Twitter Apps for iPad

Each day, we see many people asking for Twitter apps for the iPad. This list is merely a sampling of what’s on oneforty, so be sure to check out the iPad offerings on our site.

Tweetdeck for iPad

An anticipated encore to their desktop and iPhone offerings, Tweetdeck for iPad features a two-column design and browser display. Shows you everything you want to see at once; read the news in the browser and monitor your Tweets in the columns below.

Twitterrific for iPad

Recalling the elegant design and usability of the Mac desktop and iPhone apps, Twitterific for iPad makes Twitter more terrific in many ways, namely, by letting you shorten urls, save searches, and even translate Tweets into different languages.

Twitterlator Pad

If you prefer a chat-style interface, this is for you. The app also features customizable wallpapers and photo and audio Tweets.

Instapaper

Instapaper allows you to save web pages to read later, also sharing function for Twitter.

Arkovi - Social Media for Business

For those of you looking for a social media business app, Arkovi features integration with Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter and a powerful RSS integrator. It also works on the iPad in Safari.

Sociable

Integrate all of your social networks with one easy iPad application. Apple’s split-view allows you to switch between services with no time wasted. The app features a built-in web browser that allows you to view links your friends send you without having to quit anything to launch Safari.

Do you have an iPad? Have you tried any of these apps? Feel free to sign into oneforty with your Twitter account and review some of these apps. Create your own Toolkit and let us know which apps you find work the best for you.

TweetMeme Button Chrome Extension

We’re pleased to announce that the TweetMeme Button Chrome Extension is now available for download from the Chrome Extensions website.

The extension allows you to take a little version of the TweetMeme Button with you everywhere on the web, showing live tweet counts for pages you are viewing, as well as providing quick tweeting of whatever you’re currently looking at.

Our standard Retweet Button is massively popular, and over half a billion of them are seen every day across a huge range of websites. But that doesn’t mean there will always be a retweet button at hand when you need one. So with the Chrome Extension, as soon as you discover the next hot article, blog post, picture or video, with just a few clicks you can have your customised tweet dispatched to your followers.

Q&A: Icelandair on Twitter and the volcanic ash crisis

How did you use Twitter to communicate with customers during the volcano ash crisis?

At first it started out as a bulletin board where we posted notices that our website had been updated with the latest information on flight numbers and departure times. We turned our route-network inside out and moved our main hub to Glasgow in order to keep the network running, so using all means available to us to get information out there was essential.

This however changed as time went by and we saw that we needed to get information on individual flights to people and our passengers started to notice we were on-line and answering questions.

In response to this customer demand, we then started to break our web updates down to many short tweets which all contained a short message, a bit.ly link and the #ashtag.

Why do you think Twitter is more effective than Facebook for this kind of situation?

Twitter is more dynamic and forgiving when it comes to frequent updates. When flooding Facebook users with too many updates they are likely to hide your feed, while Twitter users are used to frequent updates, and in fact rely on getting frequent updates from the people they follow.

Why platforms like Twitter actually (scientifically) trigger empathy

An interesting report on some findings around how tweeting may physically enable audiences to be more empathetic. Neuroeconomist Paul Zak has discovered, for the first time, that social networking triggers the release of the generosity-trust chemical in our brains. And that should be a wake-up call for every company.

Top 10 World Cup Twitter Trends

For continuous World Cup coverage, check out Mashable’s 2010 World Cup Hub, which will be updated throughout the games.

It’s another round of World Cup Twitter trends, and we’re seeing some interesting stats on how fans are tweeting about their favorite teams, players, and arch rivals.

Similarly to last week’s stats, all of the national teams trended at some point in the past seven days, and 74 players hit Twitter’s top 10. And while some coaches and managers were trending last week, this is the first time that several referees were singled out, mostly with ire from fans over unfavorable calls.

5 Awesome Twitter Searches

Twitter’s search engine is really one of it’s great features, and in this article I’m going to demonstrate some really cool searches you can do with it.

This is kind of a follow up to Thomas Baekdal’s excellent article here on Twitip “7 Secret Ways To Use Twitter Search” which you should check out as well.

1. Who’s saying stuff about me outside of Twitter?
This search will show you Tweets that people write about you or your company that link out to an external page. This is useful for finding what people are writing about you, or indeed when people link to your site without using your Twitter name
[your name|company] filter:links
Live example: mailchimp filter:links

2. Free Stuff
If you’re on the hunt for freebies, create variants of this search and save them to monitor when companies or bloggers are giving away freebies or offers across Twitter. This will work best if you monitor it over time. Use the “near” search operator to try limiting this to your local area (e.g. near:Sydney).
free code|coupon + keyword
Live example: free code|coupon iphone

3. Who’s showing me love/hate?
The one is a bit sporadic in terms of how effective it is, but if you add a smiley or frown to your search, Twitter (in theory) will show tweets that mention your search term in a positive or negative light. As mentioned, results are not always accurate but this is useful to setup as a monitor if you’re running a marketing campaign and want to keep an eye on the haters …..
@yourname|your real name|company name :) :( -filter:links
Live example: ipad :(

4. Create customers out of thin air
[variants of questions you can answer] ? -filter:links
This one needs a bit of thought and tweaking, but it’s potentially powerful. Essentially, this search finds people asking questions that your product/service/blog post can answer. So if you’ve written a great article on how to use solar power, you might search for:
“solar power” ? -filter:links

That search should show people asking questions related to Solar power due to the ? search operator Twitter supports. Adding the -filter:links will strip links from the results, which are unlikely to be people asking questions of their followers. To further target people asking for advice, just add a “How” or similar at the front.

This creates a constant stream of users you can approach with a recommendation to check out your offering.

World Cup Sets New Twitter Record: 3.2K Tweets per Second!

Records are made to be broken and, in the case of Twitter, it just so happens that one of the service's biggest records has been shattered within a week of being set.

Less than 10 days ago, Twitter users were blowing up the service with a record number of messages being exchanged back and forth in celebration of the Los Angeles Lakers beating the Boston Celtics in the seventh game of the NBA Finals.

Just how many messages does it take to set a new Twitter record? In this case, the Laker victory brought forth 3,085 Tweets-Per-Second (TPS). Were that number stretched out over the course of a day, Twitter would have roughly 266.5 million 140-character messages flying back and forth over its servers—surely enough to earn the site some fail-whale downtime. According to TechCrunch, Twitter processes an average of 65 million Tweets on a given day, or a TPS count of around 750.

Well, as mentioned, this 3,085-TPS record didn't last long. Various World Cup games have already brought the service close to reaching this mark, but it was Thursday's match between Japan and Denmark that broke the TPS milestone once again. According to Twitter, users sent an average of 3,283 tweets per second by the time the 3-1 game concluded (pushing Japan forward into the tournament's "sweet sixteen" bracket).

"The second week of the World Cup continued to see consistent spikes in TPS after goals that are remarkable increases over our average of 750 TPS," writes Kevin Weil, Twitter Analytics Lead, on the company's official blog.

"However, we caution to call any goals a record this week both because many of the games were played simultaneously with another one and total numbers were fairly similar to the first week when only one game was being played at a time," he adds.

Twitter has been busy bulking up its background operations to handle the data being pushed out by World Cup followers. Earlier this month, the company announced that it was in the process of doubling its internal network capacity and rebalancing its network traffic in an effort to prevent site outages during high-bandwidth situations. Or, in this case, goals.

SEO training scheme look like?

I’ve been in the fortunate situation lately where Mediaedge:cia Manchester has been recruiting a number of SEO’s lately. On the back of this, we thought it best to formalise the training for each new-starter in order to aid the induction process and provide additional training. This way we can ensure that each SEO is provided with a consistent foundation of SEO – with more complex/subjective areas open for debate of course – and thus build the team’s capabilities on the back of this.

I know the term ‘best practice’ get’s flung about a fair bit online, sometimes in a way that disregards the idea that SEO is more of an art than a science…but really, the idea of providing a foundation for SEO development across the team can be designed.

All-in-all, if we compete in some of the most competitive niches then we need to acknowledge that the training, development and ambition of our SEO teams should be at the forefront of what we do. Hence, in my case, the recent launch of the MEC SEO Academy!
I’ve previously covered-off, what I think about SEO accreditation, but SEO training is another kettle of dogs. So, what does my ideal SEO training scheme look like
Daily SEO Reading

Who’s going to argue with me on this one? SEO seems to span far and wide, and is growing in reach it seems year-on-year. More departments of marketing and business are getting involved than ever before, and as such this requires a daily-fix of what’s happening in the news, and where new opportunities might be blooming for clients. With this in mind, I’d suggest that each and every SEO is actively encouraged to keep abreast of their reading.
SEO Mentor

This is one of my favourite areas of a training scheme – the idea that another member of staff (maybe not necessarily the line-manager) takes responsibility for another SEO’s professional development.

That mentor ensures that the right conversations and exposure to SEO occurs, ideally in a way that everyone in the team is empowered to promote the development of their other team mates. The aim of this is to provide longevity beyond the scheme itself and provide and impetus to keep each team member learning.
Provision of their own website

Nothing like keeping up appearances is there?! With their own website, each new starter can create a social media profile – helping them to integrate in to this excellent SEO community, and of course potentially raise the profile of the agency they work for. If they’re unfamiliar with CMS platforms, managing websites or simply wanting a testing-bed for then there’s nothing better than having your own websites (rather than a clients to test on!). This all comes at minimal cost too – just the price of a domain, hosting and some time to develop the site.

Developing a website in a niche helps them to see the true value of social media too. In doing this, they can learn firsthand the importance of adding value to an online community for true social media marketing.

The training would also bring in a level of conversation and reporting, giving each member of the SEO team a chance to show-off the improving performance of their website in that niche too. This might be where they’ve run some linkbait, built their subscriber-base, or improved behaviour / interaction factors with the site…
Training Content

Oh yeah, and that all important thing – the content of the actual SEO training. Needless to say, this needs to be absolutely top-notch, designed around the SEO basics and current hot topics / new technologies. Naturally, it needs to cover-off the SEO process, as it is carried out by the current team, but it should leave an open door for suggestions to better the process further – immediately valuing the input of the new team member and increasing the chances of buy-in.

The content of the training can be as broad as you like. For instance we’ve covered-off items that stretch into other digital marketing specialisms, in addition to offline-marketing inductions. I can’t provide any suggestions here other than design a programme to professionally develop your staff in ways to meet your business goals.
Document Progress

Each SEO mentor is empowered to encourage the development, but so too are they to help document / evidence this development. This might be some sort of checklist to ensure thye have covered as many technical facets of SEO, presenting complex issues, or even attending SEO events. The SEO mentor could then be charged with helping the trainee document their progress and highlight with clarity their development – making the whole progress something to be proud of.
SEO ‘Watchtower’

On the back of the induction period, let’s say 3 months, the SEO would choose a specialism (if they didn’t have one already). There are plenty of reasons for this, but one of the most convincing is simply to share the eyes and ears on the ground. This way each SEO needn’t be expected to know absolutely every single thing that is happening around them. Thus, providing the opportunity to wheel-out the specialist in that area for clients.
Presenting SEO

It’s one of those things that people love or hate. Delivering a presentation is not typically needed across all levels of SEO, but what is required is the ability to clearly and articulately communicate SEO, search technologies, tools, approaches and its fit into other areas of marketing.

If each member of the SEO team is encouraged to present internally on a regular basis, then it offers the opportunity to train on a deeper level – capitalising on the knowledge gained by each SEO’s area of specialist interest.
Training and Development Outputs

What do you want to achieve from the training? Naturally the best training scheme can only be the best if it achieves what it aims to. Looking for specialists – then how does this scheme funnel those people down different areas of SEO? Wanting to see their interest grow – how does this training scheme prompt (as close as possible to) scientific enquiry for instance? Do you require client-facing SEO’s, then how do you develop them across your team…inter-team training, company-wide training, shadowing client meetings? I haven’t made my desired outputs clear in this case, but it’s often effective to work-out what you require as outputs from staff, and then work backwards to decide on how best you can get there.

And of course, any SEO training must be driven by a passion to share knowledge and the passion itself to compete online amongst the best there is…how can you communicate this in the training scheme?
Benefits of a SEO Training Scheme

Just a few of the benefits include the reassurance that all members of the team have shared the same foundation of training. Training of a relatively subjective art form can of course generate debate too – great for developing people’s inquisitive and analytical mindset around the approach to each SEO process.

And, most importantly, a huge benefit of the MEC SEO Academy is that it has prompted me to write about a great topic on the wonderful SEO Scoop.

Build a Strong Foundation – Block by Block – to Attract Buyers to Your Website

If you’re a small business owner, you know just how challenging the current economy is. But, it’s also a very good time to be a small business. More and more buyers are looking online for the services or goods you provide and, today, it’s much easier for small businesses to compete for those buyers.

How? With your website, of course. That is, if you make it more than a static brochure for your company.
To use your website to attract and engage prospects, foster trusted relationships, and demonstrate your product or service–you need to create a foundation of compelling content.

Here are two points of good news for small business owners who pursue this approach:

1. Buying behavior for purchasers of goods and services is changing. More buyers are doing their initial product and service research on the Internet, prior to making a purchase decision–and many ultimately decide whether to buy based on a company’s website. In fact, in a survey of 200 buyers of professional services, RainToday.com found that 74% of buyers were greatly or somewhat influenced by a company’s website when it came to making a decision to buy. Only 3% reported that a company’s website held no influence with them when it came to buying.

2. Many small businesses still limit their website to static information about products, location, hours, and contact information. More surprisingly, 46% of small business owners surveyed did not have an active website, according to the 2010 Small Business Marketing Forecast published by Ad-ology Research. Talk about an opportunity! If your competitors aren’t using websites effectively–or at all–that allows you a huge head start.
Create Your Inbound Marketing Platform

This approach to marketing is referred to as "inbound marketing." It focuses on allowing customers to easily find you–using compelling content as a magnet to attract the attention and interest of qualified prospects for the service or product you’re selling. ("Outbound marketing" refers to more traditional methods such as advertising and cold calling where a company is focused on going out and finding customers).

There’s more good news here for small business owners: using inbound marketing to attract qualified prospects and buyers does not have to be difficult and you can use it whether you’re a solopreneur or have many employees.

Creating the content that serves as the foundation of your inbound marketing, however, can be time consuming and resource intensive. So, your best bet is to approach this thoughtfully and strategically.

How to get started:

* Know what you want to achieve. Set your objectives first, then identify the content that will help you meet those objectives. For example, maybe you’ll publish a blog (to attract prospects), an enewsletter (to retain customers), and perhaps a Facebook fan page (to foster community, share special promos, etc.). You can expand into secondary content (i.e., videos, audio interviews, etc.) to feed your primary content–but don’t lose your focus.
* Match the content your ideal prospect wants/needs with your strengths. Is there something you do that your prospects want to learn? Consider adding a blog to your website, like the charming Craigie on Main. The blog for this bistro features recipes shared by the chef and is a popular draw. (As is the online reservation system.) Do you have access to information of particular interest to your prospects? Joy Tarbell Realty publishes a main blog, niche blogs, related articles, and tools–all valuable content for prospective homebuyers, sellers, and renters.
* Consider content beyond text. Additional content options include creating a photo blog, video blog, or a podcast. Cosmetic dentist Helaine Smith includes simple video demonstrations and customer testimonials on her website. These can be very effective at helping prospects overcome fear and objections. Sometimes a picture is worth a 1,000 words.
* Make the most of what you’ve got. You don’t have to start from scratch–build on content you may already have. Professional services firm Rally Point Webinars is expanding its content foundation by posting articles (repurposed from their enewsletter), alongside webinars that demonstrate their expertise, and case studies that showcase customer success.
* Keep it simple. Don’t try to do it all–in addition to your marketing, you’ve got a business to run! As Joe Pulizzi, founder of Junta42, recommended when we spoke recently, most firms should focus on no more than three types of content, using secondary "feeder" content as appropriate.
* Integrate with social media. Use your website (with it’s compelling content) as your hub. Share links on social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to direct traffic to your website. And, make it easy for visitors to your website to share your content with others (for example, by including retweet and share buttons). Sharing quality content is an effective way to attract potential buyers to your website and generate inbound links to support your SEO.

Creating content does require consistency and ongoing attention. However, that’s also the beauty of it. Unlike a brick and mortar foundation, you don’t build it all at once. Your content library will continue to grow and attract prospects over time as you build it. Block by block.

Getting a measure on social media metrics

One of the primary barriers I encounter when talking to businesses about social media implementation is measurement. For years, web marketers have sold the virtues of web marketing via its’ accountability. Clicks could be tracked, conversions could be measured & ROI was accountable to the very last dollar. Yet the emergence of social media blurred the lines of online accountability. The direct response environment that we’ve all become so used to on the web was suddenly replaced by a channel more suited to relationships and referrals than instant sales. Which made the job of measuring results a heck of a lot harder. But rest assured, with tangible objectives in place and usage of the appropriate tools, marketing initiatives in social networks can be measured just as effectively as other online channels. Even projects with objectives related to fluffy marketing outcomes such as customer engagement and attitudinal shifts are accountable. The key is simply to quantify those objectives.

The challenge of providing tangible metrics for a social project was presented to me recently when responding to a client brief. While the brief was fairly vague in nature, the client knew enough to define three core objectives for the project:

1. To increase discussion and online word of mouth around the brand in social networks
2. To motivate consumers to share brand related content in social environments
3. To shift consumers existing perceptions and attitudes towards the brand, which were skewed slightly in the negative direction

The sight of these wishy-washy objectives relating to conversation, brand engagement & customer attitudes would be enough to give most web marketers a headache. But the simple fact is that each objective is both tangible and measurable. As stated before, the key is simply to quantify the objective. Once the objective is tangible, it can be measured. Here’s how I went about converting the objectives from fluff to real metrics (the relevant tools needed to measure each metric are provided in brackets):

1. Increase online discussion: Discussion volume is a relatively easy variable to measure. Each brand related post, comment or Tweet can be tracked with the appropriate tools (Nielsen Buzz Metrics or Radian6). As a result, measuring an increase in discussion volume is as simple as taking a baseline measurement before the project, and comparing it to post project results.
2. Motivate content sharing: For this particular project, all brand related content was to be hosted on a micro site. Content could then be ported to external social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. Each sharing icon on the site was to be tracked with appropriate web analytics code. This code would then track each time a sharing icon was clicked. The total number of clicks would provide a tangible metric around the extent of consumer sharing behaviour. Some specialist tools even provide transparency as to the size of the network that each person shared the content with (Radian6).
3. Shifting consumer attitudes: Measuring customer attitudes is undoubtedly the trickiest objective to quantify. However, tools have emerged that score discussion sentiment based upon a semantic analysis of the vernacular and the positive and negative connotations of the wording (Nielsen Buzz Metrics). While the algorithms do not yet deliver laser like precision, accuracy is generally good enough to monitor high level trends. Subsequently, a pre and post campaign analysis of conversation sentiment can be used to gauge attitudinal shifts.

The three examples above are just a handful of techniques available to marketers playing in social channels. Ultimately, the metrics you use should be tied directly to the project objectives. With the right tools, just about any objective can be quantified. However, it should be noted that the particular tools mentioned in this article are paid subscription services, and therefore are better suited to enterprise level projects and budgets.

Website Redesign Checklist: SEO 101

The time has finally come to update your outdated website. Since you have this wonderful opportunity to start fresh, make sure you get off to the right start with the search engines.

The following is a quick checklist of things you must remember when doing a site redesign. If you follow all of these steps, the transition will be a smooth one.

* 301 redirects. This must be done if you are changing your URLs in any way. This involves pointing the old URLs to the new ones.
* Reinstall your analytics tracking code. If you use Google Analytics, install the new Asynchronous Tracking code.
* Create a robots.txt file.
* Create a HTML sitemap.
* If you’re a local business, ensure you have all your citations up-to-date. This local citations list from GetListed.org is a great place to start.
* Redirect the non-www version of your site to the www version (or vice versa). This is referred to as canonicalization.
* Go through a website usability checklist to ensure your site follows best practices.
* Put some effort into creating a solid site architecture. Properly organize, prioritize and label your content.
* If you’re a local SMB, include your address in the footer.
* If you have a high-traffic site and decide to change the layout, make sure popular features are still easy to find. (Think Facebook.)
* Freshen up your keyword research. Natural keyword integration into your content is key.
* Create unique meta descriptions and page titles for every single page. Consider each page to be a new keyword opportunity and avoid duplication.
* Order is important: Don’t forget semantic structure. Until HTML 5 is in full effect, ensure your headers are listed in order e.g. H1, H2, H3, etc…
* Logically create search engine friendly URLs with your keywords.
* Use Flash sparingly. Web savvy visitors prefer practicality. (And yes there are always exceptions to every rule.)
* Ensure there is a good call to action on every page if you want to convert visitors in some way.
* Place alt tags on your images.
* Create a custom 404 page.
* Plan out a logical internal linking structure. Use good anchor text to link to your other pages.
* And last, but definitely not least, remember the 5 second rule on your homepage. If your visitor can not find what they need in 5 seconds or less they will leave.

The added value of corporate blogs

Well, as most of you know by now, I do not need to tell you the value a blog can offer for your SEO strategy. Many bloggers continue to write about the positive effects of blogging on external weblogs, but there are only a few that argue for companies to start their own blogs. Therefore I want to provide some of the major advantages for companies to start their own corporate weblog. In the first part I want to elaborate on the main advantages of corporate blogs. The real SEO advantages I want to take into account in the second part.

Advantage 1: Personal touch

It is argued that many companies only provide static information on the internet and that many visitors don’t get an actual feeling about the company when visiting a website. When a website has a weblog or news section visitors can feel a personal touch to the website and also find it more actual than when not having a news or blog section. Visitors feel that they now can actual reach the company and see what it has been up to.

Advantage 2: Explanation

Although many companies try to explain their strategy to all their stakeholders through the static content of a website they sometimes feel that they are restricted to the amount of information they provide. That is so true, since within the static content you do not want to add too much text, since nobody is going to read all of it obviously. Now we can argue that nobody ever reads a long blog either, but through a blog you can elaborate on specific items a bit more than you could do in a static content. Nobody likes too many menu items, do we? The advantage of a blog is that you are not restricted to the menu items and can therefore explain more in-depth.

Advantage 3: Generating trust

Deriving from the personal touch, as well as the explanation a company can establish trust at his visitor. This is further enhanced when visitors can communicate with each other on the blog via replies, kinda like Amazon.

Advantage 4: Being authentic and flexible

In small companies this perhaps happens less often, but sometimes it can be difficult to change content on a static website. You first have to call the head of your department, he has to call the head of the IT department and the head of the IT department will tell somebody from his department to change it. When having a corporate blog the speed can be improved. Furthermore by adding more content your company starts to become authentic in comparison with its competitors.

Advantage 5: Internal collaboration

A blog can enhance internal collaboration because of several reasons. First, because more employees are involved they can get the feeling of a better work surrounding. Second, the information is spread more easy, so everybody knows the status of current projects. Third, also because the information the corporate blog provides, other employees get to know the knowledge of others. Finally, no more need for useless printed memo’s and a large inbox on the mail accounts.

As mentioned above in the next part I will elaborate more on the SEO usages of internal blogs. From advantages 1 to 5 we can conclude that a corporate blog can have some good advantages for the visitors of the corporate website. And isn’t the objective for a SEO strategy to get more visitors and to keep them on your site. As well as that those visitors in the end must result in customers which can only be established if they want to commit to your company?

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