Archive for July, 2009

Using News Feeds and Status Updates on Facebook

Thursday, July 30th, 2009

If you have a large amount of followers on facebook and you just cant keep up with all of the news feeds and Status updates on your facebook page, then I have some great news.
You may want to only check your facebook page every second day or you may want to be able to filter what you see on those updates. There may be people in your friend list that continually update their status with meaningless, mundane stuff that you are not interested in. Facebook lets you now organise your friends into certain lists that you can easily check through to see whats going on in their world.
I have made a quick video about how to do this and hopefully it will change the way you look at your facebook home page. Please let me know what you think by posting a comment on the bottom of this post.

And remember, if you have any questions about social media, please ask me, I will personally answer them for you.

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Posted in Computers, Education, Facebook, Social Media, Social Networking

Unfollowing Bulk People on Twitter

Tuesday, July 21st, 2009

This question is coming up more frequently as peoples’ Twitter following gets bigger. I have used 3 different applications for this very process. Let me explain them for you and you can choose which one is best for you…
1.    Twitter karma This lets you unfollow en mass and is easy to do pretty quickly.
2.    Friendorfollow This lets you mass unfollow and also mass follow people.
3.    Untweeps This lets you unfollow people that have not tweeted in a certain amount of time

1. Twitter Karma
I think this one is the best for what you want.. Twitter Karma!
As with most 3rd party applications, you will need to supply your name and password as Twitter Karma needs to see who’s in your friends/followers list.

You will be able to see who is following you or if are You following them etc. You can also see how long its been since they have tweeted.

If you Pop on down to the bottom you can make your decision:

If you’re looking to drop everyone, do a “check all” and “Bulk Unfollow” and it’ll go through and unfollow them.
If you just want to follow certain ones, then check the boxes.

A bit of warning, this may take some time, so please be patient.  I find the best way to keep up on whether it is working (Because it goes into work mode the instant you click it: Would be to go to your twitter homepage, and watch the numbers increase/decrease appropriately.

One of the nicest parts is it will show you when they “Last Updated” so you can feel better removing people who haven’t updated “Ever” or “not in a year” or so.

2.Friend or Follow!

It’s actually very simple to use but a little tedious.  Simply browse to their site, enter your name hit submit and you’re off!

At that point, you can click on their names and decide if you want to continue following them or not.  It’s a useful way to see who it is that you are following who is not following you.   But the benefits don’t end there!

Simply by clicking on Fans, you’ll get a list of people who are following you, but YOU are not following back!

This happens to the best of us, or they’re spammers which haven’t been removed yet, in either case you can click on them and choose to follow or not!

Here is where it gets tricky.   Let’s say you chose to follow ‘x’ number of folks and they’re not reciprocating, and you decide  to unfollow them, you need to open up each of their profiles. I like some things about this site but it is not my favourite…it can be very tedious.

3. Untweep
This is a very simple site to follow and if you just want to purge your list according to how active some people are on your list, then you can use this site. Not much to it really…

So remember, if you’re looking to mass follow, mass unfollow, or take any kind of mass actions (Or even just get a feeling of how unbalanced things may be)  – The three tools mentioned above will help you achieve that!

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Posted in Social Media

Creating a Twitter Background

Sunday, July 19th, 2009

When creating your profile for Twitter, you want to be able to give as much information to your followers as possible. Since Twitter only lets you put in minimal information in your BIO, you want to utilize the other space as much as you can

Most of the backgrounds you see with images and information on the left hand side in the background are generally created in an image program such as Gimp or Photoshop, and then uploaded as a background image. The trick in this method is that you have to have the image scaled to fit correctly in the twitter frame on your computer. You need to remember that everyone uses different size screens with different sized pixels. You unfortunately cannot click on any of these links that are displayed in this fashion. People will need to type them into their browser if they want to go to that page.

I have found some other good resources for creating Twitter Backgrounds.

Check these out too:

The Closet Entrepreneur Lets you know how to use PowerPoint to create a background.

Croncast This will give you specs for creating the size of the image as well as other tips

Presentation Zen This gives a great resource guide to getting quality Stock Photos for your Backgrounds

An example of a Twitter profile creted in Gimp

An example of a Twitter profile creted in Gimp

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Posted in Computers, Social Media, Social Networking, Twitter

Using Twitter Advanced Search

Wednesday, July 15th, 2009

There is a great feature on Twitter that many people dont realise is there and that is the Advanced search. On your Home page of Twitter on the right hand side is a search box that many people use and it will give you only the result that you type in. Instead,  go to the bottom of the page and look for the word ’search’ in the list along the base of the home page. Once you click on here, you will need to click on Advanced search under neath the text box. this will open up your world of twitter search.

From here, you can search for peoples tweets with certain keywords in them, you can specific phrases and you can also search for tweets that DONT contain certain words. For instance, if you were searching for weight loss and you wanted to find all of the tweets that did NOT contain the words PILLS, DRUGS or SURGERY, then you can do that.

Another great aspect of this search is to find tweets that are in a certain geographic location. You can specify the distance from a suburb/city that you want to see Tweets from.

As well as searching for Tweets from a specified date range , you can also see tweets FROM certain people, TO certain people or ABOUT certain people. This can be great for businesses to keep an eye on their competitors. Just imagine, doing a search last week for all the people that mentioned your competitor , who also resided in your neighborhood. You can then also search to see what your competitor was also sending out to their followers. This way you could easily keep an eye on their business from the comfort of your office.

The other terrific thing about the Advanced Twitter search is that if somebody mentions a particular problem that your business can solve, all you need to do is send them a message about the solution and you could potentially have  valuable customer.

Below, I have posted a video on how to use the Advanced Search feature. Please add comments and let me know what you think of the video

Happy Tweeting searching!

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Posted in Business, Health, Internet, Social Media, Social Networking, Twitter

Michael Jackson nearly Broke Twitter

Sunday, July 5th, 2009

It took Michael Jackson’s death to really show us the power of Social media today and how it is really affecting the way we get our information. We I first heard the news, it was via a tweet from some I did not know. At that time, I had access to a radio which was saying that he had been taken to hospital for observation. I then lost my radio access and had no TV access either so relied fully on Internet.

As the news came filtering out, I could see the growing swell of information pertaining to MJ’s death from Twitter and Facebook but the official sites such as CNN and ABC were still not saying that he had died, yet it was all over the social media circles as official.

I guess the thing about the instant notifications of social media is that there are so many people with so many ‘news’ connections that when a tweet or status update is posted, it often contains a link to the relevant site of where that information came from. So instead of me doing my usual search of the ‘official ‘ TV sites and News sites where ALL of them were not being updated as quickly as Twitter, I just needed to watch the twitter / Facebook time line and click on any of those links that I wanted to follow.

According to Tweespeed , There are approximately 400,000 to 800,000 tweets per hour on an average day. When news broke of Michael Jackson’s Death, this figure went to approx 1.2 million tweets per hour. This is staggering. Twitter are now saying that in the hours leading up to his death and the hours that followed, 30% of tweets contained the words Michael Jackson. Nearly all social media sites, including Twitter,  reported a large slow down in their server speed because of the Death.

Youtube and all of the video sharing networks have not been left out either.

Michael Jackson’s online popularity continues to soar: Mashable reported previously that 2.6 million songs  from Michael Jackson were downloaded this week;Apparently, no artist has downloaded more than 1 million songs in a week!

Videos of Thriller ( original or tribute variety) have been viewed almost 28 million times since his death.

Michael Jackson, it seems, is getting more popular by the day.

Below is one of the most popular videos on Youtube…now it is even more popular. A prison tribute to Michael Jackson

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Posted in Entertainment, Facebook, Internet, Social Media, Social Networking, Twitter, Youtube