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InstaBG your Twitter feed

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Twitter is arguably one of the biggest and most successful social networking services on the planet. The ability to microblog, be heard by potentially millions of people and find out what other people are doing, thinking or sharing – whether they’re famous or not – is a winning combination.

If you’ve been a Twitter user chances are you don’t use any of the Twitter applications for the desktop PC, mobile devices or tablets. Majority of Twitter users still use the Twitter web site to access their accounts. Anyone who’s used Twitter online knows how drab the Twitter site is. It’s a very Spartan affair. It may reflect the Twitter philosophy of “less is more” but it would be cool to actually personalize your personal Twitter page. [Read more…]

Originally posted on December 14, 2011 @ 12:59 pm

5 Twitter Etiquettes You Should Care About

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For businesses that maintain twitter presence, there is an unspoken list of etiquettes that one must adhere to. These etiquettes arise out of a need to acknowledge your target audience and give respect to all those who interact with you using the medium of twitter. Some of these etiquettes are pretty simple and do not consume much time. Let us discuss these over the following points:

1. Acknowledge those followers who send a message to you. While there may be automated bots that could have been used to follow your account, there is a chance that many genuine followers will use a manual effort to follow your tweets. And these visitors and followers need to be acknowledged to offer them the respect they deserve.

2. If you run a business, then your twitter language must adhere to professional levels of excellence. You must try to avoid language that is mostly abbreviated.  The language being used must be clear, concise and crisp.  [Read more…]

Originally posted on October 10, 2011 @ 7:00 am

Car Theft Tweets?

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Surry Police are using everything at their disposal to combat car crimes, including the microblogging website Twitter. The English county believes the social media behemoth can be used to apprehend automobile thieves and vandals and prevent future offenses. It can also likely be used as a theft deterrent.

For a one-week period the police department will use Twitter to announce any car crime that comes into its contact center. By putting information in the hands of the public, the county hopes average citizens will take an active interest in cleaning up their streets.

Car theft

Car theft is one of the most common crimes reported to police in nearly every corner of the world. In the US alone, more than 1 million vehicles are stolen every year. This startling statistic doesn’t include minor car crimes like vandalism, which make up a significant amount of dispatcher calls. [Read more…]

Originally posted on September 27, 2011 @ 6:43 am

Once Upon a Time, StumbleUpon Beats Facebook In Generating Site Traffic

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We all know how formidable Facebook is,  as a social media site capable of generating traffic to websites and in terms of userbase as well. Next to Facebook, we always think of Twitter.  We never really thought about other sites, such as StumbleUpon perhaps? Now here’s an interesting statistics published by StatCounter covering the amount of traffic generated by social media sites that leads to website page views. The statistics cover Mar 2009 to Mar 2010. And guess what in 2009?  StumbleUpon use to bring more traffic to websites than Facebook does.

From March 2009 to July 2009, StumbleUpon was actually the number one social media sites that drives the most traffic to websites. Overall, from Mar 09 to Mar 10, StumbleUpon was second to Facebook in generating traffic to websites with 25% of social media hits, while Facebook had 48%. Twitter had 10% of social media hits.  The rest include – YouTube (6%), reddit (4%), Digg (2%) and MySpace (2%).

So, what’s the importance of these statistics? From a business perspective this only goes to show that social media sites could be a good tool for driving traffic to business sites. Hence, we now see more brands having their Facebook pages linked to their individual corporate websites.

Mr. Aodhan Cullen, CEO of Statcounter remarks:

“Social Media market share fluctuates a lot more than browser or search statistics. For example, Facebook peaked over Christmas and the New Year with almost three quarters of the total, perhaps reflecting its important role in communications between families and friends.”

In case you’re wondering StatCounter’s data was based on 13 billion page views across the globel StatCounter network of member sites.

So there, if your  company does not have a social media presence yet, you might want to start creating one on Facebook, especially now that there are many things happening with Facebook in terms of features and functionality.

Originally posted on April 22, 2010 @ 9:58 am

RIM Releases Twitter for BlackBerry App, and It Rocks!

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Update: Screenshots added plus link to the official Twitter Blog post announcing the BlackBerry App.

RIM has just released the Twitter for BlackBerry Mobile in beta. If your smartphone runs on BlackBerry OS version 4.5 or higher with at least 64MB of built-in memory, then you’re good to go. Grab the app from the BlackBerry App World, under the Test Center category. Well, of course you have to be a heavy Twitter

So, what should you expect from Twitter for BlackBerry app? Quite a lot of nice features which include the following:

  • Push notifications for Twitter DMs
  • Timeline support
  • View Following and Followers
  • Tweeting and Re-Tweeting
  • Send tweets to Facebook, Email, BlackBerry PIN, SMS, MMS and BBM
  • Keyword search
  • User search
  • Proximity search
  • Tweet Photos directly from the BlackBerry Picture folder
  • Trending topics – view a list of the top 10 trending topics in Twitter
  • Profile editing – edit your profile or change your profile pic
  • Seamleass integration into core BlackBerry apps such as Media, Browser, BlackBerry App World and Message list
  • URL Shortening – tweet or send DM of websites from teh browser using Bit.ly URL shortener

I told you, it’s quite a lot of features, right? It practically mimics what you can do on the Twitter.com. Even the layout is almost similar to the official Twitter layout – color, themes and all.

I downloaded the apps and installed it on my BlackBerry Bold 9700. One thing I can say is that this app gives  other third-party Twitter apps a good competition.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t have support for multiple Twitter accounts.  Hope this feature will be enabled in succeeding versions too.

Originally posted on April 9, 2010 @ 3:27 am