Three Practical Twitter Tools You Can Use Right Now

One of the great things about Twitter are the many Twitter-related services provided for free by hundreds of providers. Three of them have been particularly useful for the work of AirSafe Media.

Search Twitter at search.twitter.com
This is the top Twitter tool used by AirSafe.com, and is especially useful for fast moving news items. Often Twitter users link to interesting online resources, and often these are excellent sources of information located in obscure areas of the web. Also, because new tweets are indexed almost instantly, you can often find out new information before it shows up on a regular search engine like Google or Bing.

Shortening URLs with bit.ly
This service shortens a URL of any length to one that is about 20 characters long. If you sign up for a free account, you have access to a range of performance information, including how many times your bit.ly link was clicked. If other bit.ly users converted the same URL, then you can see how many clicks happened for all users, and compare how many of them were yours. Drill down some more and you can see things like who retweeted your Twitter post. You can get real time feedback on which of your links are of interest to your audience.

Use Twitterfeed to Combine Your Social Media Efforts
One of the things that Twitter can do for you is to announce new items on things like your blog, podcast, or anything with RSS syndication. With a very small amount of work, your blog posts will automatically be passed along to your Twitter audience.

Previous AirSafe Media Twitter-related Posts
How Twitter is used on AirSafe.com
Associating Twitter with a blog and an automated mailing list
The evolution of social media use on AirSafe.com
Using Twitter during a blackout

12 Things You Can Do to Help Your Favorite Nonprofit

The podcast and blog Marketing Over Coffee has an excellent idea for helping nonprofits--Over 12 days introducing them to marketing related ideas that can help them move forward. Naturally, there is an emphasis on Internet-related activities.

You can visit the blog at MarketingOverCoffee.com and see for yourself. On the first day, they suggested the following:

Introduce them (your favorite nonprofit) to the concept of Twitter (don’t set up an account yet), and work with them to pack the sum of what they do into 140 characters. Typically, non-profits have noble goals but can’t explain them especially well, leaving you with a vague sense that they do something good.

Help your non-profit by developing the following:

1. A mission and/or vision in 140 characters or less.
2. A list of keywords by which other people would find them.
3. Why, in 140 characters or less, someone would donate time or money to them.

I suggest checking out MarketingOverCoffee.com for more ideas, and to put some of these ideas of your own for your favorite nonprofit organization or community group.

If You Don't Know What Gadgets May Work for You, Here Are Several You Can Try

There are many options out there for widgets that you can put on your web site or blog to enhance your other content. Sometimes the best way to figure out what works for you and your audience is to try a bunch of them to see what works. Below are a few widget sites you can try:

• Widgetbox – A variety of widgets
  
  
  
• LinkWithin – a blog widget that appears under each post, linking to related stories from your blog archive
  
  
• ShoutMix – Provides a chat widget for your site or blog
  
  
• Wowzio – Various blog related widgets
  
  
• SpringWidgets – Web site tools for blogs and social networks
  
  
• YourMinis – Widgets for your blog, website, start page, and desktop
  
  
• Monitter – Real time live Twitter watch and badge creator
  
  
• Widgipedia – A very extensive widget resource
  
  
• Widgiland – A social widget production social network
  
  
• FeedWind – A widget for RSS type feeds

If you know of other sites with online widgets or tools for your web site, please let us know in the comments section.

An Unusual Twitter Related Service That Turn Tweets Into a Radio Show

The kinds of Twitter-related services that individuals and companies are limited only by the imagination. One of the more unusual ones is provided by Tweetrad.io, a which converts Twitter posts into a kind of radio broadcast. The service ads extras like simulated static between between posts to make it sound like you are changing stations with an old style radio tuning knob.

It isn't a word-for-word translation. URLs are excluded and common Twitter terms get turned into appropriate phrases. The result is somewhat mechanical, and for most not not hard to understand.

While this kind of service can have practical uses, the creators of it may have been looking to develop something that was more entertainment related than business related. You can get a bit of an idea of the attitude of the folks at tweetrad.io by reading what they say about their company.

At tweetrad.io our mission is to index all the world's information; however, unlike google we plan to be really evil in the process. We've started by seeking out the most relevant scholarly data on the web. Naturally Twitter was where we looked first. Using our unpantentable Tweet-to-Speech™ technology, we've made it possible for billions of people to hear the "Pulse of the Planet" as never before.

Rather than describe this service, I invite you to check it out for yourself.

How to Use High Quality Flickr Photos on Your Site Under Creative Commons License

Creative commons and Flickr. If you need a photo to spice up your site or blog, search within Flickr for photos that you can freely use. Many of the photos on Flickr can be used under a Creative Commons license. What this means is that all you have to do is give proper credit for a photo, and you can use it legally and without paying anyone.


To do it, go to Flickr, search for the kind of photo you want, then on the search results page, choose the 'Advanced Search' option, choose one of the Creative Commons option to limit your search for photos that you can use with one of the Creative Commons options.

Once you find the picture you want, look for the 'Additional Information' heading, and click on the 'some rights reserved' link to find out how you should give credit for the photo.

The photo in this post is an example of that process. The shot is of the aftermath of a 2004 plane crash in Colorado that killed three people on the aircraft. One of the comments happened to include a link to the NTSB report.


The source of the photo was from Flickr user Greg Younger, and license information is available at Flickr.

Learn How to Find or Create Google Gadgets to Improve Your Web Site or Blog

While your blog may be filled with original content that you or your group develops, it sometimes helps to have additional extras to improve your audience's satisfaction. One of the many things that you can do is add gadgets, or dynamically generated content, to improve a visitor's experience. These resources can provide a wide variety of information or content, for example news headlines, weather, or a calendar.

Google provides many free gadgets for your web site or blog, and all you have to do is search their gadget directory for one that you like, copy the code, and place it in your web site or blog. Some of the more popular gadgets were featured in this article from Quick Online Tips.

If you have a few programming skills, Google will even show you how you can build your own custom gadgets. Visit the Google gadget creation page and you will find detailed instructions for building gadgets that you can place on multiple sites and products including iGoogle, Google Maps, Orkut, or any web page. Once you write your gadget once, with minor changes it can run in multiple places.

To give you an idea of how it would work, look below to find a gadget that produces the current Dilbert comic strip:

KeywordSpy.com Is One Tool You Can Use to Evaluate a Site's Advertising Potential

If you are involved in any aspect of search engine marketing or search engine optimization, you need every advantage you can to stay ahead of the competition and to stay current on developing trends. One of the many free tools out there that can help you is KeywordSpy.
Through this keyword tool, you can perform advanced keyword research and keyword tracking to study what your competitors have been advertising in their Adwords campaigns and Other pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns. It also offers a convenient way to view the same information about your own sites.

Among the advantages this software gives is the ability discover who your competitors are, what kinds of keywords they are using, and a general idea of your competitor's online advertising budget. With this tool, you can tell the exact terms and phrases that are driving the most traffic to your competitors' websites, which should help you in tailoring your site and your online marketing approach to increase your own traffic.

Like with many online SEO and SEM tools, there is a free and a paid version of this service. It is worth it to register and check out the free version.