From the monthly archives:

July 2011

Tips for Doing Advanced Twitter Searches

July 31, 2011

One of my favorite uses of the ”near:” advanced search operator is to view tweets from an approximate country area. Here are a few: United States: Search for near:hutchinson within:1000mi Australia: Search for near:adelaide within:1500mi United Kingdom: Search for near:”barrow-in-furness” within:500km Beware using the language filter (e.g. lang:en for english, etc) because it misses a lot of tweets. Why? [...]

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Don’t Be Tricked Into Retweeting People Trying To Manipulate You

July 31, 2011

If you look at some people’s Twitter streams, you can see they complain about whatever hashtag everyone else is complaining about and ask for retweets. You can tell they don’t care about any particular issue at all. They’re  just trying to get retweets by using the hashtag. They claim to be “outraged” about something they [...]

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Will Google Plus be the world’s largest social network?

July 23, 2011

From my vantage point, I’m seeing engagement down quite a bit at Twitter, and up at Google Plus. And since the number of “active” users on Twitter currently approximately matches the number of new Google Plus users, Google Plus appears to only have to continue what it is already doing to succeed at becoming a social [...]

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Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus are about to start changing really, REALLY fast

July 21, 2011

When someone asks me how to compare these three networks, I always say we’ll know soon…but not yet. Each has given some indication that they have a lot of changes planned for the near future. But also, each is watching the other for ideas—and for things to protect themselves from. Here are a couple of [...]

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Is your follower a spammer…or a hijacked account?

July 21, 2011

If you think someone’s account has been hijacked, let them know! Tell them to change their account password and check for bad apps at http://j.mp/YourTwitterApps. (You can also just send them this tweet.) Of course, sometimes, you can’t tell. But you should usually check, because if your account was hijacked, wouldn’t you want someone to help [...]

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How to get your question answered on Twitter

July 20, 2011

1. Don’t use multiple tweets Don’t ask if you can ask, or split your question into multiple parts. Just write your question into a single tweet. Ideally, keep your question to under 140 characters. If you must go longer, use a service like TwitLonger. 2. Include a question mark “?” in your tweet. If you [...]

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Cheat Sheet For Comparing Twitter to Google+ and Facebook [infographic]

July 19, 2011

Two users have created great comparisons of Google Plus, Twitter and Facebook, in table and infographic forms. I’ll show the infographic first, and below that, the table. The infographic is by Stefano Epifani, who made this English version available from his (Italian-language) website here. Click to enlarge: Hutch Carpenter (VP of Product, Spigit) posted this great cheat sheet [...]

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How Twitter compares to Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube, eBay and Facebook [infographic]

July 19, 2011
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Two dozen great Twitter tips to live by

July 18, 2011

The two tweets I sent out about @DarrenRovell‘s “100 Twitter Rules To Live By” I felt didn’t reach enough people, so I’ve highlighted what I feel are two dozen of his most tweetable tips (and I’ve edited some slightly to make them shorter or more easily tweetable). If you like these, I suggest you read his [...]

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Misunderstanding Twitter, “The Semi-Colon of Social Media”

July 18, 2011

Quote in headline is from @JenniferLockett Why do so many people swear by Twitter, while other swear they will never try it because it doesn’t make sense? “In no other walk of life have people bashed something so fervently that they haven’t tried as Twitter.” – @DarrenRovell Years ago I came across an argument in a [...]

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