Recently, Twitter got a complete revamp that changed things drastically. Interestingly, it didn’t pump the social network with more and more features.

Ryan Sarver, Twitter’s head of API, explained it crisply: “In a world where Facebook and Google are competing on features, Twitter wants to focus on being simple.”

This article will review all the changes, from user interface changes to Twitter brand pages, what the new changes mean and how you can best use them.

#1: Easier and More Streamlined Navigation

The first thing you’ll notice with the new Twitter is that navigating has become a lot easier and more streamlined. With just one click on any update, you can now get all the information you need from a tweet.

It will show you the number of retweets, replies and favorites, without going anywhere else.

This means you can jump into the conversation right from there. It also gives you a great overview of how well that particular tweet has performed. While some Twitter tools offer this already, it is very helpful to have it right inside Twitter.com.

You can see all the information you need right here.

Another feature that might just have become very useful is the “Who to follow” box on the left. This is a fantastic new way to discover people close to your network whom you might not know about. You can click the “x” on any person who is not suitable, and browse endlessly through this tool to find people.

The little note below each of the suggested people tells you who from your network is already connected to that person. This makes expanding your Twitter tribe much more focused. I like this, as you aren’t stabbing in the dark when connecting with new people.

See who's following these people before deciding to follow them yourself.

I am immensely impressed with the new “Discover” area in the new Twitter. It surfaces content much more intelligently now and becomes a very powerful place to find new articles.

With one glance, you can browse through the hottest stories on the web and get updated on everything, without having to search endlessly through past tweets. This area also has a complete “Who to Follow” stream ready for you that you can explore:

It's now easy to discover the hottest stories.

How to Make the Most of the New Twitter.com in 10 Minutes a Day

These new design improvements mean that if you are super-busy handling all of your business activities, the new Twitter allows you to expand your network in a very short and focused stretch of time.

Here are a few tips on what you can do:

• Browse your new and improved stream for great tweets and conversations. Click “open” on any tweet to get the full context more easily.
• Spend 5 minutes browsing the “Who to Follow” stream and expand your network easily and in a focused way.
• Hop over to the new “Discover” area to find all of the latest stories from your network in one glance.

Bonus Tip: The new Buffer browser extension has been updated to work inside the new Twitter. Click “Buffer” on any tweet next to “Retweet” and easily schedule your retweets to be posted at an optimum time.

#2 and #3: Twitter Brand Pages and Embeddable Tweets

Evidently, one of the biggest changes coming for businesses is Twitter brand pages alongside the new embeddable tweets function. While only 21 brands were given access to creating their page, it is said to soon roll out to everyone else.

What is most notable about brand pages is that they allow you to pin the top tweet, so it is not cluttered with replies. This means you can find one of your top-value tweets and have it ready whenever a new visitor arrives.

Secondly, you are also able to customize a banner slot right beneath your account information. You can fill it with a promotion or special deal for your followers. Here is an example from Best Buy’s brand page.

Check out Best Buy's Twitter Brand Page.

With the new embeddable tweets function, Twitter has also given a major incentive to bloggers and publishers to come back to Twitter.com. To get to the embed function, just click “Details” after you have expanded the tweet once. Then simply click the “embed” link to get all of the options to include the tweet in your next blog post:

Notice the "Embed this Tweet" link at the bottom.

The great thing is that you can customize the styling of the embedded tweet right from there. This means you can control the position and text wrapping on the page. Once you are happy with your changes, just copy and paste the code into the HTML of your next blog post.

You can customize the Embeddable Tweets.

Here’s how this looks (note: what you see below is active, NOT a screen shot):

Top 10 Facebook Apps for Fan Engagement and Building Community bit.ly/sy33DR via @smexaminer

— Cindy King (@CindyKing) December 14, 2011

Four Quick Tips to Make the Most of Embeddable Tweets

Personally, I believe this feature can be an extremely powerful blogging tool for anyone using Twitter. The fact that it places a Follow button on the embedded tweet alone is very attractive for giving any Twitter account a lot more exposure.

• If you’re writing about an event, try finding relevant tweets to embed so you can give your article a more lively appearance.
• Add credibility to your articles by embedding tweets from experts talking about the topic. Simply search Twitter for some keywords to find relevant tweets.
• If you are reviewing a product or service, place a few tweets from across the Twitterverse at the bottom of your post to show more varied opinions.

Bonus tip: Whichever tweet you embed, let the person who tweeted it know, as you are providing them with additional exposure. They might just help you spread your content even more.

#4: The New, Much Faster TweetDeck

Another equally significant announcement from Twitter is that the new TweetDeck has been unveiled. As a heavy TweetDeck user myself, there is one most important improvement I see right away: TweetDeck is no longer an Adobe Air app, which means it is less sluggish to use.

Since TweetDeck’s acquisition by Twitter, it is evident that a lot of effort has been put into making the dashboard simpler and imitating the Twitter.com experience more closely. You’ll realize this quickly as there is no bar at the top to add your tweets, but only a box similar to Twitter.com.

The improved TweetDeck is easy to use.

However, my feeling is that these changes have taken away some of TweetDeck’s previous flexibility and functionality. Clearly, the new TweetDeck is geared toward more mainstream usage and less focused on providing the go-to dashboard for power users.

#5: The New iPhone and Android Apps for Twitter

Twitter’s new mobile clients for Android and iPhone I would like to call huge successes. The experience, much like the new Twitter.com, has been greatly improved and streamlined for you.

You can access your #discover area with top stories in the exact way as on Twitter.com. Also the @mentions and news stream have received a major design update. They are much easier to browse and interact with. Especially whenever there are unread updates in one of your streams, it displays a little line beneath the icon like you see below:

The improved mobile Twitter news stream.

Here's the improved mobile Twitter @mentions stream.

What I also greatly enjoy is that on the home tab, you now have a notification counter of how many direct messages are in your inbox. At the same time, it’s very easy to access your Twitter lists right from there with just one tap. It makes focused reading of news a lot easier for you.

It's easy to see the number of unread Direct Messages waiting for you.

Tips to Make the Most of the New Twitter Mobile Clients

There are quite a few hidden tricks and features on your new Twitter mobile clients that might just make your life a lot easier. Here is a list of the top three things I found:

• Whenever you’re writing a tweet and you don’t want to send it just now, hit “Cancel” and then “Save as Draft.” This is a great way to space out your tweets and avoid flooding your followers.
• You can easily connect multiple Twitter accounts from the home tab and switch between them conveniently. Just click on “change accounts” and swap over to your business or other Twitter account.
• For better monitoring, save some Twitter searches, as you can now easily access them right from the home tab too. This is a great way to stay up to date with your most important keywords about your business.

How do you like the new Twitter?

Overall, I believe Twitter has done a fabulous job with their updates on the new Twitter. The one point I feel might need some improvement is the new TweetDeck. But I understand that this particular revamp happened more likely because of Twitter’s overall “focus on simple” strategy than anything else.

What is worth noting is that Twitter is making a huge bet on bringing users from various clients back to Twitter.com. Looking at the changes above, I have to say that for me this has definitely been true. I find myself browsing Twitter.com far more often. The brand pages especially can be a big reason for business owners to engage more on Twitter.com itself.

Over to you now. What do you think? So much has happened to Twitter recently. How do you like it? Leave your questions and comments in the box below.

In this video, you’ll find the best Twitter tools for your business needs. Laura also gives some great insights into how you can use Twitter to connect with your audience, even offline.

Be sure to check out the takeaways below after you watch the video.

Here are some of the things you’ll learn in this video:

• A few favorite Twitter tools to check out (CoTweet, HootSuite, MediaFunnel)
• Laura’s advice to succeed on Twitter: Be useful. Listen, learn, care and serve
• Which company uses TwitGift to send chocolate-chip cookies and why
• How Twitter can help you make the online-offline connection with your audience
• How FastFollow helps you interact with a mass audience

Connect with Laura on Twitter @Pistachio and check out Oneforty.

How does your business use Twitter? What tips do you have to share? Please leave them below.

The good news is all of that content can become actionable insight.

Here are four ways to use Twitter data to optimize your social media activities for maximum exposure and effectiveness.

#1: Analyze your best topics and tweets with Crowdbooster

All tweets are not equally as effective. Crowdbooster aims to help you optimize the things you tweet by tracking what resonates and what flops among your followers.

Rapper Lil Wayne’s digital manager, Mazyar Karooni, monitors the performance of Wayne’s tweets each day. Karooni uses Crowdbooster, a free tool that lets you track the reach of your tweets.

Use this information to target special deals, rewards and promotions to the people who are impacting your brand the most.

Crowdbooster CEO Ricky Yean says, “We have found that paying attention to data can help our users become more powerful.”

Poring over Crowdbooster's analytics graph of your Twitter activity can help you identify patterns of successful tweets, so you can produce similar tweets.

#2: Track communities and sentiment with SocialMention

There’s likely a lot being said out there about you or your brand on Twitter, perhaps too much to read all by yourself. Twitter data-sifting tools like SocialMention can help you filter out the messages with negative sentiment, so you can take action with dissatisfied or antagonistic Tweeters and make things right.

SocialMention scours the social web for your keywords (or company name), and returns a report of what's being said out there and by whom.

You can also use sentiment analysis to discover pockets of Twitter users who are particularly big fans. Reaching out to those who tweet great things about you is an excellent way to reinforce your brand and foster even stronger advocates.

SocialMention scours blogs, microblogs, social bookmarking sites, comments and social networks for your keywords, almost like Google Alerts, but in real time and not limited to regular web content. It then performs an analysis to determine whether the chatter in each case is positive or negative, and lets you browse what people are saying based on filters you choose.

Poring over SocialMention analyses can help you figure out whom you need to be reaching out to on Twitter and what you need to say to them.

The 8:1 sentiment in this example means that 8 positive things are being said about this topic on the social web for every negative comment.

#3: Publish dynamically with SocialFlow.

Timing is everything in social media. The real-time scientists at SocialFlow agree, and they’ve built a platform that “dynamically publishes your content when it will resonate most with your customers and audiences on Twitter.”

SocialFlow tracks your followers' behavior patterns and helps you publish your tweets at the appropriate moments.

SocialFlow helps you create a “content queue” of potential tweets, and then “actively reorders” them in real time, based on what your audience is tweeting about at that very moment. It then can automatically publish tweets when the likelihood of engagement is highest.

“Companies import their messages into SocialFlow’s content queue where they’re dynamically prioritized,” explains SocialFlow’s president, Peter Hershberg.

“We then analyze the language they’re using,” he continues, “and combine that information with click data we get from Bit.ly, that currently sees about 8 billion clicks/month, to understand the types of content a company’s followers are engaging with. The best tweet in the queue is sent out when it’s likely to yield the greatest number of clicks, retweets, mentions, and followers.”

Since every audience and every brand—and every user—is different, it doesn’t make sense to time your tweets based on aggregate data. Middle-aged female runners may have very different social media behavior than teenaged male gamers. And trending topics throw all rules out the window.

For example, a tweet about your product would have been wasted the night Osama Bin Laden’s death was raging across Twitter. For this reason, companies like SocialFlow are monitoring active data streams to make smarter recommendations.

A fairly complex algorithm sits beneath SocialFlow’s interface, powered by the firehose of data from Twitter and Bit.ly, something that very few companies have access to, according to Hershberg. So if you’re in the business of “real-time intelligence,” crunching the numbers behind the optimal time to publish is no longer something you have to do yourself.

The complex data behind SocialFlow is made visual to help users digest it and make quick decisions.

#4: Hone your influence with Klout

Social intelligence engine Klout measures your influence on Twitter (and other social media accounts), both in relative and absolute terms. With it, you can see how influential you are among your followers, down to specific users.

Klout charts your Twitter personality compared to others in your network.

This data can be a blow (or a boon) to the ego, but more importantly it can help you determine to which influencers you should be targeting your tweets and how you can step up your game.

Klout also digests your tweeting activity and tells you what kind of user you are: broad or focused, consistent or casual, creating or sharing, participating or listening.

Klout also calculates a score depicting your total influence on the web.

You may think you’re one thing or the other, but data doesn’t lie. When you see your behavior tracked and measured, you can alter that behavior to match your vision. All of this insight, distilled, can help you tweet more effectively.

You don’t need to be a data scientist to use the wealth of Twitter data to sharpen your campaigns. The Twitter content ocean isn’t getting any smaller, but the right mix of inexpensive (or even free) tools can help you make every drop count.

What do you think? What’s your Twitter optimization strategy? Leave your comments in the box below.

Here are four tips to help you focus your Twitter efforts to get the maximum benefits for your business.

#1: Define your business goals and objectives

Take something you want to accomplish in your business and break it down into action items that are measurable and specific.

You might have a business goal to increase your business visibility so potential customers can discover you. Your next step is to create several objectives to put this goal into action, for example:

• Use Twitter to reach out to potential customers who live or work within 3 miles of your location.
• Use Twitter to share your dinner special on Tuesday nights in June.
• Use Twitter to talk with neighbors about an upcoming community event for 3 weeks before and 1 week after the event.

Here's an example of sharing about dinner specials.

An objective describes what you’ll do and how you’re going to measure your success toward meeting your goal. You may want to add in other numbers related to outcome of your activity. However, those numbers depend on factors outside your control.

For example:

• You don’t know how many Twitter users live and work within 3 miles of your business.
• You don’t know how many people will visit on Tuesday nights based on your tweets.
• You don’t know how many people will be talking about the community event on Twitter.

When you’re starting out in social media, it’s best to focus your objectives on something you can control: your behavior. Create objectives that guide your online behavior and watch how your community responds. Over time, you can fine-tune your actions so you can get the best responses from your community.

Your business goals and objectives are the backbone for measuring your Twitter success. If you don’t already have Twitter goals and objectives, take a few minutes now to write down the practical ways that Twitter can help your business.

#2: Create your conversation strategy

It’s not enough to follow people. If you really want to build a Twitter community around your business, you need give people a reason to follow you back and engage in conversation with you.

People will follow you if you talk about things that interest them. Of course, you can talk about your business, offer discounts and exclusive specials, share practical tips and announce your business products and services. Be mindful that you need to talk about things that others find interesting if you want to build a community.

Choose your conversation topics carefully because it’s important that you really care about these topics. People can tell if you really have passion for a subject, or if you’re just showing up to sell them something.

If you were having a dinner party, you’d spend some time cleaning up your house. In the same way, take some time to think through your conversation strategy and put it in place before you invest time searching for new people to follow. This way, when people check your Twitter profile, they can see what you talk about, how much you promote your business and how often you talk about other things. It’s important that you create a good first impression when people look at your tweet stream.

#3: Organize your community with Twitter Lists

Before you expand your Twitter community, invest a little time to organize your existing community with Twitter Lists. Twitter Lists help you focus on conversation streams. If you haven’t used the lists feature, Twitter provides a great overview on how to create lists and manage the people on your lists.

Twitter gives you a great overview on how to use Twitter Lists.

There are no rules about how to break up your community into lists. Do whatever seems smart to you. You could create a list that groups together people who tweet in your neighborhood, another list for customers and yet another for businesses in your industry. You might want to see how other businesses are organizing people into lists before you finalize your strategy.

Here's an example of how a business broke out their local community into several Twitter Lists.

Twitter allows you to create public or private lists.

• Private lists. You’re the only person who knows about your private lists and who is on them. You can edit your lists (add or remove people) without anyone seeing your actions. Many people create a private list for the people they talk with most on Twitter.
• Public lists. Public lists are the most common and have many benefits. People love being on lists. Anyone can view and follow your public lists and you can follow public lists created by other people.

Create your lists and organize your current Twitter community. Add each new person you follow to the appropriate list when you follow them.

Use the list button to add each new person you follow to the appropriate list.

Many Twitter tool such as HootSuite or TweetDeck allow you to create separate columns for each list. This makes it easy to follow and join in conversation streams.

HootSuite allows you to create a conversation stream from a Twitter List.

#4: Keep expanding your Twitter community

Community management, the process of adding and removing people from your Twitter community, is an ongoing activity. Set aside some time each week to maintain your Twitter community.

Start small and build over time. For example, you might set an initial objective to find 10, 20, or 50 new people to follow each week depending on your business goals and your available time.

It’s important that you don’t follow too many new people at one time. Twitter spammers aggressively follow a large number of people in short bursts. If you act like a spammer, someone might report you as such and Twitter might suspend your account!

Twitter monitors how aggressively users follow other users.

In your weekly community management, set aside a little time to review your new followers. Rather than sending an autoreply direct message (DM) to new followers, why not look over the profile and tweet stream of each new follower and write a customized, personal message? To be a good community member, connect with your community as a real person and build your relationships one at a time.

What’s your experience with Twitter? Do you have a community management strategy? Share your experience in the comments box below.

Here are five tools to help make your Twitter workflow more efficient, along with some simple instructions on how to use them.

#1: Schedule your tweets more efficiently

Not everyone agrees that scheduling tweets is the best approach. Twitter is, after all, a platform based on real-time interaction. However, offering tweets of relevant industry news content for your community is a way to brand yourself as a resource or thought leader and give people an incentive to follow you. Scheduling tweets of this curated content frees you up to answer questions from your community and monitor search terms.

With Buffer, you can select times throughout the day to send your tweets and load up your “buffer” with your key messages. There are three pricing plans – free, $5/month and $30/month, with the premium plans offering more accounts, users, tweets and times.

Scheduling tweets with Buffer is easy. First, you set your times in your dashboard.

Set times in your dashboard.

You head on over to your Buffer section and schedule the tweets. A Chrome extension makes it easy to schedule tweets right from articles themselves.

Schedule tweets of your favorite content with a Chrome extension.

Finally, Buffer offers some basic analytics that are quite helpful. It shows you number of clicks, reach and retweets (plus who retweeted) for each tweet that you schedule. At the very least, it shows you which tweets and headlines resonate the most with your audience. This is especially helpful when it comes to driving traffic to your own content.

Buffer offers some basic analytics about the performance of your tweets.

Although just about every other mainstream Twitter client like TweetDeck or HootSuite offers the tweet scheduling function these days, I like to use Buffer for this task. Not having to select a time for individual tweets that I am scheduling is a great component of the interface. Give it a try.

#2: Create easy and interesting content for your community

Tweetwally helps you create great content for your community through tweets. Tweetwally helps you highlight the contributions of your community members who participate the most by including them in your content. Here are some potential uses for Tweetwally:

• Engage your Twitter community by asking a question and showing off their responses in a Tweetwall.
• Share a few tweets from a conference hashtag in a conference wrap-up blog post.
• Share some takeaways from your webinar with your participants’ tweets.

You may recognize this digital storytelling tactic from blog posts that feature a somewhat similar tool, Storify. Why choose Tweetwally? Tweetwally lets you customize the look of your tweet story, so you can create an embeddable image consistent with your company’s branding.

First, you type in the hashtag or username you want to use to create your story.

Tweetwally is a digital storytelling tool.

Next, Tweetwally will deliver all of the tweets for your chosen search. You can edit the look of your Tweetwall under Display Options.

Customize the look of your Tweetwall in Display Options.

You’re done! Just embed your Tweetwally code into the HTML tab of your blogging system to display your Tweetwall. Here’s just a sample of what a collection of tweets can look like on a Tweetwall.

#3: Make social media listening easier

As a community manager, you’re the eyes and ears of your company.

Monitoring searches for industry keywords and phrases is an important tactic, along with keeping an eye on your competitors. However, with so much real-time community engagement to take care of throughout the day, it’s hard to keep an eye on all those search terms in real time. You need to prioritize and scale. That’s where Twilert comes in.

Twilerts are like Google Alerts for Twitter.

Twilerts are like Google Alerts for Twitter. Set up searches for the keywords or competitors that you want to learn about and get those emailed to you in a daily digest. There are even advanced search options for geolocation, which is perfect for local businesses.

Create local searches in the advanced search of Twilert.

#4: Keep up with social media news

Keeping up with social media news can be tricky, right? There’s so much information out there to stay on top of for your professional development, as well as important information to share with your community. That’s where Summify, a news curation tool, comes in.

Summify shows you a summary of the most shared news stories from your network.

Summify sends you a summary of the most shared news stories from your Twitter network right to your inbox.

In your settings, you can sync this with your Google Reader account and select certain feeds you’d like included in the summaries and customize the frequency that you get them. It’s a great way to keep current on the news you want to know without overwhelming you the way an unread pile of articles in Google Reader or Instapaper can.

#5: Measure your progress

All of the tools listed above will help you effectively manage your community and social media strategy, but measuring what you’re doing beyond “fans and followers” is critical. You want to make data-driven decisions, know how your conversations and content are contributing to your business and pin down the elusive ROI.

Marketing analytics company Performable offers an array of tools to help you measure your activity. Their reporting tools help you understand what actions people take on your website and how they arrived. This helps you see how your Twitter, Facebook or email campaigns are driving engagement on your website or conversions, like event registrations or ecommerce sales.

Here’s an example of Performable tracking engagement on our site, showing that most people came from an April newsletter email campaign sent to community members.

Performable tracks which campaigns are successful at driving conversions on your website.

Performable also features handy marketing and community tools. You don’t have to be an HTML ninja to quickly create targeted landing pages to promote events or webinars to your community.

Performable also offers easy-to-create call-to-action buttons. Offer an ebook or webinar related to your blog post or an invitation to sign up for your newsletter. These are all ways to drive engagement beyond your blog by offering value to your community with content. Because the buttons are so simple to make, you can test several to see what resonates with your community the most.

These are just five of my favorite tools. What social media tools do you use to direct and measure your community management efforts? I’d love to hear about them in the comments box below.

You know that the Internet puts your business within a few keystrokes of people anywhere around the world. But did you know that social media tools, especially Twitter, help you pinpoint people who live and work in your neighborhood?

Twitter allows you to locate people who live or tweet in your city or neighborhood, people you know, as well as people you don’t yet know. This makes Twitter the ideal tool for infiltrating your neighborhood.

How to Search for Local People

Most Twitter users occasionally tweet about the things around them. This means that you can find local people by searching tweets for things in or near your business location.

For example, you can search for:

• City name
• Neighborhood or community name
• Local landmarks
• Local businesses
• Event venues, museums and public locations
• Local fairs, parades and community events
• Hashtag identifiers for a local community or event

When you search for your city name on Twitter, you have to look for all of the possible ways people may type it. Experiment with the options to figure out which ones give you the best search results. You can also use Twitter’s search operators to string together multiple options in one search or exclude items from your results.

From this list you can fine-tune your search query.

#1: Find Local People Using Tweets Near You

Twitter lets you search through current tweets to find the name of your city, a neighborhood name, a local landmark or a business. You can narrow the results to only the tweets posted near your location.

Search Twitter for your city name.

Use the Twitter search box to find tweets about your location. Twitter shows the most recent tweets that match your search on the Tweets tab.

The Tweets tab shows current tweets that contain the city name "Tempe, AZ."

View the tweets posted near you.

Click the Tweets Near You tab. Twitter shows a list of the most recent tweets that match your search posted by people near your current location.

Click the Tweets Near You tab to find tweets in your results posted by people near your location.

Review the list of tweets and follow local people.

Read the tweets in your search results. When you find a tweet from someone who might be in your target location, click the account name. Twitter shows you a brief account profile in the flyout in the right pane. In the flyout, click Follow to add this person to your Twitter community.

The flyout shows a brief Twitter profile with the Follow button.

#2: Find Local People With Your City Name in Their Profile

Twitter allows you to search through profiles to find people who list your city name. Unfortunately, Twitter only shows a few people, not everyone who lists your city in their profile.

Search Twitter for your city name.

Search for your city name (and its variations) in the Twitter search box. Twitter shows the most recent tweets that match your search on the Tweets tab.

Search for your city name in profiles.

Click the People tab. Twitter shows a list of people whose profile location contains your city name.

Click the People tab to find people who list your city name in their profile.

Review the list and add local people.

Review the people in your search results. Click the account name to display a brief Twitter profile in the flyout. Click Follow to add a person to your Twitter community.

#3: Find Local People With Twitter Advanced Search

Twitter’s advanced search page allows you to add geography to your search. For example, you can search through the most recent tweets posted within 1 or 5 miles of a city by name or zip code. The search results are current tweets, so every time you do this search, you get different results.

Display the Twitter advanced search page.

Set your geography range.

In the Places box, identify your city by name or zip code, and select your range using the drop-down options.

Twitter lets you search for all tweets near your city by name or zip code.

Review the list of tweets and follow local people.

Read the tweets in your search results. When you find a tweet from someone you want to follow, hover your mouse over the account name. Twitter shows a brief account profile in a hovercard.

You can follow a Twitter user from the hovercard or expand it to see more profile information.

Click More to see the expanded hovercard with more profile details. Click Follow to add this person to your Twitter community.

You can follow a local Twitter user from the hovercard.

#4: Find Local People Using Twitter Grader

There are many Twitter search tools developed by other companies that help you search through the tweet stream and Twitter profiles to find people in your locale. Twitter Grader evaluates the effectiveness of Twitter users by calculating a grade from 1 to 100. They list the top 50 people in each city as the Twitter Elite.

Display the Twitter Grader Top Users by Location page.

Search for people in your city.

Twitter Grader is a free tool that allows you to check the power of your Twitter profile compared to millions of other users who have been graded.

Review the list of people.

Twitter Grader shows the Twitter Elite list for your city. When you find a person you want to follow, click the Twitter account name.

Locate a person you want to follow and click on the Twitter account name.

Click on the full name.

Twitter Grader shows an account summary. Click on the full name. Twitter Grader pulls up the Twitter profile for the user.

Click on the Full Name to display the Twitter profile for this user.

Follow the user.

In the Twitter profile, click Follow to add this person to your Twitter community.

#5: Find Local People Using Twellowhood.

Twellow is a public Twitter directory. The Twellowhood feature allows you to find people by location.

Display the Twellowhood map page.

On the Twellowhood map, click your continent, then country, then state or province.

Twellow lets you drill down to a city from a world map.

Select your city.

Twellowhood displays a list of cities with Twitter users for your state or province. Click on your city name in the list.

Twellow displays a list of cities with the number of Twitter users in each city.

Review the list of Twitter users and choose people to follow.

Twellow displays a list of Twitter users in your city. Review the people in your search results. When you find someone you want to follow, click the account name.

Click on the Twitter name to display the Twitter profile for this user.

Follow the user.

Twellow pulls up the Twitter profile for the user. In the Twitter profile, click Follow to add this person to your Twitter community.

How do you reach out to new people on Twitter? Have you tried any of these tools? Do you have other strategies that work for you? Share your successes in the comments box below.

If so, this article is for you. It will show you how to find people and what to do to engage them.

Find the right people—build the right community

This is a tricky headline. As if there’s something like the “right” community waiting for you out there. Yet focusing firmly on the people you want to interact with will pay off greatly. Following those who show a real connection to your niche is key to getting the return out of your Twitter conversations.

A fundamental question when creating your own tribe is to ask yourself, “Whom can I help on Twitter?”

That’s right, instead of saying “Who could help me?” or “What will I achieve?”, Twitter is a place to extend your reach by helping others. Stop thinking about yourself and start thinking about other people first. This is the most important lesson I ever learned.

You’ll be amazed how this will boost your influence on Twitter. For example, @MackCollier, a true Twitter pundit, covered this topic in more detail here.

Where to find the right people

Over the course of Twitter’s 5 years of existence, many very helpful directories have been created. They are a great source to find new and interesting people.

A very detailed one is TweetDeck’s Directory of Twitter users, where you can easily navigate through your fields of interest and pick those you want to connect with.

TweetDeck Directory: Think of it as a TV Guide for Twitter channels.

Another great source is WeFollow, which again offers simple ways for you to find the right users in the right niche for you.

A directory of people organized into categories.

If you’re writing a blog, a very simple way to connect with new people is to take a look at who retweets your posts. Backtweets is a great tool to find this out. Put your post’s URL into Backtweets and get in touch with the folks retweeting your post.

Backtweets un-shortens and catalogs URLs sent by Twitter users.

Chances are high they’re exactly the people you’ve been looking for to extend your followership.

Be aware of Twitter etiquette

One thing that can easily put you in a bind with someone on Twitter is if you ignore certain Twitter etiquette rules. If you’re an expert in your niche, but are not quite aware how best to interact with others on Twitter, it can turn out to be a real disaster.

A few rules are:

• Include the person’s username when retweeting their tweet—give them credit for the content they shared.

Give credit when you retweet someone.

• Reply in a timely manner—Twitter is very spontaneous, so make sure to be there for @replies if you’re tweeting something. Particularly if you schedule a few tweets.
• Thank others for retweeting your tweets. Give them a quick note of appreciation that they found your content worth sharing with their community.
• If the above gets very time-consuming, you might want to try replying to those who edited the retweet and showed particular appreciation for your tweet.
• If you tweet articles, include the authors’ names. Give them credit for their work.

Give people credit for their posts.

Create amazing content on Twitter

It has long become clear that Twitter is no longer a black hole we communicate to one-way; actually we get lots of user engagement out of it.

One technique I found very helpful is to think of tweets like small blog posts. It was the infamous @TweetSmarter that mastered this technique. For nearly every article they tweet, they create their own headline aligning it with their community’s interest. This became hugely successful, which made me pay close attention to every tweet posted.

A non-stop, 24-hour feed with news about all things Twitter.

You don’t need to dedicate the time to a tweet that you would give a full blog post. But there are a few simple things you can do to make your tweets achieve a better reach among your followers.

Whenever you tweet an article, try to link it with the interests of your community.

This means that sometimes the title of the article will fit this purpose very well, sometimes it won’t. Try finding a quote in the article that particularly relates to your community’s and followers’ interests.

Relate to your community with unique tweets.

Twitter is all about creating a personal connection; try to leverage what you know about your followers. I found that it pays off greatly with higher engagement.

Be time-efficient

Spending hours and hours on Twitter can be a great deal of fun, yet it can also turn out to be a very dangerous waste of your time when you should be doing other things for your business.

So creating an efficient work pattern on Twitter is key to getting the most out of it.

One way to reduce the time spent without trading off your impact is tweet scheduling. A vital part of scheduling tweets is to get the right balance between spontaneous tweets and scheduled ones.

Now you have the ability to tweet day and night, even when you're asleep.

Another big timesaver for me is Twitter Lists. Especially if you reach a point when it becomes hard to keep track of your timeline.

A way to organize the people you're following on Twitter, or find new people.

One way I like to use lists is to create certain interest field lists—say, for example, “Marketers and Bloggers.”

Create lists to follow your fields of interest more easily.

I can now fill them up with people I follow who are great thought leaders in that area. Keeping track of them is super-simple and hassle-free.

Are you good at Twitter?

Over to you now. Which steps are you taking to be successful on Twitter? Do you think the above-mentioned steps will work for you too? Let’s start a discussion. Leave your questions and comments below.

In order for us to filter and manage the ever-dynamic Twitter, a number of new apps have emerged.

This article will cover five new tools to help make it easier for you to reach your social media goals and help you keep up with the “latest” on Twitter.

#1: Get rid of the noise

Facebook lets you hide annoying posts, so why not Twitter?

It turns out there’s an app called Proxlet that does this and more. And it works with your favorite clients like Twitter (via Chrome extension), TweetDeck desktop, Twitter for iPhone and others.

You can block spammy apps, temporarily mute loud users, filter out annoying hashtags, and breathe a little easier.

Erase annoying tweets from your timeline.

#2: Deepen your relationships

Nurph gives you Twitter chat rooms, so you can stop fighting the 140-character limit and get a room!

Simply tweet a link to bring your friends and followers together for a real-time chat without taking over your followers’ timelines with long conversations.

Nurph chat rooms come complete with Twitter profile integration, tweet streaming and hovercards—so you’re looking at a highly optimized, Twitter-specific chat service. Nurph is one of those things you just have to try!

Take your Twitter conversations to the next level.

#3: Share and track your blog content

Dlvr.it is your smart online mailman that delivers your content to various platforms and also tells you how many people enjoyed reading it. So when you publish news on your blog(s), it’s delivered to all relevant places on the web.

This means your Twitter account, your Facebook profile or wherever you want it to be. And on top of that, Dlvr.it also tells you how many clicks your published content received. That might come in handy for your social media efforts as well.

Deliver your content to all of your favorite social networks.

#4: Making sense of it all with awesome stats and metrics

After putting some new tools in place to create content, now is the time to make sense of it all and get a bigger picture of your impact. This is where Twoolr comes in and provides you with all of the data you need to analyze your Twitter efforts.

Twoolr provides you with those metrics that matter most, giving you interesting visualizations such as usage trends, associated clouds and user comparisons. You access it all intuitively from the dashboard and are even able to receive growth and community reports straight to your inbox. It’s simple and presented in a slick design.

All the metrics you need to track your impact on Twitter.

#5: Already a Twitter pro? It’s time to extend your reach

Finally, if you feel you’re already a master of the Twitter game and want to build on that, here’s one more great tool I came across recently. It’s called Triberr and it allows you to create a tight network of fellow bloggers, sharing your posts and exchanging ideas.

It’s an invite-only network, where you can create “tribes” with other bloggers. Once you’re part of a tribe, you instantly share each other’s posts via Twitter, multiplying your reach and retweets instantly. The fact that it’s invite-only and no more than 7 members per tribe guarantee that it remains high-quality and spam-free. You can think of it as a human Twitter feed with tight quality control.

Extend your Twitter reach in an exclusive "bloggers only" network.

I hope you’re now prepared to stay on top. Let us know which tools you use to keep up with Twitter. Leave your comments in the box below.

While some automation tools do nothing but make your social media profile look like an announcement board, other tools can be used to sync right into your normal engagement to give it a helpful boost.

Here are some Twitter automation tools, services and tips, which when used the right way, can be a valuable addition to your social media strategy. And when I say the right way, I mean that you should be using these to supplement your regular social engagement and not only using these tools to give your account the look of activity.

Twitterfeed

Twitterfeed is a service that allows you to set up RSS feeds from your favorite blogs, and whenever those blogs have a new post, it will be tweeted to your account. It can be used to update your Twitter and Facebook accounts.

How to Set Up Twitterfeed

To use Twitterfeed, you simply need to register for a free account and then set up your favorite blogs using the following steps.

1. Enter an easily recognizable Feed Name and the blog URL or RSS feed URL.

Twitterfeed Setup Step 1: Enter the feed name and blog or RSS URL.

2. Use the advanced settings to customize your tweets. I usually change the Post Content to Title Only and include via @username of the blog owner in the Post Suffix.

Twitterfeed Setup Step 2: Configure Advanced Settings.

3. Choose the Twitter or Facebook accounts that you would like to have updated with the blog’s latest posts.

Twitterfeed Setup Step 3: Set to update statuses on specific Twitter or Facebook accounts.

You’ll need to use the “OAuth” authentication for new Twitter accounts and “Connect” with Facebook for new Facebook accounts.

Pros of Using Twitterfeed

So what benefits can you get from using Twitterfeed? If you choose the right blogs that your audience enjoys, you’ll be able to give them the latest news from their favorite sites and they will appreciate it!

If you choose blogs that your followers like, you will receive plenty of thanks.

Generally, you’ll know if your audience likes them because you see retweets of those status updates or, if you’re really good at choosing the right blogs, you’ll get thank-you messages for posting them, like the one above.

Cons of Using Twitterfeed

So what’s the downside of using Twitterfeed? As far as I know, there isn’t a way to say when to tweet new posts. Sure, you can tell it to only check every certain number of hours, but even then it doesn’t let you say only between the hours of 9am and 5pm, for instance.

Another little quirk is that if you send an update that you want to stay at the top of your Twitter profile for a while, you might be out of luck if one of your blogs in Twitterfeed has recently updated right after your priority tweet.

The last one has to do specifically with affiliate marketers. If you’re promoting an event, such as the Social Media Success Summit, the last thing you want is to tweet a post promoting the same event (with someone else’s affiliate link). But it’s likely to happen if other blogs in your Twitterfeed are promoting the same products or events.

Twitterfeed Best Practices

So what best practices should you follow if you want to get the most out of Twitterfeed? Here are some good tips.

• Try not to include blogs that update multiple times a day. Nothing will annoy your followers more than seeing 12 updates from the same site in one day. If you feel you must include one of those sites, be sure to use the Advanced Settings and only check the blog once every 4 hours and only tweet one update at a time.
• Only choose blogs that you can depend on to have quality posts. I find that including blogs like Social Media Examiner which only feature posts on specific topics are the safest, while personal blogs that have the occasional rant post are a little more iffy. The last thing you want is to automatically tweet posts that may offend your readers.
• Be sure to monitor your tweets regularly to make sure your favorite blogs haven’t veered off topic. Your favorite photo blog may have decided to go culinary which may not resonate with your followers.

Social Oomph

Ah, the dreaded automated direct message. I wish I could greet all of my new followers with a personal direct message or a friendly mention, but it becomes tough to do once you’re getting a high volume of follows in one day.

Plus, it’s sometimes hard to tell which accounts are manned by real people and which are bots, and why would you want to waste precious time greeting a bot?

So yes, I like to use Social Oomph to create an automated direct message for new followers.

How to Set Up Social Oomph Direct Messages

Once you have created a free account (apparently no longer free for new members) at Social Oomph, you can set it up using the following steps.

1. Use the navigation menu and go to Social Accounts > Add New Account > Add Twitter. Be sure to log into your desired Twitter account beforehand and Authorize Access.

Social Oomph Setup Step 1: Authorize your desired Twitter account.

2. Use the navigation menu to go to Social Accounts > Edit Welcome DM and select your Twitter account. Here, you will find the form to enter your automated direct message and a checkbox to automatically send a welcome message.

Social Oomph Setup Step 2: Customize your direct message for new followers.

Underneath this setup is also an option to follow your new followers back or place them in a queue to manually approve or reject following them.

Social Oomph Setup Step 3: Automatically follow new followers back.

I always follow people back for one main reason. As you can see from my automated DM, I give them the opportunity to contact me privately, and if I’m not following them, they cannot do that. In general, I feel that if someone is connected with me, they should be able to contact me privately like they can on Facebook or LinkedIn.

Pros of Using Automated Direct Messages

If done correctly, you can make your new followers feel very welcome and open a good line of communication with them right off the bat. With my direct message, I also have the added bonus of discovering new questions from bloggers and social media users which have led to some good topic ideas for my blog.

Cons of Using Automated Direct Messages

If done incorrectly, you can put off users who are anti-automated direct messaging. I have tried out a few variations of direct messages, and unfortunately have had some that did not generate good feedback. My latest has been all positive though.

Automated Direct Messages Best Practices

The following will ensure that you keep your new followers once they receive your welcome message and not generate a lot of negative feedback.

• Don’t try to sell new followers anything in your welcome DM. Period.
• Don’t try to get your new followers to sign up for your mailing list—this includes trying to tempt them with a free gift. I rarely (unless I know the user) ever click on a rogue bit.ly link for a free anything in an automated DM.
• The most successful direct messages I’ve tried do not come with any links at all. These are seen as more trustworthy and can open the door to further communication.
• The second most successful direct messages I’ve used are ones that simply link to blog posts that my new followers would be interested in. If you know that you have an audience following you for blogging advice, then your latest blog post with 100 great tips for new bloggers might be well received.
• Be sure to check your direct messages regularly and respond to them when necessary. This is a huge trust-builder and will lead to more engagement in the future.

Tweet Old Post

Tweet Old Post is a great plugin for WordPress users. It allows you to connect a Twitter account with your blog and regularly tweet posts from your archives to your followers.

How to Set Up Tweet Old Post

Setting up Tweet Old Post is simple.  Follow these steps once you have logged into your self-hosted WordPress blog and related Twitter account.

1. Go to your Dashboard > Plugins > Add New and search for Tweet Old Post.

Tweet Old Post Step 1: Search for the Tweet Old Post plugin in your WordPress dashboard.

2. Click on the Install Now link below the Tweet Old Post plugin by Ajay Matharu.

Tweet Old Post Step 2: Install Tweet Old Post plugin from the search results.

After you’ve installed it, you’ll need to activate it on the next screen by clicking on the Activate Plugin link.

3. Scroll down to the bottom of your dashboard and go to Tweet Old Post > Tweet Old Post to get to the main settings for this plugin.

Tweet Old Post Step 3: Configure settings for Tweet Old Post plugin.

Here you’ll want to:

• Sign in with Twitter to the Twitter account from which you want to tweet your post archives.
• In the Tweet Prefix field, you can set something like From the Archives or similar text.
• Check the URL shortener box to use shortening services like bit.ly which will require an API key that you can get when you register for a free account at bit.ly.
• Create default #hashtags to go with your tweets, such as #blogging or #socialmedia.
• Set the minimum and random intervals to send tweets, considering whether you want to tweet posts from your archives one or more times per day.
• Set the minimum age of posts to be tweeted.
• Exclude particular categories from being tweeted.
• Save your changes.

4. If you have specific posts from included categories that you want to exclude from being tweeted, use the Tweet Old Post > Exclude Post settings to pick certain posts to exclude from being tweeted.

Tweet Old Post Step 4: Exclude specific posts from being tweeted by Tweet Old Post.

Pros of Using the Tweet Old Post Plugin

Chances are, you gain new followers to your Twitter account and blog on a daily basis. Using Tweet Old Post is a great way to point new followers to some of your awesome content from the past. It’s like having a Related Posts section that plugs into your Twitter account.

Cons of Using the Tweet Old Post Plugin

Some followers may not be as open to older content, especially if that content is outdated or they’re simply the type who only likes new and fresh blog posts.

Tweet Old Post Best Practices

To make sure your followers are only getting your best content, consider the following tips.

• Create a category to house only your best content, then go back through your older posts and add them to that category. This way, you never have to worry about anything that you don’t want to be tweeted from your archives, and you don’t have to mess with excluding posts on an individual basis.
• Be sure to exclude posts that are time sensitive from your archive’s tweets, such as a special discount that has since expired for a product or event information that has already passed.
• Don’t overdo tweets to your older posts—you don’t want your stream to look like it’s all about you and nothing else.

HootSuite Scheduling

HootSuite offers an option to schedule updates to specific social media accounts, which can come in really handy if you have items that you would like sent at specific times when you may be away from your computer.

How to Set Up Scheduled Updates From HootSuite

The following will help you set up scheduled updates to be sent from your Twitter accounts linked to your main HootSuite account.

1. Enter your desired status update in the box as you would like it to appear and select the accounts to which you would like it posted.

HootSuite Scheduling Step 1: Enter your status message as you would like it to appear.

2. Click on the calendar button to bring up a scheduling calendar to select your desired date and time to send the status update.

HootSuite Scheduling Step 2: Schedule your status message by date and time.

You will also notice the Schedule in Bulk option.

HootSuite Scheduling in Bulk: Schedule multiple messages all at once.

From here, you need to download a .CSV spreadsheet file so you can enter dates, times and tweets to schedule if you want to do more than one at a time for a specific account or set of accounts.

HootSuite Scheduling in Bulk: Use a .CSV to format your status messages for bulk scheduling.

3. Need to make a modification or cancel a scheduled update? Create a column for your Pending Tweets in HootSuite to see what you have scheduled. Use the Edit link to make changes or the X to delete the update.

HootSuite Pending Tweets: Edit or delete scheduled messages in this column.

Pros of Using HootSuite Scheduling

Time-sensitive tweets can be scheduled in advanced so you don’t forget to send important messages in a timely fashion. This is great for affiliates who are promoting the last few hours of a discount or special, speakers who want to send a countdown to their upcoming webinar or anyone who wants to keep his or her account updated at a regular rate.

Another great use for scheduling is when you’re reading through article after article that you want to send to your followers. Don’t just send ten articles in a span of five minutes—use the scheduler to space them out over the next few hours instead.

Cons of Using HootSuite Scheduling

If you’re using HootSuite to schedule your messages when you aren’t going to be around the computer, you may miss out on answering people who send quick questions about your latest tweet (if it needs any clarification).

HootSuite Scheduling Best Practices

There’s a big one here that really applies to any automated social media service: Be sure that your account has more than just scheduled tweets. You want to be engaging with your audience, not just broadcasting to them.

One Final Reminder

The above tools are meant to supplement and enrich your social media experience. They’re not, by any means, meant to replace the most important part of social media networking, which is engaging with your followers and fans on a regular basis. Not every status update should include a link!

Your Thoughts on Twitter Automation Tools

Do you use any of the above or other tools to enhance your Twitter presence? What results have you seen, good or bad? Leave your comments in the box below.

As more professional LinkedIn users create Twitter profiles, I believe this application will become more and more powerful for building influence and visibility with your network connections.

The primary benefits of the LinkedIn Tweets application are:

• Follow your LinkedIn connections on Twitter
• Post status updates simultaneously to both Twitter and LinkedIn
• Monitor and interact with your Twitter streams from within LinkedIn
• Create a LinkedIn-specific Twitter list

Before we look at some additional ways to leverage the Tweets application, make sure you’ve first added your Twitter account to your LinkedIn profile.

Add Your Twitter Account to Your LinkedIn Profile

Click “edit profile” and “add Twitter account” next to the Twitter field. This will create a link directly to your Twitter account on your LinkedIn profile for all visitors to see if you choose to display it on your profile.

To share your tweets in your LinkedIn status, I would recommend that you choose the “Share only tweets that contain #in” option rather than allowing every tweet to flood into LinkedIn as a status update. Typically, one or two daily status updates in LinkedIn will be sufficient—you don’t want to overdo it.

Share tweets that can add value to your LinkedIn connections!

Install the LinkedIn Tweets Application

Go to “Applications” in LinkedIn and search for the Tweets application to install on your profile. Once installed, you’ll be able to visit your Twitter page on LinkedIn by going to the “More” menu tab and clicking on “Tweets.”

With Tweets, you can now display your most recent tweets on your LinkedIn profile.

How to Utilize the Tweets Application to Build Social Influence

Below are three important features of the Tweets application that you can use to help you grow your Twitter connections, gain intelligence about what your LinkedIn connections are tweeting about and promote your connections through their tweets.

#1: Identify and follow all of your LinkedIn connections on Twitter within the Tweets application

Go to the “Connections” tab to see who you’re NOT following on Twitter and follow them. You may not find a substantial number of your connections on Twitter, but go ahead and follow those who are! Most likely they’re going to follow you back.

#2: Create a dynamic Twitter list of your LinkedIn connections

From within the Tweets application, LinkedIn makes it easy for you to create an official dynamic Twitter list of your LinkedIn connections. Go to the “Connections” tab and on the left-hand side you’ll see “Save as Twitter List.” It may take a few minutes for this list to populate, and by default it will be a private Twitter list. The newly created list will show up within the Tweets application where you’ll have the ability to view the stream in real time.

This is a great tool in and of itself. Rather than manually having to go through and create a Twitter list of your LinkedIn connections, it’s done in the click of a button and always up to date. I can’t think of a better way to make Twitter more relevant to your existing professional network! If I had very little time to spend on Twitter, this is where I would focus my efforts.

Consistently monitoring this unique Twitter list can give you tremendous insight into what your LinkedIn connections are thinking and spreading online. People tend to update Twitter much more often than LinkedIn.

#3: Look for engagement and promotional opportunities through LinkedIn Tweets

The Tweets application actually functions as a Twitter client. You can tweet, reply, retweet or even share posts as messages with any of your LinkedIn connections. However, the real power comes from being able to update your LinkedIn status simultaneously, along with tweeting, replying or retweeting.

Remember, promoting and connecting others is a very effective strategy to build social influence! Don’t underestimate the power of consistent status updates, and the reach that those particular updates can have. When you find a tweet in your LinkedIn Twitter stream that’s relevant, or could be interesting, entertaining or helpful to your broad LinkedIn network, this is where you’ll want to engage and promote.

Ideally, you’ll want to retweet the important post(s) from your LinkedIn connections within the Tweets application and go a step further by checking the box to share the tweet as a status update. The retweet will then show up as a status update to your entire LinkedIn network and it will hyperlink to the individual’s Tweet page within LinkedIn, giving others an opportunity to follow that person on Twitter.

Not only have you promoted the content to your LinkedIn network, but you’ve also provided your connection with extended visibility in both networks and will potentially help him or her gain some new LinkedIn connections and Twitter followers.

This is a retweet from the Tweets application that I also shared as a status update.

By clicking on @ducttape from within the status update, the link travels directly to his Twitter page in LinkedIn.

You could spend time reviewing your other Twitter lists from within the LinkedIn Tweets application and engaging with those individuals as well. If you find something relevant that your LinkedIn network connections can benefit from, again retweet it as a status update. Follow up with that individual to let him or her know that you also posted the tweet as a LinkedIn status update because you thought your network could benefit from seeing it.

Ultimately with any social network, you want to be viewed as a resource who can be relied upon to share and spread quality information. If you can marry this with promoting those professionals with whom you’re already connected on LinkedIn, you can build social influence by helping your connections increase their visibility. This is a win-win.

For additional tips on leveraging Twitter and LinkedIn together, read “How to Prospect Using the Combined Power of LinkedIn and Twitter.” Consider downloading the Free LinkedIn Guide for Professionals from HubSpot as well. This is another very helpful resource for taking advantage of all that LinkedIn has to offer for growing your professional network.

Have you incorporated the Tweets application into your profile? What are some other ways to utilize this application to build influence on both networks? Share your feedback in the comments box below.