Twitter Tips & Tricks To Help Get You Started

February 28, 2012 by Freddy X. Vasquez  |  Leave a Comment

I’ve noticed lately that Twitter has been given another boost. It was popular for a while, then it faded in my opinion, but now it’s back and better than ever. I think media outlets finally caught on to Twitter and are now using the little site that could for marketing their products. Watch TV lately? Notice the hashtags (#) everywhere?

Of course now you’re thinking to yourself, “How do I market my Twitter account?”. Well, have no fear – here are a few tips we’ve put together so you can get started.

Customization

• Change your profile picture. Ideally if the account is for your business, your logo would be perfect. If this is your personal account, use a picture of yourself to make it seem more personalized and inviting.
• Utilize as much of the 160-character limit the Twitter bio space allows. Making sure you include keywords your followers or potential followers may be searching for will help gain Twitter followers.
• Create your own custom background image. Try not to make the image too much like an ad or sales pitch. The background image must be less than 800k and we recommend a size of 1600×1200 for a large image or smaller if you plan on tiling the image or just having it on the left-hand side. You also have to keep in mind that smaller resolutions and monitor sizes will hide much of the background. Twitter is top left justified, so the left side is the area of importance.

Twitter Search

Take full advantage of the Twitter search tool. I search for keywords that affect my business and see what’s trending. Doing a search for one subject often opens the dors to new ones you didn’t think about. Here are a few more tips:

• Search for your website or blog URL and see if others are mentioning your page.
• Search for anything near you by adding near:”city state”. For example, typing near:”New York City” tattoo would return current tweets that have happened in New York City with the keyword tattoo in the results.
• Find people who you may enjoy following by searching for keywords that interested you. Giving them a retweet in most cases will garnish a follow.
• Any time you get excellent results click the “Save this search” button to save that search. These searches can then be found under the “Searches” tab next to your timeline on the new Twitter interface. Making it a habit to check these daily will produce results quicker and more efficiently.

Followers

• Engage followers. This helps in keeping them interested and many will retweet your updates.
• Do not follow too many people. No one is going to follow someone who is following thousands of people but only has 10 followers – trying too hard actually hurts in this case.
• Retweet only interesting posts. Not doing so will have your followers jumping ship quicker than you think.
• Retweet and participate in conversations with people with a lot of followers. Their followers will see your updates and if they’re interesting, guess who they’ll follow next?
• When first joining do not follow hundreds of people. You’ll mark yourself as a bot and that’s never good.

Create Interesting and Useful Tweets

• Try making all your tweets informative, useful, or funny. Again, if they’re boring or useless, your followers will leave.
• Do not post mundane posts, e.g. having lunch. Do you care if anyone else is eating lunch? Exactly! Give your followers something to talk about.
• Add hashtags to your tweets. For example, if your tweet is about baseball, add #baseball in the tweet.
• Tweet as often as possible. No one is going to follow someone who has not tweeted in months. Try at the very least to tweet a few times a week or daily if you can manage.
• Do not whine or complain. Do I really need to tell you why?
• Try saving your most valuable tweets during the times people will most likely see them.
• Keep some space available in your tweet in case someone retweets your post. People liks to add comments to retweets, so make their life a little easier.

Get Twitter On Your Mobile Device

iPhones, Blackberries, Android phones, and almost all of the other smart phones have Twitter applications. Take full advantage of these applications. Stuck on a train, car ride, bored? Grab your phone and give your followers something food to tweet about.

Advertise You’re On Twitter

• Mention your Twitter page as many places as you can – your business card, e-mail signatures, website, Facebook, etc.
  
• Create a tweet button like the example below.

Tweet



• Create a Twitter profile widget on your blog or website.

I know there may be a lot to process here, but you don’t have to do everything in one day. Start with the customization process first and then move on to implementing Twitter on your other social networks and sites. Once you have that completed, turn to gaining followers and creating ideas you think would best fit your subject matter on Twitter.

Remember, these tips can only help you get started on Twitter and are not an end all. Once you find your niche and flow, do some more Google searching focusing on the Twitter aspects that affect you. You’d be surprised with what you’ll find. Good Luck!

How To Get The Most Out Of Your WordPress Blog

January 24, 2012 by Freddy X. Vasquez  |  Leave a Comment

Many of our clients have asked us to redesign their websites using the WordPress platform. It makes it easier for them to log in and make the updates they need right away as opposed to waiting for the “web guy”. Keeping websites fresh with new content keeps your Google rankings moving in the right direction and allows you to achieve better organic rankings.

So being many of my clients have asked me the same batch of questions on how to get the most out of WordPress, I figured why not write a quick little post helping you get started on the right path towards success.

Permalinks
One of the first things you should do is setup your permalinks correctly. If you’ve already went ahead and started blogging or creating pages, you’ll see the links created by WordPress look something like this:

http://www.YourAwesomeUrl.com/?page_id=35

Looking at that you can tell right away that SEO is not the main focus. In order to fix that, all you need to do is got to your Dashboard > Settings > Permalinks. Select the post name option, which should look like the following:

/%postname%/

Doing this will set your URLs to show the titles of your pages or posts, benefitting your SEO and should look like this:

http://www.YourAwesomeUrl.com/your-awesome-title

Google Sitemap Generator
This is an awesome plug-in created by Google that generates XML Sitemap of your WordPress blog. Just install the plug-in, activate, and a sitemap is auto-generated and updated with each blog post. The file wil be placed in the root directory of your site and called “sitemap.xml”. You can then submit this sitemap using Google’s Webmaster Tools. [Read More]

What Is SOPA & Why Should It Concern You

January 18, 2012 by Freddy X. Vasquez  |  1 Comment

The past couple of days you might have seen a bunch of sites talking about SOPA, PIPA, blackouts and asking you to sign petitions. But what is SOPA? Short for Stop Online Piracy Act, it is a proposed bill that aims to crack down on copyright infringement by restricting access to sites that host pirated content.

Simply put,the government is trying to crack down on sites that promote illegally downloading movies, music and media. This is definitely something that should be supported – but the way SOPA is setup, it promotes censorship and can lead to unwanted circumstances.

Here is an excerpt from a CNN Money article posted yesterday:

Let’s say a YouTube user uploads a copyrighted song. Under the current law, that song’s copyright holders could send a “takedown notice” to YouTube. YouTube is protected against liability as long as it removes the content within a reasonable timeframe.

When it gets a DMCA warning, YouTube has to notify the user who uploaded the content. That user has the right to file a counter-motion demonstrating that the content doesn’t infringe on any copyrights. If the two sides keep disagreeing, the issue can go to court.

The problem with DMCA, critics say, is that it’s useless against overseas sites.
SOPA tackles that by moving up the chain. If you can’t force overseas sites to take down copyrighted work, you can at least stop U.S. companies from providing their services to those sites. You can also make it harder for U.S. Internet users to find and access the sites.

But SOPA goes further than DMCA and potentially puts site operators on the hook for content their users upload. A site could be deemed a SOPA scofflaw if it takes “deliberate actions to avoid confirming a high probability” that its service will be used for copyright infringement. That kind of swampy language has tech companies spooked.

“YouTube would just go dark immediately,” Google public policy director Bob Boorstin said at a conference last month. “It couldn’t function.”

While there are good intentions with SOPA, the above excerpt shows you how one site many of us frequent will be affected. There needs to be another way – a better way – of putting an end to piracy without censoring the rest of the internet.

If you’re looking for more info on SOPA and its negative implications, here is a quick list of articles you can read:

SOPA Will Take Us Back to the Dark Ages – Mashable
Why Start-ups Are Scared of SOPA – Inc
SOPA Isn’t Dead, It’s Just Sleeping (Until February) – TechCrunch

If you would like your voice to be heard, please visit Google’s page to End Piracy, Not Liberty.