This is going to be a little technical, but it shouldn’t be too bad. You can follow me on Twitter as @WISELEO.

By the end of this post, you will accomplish the following:

1. Watch flash content on one monitor full screen while work or tweet on another
2. Watch foreign country video content without being told “You can’t see this”
3. Split your Firefox browser into multiple sub-browsers
4. Add custom routing table entries to keep your local Twitter access quick and direct

Here is a sample of what we are trying to achieve

Pretty cool, isn’t it? I got BBC iPlayer on one screen displaying Spa 2010 Grand Prix and Formula 1 live timing, TweetChat, and Twhirl on the other. By the way, I am in USA.

Full screen flash patch

There is this really interesting tool called Ignoflash and you can download it at http://deve.loping.net/projects/ignoflash/. It corrects one annoying “feature” of Adobe flash player. If you have two or more monitors and ever tried to watch a video full screen while working on another monitor, you discovered that Flash player exits full screen mode as soon as you click.

1. Download the tool
2. Unzip it and launch the tool (if you use Vista or Windows 7, please run it as Administrator)
3. Click the down arrow on the drop-down box above the big “Browse” button (ignore it, you’ll never find these files manually) and select the line containing NPSWF32.dll (NP is Netscape Plugin)
4. If you do not have that line, you need to install Adobe Flash player from Firefox.
5. Ensure that Firefox is not running by checking in Task Manager and ending the process if necessary
6. Ensure the radio button points to Netscape and not ActiveX
7. Select at least “Ignore focus changes” and click Apply.
8. It will probably say failed to patch 10.0 but success patching 10.1. That’s normal.
9. Your Firefox is now patched. Start it up, go to Youtube, and test full screen video.
10. Optionally, feel free to patch your Chrome and IE flash players as well. The .OCX file needs to be set to ActiveX, the rest are all patched as Netscape.

Watch foreign country video content (USA, UK, China etc)

I use a service http://usaip.eu which provides me with custom VPN. They have US IP addresses, UK IP addresses, China IP addresses and so on. I’ve been using them for 2 years now and the service absolutely rocks.

You can test it in 7 minute increments with a free demo account user/pass demo.

Once you verify it works in either or both L2TP or PPTP mode, buy an account. It’s about $9.63 per month. The account takes about 5 minutes to activate.

Follow their instructions, and you should be able to access BBC content now. I recommend connecting to UK 2.

You need to be running on VPN for the rest of these instructions.

Fox Splitter / Split Browser for Firefox

This is a lovely little extension. It allows you to split your browser window into multiple sub-windows. And even then there is a trick that took me a while to figure out. You will find it at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4287/

1. Install the extension
2. Restart Firefox
3. Open http://www.formula1.com/live_timing/live_timing_popup.html – register and login if necessary
4. Open another tab and open http://tweetchat.com/room/F1 – authenticate to Twitter to participate in #F1 chat
5. Right click on the and choose “Split to the left” – this is important as otherwise you’ll have “interesting” time trying to stack sub-frames properly on the left
6. Right click on the TweetChat tab and click New Tab
7. In the new tab, go to http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/motorsport/formula_one/default.stm – we’ll use this tab for the new real-time car position window.
8. Right-click on the BBC F1 tab and choose split to the left
9. Now, right-click BBC F1 tab that is now next to the timing tab and choose Split to above.
10. Choose whatever the link is that says “Live – ____ Grand Prix”
11. You now have F1 Live Timing at the bottom, F1 live video at the top, and TweetChat to the right
12. I also keep a Twitter client Twhirl underneath my Firefox window, but that’s up to you.
13. Click File -> New Window and drag the new window to your other monitor
14. Go to http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/motorsport/formula_one/default.stm and click the “Live – ____ Grand Prix” link
15. You might as well activate BBC One video full screen at this point and continue your setup on the other screen.
16. Choose the real-time driver position above living timing after the start and be sure to click mute on that feed.

Whew… That was a LOT of confusing clicking, wasn’t it? Imagine trying to figure it out the first time!

Final settings – custom routing table

Once you are up and running on VPN, every request goes through VPN, which can be ridiculously slow.

If you have XP, simply launch a command prompt

1. Click Start
2. Select Run
3. type CMD and click OK

If you have Vista or Windows 7, you will do some extra steps.

1. Click the start orb
2. In the “Search” portion of start menu, type CMD and wait a second
3. Right-click the CMD it finds and choose “Run as Administrator”
4. This will launch a command prompt with elevated privileges

What we want to do now is bypass VPN for our Twitter clients.

Let’s first find out what is our default gateway.

1. Go to our command prompt
2. Type “ROUTE PRINT” and press Enter
3. At the top you will see some entries similar to
   IPv4 Route Table
   ===========================================================================
   Active Routes:
   Network Destination        Netmask          Gateway       Interface  Metric
   0.0.0.0          0.0.0.0      192.168.1.1    192.168.1.136   4250
   0.0.0.0          0.0.0.0         On-link     172.31.46.181     26
4. See the 192.168.1.1 value after the first set of a couple sets of quad zeroes? Whatever that number is in your case should be what you use in the following commands. 192.168.1.1 or 192.168.0.1 are very common.
5. The following IP addresses correspond to various Twitter-related services so just run them as is.
6. What you want to see in response to entering your commands is “OK!” or something similar.
   C:\Windows\system32>route add 168.143.162.0 mask 255.255.255.0 192.168.1.1
   OK!
7. Simply type these commands very carefully and press Enter to activate the new routes
8. route add 168.143.162.0 mask 255.255.255.0 192.168.1.1
9. route add 70.86.182.0 mask 255.255.255.0 192.168.1.1
10. route add 128.121.0.0 mask 255.255.0.0 192.168.1.1

This configures your computer to use Twitter outside VPN so it’s going to be much faster.

Speaking of configuring TweetChat

1. After you login to http://tweetchat.com/room/F1 with your Twitter credentials, it becomes a fairly full-featured Twitter client
2. It automatically appends #F1 to the end of your tweets
3. Click refresh rate and set it to 5 sec
4. Click “toggle font” to fit more tweets on your screen
5. Reload the frame if it becomes too slow

Summary

I hope you enjoyed this article. Formula 1 is streamed without commercials online. You also have full access to all BBC content, such as the iPlayer.  After the race you can also watch the BBC Forum (Red Button) by simply waiting a few minutes after the race stream finishes.

If you are using VPN for security so your data can’t be intercepted while you are at an unsecured Wifi location such as Starbucks, please do not enter these route add commands to ensure that the entirety of your session is encrypted.

Let me show you what I mean.

• Facebook Social Plugin is used on over 100,000 websites
• Facebook already has the “Only Me” option, but unless you look for it very hard, you will not find it

All I want Facebook to do is to add the “Only Me” option as a one-click button to instantly secure your account.

Most users don’t realize how much Facebook shares by default.  As the service continues to envelop the globe, it’s becoming a de-facto database potentially containing every human on Earth.

I don’t think I am out of line when I suggest that some of them might want to keep their privacy and have the option to share data sporadically.

To that extent, I posted a comment on Techcrunch http://tcrn.ch/bhrw4T and got attacked for being ridiculous to apply a “secure by default” concept to social media.

However, I happen to own a startup that is acutely focused on security. One of the problems we solve is data disclosure. Thus, I am aware of what happens when wrong data becomes published.

Sooner or later, a high profile case will highlight this point.

A simple example could be this.

You apply for a job. You don’t want to show up on their radar screens, so you lock down your social media accounts. You are hired, and you unlock them.

Another example could be getting your parents on Facebook.

They don’t know how far-reaching it is. So setup a sandbox for them until they are ready to figure out how to adjust privacy settings.

Facebook should offer the option of “Only Me” as one of its default options. “Friends Only” is not enough. We make “friends” in social games who might not necessarily be very friendly.

I have about 400 friends on my Facebook account. Out of them, only 12 are in my “Real Friends” list. The rest are casual contacts. They shouldn’t see a lot of data my real friends are entitle to access.

Leonid S. Knyshov (@wiseleo) writes about social media and other topics of interest on http://Knyshov.com

If you liked this article, why not Tweet about it now (opens in a new window with a pre-filled re-tweet)

Please tell me how I can improve this article in comments and by Twitter.

Licensed under Creative Commons Content License: BY-ND

What happens to the business cards we get at networking events?

Admit it, most of us barely stay in touch after we meet at such events. Now that Twitter is fast becoming a mainstream communications tool, it is likely that the person whom you just met already has an account. It may not be an active account and she may be wondering what the big deal is, but none of that is important.

Add that person on Twitter while you are talking to her

• If you don’t have a mobile Twitter client, you can send a txt message to Twitter, assuming that your phone is SMS enabled for Twitter with “follow HERNAME” to 40404.
• If you have a Twitter client, just add the person as you normally would.
• Look up her bio while you are at it.

If she’s not on Twitter and curious, you can sign her up for Twitter from her cell phone

• She simply needs to send “follow YOURNAME” to 40404
• Twitter will respond by asking her to enter her desired username.
• She will reply to that SMS, hopefully the name is not taken. Remember to tell her that she can change her Twitter username at any time, so it’s not important what it is initially.
• Your contact will now have a mobile-only Twitter account and will begin to receive your updates via SMS.
• If you are a high volume Twitter user, be sure to tell her how to discontinue receiving your updates on her cell phone (I wouldn’t want to follow me via SMS!)
• Your contact can complete the signup process via Twitter website at http://twitter.com/account/complete
  
• By the way, this SMS signup process will probably be the coolest thing anyone has shown her so you’ll have bonus attention points
• Your new contact will now also remember you as a trusted Twitter expert. Experts get more referrals.

By connecting to your contact via Twitter, your connection will be stronger and you will avoid:

• Writing a “Hi, we met at such and such party” e-mail
• Getting bounced or silently caught by her e-mail spam blocker
• Having to come up with reasons to write to contacts who fell out of touch
• The torture of writing e-mail newsletters. Face it, they are painful and incredibly time-consuming, and worse yet rarely read.

Which do you think is more valuable – a list of 10,000 business contacts from stale business cards, or 1,000 mutual connections?

• I think the 1,000 people who know you well on a daily basis are far more likely to do business with you.
• By adding value to the network, you will continually show up on their radar screens as the expert in your field.
• When someone needs help within your area of expertise, it is likely that you will be contacted first, regardless of your price.

If you have those 10,000 stale business cards, run them through a business card scanner today. Now you can re-connect without:

• Writing the awkward “Hi, we haven’t talked in a while” e-mails that smack of desperation
• Writing a memoir of what happened since your last connection
• Having to explain how you met in the first place
• Having them think about whether they want to reconnect to you

If you are like me, you scanned those cards into Outlook and there is no way to directly import contacts into Twitter from Outlook. Workaround:

• Create a new empty Gmail account or you can use your existing account
• Go to your Outlook
• Click Contacts
• Click File -> Import/Export
• Click Export to a file
• Click Comma Separated Values (Windows)
• Choose the right Contacts folder
• Save the file where you will find it
• Go to Gmail
• Click Contacts
• Choose Import
• Complete the import procedure
• Go back to http://twitter.com/invitations_find_on_other_networks
• Choose G-mail
• Let Twitter find out who among your contacts is already on Twitter

You won’t reconnect with everyone, but a significant portion of your contacts will be in the system and that number will continue to rise.

• Re-run the process every week to find newcomers
• You will make an even stronger impression if you are one of the first Twitter users to follow them
• If your Twitter stream is valuable, most will follow you back
• Some may even  remember you and reach out to you
• You will have many easy opportunities to reconnect via @replies method if you can can add value to the other person

Remember, these are TARGETED followers. You already made a great impression on them once since you have their card. Once they remember who you were when they first met you, they are even more likely to buy from you.

Bonus side effect: your overall followers number will skyrocket!

About the author

Leonid S. Knyshov (@wiseleo) writes about social media and other topics of interest on http://Knyshov.com

If you liked this article, why not Tweet about it now (opens in a new window with a pre-filled re-tweet)

Please tell me how I can improve this article in comments and by Twitter.

Licensed under Creative Commons Content License: BY-ND

TweetDeck fits only 9 messages per screen, for example

The mobile device clients can handle maybe 7 messages or maybe even fewer. PockeTwit is 4 messages, Twikini is 5 messages.  If you continually fill that space with filler content or with multi-tweet dumps, you will be unfollowed.

Solving the TwitterFeed problem

While TwitterFeed by itself is a great service, by default it is was setup to be very invasive. It dumps 5 messages at a time. I submitted a suggestion to change that default setting. You are welcome to add your voice and make this portion of the article obsolete.

Note: Mario has implemented this change

Remember that we have very limited screen space to read your messages. Unless your content is so astonishingly good as to take up half of my screen, please don’t monopolize it. By the way, no content from an automated feed is that good.

I know that 5 messages per hour doesn’t sound like much. I follow 700+ people simultaneously and will probably be following thousands soon. Even 10 people with such a misconfigured account can substantially spoil my experience.

Your followers are more likely to read your message if it does not seem automated

Whenever I decide whether to follow someone, I have to evaluate whether they will take over my screen. If I see posts “via twitterfeed”, I have to pay special attention to the potential volume.

Whenever I am reading my Twitter stream, I tend to ignore posts posted in blocks. My brain tunes them out as automated, thus less likely to be interesting.

As is always in computing, the solution tends to require one click. Knowing what to click is the tricky part. I charge an awful lot of money to fix Microsoft Exchange servers with a few of those hidden clicks.

For Twitterfeed, we simply need to reset the “Post up to” setting to something more reasonable. 1 per 30 minutes is better than 2 at a time once per hour. Why is that? If your message is sufficiently compelling, I will probably look through your 20 most recent updates anyway. Twhirl lets me do that with a single click. You are more likely to catch my attention if you post twice per hour rather than once per hour.

Please try this and you’ll likely see that you will gain more followers and garner recommendations.

Quotes overload

I don’t know whose bright idea it was to program a bunch of quotes into software like Tweet Later and Easy Tweets.

Look at it from my position – I follow literally thousands of users. There is no way I can keep up with everyone if everyone tweets at the same time.

Regardless of how thought-provoking your quote stream might be, it ultimately delivers zero value to me. What do we do with those twitizens who provide us with zero value? If you guessed unfollow, you were right!

It is common knowledge in direct marketing world that your brand needs to be in front of your customer’s eyes. That’s why we create our newsletters and try to keep them sent out at least once per month. On Twitter, your last 20 posts are a click away.

If all I see from you is quotes, I assume you have zero value to provide to me. Quotes fill up my screen. Regardless of whatever information you may have for me that is useful, I have to manage my information overload. Just try following a few hundred internet marketers and see how long it will take before you start looking for the unfollow feature.

If you must use lots of quotes for whatever misguided reason, give me an easy way to filter them out. For example, use the ~ character or #quote. I can filter on -~ and -#quote and call it a day.

In summary, if I want to see quotes, I’ll buy a quote book

• I am more likely to look at what you have to offer if you tweet less.
• Twitter marketing is about writing great headlines.
• Ignoring my advice costs you money and loyal followers.

Let me show you an example of someone who really understands how to market on Twitter

This person is so good, he wound up on my #FollowFriday list even though that person never interacts with Twitter. Are you intrigued?

Meet @TeddyShabba. He has a dating advice website, which is one of my niches. Not all content on that site is even his. One reason I follow him is to study his various headlines.

The headlines are designed for high CTR. He also posts quotes, unfortunately, but they are intermixed with lots of action statement headlines. Unlike most, he does not overpost. You will notice that the posts are very infrequent and spaced out.

Even though the updates say “from web”, in reality they are from an automated tool.

That automated account has 51000 followers

Be a good Twitizen – help us manage the information overload.

• Don’t dump information on us screenful at a time.
• Don’t make us drown in your choice of quotes.
• Don’t make us unfollow you.

About the author

Leonid S. Knyshov (@wiseleo) writes about social media and other topics of interest on http://Knyshov.com

If you liked this article, why not Tweet about it now (opens in a new window with a pre-filled re-tweet)

If you were especially paying attention, you also noticed that I sometimes replace the Tinyurl and is.gd links with bit.ly links when I re-tweet someone’s interesting thoughts and links. I also use #hashtags extensively when I either produce or re-tweet content.

In fact, every single link in this article is a bit.ly link.

Click to Re-Tweet about this article to your friends

Why would I go through all this trouble?

Because most URL shortening services do not feature analytics, such as the venerable Tinyurl (by my friend @Unigilby) and other newer services, I do not interfere with a link originator’s analytics when I replace them with a trackable bit.ly link. In fact, due to a very nifty feature that appears to be unique to bit.ly, I actually help the link originator by providing her with the option to view analytics of what happens to her shared content after I share it with my network of followers.

Bit.ly (@bitly) is not the only platform that permits me to track Twitter content. I am also aware of ow.ly (part of @Hootsuite), @burnurl (@mashable’s @adamostrow Adam Ostrow), @budurl, @Tweetburner, and I am sure there are other similar technologies.

As this article is about tracking and monetizing viral distribution of content, I did not write it for beginners. Please read my other Twitter articles for a gentle introduction to Twitter and why it is so useful.

I chose to use Bit.ly because it doesn’t interfere with URLs and is fully transparent to the user. The same can’t be said about BurnUrl, and Ow.ly.

Twitter is an ideal platform for viral content distribution

Let me first define “viral”

In my view, viral distribution occurs when initial content is deemed sufficiently valuable that it gets redistributed without my continued participation. There are many well-known mega-viral hits, such as the Susan Boyle phenomenon, but many of us would also be very pleased with an extra few hundred or a few thousand new highly targeted and keenly interested visitors to our website. Getting that traffic continuously without doing any work is even better, right?

I think this article carries enough value, even though it is very long and text-heavy, that other marketers will want to re-distribute it further.

What is re-tweeting

“Re-tweeting” with E-mail

In the old days, I wrote a newsletter, sent it to your e-mail account, prayed that you will receive it and actually open it, you read it, hopefully liked it, and then forwarded it to your business associates by manually choosing their names from your address book. Optionally, you had a distribution list setup to which you could easily forward interesting e-mail messages.

Twitter version

I wrote an article, tweeted it with a short URL, you read it, liked it, and with a single click re-tweeted it to your entire network of followers. As a reminder, in order to follow you they don’t need to get your approval.

The message you saw related to this message is “Create, Track & Monetize VIRAL marketing content on Twitter http://bit.ly/xPvT7 #bitly #webanalytics #viralmarketing”

Woah, what just happened?!

You clicked one button, and all of a sudden everyone who follows you sees the message. Not only that, because you sent that message, it carries your authoritative endorsement that you found that content and its sender to be sufficiently valuable as to re-distribute it to potentially the entire world.

As of this writing, I have over 600 followers. Some of my followers have literally tens of thousands of followers and substantial influence. Within minutes, my message, if it is sufficiently compelling, can achieve viral scale of distribution.

There is more to it, however, it does not have to happen immediately. Because I use techniques that I am sharing with you today, the information does not have to go viral immediately. The snowball effect may take time and may require multiple re-starts.

People who re-tweet you are extremely likely to also start following you. I personally have retweeted someone’s interesting link more than once when I saw sufficient value and it came up again in my Twitter stream.

One last thing about re-tweeting

A re-tweet should never start with an @. It can start with anything but @. If you do start a re-tweet with an @, the only people who will see that re-tweet are those who are also following that person. That dramatically reduces the impact of a re-tweet to almost zero. It does not make it zero, but it won’t help the author as much as adding “RT” in the beginning of the message would. The only added value to that tweet will be your reputation and the time shifting effect, which may trigger additional re-tweets. You can solve this dilemma for new users with a one-click Retweet link in your content as I will explain later.

In fact, if you liked this article, why not Tweet about it now (opens in a new window with a pre-filled re-tweet)

There are six main vectors for viral distribution within Twitter itself

Direct

I wrote the tweet “Create, Track & Monetize VIRAL marketing content on Twitter http://bit.ly/xPvT7 #bitly #webanalytics #viralmarketing” to promote this article. Let us suppose that only one of my hundreds of followers likes it and re-tweets it. In my case, I need to limit my tweets to 127 characters to facilitate re-tweets (“RT @wiseleo: “is 13 chars, and don’t forget the space although you can drop the colon after RT @username:). We want to make this as painless as possible for the re-tweeter. This primary vector is most effective if you have a substantial audience of engaged followers who would be interested in this content. You only need one re-tweet to start the chain reaction, but more re-tweets will give your message better opportunity to infect the networks.

If you want to really have some fun with this, after you post your general tweet, also @ a few selected users to whom your message is highly relevant with a shoutout. If someone inspired you to write an article, for example, they will probably be thrilled to receive it. Ask your Twitter friends to specifically help you get the word out. If it’s news-worthy, include a few bloggers and journalists. Think of your tweet as a nano press-release. Be very selective as you really want to trigger a natural viral wave without being perceived as a spammer.

Don’t do this “Check this out an awesome article http://example.com @aplusk @oprah @guykawasaki @scobleizer @tweetmeme #RandomCurrentTrendingTopic” – you get the point.

Indirect search

I wrote something, someone searches for those words and re-tweets it. If you include interesting keywords as part of your tweet, chances are it will show up in the search results. Twitter has a real-time search platform that works quite well. It is used not only by the website, but also by various advanced Twitter clients such as TweetDeck, Twhirl, Seesmic Desktop, and others.

A re-tweet will bring a copy of your original message back to the top.

Hashtags search

I wrote something, tagged it with descriptive #hashtags, someone follows or searches for that hashtag and re-tweets it. This article is tagged with #bitly #webanalytics and #viralmarketing. I won’t rehash my article about hashtags, but I will mention that #bitly will have a first page of search results lifetime of about 30 days and #webanalytics will have a lifetime of 5 days. The hashtag #viralmarketing is also rarely used, so the article would probably remain easy to find for a very long time for those who know how to look for #viralmarketing. As a bonus, it will also be found for searches on #viral.

We only have 140 characters and in that space we have to place both hashtags and your viral hook. That is very tricky, but certainly doable. In this example, I still have 11 characters to spare. That is enough space for a double-retweet or for another hashtag. Shorter tweets are easier to read. They need to be keyword-saturated. In my case, the hook is that I explain how to create viral content and also monetize it.

Recent tweets of someone whom you just followed

When you decide to see if someone is worth following, you will usually click on them and see their last 20 tweets. It is possible that you will spot a tweet that someone has already re-tweeted and re-tweet it again.

This restarts the cycle of that particular message showing up in search streams and the hashtag search.

Trending topics

If you create a story that becomes so popular as to be a top-10 trending topic on Twitter, you will see massive distribution. If your content adds value to an already trending topic, you are looking at a massive viral opportunity as it will probably be instantly re-tweeted. You do not need to create a trending topic to reap its effect.

Do not attach a hashtag of a trending topic to an irrelevant article! It will scroll off the screen quickly and show up as evidence when someone happens to find your tweet in the search results. You wouldn’t want to do business with a spammer, so don’t be one.

Automated re-tweet bots

I didn’t even realize this vector existed until I tripped one of them with this article.

So, this is a special shoutout to @smmguide for re-tweeting this article automatically whenever someone re-tweets it. If you follow the #smm hashtag, you’ll see that this bot will re-tweet me.

I will research and figure out other re-tweet bots.

Go ahead and try it

Tweet about it

Additionally, there are auxiliary vectors for viral distribution

Synchronization

Some of us use Twitter -> Facebook and Twitter -> Friendfeed and other multiple social networks status managers.

As that content hits 3-rd party sites, it shows up in various forms. Because the Bit.ly URL remains intact, I can continue to track the distribution of my content long after it leaves the Twitterverse.

Internal viral distribution in third-party services

What I post on my Twitter stream also winds up as my Facebook status and my Yahoo Messenger status. Facebook is legendary for its viral distribution vectors. If you start the viral distribution on Twitter, you will likely hit a lot more Facebook accounts in the first wave than if you started it on Facebook. Instead of hoping that just your friends will like what you wrote or that a group wall post will gain traction, you will now have multiple points of entry into the Facebook ecosystem.

As your tweet continues to trigger waves through additional vectors, it will continue to have a ripple effect on Facebook.

Search engines

This one is simple and yet vital. A visitor stumbles onto your website from Google, Yahoo, Live Search, Ask and hits the re-tweet button. The cycle begins anew.

If you are distributing a video

You may also trigger a multi-wave viral effect on Youtube if the content you wish to spread happens to be a Youtube video. Both Twitter -> Youtube and Twitter -> Facebook -> Youtube vectors will trigger substantially powerful waves of their own, especially considering that Youtube has its own viral distribution features to send your video back to Facebook or Twitter. Note, however, that hashtags and other portions of your tweet may get lost at this point.

The role of Twhirl and Bit.ly

Bit.ly has a very nifty feature – if you create an account at Bit.ly, you can get an API key. Any link shortened with that API key gets attached to your username. If you guessed that my page is wiseleo.bit.ly, you are right! Every link I shorten becomes available to me for additional analysis.

You may not know this, but if you take any Bit.ly URL and add a + to the end of it, you will be able to view that link’s click analytics. It currently does not matter whether that link is yours and enables very interesting scenarios as I explain further. This article’s URL is http://bit.ly/xPvT7 and so its info page is http://bit.ly/xPvT7+.

Twhirl is my favorite Twitter client for many reasons. One of them is the ability to use the Bit.ly API key to not only shorten the URLs but also enable individual tracking on my custom dashboard on wiseleo.bit.ly. When I tweet, I simply get whatever the expanded URL is, shrink it with Twhirl, and I am done. I never have to bother with bookmarklets or going to the actual Bit.ly site.

Aggregate analytics in Bit.ly

This to me is a killer feature and I haven’t found any other service that offers it. Even though your original tweet was opened and then re-tweeted by someone with a different URL shortening service, if someone else shrinks that URL once again with Bit.ly, you will once again have tracking for your URL. Even more interestingly, you can track the stats of your competitors, if they choose to be as transparent about it.

Considering the popularity of Bit.ly, that is a very likely scenario. In fact, you may actually see who liked your content enough to do you a favor and re-shrink it with Bit.ly. It will associate the user’s name with the new Bit.ly URL.

Accuracy of Bit.ly analytics.

In my experience, there are too many factors that can throw off the accuracy of this service. Specially, services that expand shortened URLs may create false clicks. However, let’s look at the big picture. If you are promoting your own content, you likely already have your own analytics system that is far more accurate than any 3rd party tool anyway. If you are tracking 3-rd party clicks, there isn’t much else you can do.

Bit.ly accuracy does not really matter

What we want to know is where are we in the current wave. Do we need to re-start the process from the beginning? Are we still being actively re-tweeted? Don’t be alarmed if your bit.ly analytics do not precisely match your access_log results. A HEAD request instead of a GET request, which is a common scenario when expanding compressed URLs, can create such discrepancies.

We are looking at general trends and those will be fairly obvious.

Triggering additional waves

You probably noticed that I said with certainty how long a particular tweet will remain searchable. This is relatively simple to find out. Simply run a search for your selected hashtag on search.twitter.com and notice the age of the oldest tweet. Your tweet will probably have a similar lifespan on the first page of search results.

You can attempt to re-trigger a wave after a tweet rolls off the page. If you choose your hashtags wisely, it should not be necessary. Nevertheless, it can be an interesting experiment. I don’t recommend re-tweeting the same link more than once every 20 tweets.  Normal Twitter usage for most of us will make that a non-issue, but it would look tacky if the same message appeared several times in your recent tweets.

Monetization!

I don’t know about you and how altruistic you may be, but everything I write and create is designed to eventually be monetized. I can monetize just about everything, whether it would be directly or indirectly. Directly – you will buy something that I sell on one of my websites. Indirectly – you will follow me on Twitter, refer me to your friends, subscribe to my mailing list, invite me to speak to your group, buy one of my cross-promoted products – in short agree to be marketed to by me in the future.

Monetizing high traffic articles

Monetizing text is text-book simple – add some adsense or higher paying ads, wrap it into an ebook, turn it into a seminar, add interstitial ads, and there are many other possibilities. Ordinarily, having Adsense ads on a little-visited blog is pointless. In fact, I removed ads from one of my websites last night because the traffic was insufficient to bother with them. If, however, what you wrote goes massively viral, it may actually make sense to revisit that page and add monetization features.

You will make a lot more money if you can figure out how to convert your readers into buyers of your products or services rather than serving them third-party ads.

At the very least, you would want to add some related articles. If you have a seminar that expands on this topic, add the “Register now” button in the post. If  you have an e-book, link to buy it with one click. Once your content goes viral, you should definitely monetize it while it’s red-hot.

Be sure not to forget to add a re-tweet button with your desired message in the body of your text.

Monetizing high traffic videos

If you are promoting video content that you wish to monetize, you may want to use a premium video distribution platform, such as Ooyala (@ooyala). It’s hard enough to produce viral video content. I humbly propose that you should be paid for it! If there is anyone in the audience who disagrees with my proposal, you are welcome to leave now.

Did you know that no one (neither Youtube nor ITV, principal parties to benefit from this) made a single cent from Susan Boyle’s sensational video on Youtube for at least the first 100,000,000 views? In fact, there are still no ads on that or any of her videos! They couldn’t agree how to split the money, so they got none of it.

With Youtube, your only option to monetize is to link elsewhere from the more info box.

About the author

Leonid S. Knyshov (@wiseleo) writes about social media and other topics of interest on http://Knyshov.com

If you liked this article, why not Tweet about it now (opens in a new window with a pre-filled re-tweet)

Licensed under Creative Commons Content License: BY-ND

Embedded analytics!

What are hashtags

Hashtags are words on Twitter prefixed with the # character. Just as @ has a special meaning, so does #. I can write “I like to listen to music”. That will show up a Twitter search if I look for music. I can also write “I like to listen to #music”. This will show up only for a search for #music.

We use #hashtags to tag specific bits of information on Twitter to make it easier to find. For example, I like to post pre-sale password information about upcoming concerts. Others like to talk about #fashion #business and everyone’s favorite #makingmoney

Tools of the trade

Working with Hashtags will take more effort than using Twitter in general. First of all, it is actually a mistake to attempt to use your Twitter client to attempt to keep up with a very high volume hashtag.

Twitter limits its users, except for white-listed applications, to only 100 API requests per hour. Ordinarily, that’s enough for near-realtime interaction. That is absolutely not even remotely enough for real-time interaction with hundreds of people.

You can’t use two Twitter applications connected to the same account simultaneously. If, for example, you want to try using Seesmic desktop to follow a hashtag, and Twhirl to post updates, you will probably run out of API requests, which will result in a pause of your updates.

This brings us to white-listed applications. You can use Twitter Search, Twitterfall, Twitter Monitter and other similar solutions without incurring API “cost”. Warning: this can be overwhelming!

Twitter Search is a manual tool and is usually the first exposure to hashtag searches for most users. Clicking a hashtag in Twhirl, for example, will bring up search.twitter.com for that hashtag in a web browser.

TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop allow us to setup casual search columns. I use the word “casual” here because those columns will not be complete in case of high volume of traffic due to API limitations.

Twitterfall and Twitter Monitter are more interesting.

Out of the two, Twitter Monitter lets you re-tweet using standard Twitter interface, while Twitterfall is more integrated and uses direct Twitter API to post your updates.

Of course, as my luck would have it during writing this article, Monitter’s re-tweeting is broken, and Twitter’s oAuth mechanism is also broken, which disables interactive tools with TwitterFall. Fun!

For most fun, set Twitterfall to 10 tweets per second on a very high resolution monitor in portrait mode!

Let’s look at several scenarios

Sporting events

I recently participated in a live tweet event of Formula 1. As I was watching Formula 1 Chinese Grandprix live, I setup a hashtag column in my Seesmic Desktop.

In case of Formula 1, we probably had at least several dozen if not more people participating in talking about the race live. This turned Twitter into one giant global sports bar.

We did not know each other, but we were all following one hashtag #f1.

This is what this hashtag looks like today.

This is what it looked like during the race. This particular excerpt is just after Red Bull’s historic 1-2 victory.

11 updates via web interface vs. 8 updates via Seesmic Desktop interface

Breaking news

When news breaks, such as election irregularities in South Africa right this second, they will usually have a hashtag associated with them.

At this moment, that’s #saelections

People can follow and contribute to the story as it develops

12 updates via web interface and I could probably improve on that by turning off avatars.

Conferences

#adtechsf20 was the hashtag for the Adtech conference in San Francisco. Attendees can tag the content and events related to that conference with this hashtag. This is really the same concept as popular topics, so I’ll skip its screenshots.

Popular topics – let’s make money with hashtags

As a marketer, you probably couldn’t care less about any of the items above. How can you use hashtags to make money?

• If you wish to target people who are into fashion, tag your update with #fashion
• If you wish to target people into making money, tag your update with #makingmoney
• Anyone who searches for that particular hashtag as a result of clicking on some update will also see your message.
• If your tweet is sufficiently high value, they will probably follow you.

In this example, I am illustrating how I use #presale to tag my ticket password tweets. You will notice that this is not a very high volume hash tag. That means my information remains searchable and highly visible for days instead of minutes or seconds. If you are a niche marketer, I am sure you can appreciate the potential of using highly specific hashtags to generate this kind of search results.

Please do not inject improperly tagged information into Twitter stream

• As a marketer in social media, you want to engage with your audience
• Upsetting us is unlikely to result in a high value engagement
• It is far more productive to have us follow you out of interest rather than deception

Friends mentioned in this article

• @TheIceStorm
• @TPEntrepreneur
• @TDBeadles

Written in part in response to

• @singlegirlie
• @juice_digital
• @ooyala

About the author

Leonid S. Knyshov (@wiseleo) writes about social media and other topics of interest on http://Knyshov.com

If you liked this article, why not Tweet about it (opens a new window with a pre-filled re-tweet)

Licensed under Creative Commons Content License: BY-ND

This is an interesting question because I see some of my friends who should be separating their Twitter accounts and others who should be combining their accounts.

Most articles I read about Twitter tend to suggest that I should use a single account for everything. I am not sure I entirely agree with that.

You may want to have multiple personalities for several reasons

You are a musician, and your band’s name is known more than you are personally

For example, let us look at @Sevendust – I have not seen them in ages, I have no idea what the lead singer’s name might be, but I know his band’s name and surely enough is has a Twitter account.

You operate or represent a business, and your business name is more well-known than you are personally

One interesting example would be @Nascar – Nascar is not yet on Twitter as an organization as of this writing, but someone took the opportunity to assume that name and to provide Nascar fans with real-time updates. I do not necessarily need to know his name if I only care about Nascar updates.

You are a writer for a well-known publication

I recently helped a friend to start a dedicated Twitter account for her writings for San Francisco Examiner. I let her post the articles as she always does and took care of writing high CTR teasers in Twitter. CTR is an industry term for “click-through rate”. She’s @SFIndieMusic, if you are curious. Because the focus is on music lovers, rather than solely Examiner readers, the word Examiner is not a part of her username. She is identified as such in her bio.

You will note that her name combines multiple common search terms. Everything on Twitter is about expressing the most information in fewest characters. At times, that means not even mentioning your own name in the bio line. I will go into further detail on writing effective Twitter bios in another article.

You have multiple distinctly different businesses or divisions

I operate a lot of web sites. They can be anything from marketing, to online dating, to product listings, to photography advice, to data recovery, and then there is also my meta-site that aggregates all that content into one giant mix.

So far, they are connected to my main @Wiseleo account, but I am quite a chatterbox. For those who would appreciate a cleaner news feed, I have dedicated accounts with some limited cross-promotion.

@Playboy magazine is doing it right – they have several distinct identities

• @Playboy is their primary brand
• @PlayboyU is their college life brand
• @RockTheRabbit is their music brand
• @PlayboyUK is their UK brand

And who knows what else they might be using. By using multiple identities, they allow their audience to subscribe to only the parts of most interest to them.
For instance, if I only care about notifications of new Model of the day, I will simply follow @Playboy. If I care about their music, I’ll follow @RockTheRabbit.

Twitter vs. The World at Large!

Twitter vs. LinkedIn bio

On LinkedIn, we must cram all that we do into one account because we can only have personal accounts. On Twitter, we can dedicate an account to each niche that we represent.

If your Twitter bio mentions multiple things that each could generate a discrete following, you are probably better off creating multiple Twitter profiles.

Compare my keyword optimized bio with my general bio

• On LinkedIn -Data recovery expert, social networks profiles writer, SEO expert, IT expert in general (14yr experience), Entrepreneur
• On @Wiseleo – World-class computer expert. Founder of Crashproof Solutions. Online dating expert.
• On @Hotprofiletips – Use online dating and social networking sites. Control top of the list and increase your appeal. Write effective headlines. Become attractive and irresistible!

In fact, I will be changing that @Wiseleo bio soon.

My LinkedIn bio suggests several distinctly different niches for which I am qualified to write. Due to limited space of even fewer characters, I didn’t mention many other talents, such as my ability to bring Exchange and SQL servers back from the dead when Microsoft gives up on them.

I think you will agree that once Google indexes my @Hotprofiletips (it has not yet as of this writing) I will be more likely to gain more readers

The bio line is exactly 160 characters. Although it is readable, it is heavily packed with premium keywords. Further, as Twitter’s people search engine improves, this will become increasingly more important. Could I write a better headline? Yes, but it is quite difficult with the 160 characters contstraint. However, remember that Google search results mix keywords in bio and and in updates. I may replace the “control top of the list” sentence with “Appear at top of search results list” and eliminate the fluff word of appeal. The current bio will rank highly for “irresistible dating profile tips” or something along those lines.

For now, you can run a Twitter bio people search by running a custom Google query such as “site:twitter.com Online dating expert”

Quick tip to make writing 160 char bios easier

Write it in a twitter client! It will continually count down the characters. Just be sure not to hit submit.

Twitter vs. Facebook Pages

Facebook Pages just got upgraded. While they are now somewhat similar to Twitter, as you can post status updates and they will show up in your followers’ news feeds, they are not quite as engaging. In order to overhear a conversation and reply to it, a Facebook follower needs to actively read that Page’s wall as only the status updates and other posts made by the Page’s owner will show up in his newsfeed. While it’s easy to “follow” a Facebook page, you can achieve substantially higher engagement with your audience through Twitter.

Twitter vs. RSS,XML,ATOM

Looking at my HotProfileTips site, I add content to it fairly infrequently. Subscribing to that RSS feed is relatively pointless because I don’t write often enough to remain on someone’s top 20 list of RSS feeds.

I personally follow about 60 websites through XML ATOM feeds daily, but I am a techie. With Twitter, my readers can follow that account and get updated eventually without having to configure any XML feed readers.

Twitter is slowly but surely replacing my XML feed reader because I get nearly real-time updates rather than delayed feed updates.

Keep it personal, but interesting

Every night I get a flood of tweets relating to someone’s sleep cycle. It doesn’t make your corporate Twitter account more personal.

When you follow over a hundred people, you learn to appreciate those who choose not to mention this subject or routine food updates.

Oh, and change the default icon, please.

Automatic vs. manual updates

The lazy way to tweet is to use something like TwitterFeed, which is OK, but if you adjust the tweets to be more enticing manually, which does not involve much effort, you are more likely to have your followers click through to the main article.

Managing multiple Twitter accounts

I use either Twhirl or TwitterFox. Both have ability to login to multiple accounts. Twhirl lets you be logged into multiple accounts simultaneously, while TwitterFox lets you switch between accounts with a single click.

You will likely gravitate toward Twhirl eventually.

There are also meta posting tools that will post to multiple accounts, but to me they are redundant. I am a big fan of Twhirl for that reason.

Effective cross-promotion of related accounts

While it may be tempting to give a brand account two or more meanings, that only serves to confuse the reader. A far more effective approach is to interject related tweets by using the re-tweet feature.
As an example, @Playboy would re-tweet a @RockTheRabbit announcement. This broadens the channel and builds related brand awareness.

Re-tweeting simply means that you would issue the update on the niche account, but also cross-post it on your main account. I operate a website for highly technical online dating advice. My visitors learn all the unsexy things like ideal photo dimensions, how to be at the top of their dream girl’s search results, and other related original research.

I posted this update to my @Hotprofiletips account with 1 follower

The importance of white space Time and time again I come across profiles that are genuinely painful to read. One of.. http://snurl.com/domqr

Original tweet: http://twitter.com/hotprofiletips/statuses/1317949092

I then posted this update to my main @Wiseleo account with 90+ followers

RT: @hotprofiletips: The importance of white space. Time and time again I come across profiles that are painful… http://snurl.com/domqr

Original tweet: http://twitter.com/wiseleo/statuses/1317960296

There are instances when you simply must separate accounts to avoid brand dilution

I have a friend who is the Twitter face of a major corporation, or so it appears. She should separate those identities at this point as the majority of those updates are not related to that corporation. There are a few other people whom I follow who have mostly personal updates on supposedly corporate accounts.To protect the not so innocent, I won’t mention those names.

Those personal updates are simply a waste of my time. Worse yet, it dilutes the brand in Twitter searches. As Twitter’s power as a real-time search engine continues to increase, you are more likely to gain followers by posting relevant information instead of useless filler updates.

Here is a simple test whether you need to separate your Twitter accounts

• Are the updates on your branded account primarily of personal nature?
• Would those updates be of interest solely to those who follow your brand and not you personally?
• Do you have multiple missions that you are attempting to address with a single account?

Ultimately, there is only one key question

If you were to send this content via a mailing list, would you use your own name or your company name in the “From:” line for the majority of your updates?

If you answered this question by saying “I would use my company name”, then those updates should be sent from a dedicated Twitter account.

About the author

Leonid S. Knyshov (@Wiseleo on Twitter) writes about business and marketing on http://www.knyshov.com

There are several ways to use Twitter to reach your audience

Use it as intended for “microblogging”

Every entry is at most 140 characters long. You can share your thoughts and anyone can read them. If someone likes your comments, she can choose to “follow” your updates.

To make things slightly more confusing, they can subscribe to an XML feed of your updates, but in practice that is rarely done.

Use it as to augment RSS, ATOM, and other XML feeds

Even as major browsers are continually improving the XML feed support (RSS is actually a trademark), most people are still not adopting this feature.

The old way to use the web for me was to bookmark a site, visit it daily or more often, and hope the site posted new information for my enjoyment.

As XML feed support improved in mainstream browsers, particularly with Internet Explorer 7, I added about 50 different websites into my XML feed reader. This allows me to quickly scan my preferred information sources for new updates.

Most people are still not using the XML feed functionality. Some use it with built-in browser features, others with a web-based XML feed reader such as My Yahoo, Google Reader, and so on.

While 140 characters may not sound like much, thanks to services such as TinyURL, it is possible to convey a lot of information in such a limited amount of space.

A power Twitter user will typically write a normal article and then broadcast a notification to his followers consisting of the top headline and a shortened URL.

These days, I am more likely to view new articles from links in my TwitterFox or Twhirl then from my XML reader.

Use it as a very public chat room

If I want to, I can have a public discussion with another twitter user using the @username syntax. Ordinarily, such people are hard to reach, but if my message is extremely compelling, it is the easiest way to break-through all barriers in real-time.

Note: if your message begins with @wiseleo, only your followers who already follow @wiseleo will see it. If you truly want everyone to see your conversation, start your message with “Hey @Wiseleo” or “RT @Wiseleo”. As long as the first character of your message is anything other than @, every follower will see what I wrote to that person.

Use it as an instant messaging platform with Direct Messages

Not everything should be public information. By prefacing my message with “d”, I can send it directly to another user. Because Direct Messages have a higher priority and can be delivered to your handheld device even though you don’t allow any other notifications to your handheld device, you can only send them to those who already follow you.

Become a power user with 3rd party Twitter clients

Twitter will not seem significant initially if you simply use the web interface. When you start using 3rd-party software applications such as Twhirl, TweetDeck, TwitterFox, and others like it, you will quickly realize why everyone is raving about it.

I also use Tweeter Facebook application (I prefer it to the “official” Twitter app) to synchronize my Twitter updates to my Facebook status updates and WackyB’s Yahoo! Messenger TwitterSync plugin to synchronize my Twitter updates to my Yahoo! Messenger status update. By the way, TwitterSync meows a lot… Disable sound and disable update notifications if you use other Twitter clients.

This permits me to post an update on Twitter once and have it disseminated through all of my social networking channels immediately without having to manually adjust each of them.

Viral marketing solution with re-tweeting

Let’s say you liked this article and you want to let your followers know about it. Many Twitter clients have a one-click feature to “retweet” a tweet from someone. This will expose your new post to that other person’s list of followers. As you can imagine, if you get someone like Guy Kawasaki with his thousands of followers interested in re-tweeting your post, you would be quite swamped with traffic in an instant.

Summary

Twitter is a nice platform for achieving maximum exposure for your information. Unlike allowing others to be in your Facebook or LinkedIn network, Twitter is a very light-weight tool when it comes to your privacy. If you already use your Facebook status updates to inform your friends and business associates, Twitter will allow you to do the same without allowing others to see the private information in your profile.

New Twitter users can follow and unfollow you at any time, with a single click. Try that with a traditional E-mail newsletter. Twitter users are far more likely to read what you have to say than they are to read your E-mail newsletters.

Follow people whose comments you may find interesting and some may in turn find your updates interesting as well.

Use a Twitter client to derive the most benefits. Stay engaged with your followers who comment on your articles via Twiter and more will follow.

You do not have to use your cell phone with Twitter. That is a misconception. You can choose to post updates and receive notifications from Twitter through your cell phone, but it’s entirely optional.

About the author

Leonid S. Knyshov (@wiseleo) writes about social media and other topics of interest on http://Knyshov.com

If you liked this article, why not Tweet about it (opens a new window with a pre-filled re-tweet)

Licensed under Creative Commons Content License: BY-ND