Twitter recently announced that they will soon begin to pass all shared links through their own URL shortener.  This would apply to any link posted using the web interface or through third party applications such as Tweetdeck.

In the near future, when you share a personalized link, it will be wrapped in Twitter’s shortener (http://t.co) instead of whatever format the original link was in.  This shortened link Twitter creates will 301 redirect to the original link.

This probably won’t make a difference for most people, but for those of us who use our own personalized URL shorteners this will make a huge difference.

I have and use my own URL shortener.  Many of you may have noticed this from some of the links I’ve shared on Twitter.  For example, when I shared the link to the recent post on “Dwight Schrute’s Secret To Better Blogging” I used my own URL shortener to shrink the link to http://robmcguire.net/dsbb.  Having a personalized URL shortener has made sharing links much more manageable and brandable.

Twitter’s new feature is going to take away the benefits you gain from personalized URL shorteners.  When most of the links you see through Twitter all start with the same prefix then individuality will suffer a little.  People who use their own personalized URL shortener as part of their marketing efforts are going to lose out in that aspect.

According to the rest of Twitter’s announcement, it looks like bigger companies such as Amazon.com will keep their links somewhat intact, but I don’t see the same happening for the little guy.

What are your thoughts on Twitter’s new link policy?  If you use your own personalized URL shortener how is this going to change how you use it?

As you go through your Twitter journey you will no doubt run across hundreds, thousands, maybe even millions of people.  Each one has their own way of doing things on Twitter, some better than others.  If your goal is to be successful with Twitter, then you should avoid the following behaviors at all costs.

The Self Promoter

You can recognize this person by a very noticeable pattern in their tweets: all the links point to them.  Sometimes they take this a step further and will post a normal update, such as what restaurant they’re currently dining in, and leave an out of place link to their website at the tail of that tweet.

Seriously, what’s going on with that?  Marketing through narcissism has never produced good results, so why continue this pattern on Twitter?  Congratulations Self Promoter, you really put the “me” in “social media”.

The Constant Retweeter

You’ve probably seen this person in the wild before.  This person never has anything of their own to say, they just retweet what others say.  Constantly.  The lack of originality in these types is astounding.

The Quoter

On the same level as The Constant Retweeter, The Quoter never has anything of their own to say as well.  They just litter their Twitter stream with statements made by people who aren’t on Twitter.  It should be noted that there is a tolerance level for how many times a person can quote Mark Twain in a single day; anything over once and you’ve gone over your limit.

The API Guy

This person is a little harder to identify.  If you look closely at updates in your timeline, you will see the where other people’s tweets originated.  Most often you’ll see that they came from the web, Tweetdeck, Gwibber, etc.  But for people that just can’t be bothered to do some actual interaction with other people, you’ll see that their tweets have an origination of “API”.  That means the tweets have been stored and scheduled by some form of software and released in a timed fashion.  This is the equivalent of a bot.

The Cash Cow

Similar to The Self Promoter, The Cash Cow tweeter is out to get theirs.  They think of their followers as a commodity and something that should be monetized.  That is why you see so many of their daily updates with #ad or #spon in them.  It doesn’t appear that anyone ever told them that their twitter stream is very much like a mailbox stuffed with junk mail.

The Linkjacker

The Linkjacker is an offshoot of The Self Promoter.  Now there is absolutely nothing wrong with promoting your own site occasionally, but the Linkjacker kicks this up a notch.  Instead of pushing out a link to their site, they provide a link to the Digg or Stumbleupon submission of their site.  This is done in hopes that you will help them market their site to even more people.

The Snob

These are the people who choose to use social media without being social.  They post updates for everyone to see but you won’t see them ever reply to anyone.  Ok, once in a blue moon a Snob may reply to someone, but instances like this are rare.  The Snobs are usually employed as actors or singers.

So that’s the list of the 7 habits of highly annoying Twitter users.  How would your list have compared?

Here’s a quick question for you: What do you do if you hurl an insult out at someone who’s extremely popular on Twitter and they retweet your jab?  Do you:

• Immediately apologize?
• Hide from Twitter for a while?
• Delete your account?

If your Twitter handle was aumrantheku then you definitely chose the last option.

I don’t normally follow the squabbling that goes on over Twitter, but someone retweeted what Kim Kardashian said and since I was a little bored at the time I decided to go check out the Twitter page for aumrantheku.  Turns out, I was too late.  According to Twitter, she no longer existed.

Then I searched her name using the Twitter search function, and came across a seemingly endless list of people echoing their support for Kardashian and bashing on aumrantheku.  A few other people noticed as I did that this aumrantheku person deleted their account rather quickly.

I guess that’s what can happen when you insult someone on Twitter who happens to have almost 4 million followers.

I think Salem is long overdue for a gathering of local tweeters, wouldn’t you agree?

It shouldn’t be that difficult to round up those that are interested in rubbing shoulders with the people that we see in our Twitter timelines.  We talk to each other all the time, and it would be nice to actually put a face with the avatar (if you haven’t done so already!)

I think a setting a date for the Salem Tweetup® in a couple of weeks in the future (early to mid June) would give people plenty of time to hear about it and carve out some time to attend.

The comments are open for you to give your thoughts on this, as well as to suggest a time and place that something like this could take place.

There are many, many (maybe even too many) Twitter apps and programs available for everyday use.  But the one I’m about to briefly touch on is pretty good if you are into creating lists of people to follow that other people can easily use for their own purposes.

TweepML lets you create a list, any kind of list, of people on Twitter that you can share with others and they can choose to follow all, some or none of the people you listed.  I have taken the initiative here and created a list of approximately 100 people in Salem, Oregon that you can choose to add to your list of the people you are following.

The whole process is very simple: Click on the link I’m about to provide, choose the people on the list you wish to follow (all, none, or uncheck those you do not want to follow), click the button at the bottom and you’re done!  TweepML will then access your account (if you already let them) and automatically follow all these Salemite Tweeters!

Follow this link to get to the list of Salemites on Twitter

Now I scraped this list from twitterholic, so some of the people might be outdated and I probably even left out some very deserving people who should be on this list.  If there are any errors or additions you feel should be noted, contact me or just leave a comment.

Two weeks ago I wrote a little opinion piece about changing the color of your Twitter avatar to show support for a cause.  My wife and I don’t agree on everything, and when I spout off with something like this I try to keep her eyes from seeing this blog for a little while.  For one reason or another she ran across it this evening and we had a little debate.

Now while she did somewhat agree with my stand, she still tried to inform me that there is some value in things like this.  I thought she made some nice points so I asked her to write up a little of her view on this because I feel it’s important to present more than just one side to some situations.

An empty gesture is still a gesture.

While I agree that changing your avatar color produces no real change, I worry about discouraging small steps.  In a world of such profound apathy I’m willing to forgive a few “bumper sticker” activists.  A gesture like this can be likened to patting yourself on the back and most of the time I would agree.   But who am I to set the charitable scale?

Out of all the people that did change their avatar, how many went further?   Lets say out of 100 people, ten changed the color for the day; how many took the time to write a letter or donate time and money as you suggested?  We all know it was far less.  I say give your support to the causes that mean something to you no matter how small the gesture or charity.  If we all walk the walk long enough it just might stick.  It’s ok to practice.

I’m all for an open exchange of ideas, so if anyone else has something they would like to add, feel free to jump in to the comments section below.

Do you know what day it is?  It’s Follow Friday! People are going to be handing out recommendations to their followers, giving them advice on who they should follow.  Bundles of names will clog up Twitter timelines while tributes are passed around like Valentine’s Day cards.  Everyone is going to have a great time and go home happy.

Did I mention that this is probably a waste of time?

Most people are going about this Follow Friday thing all wrong.  There are no blessings coming from the way their recommendations are handed out.  Their hearts may be in the right place, but their methods are lacking.

The most common format used when recommending others on Follow Friday is to list a bunch of names and including a “#ff” hash tag either at the beginning or the end of the tweet.  It looks just like this:

Thousands upon thousands of tweets just like this come pouring out every Friday.  And as you can see, it consists of nothing but a few names and a hash tag.

These recommendations fail because there is no indication as to why anyone should follow these people.  There is no hint as to who these people are, nothing is there to entice anyone to click on over to their profile.  Essentially it becomes white noise.

It doesn’t have to be like this. You can change how you use Follow Friday to a way that gives true recommendations for great people and in doing this you will make yourself look good as well.

A good follow recommendation on Twitter should only refer to one person and contain the following three pieces of information:

• Who are they?
• What do they do?
• Why should you follow them?

Even with the 140 character limit imposed by Twitter, you should be able to come under the limit and fill in all three blanks.

Here is an example of a Follow Friday recommendation that hits the mark:

You can see from this tweet that all three questions have been answered.  This kind of recommendation will encourage more people to check out the profile of @steamykitchen and will generate more followers for her.

How does this improve my image?

When you start making real recommendations on Follow Friday like this, you are going to start something infectious.  You will be seen as someone who has kind words for other people, a kind of person who isn’t stingy with compliments.  Additionally, your appearance on Twitter will become more appealing, and people tend to gravitate towards personalities like that.

It’s a win-win situation if you share in with the Follow Friday crowd and add more than just a name with a hash tag.  If you have been the type that just lists names without a reason, try a different method and see how much better it will become for you.

I don’t know if you noticed this or not, but yesterday I flipped my Twitter account on its ear.  I changed my username, started a new account under my old name (@robmcguire), and then announced on my old account where people could find me if they wanted to reconnect.  This wasn’t an accident; I chose to do this.

I had not been pleased with the overall state of my Twitter account for several months.  I was missing too much information and seeing far too much spam.  I had to steer clear from DM box as it had become a festering pit of never-ending requests to take quizzes, send gifts, malware links, etc.  The situation I found myself in wasn’t ideal, but it was one of my own creation.

A while back, I decided that I wanted to greatly increase the size of my Twitter network for these two reasons:  I wanted to promote websites to a much bigger audience and I wanted to network my business by creating meaningful relationships with other talented people.  So I began to build up my network.

What I did to increase my followers isn’t really a secret; thousands of people do this every day.  I followed people in the hope that they would reciprocate back.  If they didn’t follow me back within a few days, I dropped them.  I followed almost everyone back who followed me so they wouldn’t go away.  I started getting more followers slowly and in a short amount of time I was gaining hundreds of followers every day.

As my number of followers grew, so did the amount of people I was following.  Tweetdeck is my preferred Twitter app, but even with sorting people into several groups it became difficult to keep up with everything that was going on.  Soon it became impossible to track what people were saying.

Eventually, I had amassed a following of nearly 25,000 people and I was following back nearly as many.  I use the term “following” liberally as it was pretty safe to say that I didn’t have a clue what was going on with most people, just the ones who were placed into separate Tweetdeck columns.  About that time I stopped building my followers because it had only become a numbers game at that point.

By then, I had already noticed that I wasn’t able to drive any significant amount of traffic to any website with the following I had amassed.  I did the math and figured that anytime I pushed a link to one of my sites it had a click-through rate of 0.05% or less.  That equates to less than 1 person out of every 3,000 followers.

I can safely assume this stems from one or both of the following: I am an extremely uninteresting person (possibly) or my Twitter network was as uninterested in me as I was with them (very likely).  In my quest to build a huge network I ignored common sense and chased the numbers.

In the end, my Twitter account resulted in me having a network of thousands of people with whom I never shared one word.  And my timeline was littered with things I was not interested in (tooth whitening, get-rich-quick schemes, etc).  It was a mess, and I took a drastic measure and started fresh.

I took a few things from this experience that I am going to apply to my newly restarted Twitter account and that is to limit the amount of people that I follow to a manageable level and focus more on connecting with those in my network.

How is your Twitter experience been for you?  Have you done anything like I have that you regretted later?

I am not going to change my avatar color, nor am I going to change the color of my tweets for your worthy cause.  I didn’t change my avatar to green to show my support for democracy in Iran, and I’m not going to change my avatar to red to show my support for World AIDS day.  Sorry, but I find this to be an empty gesture.

This is not to say that these two campaigns are without merit.  I find them both to be important.  But if you want me to color up my avatar for the cause of the month, then you are first going to have to explain to me how my avatar will make a measurable difference in anything like that.

Seriously, did the drama of the Iranian elections stop because some people colored their Twitter avatars green?  Did the Iranian powers-that-be pause in their atrocities after they caught wind of the wave of green avatars on Twitter?  If they did, I didn’t catch that news release.  Going “green” didn’t accomplish anything other than maybe a blurb in a few blogs about green avatars.

Now today the trend is to change the color of your tweets and avatar to red in order to raise awareness of World AIDS Day.  I’m going to pass up on this day trend as well.  I can honestly say that I haven’t run across one single person in the last 25 years who wasn’t aware of what AIDS is or what steps they can take to prevent contracting the virus.  I just don’t see what changes can occur by turning the text of the fluff I tweet into red.

If you really want to do something that will bring about change, then skip the avatar changes and actually do something.  Instead of just coloring a picture, try pressuring your lawmakers into responding to these international crises.  Donate to organizations that help in these areas.  Start a fundraiser and donate the funds to medical research.  Do something tangible.

Let me digress for a minute and further explain this concept with the empty gesture I despise the most: the “I Support Our Troops” bumper stickers.  Now I myself am completely grateful for the service that the men and women in the military do for us on a daily basis, and I think that everyone should feel this way regardless of their opinion on the war.  I don’t envy their role, and am thankful that people like them have stepped up and volunteered in that capacity to serve our country.

So when I see that yellow ribbon bumper sticker I have to wonder if they really do support the troops, or is it just another emblem on a car.  Because sadly, I’ve yet to see a sticker with that kind of ability.  But I’m fully aware that people do have that potential.

You want to support the troops? Try writing a soldier, any soldier, a letter expressing your gratitude.  Send care packages to those stationed in the Middle East.  And remember that the families our soldiers leave behind are hurting as well, both emotionally and financially.  Helping a soldier’s family while they are risking their lives thousands of miles away can be hugely uplifting, for them and for you.  Actions like these will speak volumes more than any little sticker can do.

Maybe I’m just cranky this morning, but after logging on to Twitter and seeing this I had to get this rant off my chest.  I’m really not against anyone showing their support for worthy things, I’m just against promoting the use of empty gestures as a way to bring about change.  Real action is required if any good changes are to come.

So what do you think?  Do you support the process of coloring your Twitter avatar to show your support for a cause?  Is this just the rant of a person who hasn’t had enough coffee yet?

How self-conscious are you when you’re putting out updates on Twitter? Are you worried what others may think or that you if you say something that others don’t like you’ll lose followers? The good news is that you’re not alone in feeling this way. The bad news is there’s nothing you can do about it.

If you want to feel free and comfortable using Twitter then you’re going to just have to be yourself. It is impossible to please everybody all the time so you’ll be much better off in the long run being true to yourself and letting the chips fall where they may. Besides, if you fall into the people-pleasing path then your tweets may end up not being an honest representation of yourself. You don’t want to be a phony, do you?

A little while ago, when the media was making a big deal out of the Miss California – Gay Marriage thing, I fired out a tweet about it. In that tweet I said that I thought Perez Hilton was an asshat in that ordeal. Shortly after, I noticed that I lost some followers including two long-time followers that I have had several conversations with. I didn’t like losing them for what I said, but at the same time I was OK with it because it was my honest opinion and I said what was on my mind.

You can spend your time projecting your true self on Twitter, or you can spend your time worrying about making everyone happy. I think you’ll find yourself much more content just being yourself and not trying to be somebody you’re not.