Instigator Blog: How to Get the Most Value out of Twitter Links
fredwilson
· 4 months ago
what a great spec that is!
i sure hope it gets built
Benjamin Yoskovitz
· 4 months ago
Fred - Thanks for the feedback!
Feel free to post it on your blog, I'm certain it will get a lot more response (both positive and negative.) I'd love to see the idea taken over and come to fruition with other people's help.
chiropractic
· 4 months ago
Terrific! I like number 3, was thinking about this today. I don't mind RTs, but it's more efficient to only have one in my stream (the rest filtered out). I would think the same went for any dupe content. No point in viewing same tweet multiple times.
Chris
· 4 months ago
I love Twitter, and I think that it can be a great marketing tool if used correctly. Thank you for this brilliant list of tools to make the Twitter experience even better!
Keith - Forex Robots
· 4 months ago
Personally I think this twitter thing has gotten way out of hand. Every marketer on the planet is trying to take advantage of this niche, and while I think your idea has a lot of value, I see twitter hitting a saturation point very soon and from there it will start a long decline. Things on the internet get very hot, very quick to the point where the next big thing (twitter) is all you see and hear about. When everyone knows about it, and everyone is trying to get into it, that's usually when you can bet that the decline is coming soon.
Wedding Photographer
· 4 months ago
I think you are onto something here, I would definitely use a product that includes what you mentioned above. Wish I could help on the dev side.
Adwido
· 4 months ago
These are some good ideas. Which may help alot.
Tycoon Blogger
· 4 months ago
Linktwits...that is an awesome domain name. I will be watching to see what gets built on that domain.
Jason
· 4 months ago
This is a fantastic idea and as you say I am sure someone will build an application built to fulfill this aim. Twitter is a great tool and can be leveraged better.
NZVel
· 4 months ago
Some good info stuff here..#3 is great.. I know I need to be doing more with my twitter page... Cheers
authorityseo
· 4 months ago
I question the only show me the links. I like a part of Twitter that gives me a couple words so I know if the link is interesting to me or not. With the parameters you can't keyword stuff the text before the link.
Benjamin Yoskovitz
· 4 months ago
Thanks for the feedback. But the idea behind LinkTwits.com is that the system knows what you're interested in and ranks accordingly. It would read the content of pages that are linked to via Twitter to learn what those pages are about, because oftentimes what people put in a tweet with a link isn't useful information and clutters the interface.
jim
· 4 months ago
I like the idea of tagging the link itself and having it capture tag metadata, rather than using hashtags, that alone would be a good improvement over the current shortening.
Yuva_Payday
· 4 months ago
These days Tweeter has become a more indispensable tool for marketing. We need to use it effectively and judiciously to make hay of it. The ideas you have given are all in that direction.
Alfred
· 4 months ago
Unless Twitter gets it's act together and gets servers that can keep up with the demands placed on them, I can't see them remaining popular through the year.
Benjamin Yoskovitz
· 4 months ago
Of late Twitter's been quite good at staying online and performing reasonably well. I wouldn't say those issues are completely behind them, but the worst would appear to be behind them. We'll see!
katie - company formation
· 4 months ago
Great post!
I definately think Twitter can be moblized as a great marketing tool - though I think for it to be effective marketeers need to be selective in what they choose to 'tweet'
katie - company formation
· 4 months ago
What a great post!
I definately think that Twitter is a powerful marketing tool, but I think maketeers should bear in mind that Social Media is about conversation, not just blatant promotion.
i'm a bit over it. i can't sit there and look at it all day and how do i know of all this noise is worth noticing ?
Benjamin Yoskovitz
· 4 months ago
Sam - I think it's a question of who you follow, how you interact with those people and what you're looking for.
I've found Twitter to be extremely useful for a few things:
* staying connected with friends, colleagues, etc. * research (this is growing more and more important, at least for me) * promotion / marketing
There is a lot of noise, but the tools are emerging (like TweetDeck, etc.) to filter that noise effectively. CoTweet helps businesses filter the noise for example.
Analytix
· 4 months ago
Twitter has become a tool that no business can ignore for promoting their business. Very well written.. Keep up the good work!
Pavel Larkin
· 4 months ago
What's about business model for this service (linktwits.com)? AdSense?
Benjamin Yoskovitz
· 4 months ago
Pavel - That's a good question. Advertising has the potential of making money, although long-term I don't think I would rely exclusively on that as a business model.
One of the values out of a service like this is in the data. If you get to scale, you're accumulating a lot of data on what people are linking to, and how they're tagging it. That data has the potential of being valuable to a number of people.
You can also sell advanced features such as better/more detailed analytics to users.
The initial focus would have to be on gaining traction and not revenue, because you'd be competing with other link shortening services that have a huge head start, namely bit.ly. So the focus would have to be on differentiating yourself from services like bit.ly and adding value to the ecosystem.
Pavel Larkin
· 3 months ago
Ben, thanks for the answer.
I really like the idea and even thinking of doing it.
Why do we need one more shortening service? IMHO it's a long way trying to gather tags for short urls. There are 200+ shortening services (http://longurl.org/services). Also there are 20+ bookmarking services like del.icio.us (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_boo...) which give us an ability to tag urls.
So, my suggest using all the power of the available services and just join the data in the linktwits service to get a unique feature as you've described in your post.
I'm going to do a shot in the dark with this one - to check number of plain urls that are shortened in bookmarking services. If the number is quite big (for instance, if more than 50% percent of shortened urls already have tags through bookmarking services), my advice would be to look at it more closely.
WDYT?
Benjamin Yoskovitz
· 3 months ago
Pavel - I'm not sure the percentage of shortened URLs that have tags through bookmarking services is that high. I would guest that most people are tweeting links w/o also putting them into bookmarking services and tagging them.
Ultimately I do agree that the tagging component would be best leveraged through an existing URL shortener; bit.ly would be great since it already has the market largely cornered w/ its Twitter relationship. Millions of links are going through bit.ly (on a daily basis, I believe.)
But initially, it would be a proof of concept play to see if the system would work, and then you could look at integrating with a service like bit.ly. I'm certainly open to ideas!
Steve
· 4 months ago
Thanks for your article! Really helpful.. Dell has made some profit from Twitter customers .. this shows that modern businesses may need Twitter to increase the reach to 'right' customers in future.
johnjohn12343
· 3 months ago
I really dont get twitter. I think I must be about the only person in the world left thinking this but whats the point?
I see its marketing benefits but for the life of me cant see why the average person with nothing to promote would want to bother??
inkapoint
· 3 months ago
Happy to see that you got such a domain. And well said dude.
Joe
· 3 months ago
This idea's genius. I really hope someone does build this
Matt Chatterley
· 3 months ago
Great idea and spec - I'd love to see something like this available..
vic
· 3 months ago
That's a detailed request and thank you for spelling it out. It's a menu or road mapfor those developers to follow.
neeshu
· 3 months ago
I recently read in the news paper that a boy did a research saying twitter is uninteresting site hi we are a 35 year old travel company, we provide cheap flights to Manila, Perth and several other locations, will you be willing to exchange links with us mail me neeshu on crystaltravel.co.uk or visit www.flybliss.co.uk
ravm
· 3 months ago
As I'm somewhat new to Twitter, this is great information. Thanks for sharing. Look forward to reading more from you.
yuyudin
· 3 months ago
I'm waiting for an app that combines what PostRank does but for Tweets or feeds like FriendFeed. There's just too many platforms to be on and we need something that combines them all under one service.
Theresa Alleman
· 3 months ago
Great Ideas! I believe twitter can be a great marketing tool if used in the right way.
Flaw
· 3 months ago
I'm pretty sure that I'm not the first one who says that but I really don't get twitter and all the attention that it gets. Not only that I don't use it, I don't even have a clear idea of what it does. A friend of mine kept bugging me with it and I understood that it can only type short messages so he has to use an url shortening tool, like tinyurl. From what I understood from your post, a tool like that should really be implemented by default in the twitter post, shortening the urls by itself and maybe a self-extraction process of the keyword from the url, to use it as a tag or an anchor? I don't know... Twitter is a real mistery
Trish
· 3 months ago
A ranking system which categorizes tweets is an awesome idea, and any algorithm that can implement this will be deeply appreciated by everyone in the blogging community.
yuva
· 3 months ago
I normally use Twitter for my marketing and personal uses, but i learned here to harness Twitter for our benefit in a more sagacious way.
edharris
· 3 months ago
Thanks for the tips. Frankly, I don't use twitter that often because I assume nobody wants to hear "updates" about insurance products. But, I suppose I should provide more informative content rather that "sales-type" of content and it will be good for everybody.
hospedagem
· 3 months ago
I really dont get twitter. I think I must be about the only person in the world left thinking this but whats the point?
Liza
· 3 months ago
These are awesome ideas! I wish Twitter would incorporate some of these, I would especially like to see the system learning about our interests over time and displaying tweets based on those interests.
jasonfreemon
· 3 months ago
I'll definitely agree with this. Twitter is one of the better things that has happen to my blog, it's enabled me to let multitudes of people to know that I've updated my blog instantaneously!
Dad Blog
· 3 months ago
The twitter ideas are great. I think some outsourcing could really get this done in a matter of days for you!
Grog
· 3 months ago
"Sponsored Tweets"...I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this company.
Benjamin Yoskovitz
· 3 months ago
Sponsored Tweets - like sponsored blog posts - is an interesting area for people to go. I really don't have a strong opinion one way or the other. I'm definitely not someone that's completely AGAINST sponsored content. Like a lot of things it's there, can be abused, and will be abused by some. But for others it will bring value. I think the people who are so adamantly against it should relax and worry about something else.
Giu
· 2 months ago
I'm reading that Twitter does not reach the young people, only people with more than 25 years. Isn't it a problem for the future?
dragonblogger
· 2 months ago
Leveraging sites like Hootsuite which can track link clickback and provide analytics for your links are very useful, that plus twitter analyzer shows you trends in your tweet patterns, these tools combined make it very easy to maximize and optimize your twitter patterns.
Richard
· 2 months ago
I feel it is crucial to establish links for seo and linkbait is not as well as it used to be I feel. As you explained because of twitter and more... Thank you for the information.
Mark B
· 2 months ago
7.? The app forces you to engage people. You shouldn't just retweet verbatim (or be able to) - ask questions and challenge! 'Conversations' (and the spread of your tweets) can multiply exponentially when fed on the challenge of thought, bringing you traffic.
bayilik
· 2 months ago
I integrated twitter to my blog.I hope it will be more good for my blog.Good articles.Thanks.
webdevelopment
· 1 month ago
Nice Read. It is Very Useful information. I bookmarked this blog.
All Comments
i sure hope it gets built
Feel free to post it on your blog, I'm certain it will get a lot more response (both positive and negative.) I'd love to see the idea taken over and come to fruition with other people's help.
I know I need to be doing more with my twitter page...
Cheers
I definately think Twitter can be moblized as a great marketing tool - though I think for it to be effective marketeers need to be selective in what they choose to 'tweet'
I definately think that Twitter is a powerful marketing tool, but I think maketeers should bear in mind that Social Media is about conversation, not just blatant promotion.
Thank
I've found Twitter to be extremely useful for a few things:
* staying connected with friends, colleagues, etc.
* research (this is growing more and more important, at least for me)
* promotion / marketing
There is a lot of noise, but the tools are emerging (like TweetDeck, etc.) to filter that noise effectively. CoTweet helps businesses filter the noise for example.
One of the values out of a service like this is in the data. If you get to scale, you're accumulating a lot of data on what people are linking to, and how they're tagging it. That data has the potential of being valuable to a number of people.
You can also sell advanced features such as better/more detailed analytics to users.
The initial focus would have to be on gaining traction and not revenue, because you'd be competing with other link shortening services that have a huge head start, namely bit.ly. So the focus would have to be on differentiating yourself from services like bit.ly and adding value to the ecosystem.
I really like the idea and even thinking of doing it.
Why do we need one more shortening service? IMHO it's a long way trying to gather tags for short urls. There are 200+ shortening services (http://longurl.org/services). Also there are 20+ bookmarking services like del.icio.us (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_boo...) which give us an ability to tag urls.
So, my suggest using all the power of the available services and just join the data in the linktwits service to get a unique feature as you've described in your post.
I'm going to do a shot in the dark with this one - to check number of plain urls that are shortened in bookmarking services. If the number is quite big (for instance, if more than 50% percent of shortened urls already have tags through bookmarking services), my advice would be to look at it more closely.
WDYT?
Ultimately I do agree that the tagging component would be best leveraged through an existing URL shortener; bit.ly would be great since it already has the market largely cornered w/ its Twitter relationship. Millions of links are going through bit.ly (on a daily basis, I believe.)
But initially, it would be a proof of concept play to see if the system would work, and then you could look at integrating with a service like bit.ly. I'm certainly open to ideas!
I see its marketing benefits but for the life of me cant see why the average person with nothing to promote would want to bother??
A friend of mine kept bugging me with it and I understood that it can only type short messages so he has to use an url shortening tool, like tinyurl. From what I understood from your post, a tool like that should really be implemented by default in the twitter post, shortening the urls by itself and maybe a self-extraction process of the keyword from the url, to use it as a tag or an anchor?
I don't know... Twitter is a real mistery
thanks sharing.
http://www.sachi-infotech.com
Thanks
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