PAGE 12 The Inlander | InlandPress.org | JUNE 2011

Improve your Twitter strategy with these Web-based toolsBy Michelle FinklerAssocIATE EdITor

Whether you’re a Twitter novice or enthusiast, there’s always room for improvement when it comes to making the most of the microblogging site. But have you always wondered just how valuable Twitter can re-ally be to your media company?

Twitter is a powerful way to attract and engage followers, according to Paul Wagner, CEO of Portland, Ore.-based Forkfly. You can evaluate and improve your media company’s Twitter presence with the following Web-based tools, Wagner said.

Twitalyzer rates your Twitter account’s engagement, generosity in retweeting other users’ tweets and other metrics, such as which tweets have been the most suc-cessful, Wagner said.

“Engagement simply means, ‘What are we doing to create a dialogue?’” he said. “If we post a tweet and someone responds to it, are we saying thank you? Are we giv-ing feedback?”

Wagner said a newspaper’s generosity rating on Twitalyzer should be in a very high percentile, meaning you are retweet-ing fellow tweeps’ posts, he said.

“Let’s say you have someone who is regularly retweeting your message,” Wag-ner said. “Twitalyzer will show who your top followers are—the ones who love your content and share it with their friends. What would be generous of our [Forkfly] feed to do is anytime they have something to say that is of interest, to rebroadcast it to our 9,300 Portland followers.”

These Twitalyzer ratings tie together, he said, affecting your score in other metrics. So if your generosity drops, so does your velocity or the speed in which your mes-sage is pushed into the stream, he said.

“What this means in essence is that our message may sit there for some time before someone picks up on it and rebroadcasts it,” he said. “You’re at a big advantage as a news organization because the type of content you’re putting out there is going to be relevant and worthy of being shared in real-time. If you’re putting out something that says, ‘Freeway closed between exits 23 and 25,’ that’s something people are going to pick up on.”

Wagner also warned against linking your Facebook page to your Twitter account since, as a media company, you’re trying to accomplish two different goals with each platform.

“Twitter is a constant flow—a stream of consciousness. This is a constant barrage

of information that you have to filter through yourself,” he said. “What happens with Facebook are a couple things. Let’s say I post a really long message to Face-book. When I say ‘really long,’ I mean more than 140 characters. What happens is because my Facebook feed is linked to Twitter, my message is cut short [on Twit-ter]. Since Facebook posts tend to be a bit longer, they don’t translate well to Twitter. You’ve got to compress to get your mes-sage across on Twitter. If you don’t get your message across, you won’t get picked up and retweeted.”

Another service, Twitter Grader (Twit-terGrader.com), is similar to Twitalyzer but free and much more simplistic in eval-uating your feed on Twitter, Wagner said. It shows the number of updates, the number of tweeps you’re following, the number of followers you have and your rank out of the roughly 9.5 million active Twitter us-ers.

Friend or Follow is a quick and easy way to find out who hasn’t followed you back so you can un-follow them, Wagner said.

“It’s very simple,” he said. “If they’re not following you back—unless it’s a valuable source of information that you might want to rebroadcast in your own chan-nel—they’re completely worthless to you. I’m not sure who you might want to follow in your area. Maybe it’s the mayor of your town, and he hasn’t followed you back. Don’t delete the guy or girl. That’s probably a bad idea since they’re a useful source. But if it’s the guy from the bike shop down the street, and he has not followed you back, delete him and be done with it.”

TwitalyzerWebsite: Twitalyzer.comCost: Freemium What it does: Gauges the overall impact of your Twitter account.

Website: FriendorFollow.comCost: FreeWhat it does: shows who you’ve followed who hasn’t followed you back.

Friend or Follow

Friend or Follow is a free way to find out who you’ve followed who hasn’t followed you back.

Twitalyzer is a Web-based tool that rates your Twitter feed’s overall impact. Twitalyzer is a freemium service with subscriptions starting at $4.99 per month.

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Tweet Adder

Wagner said media companies can beef up their Twitter feeds and the feeds of their local advertisers by using Tweet Adder.

“We have social media feeds all over the country with sizes ranging from 3,000 to 12,000,” Wagner said. “What we’ve started to do there is take local merchant content and rebroadcast it. What we can do that merchants can’t and what we can do that they don’t know about is use soft-ware like this to quickly ramp up Twitter efforts. Still, Twitter is only as good as the nature of your feed and the number of fol-lowers who decide to opt in.”

Wagner said it’s easy to acquire a lot of junk followers, but finding quality follow-ers can be challenging. Tweet Adder, how-ever, allows you to search by location and activity, such as searching specifically for Twitter users in the Portland area who have tweeted during the past five days, he said.

“That’s a wonderful search parameter,” Wagner said. “What Twitter will tell you is that they have two billion users world-wide, but what they don’t tell you is that most of them are dead or not using the system. You want to make sure you’re us-ing the active base, which is what this system is really great at doing.”

In the markets that Wagner has been working with, he said they were able to get 2,000 to 3,000 new followers in the period of a month. Results may vary, however, since you still have to make sure that you’re putting great content on that feed, he said. Also, the process of using Tweet Adder to build followers is gradual since following too many tweeps at once will trigger a red flag with Twitter, he said.

“Twitter is very careful about spam, and I don’t just mean sending out a bunch of junk messages,” he said. “What they’re really looking for is are you adding too many followers at a time, and if so, why are you? And if you are adding too many followers at a time, what’s the nature of your content? So they’ve got this crazy algorithm, and if you go in there and you’ve got one tweet over the last three

weeks and you decide to add 400 followers that day, you may get banished for the pe-riod of a week. That’s for your first of-fense. If you do it again, you’re gone. They will get rid of your feed.”

To be safe and not draw attention from Twitter, Wagner said Forkfly has found success in the following steps: Make sure you’ve posted quality content to the feed at least daily, find all the local followers active on Twitter during the past five days and add roughly 300 new followers using Tweet Adder.

“How do you add a follower?” Wagner asked. “You’ve done this search, they’ve given you this list and you click ‘Add Fol-lowers.’ ‘How many would you like to add?’ 300. This is who you’re fol-lowing. You’ve followed 300 people over a period of

roughly an hour because it doesn’t want to do this too quickly or that could alert Twit-ter that something is amiss. So the 300 get added. What’s the next step? The next step is to wait. You wait roughly a week. If they have not followed you back within a week, they are not going to follow you back.”

The next step is to unfollow, Wagner said. Of the tweeps that you’ve followed during the past week, Twitter Adder will show who has not followed you back so you can delete them.

“Statistically, roughly 15 to 20 percent of those that you follow will follow you back with each batch,” Wagner said. “So, if 20 percent is the number, I’ve just add-ed 60 new followers over a two-day period. You’re going to do this every day. You’re going to cycle through this—add, unfol-low, add, unfollow.”

Twitter Adder can also be used to man-age your feed and send delayed tweets, like HootSuite allows, though Wagner said what Twitter Adder is best at is managing multiple feeds, searching by parameters and adding local followers.

“This is about finding qualified people that you want to follow in your commu-nity only,” he said. “It’s easy to build a follower base on Twitter that will do you absolutely no good because the bottom line is, if you’re just adding random people from around the country, they don’t care about your content.”

Website: TweetAdder.comCost: Prices start at $55What it does: Allows you to search for local, active Twitter users, so you can follow them and get followers in return.

Tweet Adder allows you to search by location and activity, so your newspaper can find active tweeps in your area.

Twitter CounterWebsite: TwitterCounter.comCost: FreemiumWhat it does: Projects your Twitter feed’s growth in followers.

Wagner said Twitter Counter is a great way to see how your Twitter feed is trending with regard to attracting followers.

“What this will do is give me some rapid stats on my growth,” Wagner said. “So every once in a while, you’ll see that we dropped a few followers. Twitter will do a scan of their entire database of users, and

they try to delete spam followers, which is why you’ll see that drop-off.”

Contact: Paul Wagner, paul@forkfly.com

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