This brings me to some great Twitter Infographics that I recently came across.  Here are just a couple of them:

Is Twitter a Waste of Time By ProBlogger:

The Who Why and How of Twitter by The Next Web

I would love to see your favorite infographics as well if you have any you want to share.

- Stefanie

I was wondering myself this evening how many new and different Twitter Chats are available and which ones that I would like to participate in and maybe should participate in.  This prompted me to do a little digging and a little googling for some lists.

The following are my finds for you to use as a resource when you are looking for a Twitter Chat to join:

• A spreadsheet of over 430 Twitter Chats
• The 12 Most Stimulating Twitter Chats
• Twitter Chat Schedule (another spreadsheet)
• Twebevent – a great resource
• 13 Twitter Chats for PR Pros
• Twitter Chats Category List
• Public Relations and Social Media Twitter Chat Schedules

If you have other lists or Twitter Chats that you would like to suggest please feel free to comment and share this information.

- Stefanie

P.S.

Once you have found your chat you can use TweetChat to follow along.

The tools that work with Twitter seem to be increasing on a steady rate as well.  There are tools for business, fun, tracking, to make twitter do more, tools to manage your followers and your tweets and much more.

I started to put together a list of all of the Twitter tools available the other day and in doing this I found a great mind map already completed that broke down the Twitter tools available.  I will be putting this list together still, however this is a great starting point:

If you have tools that you love and don’t see them on this list I would love to hear from you.

We have seen a lot of companies use Twitter to share special deals with their followers.  This is a very effective strategy because in most cases these deals are not available anywhere else.  This encourages active followers who will watch for the special promotional tweets from the business they are following.

One of our local clients A-1 Custom Trophies has begun using Twitter and will periodically tweet a special just to their Twitter followers.  You can follow A-1 Custom Trophies on Twitter (@A1_Trophies).

This strategy of posting special deals on Twitter has also been used successfully by several other businesses.

Corner Coffee in Minneapolis MN is now using Twitter to send special deals to their customers.  (@cornercoffe)

Dell Computers is an example of a company added a very large additional revenue stream by using Twitter for special promotions (over $2 million a year) (@DellOutlet)

StarBucks is using Twitter very effectively and is communicating special Twitter deals on a regular basis (@starbucks)

Naked Pizza has also been using Twitter for special promotions – and in fact last year a special Twitter promotion brought in over 15% of the daily business for that day. (@NakedPizza)

As you can see businesses are using Twitter to send out promotions and specials to their followers and are having success in doing so.  As a business owner this is something that you do not want to miss.

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• Coffee Giants Starbucks To Take Advantage Of ‘Promoted Tweets’ (ronmedlin.com)

Here are some videos from some of these companies sharing about Twitter.

Dell Computers

Southwest Airlines – Interview with Christi Day

Comcast

Comcast CEO – Twitter Changed our Company

Starbucks

Brad Nelson of Starbucks talks to the PSAMA

There are several ways to select who you want to follow on Twitter.  One quick and easy way is to follow your friends or those that you know to start with.  After you have followed your friends however it is time to get down to business and start to find and follow those that are talking about what you are interested in or who are your target market for business.

Here are some ways to locate those individuals on Twitter that fit the criteria of either they talk about what you are interested in or they are your target market for your purpose for being on Twitter.

Search for individuals talking about what you are interested in

There are several ways to find people to follow that are interested in what you want to hear.  I am only going to cover a few today, so please keep in mind there are many more.

HootSuite- Hoot Suite is a web based Twitter client that can be used to do many things (manage multiple twitter accounts, reply to people, follow people, schedule tweets, and more).  The focus on HootSuite today however is the ability to use it to search.  You can search in HootSuite for tweets that contain key words that you are interested in.  Once you find the people that are sharing tweets of interest to you from within HootSuite you can select to follow them.

Search Twitter – You can use good old fashion search Twitter and search on the keywords of interest and follow those individuals directly from Twitter

Tweep Find –  TweepFind allows you to search for a key word and find the top individuals based on user rank for that key word.  ( a similar tool is TweetFind, however this one is based on the Tweets instead of Tweeps)

Nearby Tweets – Nearby Tweets is an excellent way to search for those that are in a particular location and tweet about a particular topic.  This is an excellent tool if you are building a local list for people that may be interested in what you have to offer.

Browse a Directory with Twitter Users Listed

One great way to find people that you wish to follow is to use a directory.  The directories have people grouped based on their interests and what they tweet about.  Here are a list of a few directories to use to search for people to follow:

Twello – Twello is one of my favorite directories.  Individuals are grouped by basic categories as well as very well defined categories.  You can also search for people that contain certain words in their profile.  One thing I really like about this directory is that you can login directly and as you are browsing you can select those that you want to follow without having to move back and forth between the directory and Twitter.

TweetFind – This is a new directory that looks very promising.  It groups individuals into categories and it also ranks users.  One worth checking out.

GeoFollow – this is a directory that allows you to do a few different searches to find what you are looking for.  Another great tool to build a local list.

I am hoping that these tools with give you a place to start to find those to follow that are of interest to you and that you may be an interest to as well.

Good Luck finding and adding followers

-          Stefanie

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• Three steps to getting started in Twitter (socialwebschool.com)

There are literally thousands of tools available that can be used in some manner with Twitter, from clients to search to ranking to lists you name it they are available.

There are too many tools currently available so I can list all of them in this post, however I would like to give you a list of a handful of helpful tools at this time.

Twitter Trending Tools

Twit(url)y – list the top urls that ae being discussed on Twitter and does a nice job of breaking them down into Everything, News, Pics and Videos

Tweetmeme – is another Twitter tool that helps you see trends.  It lists the hottest links on Twitter

Twitscoop – is another tool to help you stay on top of Twitter.  Twittscoop also lets you update your Twitter from it’s interface

Twitter Tracking Tools

TweetStats – a tool to use to graph your tweets

Hoot Suite – This is a Twitter client that also has tracking and stats available

Twitter Unfollow Tracking and Automation

Qwitter – this tool will email you when someone quits following you after a tweet

Twitterless – this tool you who stops following you and graphs your follower history over time, making this info available in a variety of useful views.  At this time however this tool is in Beta still so I can’t give my honest opinion yet, but I am very curious to test it out.

Twitter Karma – This is one of my favorite tools.  It is a great way to see who is and who isn’t following you and it offers a way to mass follow or unfollow those users.

BuZZom – is a new tool for managing your followers and looks very robust.  I will be testing this one out over the next several days.

Twitter Search Tools

Search Twitter – This is Twitter’s built in search tool and it works very well to search Twitter for topic so interest

TweetScan – this tools works very similarly to Twitter Search but displays slightly differently

Twitter Local – this is a great tool to search tweets posted in a local location

Chirp City -  A tool to check out those Tweeting Near You

If you have a favorite Twitter tool either on this list or not please be sure to post a comment and share it.

Thanks

He shares 30 Predictions for the Future of Twitter.

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Many of you know that Twitter has been rolling out a new feature “Twitter Lists” over the past several weeks to a few accounts.  Yesterday the big roll out started happening to other accounts and I am happy to report that I now am the proud owner of having the ability to use Lists in my Twitter account.

I have to say Twitter Lists are wonderful!

I haven’t used all of the functionality available in them yet, but I have used them to start segmenting who I follow.  This has been great because it gives me the ability to just view the tweets from those in a particular niche at a time.  This makes it really easy when using the web interface on twitter.com to see the tweets you want to see.  I love to read everyone’s tweets but this way I can group who I follow and then read that group all at one time.  This is a great time saver.

If you haven’t been given your Twitter List feature yet it should be there within the next several days.  Once you get it you will see how easy it is to create lists and add people to them, you can even add someone to a list when you follow them (best way to do so in my opinion).

Also there is a new tool available where you can see the lists that others have created and follow them too.  This is available from listorious.

I am sure I will have more to say on Twitter Lists as I use them more but for now I am giving them a thumbs up.

~ Stefanie

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This lead me to make this post today, So you are new Twitter and just don’t understand what it is yet ?

In thinking about what is the best way to explain Twitter to someone that hasn’t heard of it or used it yet I thought that sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words.  This lead me to YouTube and to some great videos that do a wonderful job explaining what Twitter is.

I hope you enjoy these and find them helpful

~Stefanie