Archive for the ‘Twitter’ Category

Twitter: Rampant self promotion works!

Tuesday, August 21st, 2007

About two weeks ago, I installed the “Twitter Updater” plugin to figure out if pinging Twitter brings traffic. Turns out, it does. Pinging Twitter doesn’t bring a lot yet, primarily because I am totally new to Twitter and the blog about blogging niche. So, it goes without saying I don’t have many Twitter followers. The first week, I got zero Twitter hits, I’m now getting 2-3 hits a day.

I just checked Twitter page and I now have 5 followers — and when you consider that I am entirely incompetent when it comes to Twitter, that’s not too shabby. With luck, more people who like Twitter will enjoy my posts and stop by. (I also need to devote some time to visiting my Twitter followers. After all, if they are following my blog, it’s likely they blog on topics that interest me!)

Can you create link juice at Twitter?

Unfortunately, you can’t. :( As Andy Beard noted, Twitter Links are nofollow. That holds for the self-promotional ones you create by pinging from your blog, and also editorial links to other blogs that might interest people. So, if you like someone else’s blog, it’s fine to mention them in a Tweet, but link them at your blog too.

Then is it worth the time to ping?

Yes! Traffic is traffic. Traffic from followers is a really good type of traffic. Twitter gives them a way to follow you.

Mind you, if pinging Twitter took any time, it might not be worth the effort. But the fact is, once you install “Twitter Updater” plugin on your WordPress blog, it pings Twitter automatically when you publish.

I now need to find a plugin that lets me show my tweets here at my blog. I need it to help publicise the fact that I can be followed at Twitter, but the one from Twitter often loaded slowly. Also, since Twitter nofollows my links, I feel that, in fairness, I need to nofollow my links to their site. :)

I now think of using Twitter the way I use feeds. Some people want track posts on Twitter instead of RSS; so make it easy! (Oh, and by the way, in fairness, I should tell you I got the idea of pinging Twitter by observing Jason Calacanis, who has been pinging Twitter for a whilenow. He seems to be a master of publicity; when you see him using something, you can guess it works! :) )

Posted in Plugins, Social Networking, Twitter, WordPress | 5 Comments »

Test of My Hacks to WordTwit A Plugin: This title is really long for that reason.

Friday, August 10th, 2007

To attract Technorati and Twitter traffic, I’m now getting all my posts logged at Twitter, and manually pinging Technorati. But I was thinking: If I’m going to ping Technoratiy, wouldn’t it be great if I could get some of my tag words into the Twitter log?

Of course it would!

So, I decided to modify the string I send using WordTwit: This involves adding code to WordTwit. But what should I send to Twitter?

Examining twitter, I noticed I get to enter 140 characters. I also noticed the url gets changed into a tinyurl that takes up to 28 characters- which I will round up “just in case”. I’m guessing (only guessing) that to get tags to show, I need to keep the title, tags and any extra characters to less than 110 characters. (That leaves room for the 30 character tiny url.)

So, I did a bit of coding to chop long titles down to 40 characters and slap on some categories at the end of the the message . I only add categories if they fit inside the 110 character budget.

The only way to test this is to post, so I’m doing that. We’ll see if this shows at Twitter! Here’s sort of what my Twit should look like if it works:

$shortTitle=trim( substr( the_title('','',false), 0, 40) );
$titleLength=strlen ( $shortTitle );
$tagLength=100-$titleLength; // twitter permits 140. The tiny url uses up to 30, other text uses about 10

foreach((get_the_category()) as $cat) {
$shortCats .= $cat->cat_name . ‘ ‘;
//echo(‘
short cats= ‘.$shortCats);
}

$shortCats=trim( substr($shortCats, 0, $tagLength) );
$i = ‘\” . $shortTitle . ‘\’ - ‘ . get_permalink().’ ‘.$shortCats;

echo(‘
‘.$i);
?>

This may or may not work. If it doesn’t, you’ll see a another test (with the tags listed before the url!)

Wish me luck! :)

Posted in Blog Hacks, Traffic, Twitter | No Comments »