So you have decided to drive traffic to your websites with Twitter but now you are are getting swamped with SPAM which makes Twitter useless (at least as far as following the updates of good Twitter accounts). Well, the following article is a common sense strategy to help tame the Twitter SPAM problem.

But first we need to review how we ended up with this problem in the first place. To market on Twitter you need to create Twitter accounts for your various websites and you also need to build these Twitter accounts up by getting lots of targeted followers that will be interested in what you have to say. To do this, you need to use a tool such as Tweetadder and follow people on Twitter that you want to follow you back. The problem is, that when you follow tons of folks on Twitter you will also end up following tons of Twitter spammers which makes your Twitter account pretty much useless since it will be filled with spam-ish style updates.

Does this look familiar…?

Does your Twitter account look like processed meat product?

You could always unfollow accounts that SPAM your Twitter timeline but trust me when you are following tens of thousands of accounts it will be no easy task. You could also make Twitter lists of the accounts that you DO like and then you could ignore the SPAM. The problem with that approach is it is very time consuming (picking and choosing good accounts) and it doesn’t help the fact that all these spammers will be filling up your direct message box, therefore we do not believe that is a viable strategy.

Avoiding Twitter SPAM is as simple as this:

Create a new Twitter account, an account that you will NOT be using for marketing purposes (lets call this account your “personal” or “hot list” Twitter account). With this personal account you will only follow the folks that you REALLY want to read what they have to say. You will not be trying to build up the following of this account, you could even set the account to “private” if you really want to keep it hidden from the spammers. Then you could use a great tool such as Tweetie and review this Twitter account daily looking for interesting content to retweet or get links from to retweet from your other marketing Twitter accounts.

Therefore what you are really doing is creating a master account to follow those that interest you and sacrificing all of your marketing Twitter accounts, building them up only to send out updates.

As an example, I have 12 Twitter accounts. 10 of these accounts are used for marketing purposes and driving traffic to various web properties that I own. With these 10 accounts I build them up daily with Tweetadder so that they gain a large targeted following. Yet by doing that those 10 accounts are filled with SPAM and reading any updates from within those accounts is essentially useless (thanks to the spammers). So I send out updates and links with those 10 accounts and drive traffic. I use the other two Twitter accounts as follows: one account is my “idea basket”, I send updates to that account with ideas and status updates that I might want to use in the future. The other account is my “master” account or “personal” or “hot list” account (whatever you want to call it) where I follow people that interest me and Twitter accounts that are useful for retweeting purposes etc. I do NOT follow any accounts that are not of special interest to me and therefore I avoid all Twitter SPAM with and it’s always the first account I read each morning which allows me to use Twitter in the way it was intended.

I realize this strategy seems like common sense but you would be surprised how many folks have asked us to help them with their Twitter SPAM problem and when we tell them about the way we handle our Twitter accounts they almost always say “why didn’t I think of that?”, so we decided to share it here and hope that some of you find this approach to Twitter SPAM helpful.

One of the biggest complaints we hear from Facebook users is the massive amount of Game status updates in a users Facebook home page. You’ve probably seen these types of updates sprinkled throughout your Facebook page.

Status updates such as…. “so and so found a Lonely Bull on their farm. Oh no!”. There are times when your entire Facebook home page can be filled up with such updates. And many folks find those types of updates highly distracting when trying to communicate with friends and family.

Turning off or “hiding” game updates is super easy! And here is a quick guide to show you how to do it. First scroll down in your Facebook home page to the first game status update you want to hide. (see image below)

To turn off Mafia Wars updates in your timeline hover your mouse over any Mafia Wars or other game updates. When you move your mouse over the update you will see a “hide” button pop-up in the upper right corner of that status update. (see below)

When you click the “hide” button you will be presented with three choices. (see below)

Now you have the choice to:

1. Hide the friend who made the update
2. Hide updates from that game in your Facebook page
3. Cancel

In this case we want to choose the 2nd option which will hide all Mafia Wars status updates in your timeline. When you click “Hide Mafia Wars” you will get a small alert message stating…

Yay!! No more Mafia Wars status updates in your Facebook home page. Repeat this same process for any other game or Facebook applications that you find distracting and wish to hide.

Hiding friends that you don’t want to “unfriend” yet would prefer to NOT read their status updates works the exact same way, just hide them!

What if you want to “unhide” something that you have hidden in Facebook? It’s easy to unhide friends or application status updates that you have hidden. All you do is click “Top News” in your Facebook home page, then scroll to the very bottom and find the link that says “Edit Options”, click it. You will then get a pop-up screen that allows to unhide friends or applications that you have hidden. Find the application you want to unhide and click “Add to New Feed”. That’s it!

OK, so you have decided to go guns-a-blazing into the Twitter marketing universe. You have your Twitter account(s), and you are making tweets like a madman. Your following is growing and you might even be using handy tools such as Tweet Adder to build a targeted following, but then you hit a road block. Once you have followed 2000 people, Twitter wont let you follow anymore accounts. Why is that? Well, Twitter is trying to make sure that it’s service doesn’t digress into a useless tool of spam. Twitter knows that when a person follows another person that person often follows them back, therefore Twitter marketers generally follow hundreds or thousands of accounts and a large percentage of those accounts follow-back, this creates a “spammy” atmosphere and therefore Twitter has placed limits on the amount of people you can follow. But wait…. are we saying that you can never follow more than 2000 people on Twitter? No, not exactly. The Twitter limit on following people is only in place if the amount of people following you in return is not close (within 10% or so).

Get it? If you are following 2000 people you need to be followed by approximately 2000 people.

Example, lets say you have 1000 people following you and lets say you are following 1999 people. You will hit your “follow limit” the next time you follow a person on Twitter. Then you will not be allowed to follow anymore tweeters with that account.

So what can you do when you hit your follow limit?

You have two options:

1. Reduce the amount of people you are following.

2. Patiently wait and hope that you gain followers simply by making tweets. Once your following is around 2000 you will then be able to start following new people again (although you will need to keep those two numbers close to each other).

We feel the best option is #1. (Reduce the amount of people you are following). Unfollow people who are not following you back. Unfollow spammers. Unfollow tweeters that don’t interest you. The easiest way to accomplish that task is to use a tool such as Tweet Adder that can automate the process of unfollowing accounts that don’t meet the criteria you desire. Tweet Adder also features a great option which is to only unfollow accounts that were generated through Tweet Adder in the first place which insures that you will not accidentally unfollow accounts that you have hand-selected to follow.

The bottom-line is you need to have the number of followers at or around the same number as the amount of people you are following. If you keep the ratio of followers to following around 1.1 to 1 you will never encounter the dreaded Twitter following limits.

Google Buzz is Google’s attempt to capitalize on the growing social media market. Google Buzz integrates into gmail and allows you to share photos, videos, updates and more. One nice feature of Google Buzz is that there is nothing to setup, you are automatically following the people that you email and they are following you back as well. You can share your updates with just your friends or you can share with the entire public. To get all the details go to buzz.google.com or check out the video below.

The following review of Tweet adder is not a “canned” review. I really did buy the product and I really use it everyday. I hope this review will be helpful if you are considering using Tweet adder.

Here we go…
I haven’t been this excited about a product in a long time! Tweet adder is no gimmick and produces great results. Tweet adder is a software product that will help you build-up your Twitter account without the undesired result of a twitter-train scheme (Twitter -trains are bad because the followers you get are not targeted therefore they are a waste of time). Tweet adder is really nothing more than a way to automate the natural and best-practices processes of building up a Twitter account  (i.e., following the right people, unfollowing, following back, etc.). If you are doing all of these steps manually for one or more Twitter accounts, Tweet adder is for you. The best thing is that Tweet adder allows you to put all these processes on auto-pilot so you can be building your Twitter accounts while you are shopping or relaxing in your hot tub.

I cautiously bought Tweet adder about a month ago to see if it would be a good tool for me and I have used it constantly everyday since that time. I have taken several stale Twitter accounts and turned them into valuable marketing resources with the help of Tweet adder. For instance, I had an old Twitter account for a internet forum community that I manage and the account only had 59 followers and wasn’t growing. I didn’t have much time to manually build up the account so it was essentially worthless. I added it to my Tweet adder automated routine and within one week the account now has 360 targeted followers and is sending great traffic to my website. (keep in mind once you build up your Twitter following you still need to make good, compelling tweets to send traffic to your website)

So what is Tweet adder?

Tweet adder is a desktop software application runs on Mac or Windows and allows you to create a large list of folks you would like to follow based on whatever you deem worthy (tweet keywords, profile keywords, location, followers of another user, or users followed by another user). Then you set up Tweet adder to follow a predetermined amount of those users everyday. A large percentage of those users will follow you back and BOOM!! You are now growing your Twitter following with targeted users. And if those users don’t follow you back you can have Tweet adder automatically unfollow them.

My personal favorite Tweet adder strategy is as follows:

- Pick a Twitter user that has followers that I wish were following me (eg. if you had a football website you might want followers that follow the NFL Twitter account).
- Auto create a list of all of those followers and have Tweet adder follow 100 of them per day (or whatever number you want).
- Have Tweet adder auto follow back any user that follows me for any other reason (this builds strong relationships).
- Have Tweet adder auto unfollow users that don’t follow you back after three days (this keeps your Twitter account lean and clean)

Tweet adder can also send automated Tweets, replies and direct messages but I like to do that stuff myself so I don’t use those features although I might in the future when things really start rolling. Currently I have 6 Twitter accounts that tweet adder is building for me and each one is growing every single day.

In a nutshell… Tweet adder automates the tasks that will help you build up your Twitter followers in a real and targeted way. Other Twitter building schemes might be able to get you tons of followers but those followers will likely NOT be targeted and therefore be a waste of time and a distraction to your Twitter marketing campaign. I would rather have 100 targeted followers than 10,000 untargeted followers. When someone asks… “how do I effectively use Twitter to market my website/product” I tell them they need targeted followers and the best way to get targeted followers is to start following people that you want to follow you and unfollow the ones that don’t follow you back (that, combined with making good tweets is the best way to build a twitter account). Tweetadder automates that process and speeds it up so you can build you Twitter account more rapidly via automation, and therefore have time to work on other projects.

Tweet adder offers a free demo so download it today and see for yourself how powerful Tweet adder is.

Today we take a look at Tumblr. Tumblr is a blogging tool that similar to Posterous and fits somewhere in between Twitter and a full blown Word Press blog. I must admit I am a bit conflicted about the usefulness of both Posterous and Tumblr because they are so close to full featured blog yet lack the tools to monetize the blog therefore leaving you stuck somewhere in the middle. If you are not going to monetize your blog why not just use Twitter where you will have the advantage of the massive membership? Even still, tumblr is a really cool tool! Tumblr has much more robust tools than does Twitter therefore if Twitters leaves you wanting… Tumblr is for you!

Tumblr is free and creating an account is beyond simple. With Tumblr you can post text, photos, links, music, and videos from your browser. You can also make blog posts easily from your phone and there is also a great iPhone app for Tumblr. One feature I found interesting is the ability to make a “call in” post from your cell phone. I was expecting that the call in feature would turn your voice message into a text message and then post that text on your blog. Instead, the call in feature merely posts an audio recording of your call on your blog which is cool but not that useful, especially for SEO purposes.

Tumblr lacks a cool widget to place back on your Word Press blog (or other website) and therefore falls short of Zannel in that regard. Companies such as Tumblr and Posterous need to keep in mind that publishers need to be able to use every tool in a way that benefits us in some way, we need to be able to monetize the tool or use the tool to enhance our existing projects in some way shape or form.

So who might use Tumblr? The best use for Tumblr would be for creative folks who want to catalog ideas, images, videos, and create a sort of online portfolio of stuff from the net or Twitter marketers who need a “home”, i.e., a place for their users to be directed to that contains more detailed information. If you plan to create a blog that will feature Adsense or other affiliate banners for revenue generating purposes Tumblr doesn’t seem to be the solution unless I am missing how that might be accomplished.

Tumblr easily connects with Twitter for cross posting, i.e., you can auto post to Twitter from your Tumblr entries or post your Twitter entries to your Tumblr blog. Tumblr also supports Facebook posting as well as a variety of other tools via RSS feed posting which is really cool.

Customizing your Tumblr blog is easy and there are some great themes to choose from, you can further customize your theme if you like digging into the html code. Tumblr’s web 2.0 look and feel is very well done and the dashboard is simple enough to find your way around with little trouble.

You can check out the Tumblr account I whipped up in just a few seconds. InternetPoop on Tumblr.

In summary, I really love Tumblr but I’m not sure how I will use it in the future. I can’t put a ton of effort into something that’s difficult to monetize. However, I do believe there is a need for tools such as Tumblr and if Tumblr (or Posterous for that matter) ever decide to include a customizable side bar for Adsense ads or other custom affiliate code these tools might just give Word Press a real run for it’s money.

Las Vegas PubCon 2009. Hanging out at PubCon has been a blast, I’m here with my protection (the Social Networking Ninjas) and we are checking out the exhibitors on the convention floor today. I plan to give a more in-depth review of PubCon when I have more time but a few of the folks that caught my attention are: LotusJump, PR Web, and Seo Samba, very cool stuff!

On the down side I lost my parlay bet on the Colorado Avalanche game last night and I also failed miserably at the roulette wheel. Hopefully tonight will paint a different picture.

On second thought I don’t think I will add to this review. PubCon was a bit of a disappointment. Whatever you do DON’T pay for the exhibit hall, it’s a monumental waste of money. No offense PubCon but that should have been free. On the bright side I ended up winning back almost all of my money on the roulette wheel and Mario Batailli’s restaurant was AWESOME!!!!

Twitter is the hottest social networking tool on the planet, especially for businesses and internet marketers. Most internet marketers have several Twitter accounts which makes updating and tracking these multiple accounts somewhat tricky. After all… logging in and out and back in again to every Twitter account would cause most folks to tear their hair out and give up! Along comes the Twitter desktop app! A Twitter desktop app will allow you to stay logged into all of your Twitter accounts, see every update, see all your replies and direct messages, as well as easily tweet and retweet from your various Twitter accounts. Desktop Twitter apps also integrate URL shortening services so that tweeting shortened links has never been easier.

And the 3 best Twitter apps are:

#3 Seesmic Desktop

Seesmic’s Twitter desktop app has the potential to end up #1 on our list at some point in the future. We love this app! It’s column based and you can see all of your Twitter accounts together in one column. Seesmic also offers Facebook support which is important to some users (I find it as a distraction). Seesmic is still a tad rough around the edges (literally). We would love to see Seesmic not try to mimic the look and feel of the operating system, instead, come up with a unique look and feel that separates it from the operating system. Still this is a up-and-coming Twitter desktop application.

#2 TweetDeck

TweetDeck was my favorite Twitter app until Tweetie came along (see #1 below). TweetDeck has a slick user interface and TweetDeck makes it easy to follow multiple Twitter streams. One big problem with TweetDeck is setting up the columns is complicated and often times confusing. All of my tweets, replies, and direct messages should automatically be grouped together without me needing to arrange them. One thing I love about TweetDeck is the ability to Tweet to multiple Twitter accounts all at once (just enter your Tweet and then select the accounts you want to Tweet to and hit enter!) very cool. If TweetDeck would move away from the horizontal scrolling model and come up with an integrated way to keep each Twitter accounts tweets, replies, and direct messages together it might regain it’s top spot in the list.

#1 Tweetie

Tweetie kicks butt and takes names, it’s everything you want in a Twitter desktop application. Tweetie features a stunning user interface and is totally intuitive, anyone can quickly start using Tweetie without reading a single instruction. All of my Twitter accounts are in one column and I can easily select tweets, replies, or direct messages. It’s tough to find anything wrong with Tweetie although if you want to avoid some minor advertisements you need to cough up $19.95 and there is no Windows version that I am aware of. Tweetie does not offer Facebook support but guess what? Who cares?? This is a Twitter client not a Facebook client and frankly I use Twitter in a dramatically different way than I use Facebook so I prefer that they are totally separated. Tweetie just looks and feels right and I am very surprised that Tweetie doesn’t get more attention from the people who review these types of things, Tweetie is generally a after thought among most reviewers but if you ask me it’s at the top of the heap!

Truth be told… all three of the above Twitter clients are excellent, but at the moment Tweetie reigns supreme!

Posterous is a great blogging platform that features tools somewhere in-between Twitter and WordPress

Have you checked out Posterous yet? Posterous is a dead simple place to post anything. The best way to describe Posterous is… a blogging tool that is a bit more like Word Press than it is like Twitter, imagine a “Word Press lite”. Yet saying the Posterous is “lite” doesn’t do the product justice. We have reviewed Posterous and we are happy to tell you that we love it and believe it is a valuable tool that has huge potential. To get started with Posterous all you need to do is send an email to post@posterous.com BAM!! you have just setup your blog (is that easy or what?). Posterous knows that from that point forward any emails sent from that address will automatically be posted to your Posterous blog. Email your text, images, and even video, and it will be posted to your Posterous blog.

Posterous blogs are super simple to setup, yet Posterous is robust enough to be considered a serious contender in the blogging-tool universe (here is an example of a site that was setup in just a couple of minutes).

Posterous is great for individuals, families, and groups, as well as businesses. Posterous tools are extremely easy to use but there is much more to Posterous than meets the eye.

Some of Posterous’s best features are:

Image galleries. If you send an email with multiple picture attachments your pictures are automatically turned into a slick image gallery in your blog post (you can also choose to NOT have the gallery feature and have your images appear “in line” by including “((nogallery))” in the subject of your email update).

Custom domain name. You can setup your Posterous blog to be yourdomain.com.

Auto update other sites. With a single update from Posterous you can update your Twitter account, your Facebook account, YouTube, flickr, and even your own personal blog! Better yet, with Posterous you can use different email addresses to send your updates to specific places, for instance…

Just email to the right address and Posterous will handle the rest.

• Post Everywhere? post@posterous.com as usual
• Twitter? twitter@posterous.com
• Flickr? flickr@posterous.com
• Facebook? facebook@posterous.com
• Tumblr? tumblr@posterous.com
• Any other blog? blog@posterous.com
• Posterous only? posterous@posterous.com
• Combine them! flickr+twitter@posterous.com

Customize your blog. With Posterous you can change the look of your blog using several built in templates, and you can tweak those templates as much as you like, you can even add in your own custom header graphic.

Collaborative blogging. You can turn on features that allow other people (that you determine) to add blog posts to your site, or you can turn on public posting and ANYONE can post to your blog, all you need to do is review and approve the posts.

Posterous is great, but not perfect

Like every other social media tool Posterous has it’s limitations. There are a few things that we would like to see added to Posterous to make it even better.

Lame widget. Posterous has a widget that at first glance seems pretty cool but unfortunately it’s just a WidgetBox collaboration and therefore it’s very limited. It is also covered in third party advertising therefore it’s not a very good solution in our opinion. I would love to see Posterous adopt a “Zannel-like” widget which would make Posterous that much more attractive.

Posterous connections. In social media the most important thing is making connections with other people and sharing information (Twitter and Facebook lead the pack in this arena). With Posterous there doesn’t seem to be very clear tools to make connections with other Posterous users.

Monatization. It would be great if Posterous allowed it’s users to add side blocks that contained Adsense code or other affiliate links so that we could benefit from the efforts of promoting our Posterous blogs.

Posterous gets our thumbs up!

All in all, we highly recommend Posterous as a great blogging tool. Posterous is somewhere in-between Twitter and WordPress and fills a void that frankly was in need of filling. You can start your own Posterous blog right now by sending an email to post@posterous.com – try it and see what you think.

We would love to get your comments below on Posterous so we can see what you think about the Posterous blogging tool.

Everyone has heard of Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace. Yet there is a social networking tool that is as good (if not better) than all of those tools. It’s called Zannel! Zannel is a microblogging tool that is very similar to Twitter in many respects but it also features some tools that surpass Twitter. As a social networking consultant I am always testing out new social media tools and figuring out ways to use these tools to best serve my clients. Every social networking tool has it’s strengths and weaknesses, and Zannel is no exception but in my opinion it comes very close to be a perfect social networking tool.

Overview
With Zannel you can send short messages, pictures, and videos, to the web with your cell phone. Yet unlike Twitter there are no third party tools involved in sending pictures and videos – Zannel handles it all. Zannel has been called a visual microblogging tool, in that instead of focusing on text updates Zannel integrates text, images, and video, seamlessly for the end-user.

What’s so great about Zannel?
The two best things about Zannel are: 1. the widget that you can embed back into your website or blog (Zannel’s widget blows all the other widgets away, it’s customizable and looks great on any website or blog). 2. The connections you can make from Zannel with Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and more, many social networking tools allow you to connect with other tools but none of them do it as good as Zannel.

One of my clients uses all the major social networking tools to enhance their marketing program and with Zannel we have set them up so they can send one message and it goes from Zannel to all the other sites (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and flickr), the beauty is that Zannel is smart and it knows to ignore YouTube and Flickr updates if no picture or video is a part of the message. I like to think of Zannel as my starting point with every social networking program I create. With a Zannel account you can update your own website (via the widget), update Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, and other sites, all with one text message to Zannel.

The down side
There are a few things that are not so great about Zannel: 1. The small network, while Zannel has a large user base it’s nowhere near the size of Twitter or Facebook, so I certainly wouldn’t recommend using Zannel exclusively. 2. Advertising, there are some sponsored updates that show up in your profile without your opt-in (i.e., your following) which seems a bit odd. 3. iPhone app, while there are some Zannel iPhone apps for specific user (celebrity) accounts I do not believe there is a generic Zannel iPhone app.

Way more good than bad with Zannel
Yet on balance Zannel is a great social media tool and I would recommend that everyone who is employing social networking in their marketing, or just folks that want a more rich microblogging site sign up for a free Zannel account today. Zannel hasn’t gone completely unnoticed and has in fact won some web accolades including a 2008 Webby Award for “Best Mobile Social Network.” Zannel’s web interface is extremely well designed and it’s very easy to register and start implementing Zannel’s great features in a matter of minutes.

Zannel: the best social networking tool you may have never heard of.