by guest Blogger Hanna Watson

Social media is being used for just about everything these days from keeping in touch with friends to promoting a business. While it works well for these uses, it can also be a great tool for doing good and making a change in the world as well. Perhaps the biggest and most successful example of this is the use of social media in the Obama campaign and in the recent health care debate. It worked for them and it can work for you too. Here are some reasons why you should consider it, if you’re not already utilizing social media tools for your charity, group or organization.

• You can spread information rapidly. Social media is a great way to get the word out about what you’re doing and what you support. Information on blogs, Facebook and Twitter is copied, pasted and spread around quickly, making it easier to inform.

• Let people know about real events. Using social media, you can easily let people know about real events in the community that your organization is taking part in. They can add it to their personal calendars and get updates and reminders about it as well.

• You can find new supporters. Every time someone links to your profiles, articles or videos through social media your organization gains a potential new supporter. Many people may not be familiar with your organization or what you support and the whole social aspect of social media can be a great way to spread the word.

• It’s easy to post a variety of media. Some people will be especially moved by photographs while others will require the action of a video to be engaged. Social media makes it easy to employ all of these different kinds of media in one place.

• You can support other charities as they support you. Social sites are called such because they support online communities, and as part of that community you can help lend a hand to other groups by supporting them through your site as well. When you help them, they can help you back and you both will get the support you need.

• It’s easy to get feedback. With social media it’s easy to get feedback from your supporters (or opponents) on what you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong. It can make a big difference in the success of your future endeavors.

This post was contributed by Hannah Watson, who writes about the distance learning colleges.

She welcomes your feedback E-mail: HannahWatson84 [at] yahoo [dot] com

Post from: Social Media Vision

How Social Media Can be a Valuable Tool in Promoting Your Cause

Twitter Clean Up

I wrote a post before on how to do a Twitter cleanup by using FriendorFollow.com to remove all non-followers on Twitter and using Twitter directories like Twellow.com or Wefollow.com to find and increase your niche follower count. The reason for a Twitter clean up is to remove all the non-engaged followers in your Twitter stream (besides celebs and news profiles).

Why follow these users if they don’t follow you back and provide relevant and engaging conversations? The 2nd step of a Twitter clean up is to increase your niche and social network of Followers that’s relevant to you.   The Twitter directories was a way to focus on finding new friends who you can target more effectively than friend  search.

New Twitter Account Management Tool for Maintenance

Well I have found a new website tool called InRev TwitIn at http://www.buzzom.com/ In their words

Welcome!!! Experience the new Social Media Tool. To follow and unfollow people in Twitter is just a click away. Just type in your Twitter Id and get on. Have Fun!! Manage your Twitter Account with faster operation and methods found nowhere else, secured by OAuth.

I recently came across this site and have found this tool to be the All-in-One ultimate resource for account management.  I also found this to more effective and faster than using friendorfollow in which I will explain why here shortly. To use the site, you must first log in using OAuth (an open protocol to secure access to a website with protected data)

Once in you will notice 3 major features for this website

1. Flush – Unfollow who are not following you

2.  Grow - Grow network, follow new people

3.  Reciprocate – Follow your followers back

The Flush Button

The Flush button is used to bring up 50 users (hit “refresh list” to bring up more) you are following but are not following you back.  Take advantage of this method by removing all the users in your Twitter stream who provide no engagement or value.

There is however the exception with Celebrities, News and other High Profile accounts that you may follow but don’t expect them to engage or follow back. Buzzom does have a great feature for filtering out these users and still pursue the rest.  These features are considering “locking”.  You have the “Follow Lock” and the “Unfollow Lock”.

• Locking – Locking users will place all the users you checkmark in an area where it won’t be in your future results anymore.
• The Follow Lock – All locked users you checkmark while searching for new users to Follow will be placed in the tab.  This is great when searching for new people to Follow on Buzzom, you can filter out all the Spammers, Bots and non-relevant people you don’t want to follow.  This is not a block feature but simply a filter to not show these users in Buzzom.
• The UnFollow Lock – Every user you Checkmark to Lock while “Flushing” away or finding users who you follow but they don’t follow back will be placed in the Unfollow Lock tab.  People place here are your typical Celebrities, News Feeders or High profile users who don’t typically follow people back.  Don’t worry if your afraid of removing a Twitter user who you like to follow but don’t mind they follow back, you can “SAVE” them or “LOCK” them so that way you won’t remove them from your Follow list.

Everything you Lock will be saved for all future uses due to OAuth.  Once you login Buzzom it will save your information for future use.  So Flush away and be sure to “SAVE” the users who you want to keep following while “FLUSHING” the rest of the users who don’t follow you back.

The Grow Button

This action provides you the list of people who are likely to follow you back. You can select the people from the list and follow them all at once.  You can also “LOCK” users who you do not want to follow and have Buzzom show them in the future searches.

The list is actually relevant to your profile and the users do have a high follow-back ratio.  Just because Buzzom automates the list you can still manually scroll down and un-check mark users you may feel not be worthy in following and adding to your network.

One of the fastest methods I seen to accurately grow your Twitter Network effectively and efficiently.  Other great methods Buzzom provides are:

• People Search - This search you can target new people to Follow by using keywords to locate in the Bio’s or Tweets.  This is a great search that I have found to replace the Twitter Directories like Twellow.  For instance I would use Twellow to locate “Real Estate Agents” or “Virginia” in the categories or search.  Buzzom now takes the search 1 step further by also allowing to switch to keywords in Tweets too.  So in essence this is an all-in-one search in this one stop shop site.
• Cross Follow - This cool feature will allow you to choose which Twitter user you want to show data for either all of his/her Followers or all of his/her users she is following.  In essence you will be comparing your data with thiers and will only show the people not in your network to allow to add to yours.  You can start selecting all the Top profiles in your niche to Cross Follow, it’s all about surrounding your self with like minded success individuals right?

The Reciprocate Button This action will bring up all the users who are following you that you haven’t followed back yet.  Now mostly the users you have skipped may be due to spammers or bots but you may occasionally skip a few on accident and this feature is great for finding lost stragglers.  These users who are following you should deserve a follow back if they are not spammers.

Post from: Social Media Vision

Ultimate Twitter Account Management Tool & Clean Up Maintenance

URL Shrinker

URL shrinking tools have become very popular over the few years with long links like EBAY auction links and the character limit in Plurk and Twitter.

The most popular and most classic URL shrinking tool is Tinyurl which even Twitter has adapted as the main URL shortening tool.  Tiny URL is the original URL shrinker and is the one that is most understood with the name.  Everyone knows what Tinyurl means when looking at the service where other services like is.gd or snipurl may not be user friendly to some.

Birth of Budurl

I have been using Tinyurl like most others have and I noticed there was something missing.  I wanted a way to see who was clicking on my links that I provide on Twitter to measure my results.

Within my Real Estate community I was introduced to Budurl where a lot of my fellow Real Estate professionals been throwing up Budurl links instead of Tinyurl links.  This sparked my interest in checking out the site because of so many Tweets I been noticing the switch.  

Budurl turned out to be great tool in providing Link Stats and a URL shrinker.  You can even create an account to keep track of your URL shrinks to see how many people have clicked on your link.  If you don’t want to create an account you can just put a “/s” at the end of your Budurl link to see the stats within your web browser.

So Budurl was only 22 characters while Tinyurl was 25 characters.  Budurl provided link stats while Tinyurl didn’t.

Budurl won my vote.

Bit.Ly knocks out Budurl

Recently there has been many new URL shrink sites out there that really do the same thing but with just different names.  I have experienced quite a few of these and still became loyal to Budurl.

2 Sites have caught my interest though recently, Is.Gd and Bit.ly URL shrink service sites.  Now these 2 sites have caught my interest to the simple fact that the Twitter client Tweetdeck has the shorten URL services within the client.

Is.Gd is by far the shortes URL service out there with only an astounding 17 characters total.  The only down side is this service still doesn’t provide good link stats and track like Budurl.  So I would only use Is.Gd if I need to utilize a very long Tweet, taking advantage of the extra 5+ characters I can save.

Character Limit

Bit.Ly is only 20 characters but does a whole lot more than Budurl.  I have been a Budurl fan for a long time and I didn’t think any URL shorten service will beat Budurl until I seen the features on Bit.Ly.

Traffic Sources

Bit.ly has a link tracker too like Budurl but always takes it a step further.  Bit.Ly displays all the referring sites and E-mail/Software stats.  So whether a user reads the shorten url via chat client, e-mail or Twitter, Bit.ly will show you how many clicks.

Conversations

The biggest reason why I switched to Bit.Ly is due to the c0nversation tracking in this URL shrink service.  You can actually keep track of your Retweets in Twitter and reposts in Friendfeed.  Not only can you keep track of sites displaying your shorten url but you can also view the comments left on the link as-well.

Convenience

Lastly on why I made the switch to Bit.Ly is because of this last feature which makes Bit.Ly more attractive to use especially at work when you can’t download Twitter clients like Tweetdeck, the feature is the last 15 recent shrinks.

Bit.Ly will display your last 15 URL shrinks without forcing you to create an account or log in an account.  This is perfect for on the fly and is so convenient to see all your stats on one page.  Budurl can display all your Budurl links to display clicks but you have to log in and create an account.

Yes I have made the switch to Bit.Ly now and I have nothing against Budurl they were a good service to use but for right now Bit.Ly has won me over.  What are your thoughts?

Post from: Social Media Vision

Bit.ly Trumps Budurl To Become Best Twitter Link Track, Stat & Shrink Tool

Qwitter Tool

Qwitter is a Twitter tool that e-mails you whenever someone un-follows you on Twitter.  The e-mail will tell you what your last tweet post was when the follower last followed you.

The Pros of Qwitter

Before I get into the reasons why you should not use Qwitter, let me just point at the developers over at Qwitter (Contrast I.E) are brilliantly smart and have developed other web apps like ReallyTinyUrl & Exceptional.

Below are some reason why you may want to use Qwitter…

• Qwitter is for you… if are manically obsessed with your social status and have a fear of not being popular.
• Qwitter is for you… if you are anal about measuring results even if they are useless statistics.
• Qwitter is for you…if you have been called Vane, Conceited, Big Ego and Narcissistic.
• Qwitter is for you…if you live for Drama & Negativity.
• Qwitter is for you…if you want to be dangerously self conscious on what to write about, thus preventing you from being you.

As you can see Qwitter is not for everyone….

The Cons of Qwitter

• Qwitter is not a good measuring tool.  There are many other reasons why a person may unfollow you and to always 100% assume that they stopped following after a certain tweet is a little far-fetched.

• Qwitter is not to be used as a guideline to become a better Twitter user.  You may use Qwitter to measure on what not to do in the Twitter world but I have a better solution.  Read the The Ultimate Social Media Etiquette Handbook by Tamar Weinberg.

• Are you worried about your popularity and want to gain more Twitter followers? Well take the advice from Lisa Hoffmann with her article Want more twitter followers? Fuhgetaboutit.  The art is to not focus on the past but to focus on the future.  Don’t worry so much on the formula on gaining new followers, success will come in time if you keep doing what your doing, which should be interacting.

• Negativity is a poison that spreads.  Stop surrounding yourself in negative news and focus on the positive things like being more active in replies, link recommendations and having great conversations.  Allowing yourself to be always remind of negative news will put you in a negative mood and rename your Twitter handle Negative Nancy or Debbie Downer.

The last testament to the reason on why not to utilize the Twitter tool Qwitter is from a famous poem  quote by the late Thomas Gray

IGNORANCE IS BLISS

Post from: Social Media Vision

Why You Should Drop Twitter Tool Qwitter Like A Bad Habit