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.

Yeah, yeah we have heard all the horror stories… cell phones cause brain tumors, and text messaging while driving is now illegal because it’s dangerous. Yet just when everyone is picking on texting we find our that texting can actually save your life! Sure it’s not wise to attempt to send or read text messages while you are driving your car but texting isn’t all bad. Check out this recent story from New Zealand:

Tourist’s texts to Greece save him in New Zealand

A tourist who got lost on a New Zealand mountain was rescued after sending text messages to his family in Greece, newspapers and websites reported on Monday.

Marios Symeonidis was visiting Mount Ruapehu, home to New Zealand’s largest skiing and snowboarding area, this weekend with a friend, but then lost his companion while taking photographs, website www.stuff.co.nz reported.

He was not equipped for an overnight stay and was only wearing light clothing.

Symeonidis sent text messages to his family in Greece, telling them he was lost. They then passed on the information to police in New Zealand via Greek emergency services.

Four teams were dispatched to rescue Symeonidis, who ended up spending the night on the mountain and was then picked up in the morning by another tourist, who drove him to the rescue teams.

Rescue pilot Henry de Waal said Symeonidis was well after his ordeal, and extremely hungry.

source

In a recent article the folks at Mashable did a great job of rounding up stats from analytics company called Net Applications on browser usage on the internet. The good news is that quality browsers such as Chrome and Safari are growing in usage, yet the bad news is the worst browser of all-time Internet Explorer 6 is still the 2nd most popular browser with 20.07% market share.

From the article…

5.20% of the market is actually impressive for a browser as new as Chrome, but Internet Explorer still dominates. IE8 takes up 22.31% of the market and IE7 carries 14.58%, but it’s upsetting to see that IE6 on its own is still the second most popular browser version (behind IE8) at 20.07%.

At Mashable, we’ve made it clear that we believe IE6 must die. It has stifled innovation and left its users vulnerable to security threats for too long, and compared to modern browsers it’s a hassle to use.

Google agrees, and so do many other companies; that’s why it’s phasing out support for the browser, hoping that in doing so it can convince users to either upgrade to a newer version or switch to a competing browser like Firefox, Chrome or Safari.

The good news is that this seems to be working, albeit very, very slowly. IE6 has been declining gradually for months. It just can’t happen quickly enough.

Read the entire Mashable article here.

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.

Have you heard of Google Goggles yet? Google Goggles is a visual based search engine. To search just use your camera on your cell phone. The technology is still new but offers some exciting new capabilities that might make using your cell phone even more productive. Google Goggles is available for Android based cell phones.

Twitter is all the rage, online marketers, affiliate niche site owners, media outlets, family, and friends are all tweeting up a storm. It seems like you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting somebody who is talking about or using Twitter. In 2010 it is estimated that 20 million people will sign up and use Twitter regularly, that’s 10 times less than the amount of people who use Facebook but it’s clear that Twitter is gaining fast. And while Twitter seems to be the next “big thing” not everyone is singing it’s praises.

5 Reasons why Twitter sucks:

#5. No advertisements. How am I supposed to get great bargains on Viagra or deals on car insurance when Twitter doesn’t serve me ads? I wants banner ads on top, on the side, as well as endless looping pop-up ads every time I try to leave Twitter.

#4. Registration is too simple. I prefer going through several pages of forms during the registration process and entering a captcha at least 6 times until I can get it right. Furthermore, no email account activation is necessary. I don’t know about you, but I look forward to the scant opportunities I get go snooping through the 1,273 items in my junk mail folder to find an email activation link. Twitter, you’ve let me down again.

#3. No endless Farmville, and Yoville status updates. When my second cousin buys a chicken for her Farmville farm I want to know about it ASAP!!

#2.The name is dumb. Who came up with the name Twitter anyway?

#1. I didn’t invent Twitter. The most pathetic thing about Twitter is that I didn’t think of it first. It should be me who is holding out for the first billion dollar bidder to fatten my wallet and send me laughing all the way to the bank. I mean come on people… I could have thought of Twitter… anyone could have thought of Twitter… but specifically, it should have been me. That makes me 0 for 3, I didn’t think of MySpace, Facebook, or Twitter… heck I didn’t even think of YouTube! So off I go thinking up the next big thing and trust me… it will be much better than Twitter.

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.