twitter

As I recently mentioned in my BlogWorld recap, I met Leo Widrich, one of the guys behind the Buffer App for Twitter sharing.

Now as many of you might know, I’m a huge fan of HootSuite for my Twitter management needs. For the longest time, I have heard people raving about Buffer, but I figured I didn’t need another app to schedule tweets since I could already schedule tweets in HootSuite.

What I didn’t realize is how much simpler Buffer really is. Let me demonstrate.

Before I begin, as a disclaimer, I didn’t get any freebies, payment, sponsorship, etc. from Buffer for writing this post. If you choose to use my referral URL to sign up for Buffer, I don’t get paid – I simply get extra Buffer scheduling space.

Tweet Scheduling in HootSuite

The simplest way to schedule tweets in HootSuite is by using the bookmarklet which you can find in your HootSuite dashboard when you hover over the Tools menu.

HootSuite Bookmarklet

Once you drag the Hootlet to your bookmarks bar on any browser, you can click on it while viewing a page you want to share. Then you’ll see a popup allowing you to choose the social profile to share it with along with the option to send the tweet now or schedule it for later using the calendar.

HootSuite Twitter Scheduling

If you need to remember what scheduled tweets you have in the system, you can go to your Publisher menu to see your scheduled tweets.

HootSuite Publisher

Now as you can see, I made an oops and scheduled two tweets to go out at the same time. To change that, edit the text, or reorganize the tweets, you have to edit them individually using the same scheduling calendar.

HootSuite Publisher - Editing Tweet Schedule

Tweet Scheduling in Buffer

Now, let’s take a look at the Buffer difference. When you setup your account, you start by entering your preferred tweeting schedule. I like to send my posts at five minutes after the hour. This means that my tweet will come across someone’s feed after all of the automated Twitterfeeds that usually happen right at the top of the hour.

Buffer Twitter Scheduling

For easy Buffer sharing, you can grab the Buffer bookmarklet for any browser’s bookmarks bar or install the browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. Then, when you’re reading an article you want to share, you click on the Buffer bookmarklet or button installed by the extension (I use the one for Chrome) and get the following scheduling popup.

Buffer Tweet Scheduling

Here you can select your preferred profiles to share the tweet with and edit it as you so choose. Then you can post now or add to Buffer. To see your pending tweets, you just go to your Buffer dashboard.

Buffer Pending Tweets

Since you set your preferred tweeting schedule, you can’t accidentally set two at the same time. To edit the text, simply click on the pencil to edit. If you do notice you want to rearrange, you can simply use the Drag to Reorder to move them around.

Buffer - Reorder Pending Tweets

Continue Buffer Review – My Favorite Time Saving Twitter Tool

Top 25 Blog Posts

Thanks to an idea from Michele McGraw on ways to prep your blog before an event, I decided to do two lists for newer readers as well as people I meet at Blog World Expo later this week.

This first list is a compilation of the top posts on Kikolani, as determined by PostRank‘s engagement analysis. Without further ado, here are the posts readers have engaged with the most.

Series

  • Fetching Friday
    Many great posts over the last year have been from my Fetching Friday series, where I compile the best posts of the week throughout the blogosphere on a variety of topics, including blogging, social media, SEO, personal development, and more.
  • Benefits of Blogging
    This five part series covers the benefits of blogging, including having a worldwide audience, building a community, strengthening your interests, learning Internet marketing skills, and becoming an authority in your niche.

Continue Top 25 Blogging and Social Media Posts on Kikolani

One of the things I have been hearing lately is that people are getting overwhelmed. Overwhelmed by following too many people on social networks or subscribing to too many blogs. And although they are inundated, they do not want to just get rid of everything and start from scratch. So how do you get what you really need and not suffer from information overload? Here are some simple ways to organize your sources of incoming information on social media, email, and blogs. I know some of these may sound like they are time intensive, but trust me, the extra time you spend setting up will be worth it for future use on these information avenues.

Twitter Lists

Twitter now allows you to add Twitter members to Twitter Lists, which helps you easily organize people you are interested in following by topic. Once you have created a few lists (or found good ones to follow on sites like Listorious, you can login to Twitter and go straight to your lists, or setup your TweetDeck, HootSuite, or other Twitter applications to show you the people you are following on those lists. This way, instead of having to spend a lot of time unfollowing people or starting up a whole new Twitter account, you can simply just see the people on your lists, bypassing the rest.

Other Twitter Cleanup Methods

  • Use Twitter Karma to take a glance at your followers all on one page. Sometimes it’s easy to spot bots over real people, or people that you don’t recognize. Since the mass unfollow no longer works, you have to open the Twitter profile in another tab / window to unfollow them.
  • Any time you realize you have seen a lot of uninteresting tweets from a particular user, take a moment to unfollow them.
  • If you’re a reciprocal auto-follower, use TweetDeck’s New Followers column to spot out bad followings from the beginning and unfollow those that don’t interest you.

Continue Getting Overwhelmed? Get Organized!

Twitter offers many ways of promoting your business, blog, or website with interested people in the Twittersphere. Before I get started on the various ways to promote yourself, remember that Twitter should not only be about self promotion. While there are many opportunities to promote your own agenda on Twitter, you have to keep a healthy balance between promoting yourself, responding to others who ask you questions, thanking Twitter users that help you out, and just sharing valuable information with your followers from other websites and blogs.

One thing to do to analyze your usage of Twitter is to simply take a look at your Twitter profile page, which shows your latest status updates. This is a page which potential followers will also be viewing prior to choosing to keep up with your updates, and it will let them know what kind of Twitter member you are. You don’t want people to see nothing but links to your site, advertisements, etc. – you will want people to see that you are contributing valuable information. A nice mixture would be as follows:

  • Status update sharing a promotional link.
  • Status update sharing a beneficial quote related to your niche.
  • Status update with an @reply to someone else.
  • Status update sharing a news article related to your niche (not yours).
  • Status update with an @reply to someone else.
  • Status update sharing a helpful article related to your niche (not yours).
  • Status update sharing a promotional link.

So, without further ado, here are some ways you can use Twitter for promotion, with some examples for businesses and bloggers / article writers.

Continue How to Promote Your Business, Blog or Website on Twitter

One of my commenters last week asked about the difference between social bookmarking and social networking sites. I think of social networking sites as ones where you can communicate directly with other members, where as social bookmarking sites are ones that you can add bookmarks to be shared with other members without as much direct communication.

There are sites that are definitely considered one or the other, but some sites offer both bookmarking and networking features. Here are some networks that can be used for both purposes.

Twitter

Favorite Tweets on Twitter
Favorite a Tweet on Twitter

Social Networking Features
Follow Twitter users
Status updates to all followers
Direct public messaging through @replies
Direct private messaging to users following you

Social Bookmarking Features
Save tweets in your Favorites to share with everyone

Most people think of Twitter as simply a social networking site. But one of the most popular things to share in the 140 character status updates are links to websites. If you have a lot of followers, chances are you have seen one or two tweets with links to articles that you would like to come back to later.

This is where Favorites comes into play. You can easily save tweets by clicking on the star. This will effectively bookmark the tweets in your Favorites section for later. I’m not sure if there is a limit to the number of tweets you can save in your favorites, but at the moment, I can access over a hundred favorite tweets from a year ago.

Continue Social Networking, Bookmarking, and Sharing