Sazbean

Software Development Management

Main navigation

You are here: Home / Archives for twitter

twitter

/

What I Want in a Twitter Utility

utilitytakmobabibelotTwitter 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: , , , , , ,

Liked this post? Consider subscribing to our RSS feed or our weekly newsletter.

/

All Your Tweet Belong To Us

allyourtweetAll 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: , , , , , ,

Liked this post? Consider subscribing to our RSS feed or our weekly newsletter.

/

SocialToo – Automate Twitter Following & Unfollowing, Send Surveys

socialtoo_logoIf you’re of the mind to follow everyone who follows you on Twitter, SocialToo can save you time and effort by automatically following anyone who follows you.  You also have choices on how and whether you unfollow anyone who unfollows you.  There are also options to block automatic DMs (direct messages) from other services and to send you a daily email with statistics about your followers.

Most of SocialToo’s services are currently free, but they also offer some paid (although cheap) services. For $5 (each), they offer services to unfollow anyone you’ve manually followed who aren’t following back and to catch up on following people before you started using their services.  For $25, you can delete all your followers.

For users interested in tapping into the collective intelligence of their followers, SocialToo gives the ability to create a one question survey (with an option for comments) through it’s SocialSurvey service, which can then be sent to a Twitter account.  All of SocialToo’s services seem to be setup to eventually intergrate with multiple social networks, similar to Ping.fm, but for now, just Twitter and some Facebook integration is possible.

Technorati tags:  , , , ,

Liked this post? Consider subscribing to our RSS feed or our weekly newsletter.