Social Networks

Sarah Worsham / Apr 15, 2009

What I Want in a Twitter Utility

Twitter has been a great way for us to connect with customers, partners, marketers, designers and lots of interesting people. We also use Twitter to provide information which we hope is useful to our followers. Much of this information is gathered via RSS feeds which is then sent automatically to Twitter every so often using Twitterfeed. As nice as Twitterfeed is, it still doesn’t have everything I need or want. I’ve also tried ping.fm, AllYourTweet, and HootSuite. While each has a particularly strength, none seems to offer exactly the combination that I’m looking for. Many utilities try to send to multiple social networks. Right now I have more control of how my content is seen in each place with RSS feeds.

Needs:

Send tweets from Multiple RSS – each with their own separate settings
Ability to choose how often and how many items from each feed
Send from feeds by either published date & time or the order of the feed
Send a title or a title & partial description
Automatically convert any links to short urls
Schedule specific tweets for future dates & times
Automatic follow/unfollow
Manual follow/unfollow
Tweet frequency of at least every 30 minutes

Wants:

Statistics on how many times each tweet url is clicked on – and by who
Suggest people I should be following (or unfollowing)
Set certain people to be followed even if they aren’t following me
Take multiple items from a feed from a certain date or what’s not been tweeted and dole them out every so often (instead of me having to add periodically to the feed myself)
If a whole feed could be taken by what’s not already been sent, tweet a post every 10 minutes or so instead of multiples at every 30m or every hour.

That’s all I could come up with off the top of my head. HootSuite seems to be closest, but I couldn’t get it work reliably with our Google Reader feed. Hopefully they’ll improve the service with time. Until then, I’m sticking with Twitterfeed.

Do you have other needs or wants to add to the list?

(photo by takomabibelot @ Flickr CC)

Technorati tags: twitter, social media, internet marketing, social media marketing, business, social networks, marketing

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Sarah Worsham / Apr 14, 2009

Selling (and Socializing) on Facebook

My article on Facebook for eCommerce sites – Selling (and Socializing) on Facebook – is up over at Practical eCommerce. I hope you find it interesting and useful.

But the real power is in what Facebook inherently offers – the ability to socialize and communicate directly with your customers Once customers become a fan, or join your group, you can send them messages, updates and news. Most importantly, you can see exactly who they are and can reach out to them to gather information about why they like your products and what can be improved. – Selling (and Socializing) on Facebook – Practical eCommerce

You can see the other articles I’ve written for Practical eCommerce here.

Sarah Worsham / Apr 7, 2009

All Your Tweet Belong To Us

All Your Tweet is a free service (currently in beta) that aims to aggregate various Twitter services into one place. Fairly basic functions such as follow, unfollow are offered, along with basic analytics (followers, friends, favorites, status updates) for multiple accounts. A web-based twitter client integrates all accounts into one dashboard, with URL shortening and tracking, and the ability to integrate RSS feeds into Tweets. Scheduling future tweets is also a really nice addition.

When I demoed All Your Tweet, the interface seemed a bit confusing with links at the top and Action links along the left. Some of the links are only available from the dashboard, which makes changing between “Actions” difficult. The web-based Twitter client is nice, but while it constantly updates times, it didn’t seem to always update tweets (those were in batches). So the time updates are a confusing illusion that it is actually constantly refreshing. Having analytics on the side was nice, but not something that was needed while tweeting. Most disappointing, I couldn’t get the RSS feed to work properly – although this may be due to recent problems with Twitter.

All Your Tweet has some really nice functions and I’d like to see them make the interface more robust and easy-to-use. It has the potential to be a pretty useful social marketing tool.

Have you tried All Your Tweet? What are your thoughts?

Technorati tags: all your tweet, social media, internet marketing, social media marketing, business, social networks, marketing

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