Ze Home of Evan Samek

According to David Martin, Vice President of Primary Research at Nielsen Online, Twitter’s current visitor retention rate, that is the number of visitors that return to Twitter after signing up within one month is about 40%.  Now for some strange reason, Nielsen isn’t reporting how exactly they determined that number.  I’m going to go ahead and guess here, but I bet they calculated that based on visitors returning to the Twitter.com domain, which won’t give them correct results.

Now whats the problem with this?  Well, everyone, and I do mean pretty much everyone, wants to get off of the Twitter website ASAP and use a client that sits on their desktop.  If not a desktop client, they are using the Twitter API in a number of other ways on another site, normally another social network mash-up site. This is because while Twitter is a great service, their UI isn’t as seamless as Tweetie for Mac or Twhirl or as popular as TweetDeck.  It’s not that Twitter’s UI is bad, its just why would anyone rather be reloading the pages on a website to see their replies rather than just switch to an already loaded tab sitting on your desktop. So really, the Twitter.com domain isn’t being hit by folks like Facebook or Myspace (as they have graphed out), rather they are relying on Twitter’s API to deliver the service. The incredible amount of API call statistics, I would assume, is not accessible by Nielsen since Twitter is a centralized service running exclusively through themselves.

I call for a new study to be published with these variables addressed, or reveal that they accurately analyzed Twitter’s retention rate with respect to Twitter’s API.

After being on twitter for over a year now, I have finally started to follow mass amounts of people in search for some good inspiration, friendship, and conversation.  However, with all these new friends, I have to weed out the one’s who aren’t really contributing to the conversation-at-large.  The ‘tweeps’ I usually weed out are users that….

1. Only tweet links.
2. Talk about how their inbox has 1,000′s of unread emails that must be answered.
3. Constant @’s to my tweets that have nothing to do with what was said.
4. Only retweet other people’s tweets.  What, have you no thoughts of your own?
5. Celebrities or other famous-types who don’t interact with fans.
6. Celebrities or other famous-types who have someone else tweet for them.
7. Constant self promotion.
8. Ridiculous use of Adjix to gain money from links (it’s even worse if an ad is embedded into the tweet).
9. Tweet once in a blue moon. I will never see your tweets, so whats the point of following you?
10. Tweeting about completely useless information, like “I’m hungry”.  At least tell me what you are eating or going to eat; or even you inexplicable love for a particular cuisine.
11. Anyone who is rude in 140-characters or less.

What kinds of tweeple do you drop when weeding needs to be done?

I have decided, after about 4 or so hours of usage, to do a quick critique of the new Tweetie for Mac app.  This is different than a review, in which I would outlined every aspect of the program with criticisms along the way.  In contrast, this post will only list my criticisms of the app.

Make direct message and ReTweet more accessible

Don’t make me right click to get this menu.  Make the menu appear when rolling over the picture or the ege like the reply icon as in Twhirl.  These functions are not secondary, they are primary to the twitter user.

Why are hashtag subjects (#) so gray against a gray background?

This just makes it hard to see the subject in a tweet.  Increase the contrast, it is not something that should be hidden with the background.

Everything else is pretty damn good.  Haha.  This was a shorter critique then I thought.

Welcome to the second installment of my 10 part series, How to Use Twitter for Your Business.

Picking a User name

The very first part of using twitter, once you have decided to use it for your business, is registering a user name.  There are a few things to keep in mind when coming up with a user name.  First of all, you should use your real name.  Of course, you are probably not the first company with your name, so this probably won’t be the last step in your search for a user name.  If your business name itself isn’t available, then just choose anything that is close to it.  Add “Inc”, “ORG”, or “official” to the user name to diversify your search.

Don’t make your tweets protected!

If you make your tweets protected, then only those you authorize to see your tweets will see them.  You are going for public exposure here, so enabling your tweets to be protected is counterproductive to your goal.

Enable Cell updates?

Well this option is up to you. Enabling your cell for updates not only means that you can send updates to Twitter via SMS, but also anyone who directly messages you will get sent to your phone.  For large companies, you should probably think about disabling the cell updates.  Otherwise, if you are a larger company, you could get SMS messages every other minute, and that can be quite annoying.  For smaller companies, I suggest that you do turn this on and set the cell number to whoever is handling PR in you company.  This way, a PR person has the ability to respond to a direct message faster, giving your company a good reputation for PR.

Tune in next time for an advanced explanation of Twitter Settings Area, part III of X in How to Use Twitter for Your Business