Yikes! I participated in two Twitter chats last night and lost a follower as a result of overwhelming his stream with my tweets.
Here are eight simple ways to avoid driving your followers crazy by dominating their streams, and perhaps losing them in the process:
- Use a second ID for chats: One brilliant user has a second ID that was identical to his main ID, except with “Chat” added at the end.
- Avoid responding to everything: Some well-meaning users respond to almost every individual question or comment with a tweet rather than summing up and holding back. If you want to thank someone, then send a direct message (DM) instead.
- Ease up on #followfriday: Oh my gosh, some people have nothing but “@name @name @name (x 10) #followfriday” in their stream on Fridays. Their whole Twitter page is full of names. Make your #followfriday more meaningful by recommending less people and explaining those recommendations.
- Watch those links and quotes: Sure, we all appreciate a good quote and links to great articles. Just take care not to fill up your stream with quotes, links or both.
- Schedule tweets: Typically, I don’t recommend automating anything in Twitter as it will likely lower your rep. However, if you’re like me and only check Twitter a couple of times a day, then you may want to spread out your tweets, replies, etc., using an automated service. This avoids cluttering a person’s stream with bursts of tweets.
- Dump the short tweets: Some people’s Twitter page show lots of meaningless tweets, such as “Cool!” “I agree,” “LOL” and “Thank you for RT.” DM those messages instead, or expand your responses to add meaning.
- Share your own links sparingly: Just now, one user has three tweets to his own blog in my stream. It’s OK to share your stuff, but certainly not one link after the other. Spread ‘em out. A good rule of thumb is to tweet your stuff no more than once a day..
- Drop the play-by-play: Lots of us love sports, but not when you give us every play at the event you’re attending. This applies to conferences and events, too. Instead of “live tweeting,” give one or two summaries of what’s happening.
Every rule has exceptions. Some folks tweet from conferences and share great insights. The point is to tweet carefully and wisely. Follow us on Twitter @webworkerdaily.
How do you tweet without irritating your followers?
Image created at twitlogo
It seems hard to improve on a standard screen capture, right? You want a copy of whatever happens to be on your screen, so you take a screen cap. But Aviary, which already has an impressive array of online photo-editing tools, has come up with a nifty screen-capping web app and a matching Firefox plugin that improve on the basics.
Here are five things that make Aviary screen capture really useful. Read the rest of this entry »
To celebrate this week’s launch of the superb Firefox 3.5, we’ve put together a collection of the WebWorkerDaily team’s favorite Firefox extensions. You can subscribe to our collection here; as we discover useful new add-ons, we’ll add to it over time. The great thing about add-on collections is that you can pick and choose which add-ons to install, so if you don’t agree with all of our choices, you can just pick the ones that you like.
Here are the add-ons that made our collection (they’re all compatible with Firefox 3.5):
These are our favorites, but if we’re missing any, please let us know in the comments.
Here are a couple of ways to be more efficient when it comes to sharing your photos online from events. Like most web workers, you’re probably on many different social networks. How do you share those great photos from the event with all of your contacts on all of your social networks, without having to log in to each one separately?
Fortunately, there are ways to automate the process of cross-posting photos to many different services at one time.
Flickr
One of the best ways to broadcast your photos is via Flickr. It’s very simple to set up, and the results will save you a great deal of time. You’ll be able to send any photo from your mobile device to your Flickr account via email, and it will then automatically send a link to that photo on Twitter and Facebook at the same time, if you choose to do so. To set up Flickr to automatically share photos with your contacts on Facebook and Twitter: Read the rest of this entry »
When it comes to collaborative projects, there’s one area where I’ve found it particularly easy to trip up, especially if you’re working with a team you never see in person. As you put together the initial research for a project — maybe interview notes for a series of blog posts, great examples for a web site design, or the figures for a marketing plan — keeping the information organized and accessible for everyone involved can be a major hassle. Read the rest of this entry »
Editor’s note: With this post we welcome Nancy Nally to the WebWorkerDaily team. Nancy is the owner of Balalaberry Media and is the editor of its online scrapbook industry trade journal Scrapbook Update, which she founded in 2004, along with working on other writing projects. She shares her home in Palm Coast, Fla., with her geek husband and young geek daughter, who has autism.
I may not be able to make a phone call on my iPhone from 30,000 feet (yet), but I’ve still found that when I’m out of my office and have to fly, having an iPhone in my pocket is a powerful sanity-saving tool. Here are the apps that help keep my air travel running smoothly.
Plan.Pack.Go: Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush
Flying means packing. Even if you have a standard “kit” you travel with, it’s still easy in the rush to get out the door to forget your toothbrush, or charging cable. The list templates in this app let you create and save your standard list, edit it if needed for a specific trip, and then check off items as you pack them. Unlike many packing apps, this one includes list items for standard pre-travel tasks, like charging batteries. A sideways shake switches between your unpacked and packed list items, and the categories are well-organized. I’ve tried several packing apps, and this is by far the most slick in design. Designed by Tangent software, and available from the App Store for $1.99. Read the rest of this entry »
Maintaining and promoting your various online personas can be a challenge. As Charles wrote recently, there are a variety of options for managing many online identities, and yesterday one of them, GizaPage, which I wrote about back in May, released several new features.
You may recall that GizaPage has a different take than other similar services. Where most either pull or aggregate your content into their own interface, GizaPage’s tab format gives folks the ability to view all of your profiles in their natural context. While I found the initial release to be thoughtfully done, some of the new options make it a much more compelling option.
Read the rest of this entry »
Like many of us, you’re probably getting used to the much-improved version 3.5 of Mozilla’s Firefox browser. Of course, one of the primary reasons that many people use Firefox is the large ecosystem of useful extensions available for it. The speed of version 3.5 will automatically give you an efficiency boost if you’ve been using previous versions, but there is one Firefox extension that I highly recommend to speed many kinds of tasks up even more: Mouse Gestures. This is one of the few extensions that causes an eye-popping response in many new users. It’s compatible with 3.5 and easy to get started with, too.
Read the rest of this entry »
