HubSpot's resident social media scientist Dan Zarella released a new report on how to get the highest number of click-throughs for your tweets.
Some of the information (presented below in a handy infographic) is stuff we already knew: Tweets between 120 and 130 characters tend to get retweeted more often than longer and shorter tweets and tweeting links at a slow rate gets more clicks, for example. But other findings - including click-through rates for tweets containing the word "daily is out" by paper.li users - were surprising.
A group of Web researchers may have found a way to use Twitter bots to increase interaction between people, as well as between Twitter users and brands.
As first reported by MIT Technology Review, the Web Ecology Project started as a contest to see which team of researchers could get the most @ mentions on Twitter. Some teams developed surprisingly lifelike Twitter bots which tricked human Twitter users into thinking they were real people.
But then something unexpected happened: not only did the Twitter bots get those people to follow them and retweet their messages, but they also increased human connections.
Social media use grew 300% in China last year and more than half of the country's 500 million users are on a social network, according to a government report released last week.
And that's why Chinese New Year became the most micro-blogged event in history, with 481,207 messages posted in the first minute of the year on a Chinese, Twitter-like service, as well as 32,312 messages posted in a single second: well above Twitter's record of 25,088 tweets in a second. Still, many Chinese, both in China and abroad, are finding ways to use Twitter to talk free of government censorship.
Much is being made out of projections by Twitter tracking service Twopcharts's projections that Twitter will activate its 500 millionth account next month, but a closer look at the microblogging service's growth shows anything but a steady rise.
Twitter passed the 200 million mark last February and then, on May 18, it reached 300 million accounts. That's 50 percent growth in roughly 90 days and the milestone gave Twitter stock as one of the Big Two (at the time) social networks.
We love the NBC cult-hit Parks & Recreation which features Rob Lowe as a hyper-healthy and super-enthusiastic city manager, so we're always a little concerned when we hear rumors that the show may get canceled.
So, against that backdrop we got a little suspicious when Lowe, just ahead of a Thursday appearance on the Ellen Degeneres show and the Saturday premiere of a Lifetime movie he's starring in, tweeted that Indianapolis Colts quarterback Peyton Manning was going to retire after missing the entire 2011 season.
Twitter has acquired Summify, a service that digests the links in one's Twitter feed and produces a daily email of the most relevant stories. The developers will join Twitter's Growth team, and their work will still "explore ways to help people connect and engage with relevant, timely news." As Twitter nears 500 million users, it needs new ways to teach them how the service works.
It's hard to learn to use Twitter, and users give up easily if they don't get it. Summify can help Twitter show new users why they should use the service. Twitter's latest changes are all about discovery of new people and content. Summify isolates the most meaningful stuff in one's Twitter feed, which helps users get value out of it.
Since the Kenyan army has gone into Somalia in October (during my trip to Kenya), the main Islamist group Al-Shabaab has used Twitter in its propaganda war against the Kenyan government.
It's latest tweets, posted yesterday on @hsmpress, include photos and descriptions of two Kenyan government officials they've kidnapped, Fredrick Irungu Wainaina and Mule Edward.
Last fall ProfNet, the company that connects reporters with sources, asked me to lead a Twitter chat on how journalists can use social media in their work. It was fun, and using a hashtag set up for the chat, I was able to disperse little bits of social media wisdom in 140 characters or less.
I even got my picture in on ProfNet's sign in Times Square leading up to the chat, a photo of which is now a rather cool conversation piece in my living room.
The problem is not everyone who follows me on Twitter is a journalist, or even cares that much about the inside baseball stuff I talked about during the hour scheduled for the chat. They complained that their feed was filled with me sprouting technical gibberish. Another sent a direct message asking if a "dork-bot" had hacked into my Twitter account.
Several services are stepping up to offer Twitter chat features that Facebook and Google+ users take for granted as an integral part of the service. But questions abound: Do services like Bonfire and Joint match up to make Twitter as good as a chat client as its competitors?
Twitter says it is working with the developers of Proxlet, a third-party client that was shut down last week for violating its developer rules.
Proxlet helps users manage their Twitter feeds by blocking apps, organizing hash tags and muting users. Last week Twitter told developers Aaron White and Chris Ricca, who could not be reached for comment, that the client was being disable for exposing proxy URLs, which could have to the leaking of personal information.
Update: The "only thing that has changed so far on our end is disabling the extension so it isn't hurting users, and deciding how we'll notify our native client users," White said in an email Tuesday. "Unfortunately, since Chris & I built Proxlet as a side project and are pursuing other startups, it's really hard to be in 'reactionary' mode & do support justice."
White complained in an interview to BostonInno that they had been given no warning or time to repair the glitch before the site was shut down, and that many of their tens of thousands of users had no way of knowing that the client had been disabled. But Twitter spokesperson Jodi Olson said the company followed standard procedure in shutting down Proxlet.
TweetReach is reporting that 93.7 million individual Twitter accounts received a message about the Golden Globe awards between 5 and 8 p.m. Sunday night, more than triple last year's reach on the microblogging Web site.
The reach makes it the biggest event ever analyzed by TweetReach, which measures the impact of Twitter in a wide range of news an entertainment events. Tina Fey's photobombing of Amy Poehler during the presentation of the best actress award was one of the most tweeted moments of last night's Golden Globes, and Zooey Deschanel's tweet about her wardrobe was the most retweeted message related to the event.
