A few people were using it, then a few more, than many more, then Oprah, now everyone (well, tens of millions at least) is using it. We are talking about Twitter. Twitter can play a very important role in building your membership as well as the quality of your relationship with your members. iGrOOps has just made this process a whole lot easier, more effective, and more enjoyable with the introduction of Twitter Tools.
What is Twitter? According to Twitter.com, "Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?" But it has evolved into so much more. Twitter is a new way to communicate and manage a significant number of quality relationships. It has become one of the greatest tools yet for finding new members and building quality relationships with your members.
To master Twitter, listen to Twooting, the daily podcast all about Twitter hosted by yours truly, Bo Bennett and Ryan Levesque. You can find the podcast at http://www.twooting.com.
Feature List.
Twitter Tools. Twitter tools is the new application from iGrOOps that was created to automate and manage your Twittering, allowing you to maximize your member growth and streamline your Twitter account. These tools are available to the administrators only and linked at the bottom of your membership site.
You must be logged in as the administrator to see the menu items in your footer -- the bottom of your iGrOOp.
Getting Started with Admin Options
Before you can use Twitter tools, you need to make sure you have a Twitter account. Get this at http://www.Twitter.com. Be sure your Twitter account is a reflection of your membership site and pick a good name to match.
Once you have your Twitter userid and password, you must pass this information to your iGrOOp. Do this by clicking the "Admin Options" tab in Twitter Tools.
There you will see many options with explanations of the options in the right hand column. You must at least enter your Time Zone, Twitter UserID, and Twitter Password. This is required for these tools to function correctly. Once you enter and save this information, you can begin using these tools.
Twitter requires an UNencrypted password to be sent across the network. This is commonly accepted for the Twitter API, and there is very little security risk associated. We strongly recommend that your Twitter passoword is NOT the same as any of your other passwords.
Receiving Direct Messages via E-mail. In your admin options, you will see that you have the option to receive direct messages via e-mail. You should use this option over the option Twitter gives you in your profile. Why? Here are the reasons:
1) The e-mails we send are prettier and include more detail.
2) Links in the email will use your iGrOOps interface instead of Twitter. This will give you more options when replying, as well allow you to handle multiple Twitter accounts without logging in.
3) Multiple direct messages are combined. If you receive a LOT of direct messages, all the messages you receive in a 5 minute period will be combined into one e-mail. This will significantly reduce your inbox clutter.
4) Ignore spam DMs! Using the spam words tool, you can enter any of the words and phrases that usually appear in spam direct messages, and these direct messages will never be sent to you via e-mail. The will appear in your Twitter account under your direct messages tab, but you never have to see them if you don't want to. This is a wonderful feature considering that over 95% of all direct message is total spam*.
Sending a Tweet / Replying
When you visit the app, it will default to sending a new tweet. The interface is very simple and straight forward. You have 140 characters to post your tweet. If you go over the 140 characters, the counter will show a negative number. If you try to post a tweet that is over 140 characters your tweet will be scanned for any long URLs and if found, they will be automatically replaced with short URLs. You will then have the option to edit more, or send the tweet. No edits will ever be done without giving you the option of approving first.
You can send direct messages from this interface as well. To initiate a direct message, enter "d + username + message" where "d" is just the letter, "username" is the Twitter userid of the user who is following you that you want to message, and "message" is your message. Do not include the "+" or the "@" before the username.
You also have the option of including an FAQ from your FAQ application. This is done by the hand pull down under the textarea where you enter your tweets.
Just selecting your FAQ will automatically insert the question and a link to the answer in your tweet. Some things to consider:
When you reply to links in your email from direct messages or other notifcations sent by iGrOOps, the links take you back to this screen. The system will automatically know if you are replying to a direct message or public tweet and setup the message accordingly.
Launching Your Twitter Tools
You will notice a tab that reads "Twitter Tools". This is where you can access all of the really powerful features. This will bring you to a pull down menu where you can select the tools. We have created this feature where we can easily add more tools in the future.
Scheduled Tweets
Those who succeed online do so in no small part due to automation. Those who can take advantage of automation have a signifcant advantage over those who must interact with computers manually. Many of the tools here are built on this principle, specifically the schedueled tweets.
Some user use Twitter exclusively for answering the question "What are you doing?". These users streams will often read, "washing my hair now", "eating a taco. Beef. Yum", and other extremely exciting announcements. Good for them. These users will scoff at the idea of scheduled tweets because rarely do we know exactly what we are doing well before we are doing it. General idea, yes, but the kind of detail usually tweeted about, no. But users, especially users in business know that Twitter has so many more uses and is very powerful as a business tool. It is in these uses the scheduled tweets come in very handy.
Here are some examples for using this tool.
Managing Your Scheduled Tweets. All of your existing tweets are clearly listed at the bottom of your scheduled tweets page. This makes it very easy to find them, edit, or remove them.
* that number is an estimation by me in dealing with my many Twitter accounts. Your spam percentage may vary.
Keyword Notify
One of the most powerful features of Twitter is the search. Search is great for many reasons, including finding interesting people to follow and interesting conversations to jump into.
The keyword notifcation tool allows you to setup searches that will e-mail you the results on a specified schedule. The searching is powerful since it uses the search features of search.twitter.com. To create a search:
1) Build your search for keywords at http://search.twitter.com/advanced and click the "Search" button. Follow the instructions on that page and play around with the data. When you get the results you are looking for, proceed to the next step.
2) Look for the "Feed for this query" link on the left side of the search page and click the link.
3) Copy the search URL in the address bar and paste it in the search field. This should begin with "http://search.twitter.com/search.atom".
That is it! You can have up to 5 of these searches. Then just select the frequency in which you want to be notified of matches and enter your e-mail address where you want these notifications to be sent.
You can actually have multiple keywords and phrases per search giving you far more than five. You just need to construct your searches the right way. If your search string is too long however, it may fail. If you find this happening, shorten your search string.
Keyword Auto Follow
Just like the keyword notify, keyword follow uses the advanced search to identify those users who are posting terms and phrases that might be a good user for you to follow. The script will automatically follow the user who posted the tweet that contanined the match of the search you created. To create a search, see the instructions in the above section.
Once you start autofollowing others, you will be able to see how many users you have followed in the current and previous days on that screen.
Twitter limits the number of users you can follow. For current limit rules (they keep changing), see twitter.com's help section.
Auto UNFollow Rules
Not too long ago Twitter allowed you to follow as many people as you wanted to. This opened up the system to abuse and "excessive following". With their current limits, it forces users to be more selective about whom they follow. No longer can you follow anybody and everybody. In order to follow more of the users you think might be interesting, you need to unfollow users whom you think are not.
Twitter users can get nasty when you unfollow them. Some take it personally and will ask you why you unfollowed or even publicly accuse you of being a "spammer" because you followed then unfollowed them. Fortunately, there are not many of these users, but they are around.
Unfollow after. This is a pull down menu with the number of days in which you want to automatically unfollow those you are currently following. It can be as little as 7 days, and as long as 30 days. If enough time has passed, you will see in the pull down menu the total number of users that you can potentially unfollow by selecting that day. We say "potentially" because the options you select on this screen can affect that number.
Who to unfollow. You can choose to unfollow all users after the number of days you have selected or just those that unfollow you.
There are many Twitter users who strongly believe that you show follow those who follow you, and just as many who strongly beleive that you should never follow someone just because they are following you. You can choose your own position on this one. Our software allows for both.
Excluding users from unfollow. This is where the system can become extremely useful. So far, just following and unfollowing using the options above will not increase the quality of your Twitter experience, just the quantity of those you follow and those who follow you. By entering in users you do not want to unfollow you really start increasing the quality.
The system will NEVER unfollow those users that you followed manually, using another software platform, or that you had before you started using iGrOOps Twitter Tools. This unfollow works only with users you followed automatically with the auto follow.
You can of course enter users manually in this section. Just enter their Twitter ID (case sensitive) one per line. These users will not be automatically unfollowed as long as they are in this list.
You can also automate the creation of this "safe list" by choosing one or both of the following options:
The combination of both these options will lead to a growing list of followers who are real users and are most likley to communicate with you.
Like the follow list, you can also see how many users you have unfollowed the day before and in the current day.
Before using the auto follow / unfollow, you might want to purge your account of all those you are following... or at least all those you don't care about following from this point on. Start fresh!
Auto Direct Message
Automated direct messages can be very effective if used properly. These are automated in the sense that they are sent to your new followers -- never sent to the same followers after they are already following you. Consider this more an "automated welcome message".
Before you create your automated direct message, have a look at the article I wrote on this at http://www.twooting.com/members/twooting/blog/VIEW/00000003/00000038/Automated-Direct-Messages-Useful-or-Evil.html
Like the follow list, you can also see how many users you have sent automated direct messages to the day before and in the current day.
@Mentions Notify
This simple tool will send you an e-mail any time your Twitter ID is mentioned in the public timeline. It is great to know when people are talking about you and what they are saying!
You may not need this tool if you have a unique Twitter ID -- you would be better off using the Keyword Notify tool. For example, one of our accounts "@EVcast" is a unique enough name where if anyone mentions the "EVcast" (without the @) we can be pretty sure they are talking about us, so we search for the keyword "EVcast" and o not use the @mention notify.