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Top 10 Twitter Tools According to @ZaddleMarketing
Tonight I gave a presentation at the #lincstweetmeet event on the top 10 twitter tools, covering both old twitter applications and new applications. In all honesty there were probably another 20 I could have added to the list (however I only had 18 minutes!)
Other worthwhile mentions include SocialOomph, Tweetdeck, SocialMention & Sprout Social
Do you agree?
Are there other applications you use or could recommend – feel free to share you tips below.
Unbelievable Examples Of Using Augmented Reality For Marketing & Presentations
Okay – so a Twitter post earlier today got me looking into Augmented Reality in more detail (sorry I can’t remember the tweet without looking back through my timeline) – anyway I came across this video which is truly mindblowing as to the potential that augmented reality has – must admit I had never really looked into this at all before – but my word this is genuinely unbelievable stuff
Have a look for yourself – the chocolate cereal box at 30-40 seconds is awesome! And the presentation at 2.38 is mind boggling 
So my questions are (as I have no idea on these things):
How hard is this to do?
How expensive would it be to do?
Are there any stats out at the moment that can monitor & feedback user engagement (& purchase) with this type of marketing?
Anyone know? Please answer below.
How To Search On Twitter
With the popularity of social search continuing to increase, we thought it would be a good time to help people “find” what they want on Twitter.
Most people have seen the search facility on Twitter – however this can be narrowed down further with a few simple commands (listed below the image)
- Standard Search: Places To Visit = tweets containing “places” “to” “visit” in any order – this is the default setting for Twitter.
- “Places To Visit” = tweets containing the exact phrase “places to visit”.
- Manchester OR Leeds = tweets containing either “manchester” or “leeds” (or both).
- Football -spanish = tweets containing “football” but not “spanish”.
- #Leeds = tweets containing the hashtag “Leeds”.
- from:AndyClaytonEC = tweets sent FROM the person “AndyClaytonEC”.
- to:lesanto = tweets sent TO the person “lesanto”.
- @jennysjams = tweets referencing the person “jennysjams”.
- “places to visit” near:”Leeds” = tweets containing the exact phrase “places to visit” and sent near “Leeds”.
- near:Lincoln within:20mi = tweets sent within 20 miles of “Lincoln”.
- social search since:2010-02-01 = tweets containing “social search” and sent SINCE date “1st February 2010″ (always have the year-month-day format when searching).
- social search until:2010-01-31 = tweets containing “social search” and sent UP TO the date “2010-01-31″. (although I am not sure how far back you can go with this, as I thought Twitter no longer kept your tweets for longer than a month or two).
- football -spanish = tweets containing “football”, but not “spanish”, and with a positive attitude.
- traffic
= tweets containing “traffic” and with a negative attitude. - traffic ? = tweets containing “traffic” and asking a question.
- tricks filter:links = tweets containing “tricks” and linking to URLs.
- news source:twitterfeed = tweets containing “news” and entered via TwitterFeed
Using Twitter search more accurately as a business can help you to find people either talking about or looking for your product or service. Equally, as a venue, you can see people who are tweeting close by to where you are – this might give you the opportunity to invite them to come and look at your venue, or to drop in for a coffee.
Google Begins +1 Experiment
Anyone doubting the importance of “social search” really ought to be looking at what Google is doing right now.
Kipp Bodnar at HubSpot posted a great article about Google +1
After recently confirming that social networking DOES have an impact on your natural search listing (i.e. it has been incorporated into the Google Search Algorithm), Google has started to experiment with real time recommendations of search results (both Natural Search and Google AdWords).
When signed into Google with your Google account, users will begin to see an option to “+1″ a search result or Google AdWords advert, this is a way of “recommending” the site you found as being useful, and matching what you were looking for. Very similar to a Facebook “like”, this “recommendation” will then be visible to any of the people within your own network who come across the same site.
Please see the video below for a more succinct explanation from Google
At the moment I assume this is only available in the US (or Google.com) and as you have to sign in to use this service, I am guessing that UK based users probably won’t get to see this just yet.
If this is widely liked and rolled out fully, this could have a significant impact on both the Google Natural Search positions AND the Google AdWords adverts. Despite what people say, Google has always been about giving it’s users the best quality results it can find, and the Google Algorithm has continually found ways of over coming the spammers, directories (to an extent) and the poor quality affiliate websites (to an extent).
It will be interesting to see whether Google shows search results +1′d by your friends ONLY, or whether it will take the approach of showing (or incorporating) the most popular websites +1′d across all it’s users.
What is becoming very clear, is that Google knows the popularity, value and culture change towards social networking, and is working hard to ensure that it continues to represent the “best” search option for people moving forward.
It also means that the goal posts of SEO are moving yet again.
Now where is that bloke who said “social search” would make Google search redundant within 2 years…….
Google Circles Or Google Me?
I have been watching the recent rumours then denials by Google about its own social networking platform. Some have dubbed it the facebook killer (despite not knowing what it was – probably the same people who dubbed wolfram alpha as the Google killer! Lazy Journalism?) – however I came across this inconspicuous search result yesterday:
www.google.com/s2/search/social
On clicking this link (and signing in with my Google account) I was then presented with a list of people I knew via my Google Account, and more intriguingly, a list of all the social network sites that they were part of, as well as a list of posts they had published to these sites. The sites included:
- Their own websites
- YouTube
- Picasa Web Albums
- Blogger
- De.li.cious
- Google Reader
- Flickr
- Quora
- TinyUrl
I can click on the name of the people in my “profile” and then go through to their “buzz” tag and see all the tweets (and other stuff) they had posted – which in itself isn’t the bit that got me thinking.
What did get me thinking was how Google could use all this information it is very obviously collecting to create a social media platform to rule them all!!
Instead of trying to compete with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and all the rest – why not create a ”super” platform that actually feeds in all the social media information, from all your subscribed social media channels all into one place?
This would actually be a better experience for most people as they would be able to keep even more up to date with their social networks (without having to look at multiple feeds in management tools such as hootsuite).
How good would it be to have a Google platform that brought information through (similar to how twitter works) but filled with the posts from ALL the social media platforms in one place – so you would get a steady stream of updates but it would be 5 in a row from twitter, 2 from facebook, another 3 from twitter, one from flickr etc.
If you could then respond directly from one platform BACK to these it would make the management of multiple social media platforms much much easier for everyone.
Google could also then corner the “social search” market (which possibly has them concerned at the moment) – allowing you to search for (or ask for) help across multiple social media platforms at once, without the need to navigate away from Google.
So could the answer be that Google don’t end up offering a “social media” platform – but actual become THE social media platform by integrating everyone else?
