the crowd. No one is going to take the time to read the piece if it is just a rehash of 50 other posts. Huge blocks of text are an instant turn off to readers. They will close the window.

A blog is one of the greatest marketing tools that is available at the moment. It is a great way to create a personal, memorable experience between your business and a customer that is often lacking on the internet. Be sure to keep SEO in mind while you flesh out your strategy to build traffic and authority to your blog.

Author’s Bio
Jeff is a professional internet marketing and blogging consultant. He writes mostly about blogging, internet marketing, Pay Per Click Strategies and Search Engine Optimization techniques and best practices. Jeff is also a consultant and content contributor for NY condominiums community.

An Interesting Interview with TweetMeme

This is one of the interesting interviews we have on our blog.
Sarah Blow, from TweetMeme.com was kind enough to answer our questions. And importantly, answered so accurately. Its interesting to see a business built around Twitter.

TweetMeme is a service which aggregates all the popular links on twitter to determine which links are popular. TweetMeme is able to categorize these links into categories and subcategories, making it easy to filter out the noise to find what you are interested in.

TweetMeme was built by a small web company called fav.or.it who are passionate about twitter, social media and a whole lot more. You can read about what the team are up to on their blog

A glimpse at TweetMeme office space!
All the photographs of TweetMeme looks interesting, we have chosen one for this interview. You can look at the rest @ flickr.

Here is the interview:

Please tell our readers about yourself and TweetMeme service.

TweetMeme is a service that aggregates the most re-tweeted stories on twitter and makes them accessible to people in one central location. The service also includes it’s re-tweet button which helps users quickly engage their readers in re-tweeting interesting and relevant content to their twitter followers. Other offerings around TweetMeme include the Widget and API.

Some history about TweetMeme and fav.or.it(Parent company of TweetMeme!).

TweetMeme started out around 8 months ago as an extension of the original service Fav.or.it but specifically created with a focus on the content from Twitter rather than the web at large. The company is owned by Nick Halstead who is passionate about technology and entrepreneurship. Fav.or.it was founded about a year before TweetMeme and TweetMeme is a brand owned by Fav.or.it Ltd.

What inspired for the creation of tweetmeme.

TweetMeme was a natural progression of the original Fav.or.it concept of centralizing and aggregating interesting and most importantly relevant content from the web. The focus on Twitter came about as Twitter became more main stream showing that it may yet become a tool for the masses.

Many people around the world, all over the blogs are talking about “Is Twitter a Good Marketing Tool or yet another Time Waster” ? Tweetmeme being in the business, I can guess your answer, but would like to know it from you. And please tell us the reason for your answer.

You ask an interesting question here on Marketing. I would say Twitter is a tool that you MUST understand before using it for Marketing purposes. If used correctly such as for the Twestival campaign which raised hundreds of thousands of pounds around the world for the charity Clean Water then yes it is an excellent marketing tool. However if companies just use it as an extended RSS feed and don’t actively engage their brand in conversation and support then it’s no where near as useful as it could be. We try to help companies understand this when they come to us asking about using our featured tweet offerings or asking for a custom channel to be created for them. We think it is incredibly important for companies to understand both the risks and the rewards that can come from using social media tools such as twitter for marketing their brand but also for public relations.

What are the long term business plan and business model for TweetMeme?

Now that would be telling wouldn’t it…. We are already making money through our advertising revenue, featured tweets and custom channels but look out for other interesting things in the coming months. I’m going to leave that question there and leave you all guessing to find out what comes next for us.

How addicted are you and other employees at TweetMeme, to Twitter?

Addicted… that’s a strong word… that would suggest that we can’t keep away from the tool. We use it a lot but not to the detriment to our health or happiness. We understand that there is a healthy balance to be had between online and offline communications. I think you would class all the employees at TweetMeme as Twitter enthusiasts!

Do you think Twitter is becoming more of a main stream media now a days or do you think it will be a main stream media soon.

I think Twitter is fast becoming a common communication channel much like SMS however it will still take some time for the majority of the general public to find a suitable way of it working for them. Mainstream Media here in the UK already use it on local and national radio stations, within some TV programs for feedback and major celebrities both in the UK and the US are using it to engage their fans. As an engagement tool it is powerful but I’d love to see it used on programs such as Top Gear and National News Programs. So all in all I’d say it’s coming but it will take time.

Do you think, the presence of a company on Twitter, will positively help in their business or is just a distraction.

I think it depends on how the company has a presence on twitter and what the purpose of it’s presence is. If it is individuals on Twitter just to communicate on a personal level then that is very different to say a large medical company interacting with other businesses or key business influencers within their industry sector. Twitter has the power to connect people that would otherwise never manage to communicate with one another without intervention.

We can see TweetMeme buttons on many websites now a days. It makes me curious to know, how much bandwidth does it consume each day or each month? And what server configurations do you use to manage them?

We serve over 46,000,000 buttons per day but this isn’t the only thing that we do and as such our bandwidth usage isn’t something that is easy to split down to specific usage functions. We use Sun Micro-systems servers and are supported through the Sun Startup Essentials program. It’s a great program that we would encourage other startups to consider.

What new features can we expect from TweetMeme in coming days?

You’ll have to wait and see… that’s part of the fun of following us on twitter @talktweetmeme or following our blog http://blog.tweetmeme.com we announce all our latest releases of information over there, so you’ll just have to wait and see.

How big or small is TweetMeme, as a company?

I guess size is very much dependent on how you measure it. As far as number of employees, we’re a small team of 9 people but as far as our reach and traction, then I guess you would say we are pretty large.

What do you feel about Twitter. What might be its future?

Unfortunately I don’t have a crystal ball but Twitter’s future is bright and I look forward to seeing where it leads in the future.

How important do you think the numbers game in Twitter(I am talking about the follower count)? Do you think it matters?

Does the follower count really count…. now there’s a question that thousands have tried to answer. I think the most important thing with follower counts is that you follow people that you find interesting and people who find you interesting follow back. I don’t believe that any good can be had from following the whole of the twitter population and at some point you reach a personal maximum where the number of people you follow is so large that the stream of information is just too vast and varied that you miss interesting conversations and as such will end up following less to keep useful information flowing. As far as finding followers goes, be interesting, engaging and of value. If you are those three things you’ll get followers. You don’t need to be the most followed person in the world to have a large influence just a good strong network with links to other key influencers if you want to get a message spread far and wide.

Best practices at Twitter.

I’m assuming you mean when using twitter with this question:
Be honest, block spammers, don’t feed the trolls (those people deliberately out for an argument), be careful about telling people your location when you’re out and about, think about personal online safety (don’t publish your address details, bank details etc!), be reasonable, engage, inspire and enjoy!

Worst practices at Twitter.

Advertising, spamming, explicit images, rss to twitter only, excessive tweeting, uninteresting or irrelevant content,

Finally, how ofter do you re-tweet, at least when you see the TweetMeme button on a blog/website, which is interesting?

I re-tweet anything I think is useful to my readers when I see it, be that through the tweetmeme button or copy and paste. I don’t re-tweet excessively url’s as my users like conversation as well as links. Links without conversation are largely irrelevant. It’s all about meaningful, relevant and reliable conversation!

Thanks to Sarah Blow,
Community Manager
TweetMeme.com. For being so generous to agree for an interview with us. You can follow TweetMeme with these links:
http://tweetmeme.com
http://blog.tweetmeme.com
http://twitter.com/talktweetmeme
http://twitter.com/girlygeekdom

Thanks for reading. And I hope you can see a TweetMeme button below this article. Use the button to share about this interview with your friends, if you find it interesting.