jpmblog.com » Twitter

How to Change your Twitter Profile Picture

JPM — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 17:15:49 +0000

One of my Twitter Followers has asked for help with changing their Profile Picture on Twitter so I thought I would produce a quick guide and post it on here.

How to change your Twitter Profile Picture:

1) Log into your Twitter Account at http://www.twitter.com and click on your account name in the top right hand corner of the screen to display the pull down account menu.

Click on Settings to load the Settings screen

2) After the Settings Screen Click on the Profile link to display your profile settings.

3) When your profile loads the top option is the Change Profile Picture facility.

Click on Browse and select the picture that you want to use from your computer, and click on OK.

4) Click on Save at the bottom of the screen and Twitter will upload your image and set it as your Profile Picture.

Please be aware that you might not see the change in picture immediately as it can take a while for the changes to replicate.

How to get Traffic from Twitter and why Twitter is like TV Adverts

JPM — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 12:19:15 +0000

In this previous post I discussed how I was finding that the content of the articles I was linking to was more important then how the actual tweet was written.
What I also started to notice was that when I sent a tweet the effect on traffic to my site was generally pretty instant rather then sustained.
This might be because when you catch a follower online your tweet appears at the top of their timeline but if they login sometime after the tweet is sent then can get hidden within dozens of other tweets.

With this in mind Twitter could be compared to TV advertising in that it’s at it’s most effective when people actually see the advert at time of broadcast, if it’s missed then it’s message is lost.

So how then can Twitter be used to it’s most effective to share your links and drive traffic to your site? Following the TV advertising example I tried sending multiple tweets linking to my iPhone site across my Twitter networks.
My Twitter network is shared across 4 Twitter accounts each focused on a technical theme so tweets about the iPhone should be of interest to some of my followers.

Rather the retweeting the same link several times in 1 day, I decided to pick a number of popular articles and schedule a Tweet linking to each at regular intervals throughout the day. Each time the tweet was published it was sent out across all 4 accounts, this allowed frequent visibility of links to my site without boring my followers with repeated identical links.

As seen in the graph below Using this method really boosted the amount of traffic to my site, nearly doubling the amount of site views.

By going deeper into the hourly stats following this method the individual traffic spikes (the blue line) matching the scheduled tweets can clearly be seen.

Does how a Tweet is written effect the number of clicks

JPM — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 22:02:21 +0000

In this post I explained how I had Tweeted a link to my Twitter Network and wanted to see if there was a difference in the amount of traffic sent to the article, if the post was written in a different manner.

A link to the exact same article was sent out at the exact same same ‘optimum times’, on the 31st of August the Tweet was basic and too the point, on the 1st of September the Tweet was more descriptive and tried to sell the article more.

The results can be seen in the Graph below which shows traffic to the Article. Little if any difference was noticed.

Compare the results to the following graph which shows what happened when a tweet was sent out to all my Twitter networks at the same time and ignoring optimum tweeting times.
The Tweet was describing a way to find out how to find cheap iPhone games, so there was a natural incentive for my followers to click on the link.
Even though optimum posting times were ignored, the article attracted more readers.
Perhaps content is king over style.

How Tweeting Links can Improve Traffic

JPM — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 16:45:54 +0000

In this article I wrote about an experiment I was running with Twitter about scheduling Tweets to tie in with when the majority of your Followers are online, and here are the results.

Twitter sent 21 visitors to the article, which from a potential pool of about 4.5k followers is a little disappointing as that it equates to not even 1% of my followers clicked through to read the article

However whilst the results weren’t as good as I was hoping the traffic to the article did double, but is there anyway that I can improve the traffic further using Twitter. This is a copy of the Tweet I sent: How to view iPhone Photos on your PC http://t.co/3e7zxLg

In all honesty the Tweet I sent wasn’t particually exciting or catchy, and could have probably have used a couple of Buzz words.

So with a bit of re-wording and polishing the tweet becomes: The iPhone can take great photo’s & heres a Great Article on several methods for viewing your iPhone Photos on your PC. http://t.co/3e7zxLg

I’ve scheduled the Tweet to be published to my Twitter Network at the same times as the previous Tweet.

I’ll report back here on the results

How to See when your Twitter Followers are Online

JPM — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 16:30:42 +0000

Twitter is a great tool for sharing a message with many followers at the same time, however how do you know when the best time to Tweet is.

Given that most Twitter Users have busy timelines where older tweets can be missed, to reach a maximum number of followers it’s best to post when most users are currently online and looking at Twitter, so that they see your Tweet Arrive – but how can you tell when the optimum time is to reach your Followers.

Tweriod is a free service which will analyse your Twitter Followers Twitter usage over the previous month and generate a report of the optimum time frames when most are online. It’s free reports cover Sundays, Mondays, Weekend Averages, and Weekday averages. I tend to use just the average results.

Using one of my accounts from this twitter experiment it’s clear to see that the optimum time frame is around 4pm. You could then either manually Tweet or schedule a Tweet for that time frame knowing that as many of your Followers as possible will see the message

Tweriod is easy to use, all you do is log in to the site using your Twitter account details and they do the rest, you can get an updated report for free once every month, and whilst there are some premium facilities that you can pay for the free service will be fine for most Tweeters.

To put the results generated by Tweriod to the test:

I’ve used Google Analytics to pick a popular article from my site.
Write a Tweet about the Article.
Schedule a Tweet to each of the 4 accounts and also my iphonehints twitter account for their optimum time.

I’ll post the results here.

Quick Twitter Followers Update (29/07/11) (end of first month)

JPM — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 17:12:35 +0000

In this post I discussed how I was testing TweetAttacks on Twitter Accounts that I created to see how quickly you could build up a large relatively targeted Twitter Audience.

Each time I make a post on iphone-experience.com I re-tweet on these other accounts to increase the number of people who are aware of my articles.

I have 4 accounts currently being increased by TweetAttacks, and I currently have a combined following of 1426 twitter users, and increase of 403 over last weeks total. During this week I was without a computer for a couple of days and manually followed other users using this process.

If your Twitter Followers were a Country, which Country would they be

JPM — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 16:30:06 +0000

Twitter is a fantastic tool for very quickly reaching out to many people and sharing a brief message, but when looking at how many Twitter followers someone has can you really put that number in to context. To most people it will just be a figure, but to try and visualise numbers of users you could compare the populations of countries.

For example every time Stephen Fry writes a Tweet it appears on the the time line of ~ 2.8 million Twitter users, which equates to the population of Mongolia. Imagine any other situation where an entire population of a country can hear something you say, and what’s more a country who has chosen to listen to you by following your Tweets.

Here are some further examples of comparing Twitter followers to the populations of countries:

Lady Gaga – 12.1 Million – Senegal
Justin Bieber – 11.4 million – Cuba
Barack Obama – 9.4 million – Sweden
Oprah Winfrey – 6.8 million – Papua New Guinea
Stephen Fry – 2.8 million – Mongolia
Arnold Schwarzenegger – 2.1 million – Lesotho
Jason Bradbury – 130k -Saint Vincent and the Grenadines & Palau combined
Edna Fry – 108k – U.S. Virgin Islands
Pat Flynn – 50k – Saint Kitts and Nevis
iPhonehints – 1.4k Niue ( or 2.8k – Falkland Islands if you include the accounts from this project)

Interesting 2 pop stars (one of which is a young lad) has significantly more followers then the official Twitter account of the President of the United States and most powerful man in the world.

With popularity and an audience comes responsibility, as a small example Stephen Fry has accidentally taken a few websites down simply by providing a link to their site and the amount of traffic has taken down the server. Imagine if Lady Gaga linked to a site, the amount of traffic could be about 4 times larger.

We have recently seen how when Twitter collectively gets behind a cause the effect can be incredible, just ask the former staff at the News of the World news paper, and with millions of followers you could start to direct Twitter causes. This could (and I ‘m sure does) causes some cause of concern.

Even my little iPhonehints twitter feed reaches the same number of people as in a country called Niue, (which is a small island country of New Zealand citizens).

Hello Niue I feel I have a connection with you now.

Quick Twitter Followers Update (22/07/11) (over 1000 followers in 3 weeks)

JPM — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 20:02:58 +0000

In this post I discussed how I was testing TweetAttacks on Twitter Accounts that I created to see how quickly you could build up a large relatively targeted Twitter Audience.

Each time I make a post on iphone-experience.com I re-tweet on these other accounts to increase the number of people who are aware of my articles.

I have 4 accounts currently being increased by TweetAttacks, and I currently have a combined following of 1023 twitter users, and increase of 308 over last weeks total.

On average I’m picking up an additional 48 followers per day, which means that if I did this process everyday for a year I could increase my followers by 17500.

Over the next week I’m going to increase the numbers of people I follow using TweetAttacks to see if I can accelerate the process with out upsetting twitter and getting banned

Using Twitter to Follow a Major News incident (Explosion in Oslo)

JPM — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 17:15:03 +0000

Twitter is a great tool for allowing people to share their news very quickly, and nothing highlights this better then when a major news incident takes place.

Today there was a massive explosion in a government building in Oslo, whilst the cause is still unknown there is significant damage to buildings and probable casualties. We pray for everyone involved in the incident for their safe keeping.

Traditionally the world would have to wait for news reporters to get to the scene to start sharing the news of the incident, but modern technology, e.g. Twitter running on camera phones, allows people on the scene to share their own experiences and pictures of the incident. As soon as the incident happened on-lookers started to tell and show the world of what they could see.

This kind of crowd sourced news offers an unprecedented view at real time events, and we could all follow the real experiences of real people just by using the Twitter Search Engine.

Typing: near:Oslo within:15mi into the Twitter Search box displays the Tweets that were posted with a 15 mile radius of Oslo, and the Twitter keeps refreshing the search results so that you are always seeing the latest updates.

We can see the news through the eyes of witnesses rather then the condensed summary by the news agencies.

How to Use Advanced Twitter Search Operators

JPM — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 16:30:33 +0000

Twitter can be an incredible information tool, it’s just that sometimes the sheer amount of information can be overwhelming, and it can be difficult to find the specific information that you are looking for. Fortunately Twitter includes some powerful search tools.

The easiest way to performed advanced searches is through the Twitter Advanced Search Page which provides an easy to use interface but for true customisation Twitter provides a number of operators that you can input directly into a Twitter search box.

The operators in full can be found on this page but here are some useful examples.

I’m looking to connect with people in or around the English Coastal Town of Bridlington, so that I can find out about local events and news. I could just search for mentions of the town in the normal Twitter search box but it would be better to see who’s actually tweeting from there.

I can use the near: and Within: operators to see who’s been tweeting from around the town and surrounding areas, e.g. to see who’s been tweeting from within a 10 mile radius of Bridlington I can enter the following search parameter:

near:bridlington,uk within:10mi which returns a list of tweets from Users in Bridlington. Brilliant.

or perhaps you run a website and and want to increase your sites Twitter Following by following Targeted Twitter users, for example UK based tweeters who play GTA (Grand Theft Auto) you could search for something like:

playing GTA near:Leeds within:300mi which searches for tweets containing both the words “playing” and “GTA”, that are made within 300 miles of Leeds, you could then connect with these users through twitter.

You could also then increase your Twitter following by using this method or feed the search string to an Automated Twitter Following Tool

jpmblog.com » Twitter

How to Change your Twitter Profile Picture

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