2009 was, without doubt, the year of Twitter.  Whether it was the massive hacker attacks that created a massive outage and reminded us of how it has now become an important part of our lives, the interest in both Fortune 500 companies as well as small businesses to utilize it as part of their social media marketing strategy, or the phenomenal growth in membership, tweets are now part of our mainstream culture and are the default real-time search results for the likes of Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

I expect Twitter to continue to transform itself into a more useful platform for both businesses and professionals to use in 2010.  But there were many excellent blog posts from 2009 containing excellent tips that we can still utilize well into the new year.  Let’s take a look back at the greatest Twitter blog posts and tips of 2009.

As with my similar Top 25 Most Useful LinkedIn Blog Posts of 2009, I used a number of factors when considering which were the best blog posts and tips to recommend to you all.  Within each section I have ordered the listing in descending order by most retweets at the time of this blog post, which are indicated in brackets.   Warning: Those with the most tweets were those listed on Mashable, which in itself guarantees a LOT of retweets. So don’t let that scare you into not reading some of the blog posts that got fewer tweets, as they are of comparable quality.

I tried to limit this blog post to the same 25 that I did for LinkedIn, but considering that a lot of people still don’t “get” Twitter, I thought it was important to add some excellent blog posts which give background on why you should tweet as well as some great tips for beginners.  Thus, my Top 25 became a Top 35 list.

On a final note, I also contributed 19 Twitter-related blog posts in 2009, so I have taken the liberty to also sprinkle the below list with top suggestions with tips from my own blog posts for your reference where appropriate.

Need a Reason to Tweet?

How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live by Stephen Johnson [4,921]

If you’re still on the sidelines, please read this classic article from Time Magazine.  The article begins with the same sort of skepticism that we all had before embracing the real-time platform, and it ends on a very uplifting note.  Highly recommended.

9 Ways Twitter Can Help in the Real World by Amanda MacArthur [72]

Are you still looking for a reason to start using this hyped social media channel?  This clever piece gives you nine different examples of how you can start using it.

How Twitter Was Born by Dom Sagolla [?]

This is an excerpt from the book of the same name.  Perhaps by understanding its history you can gain some insight as to why you may want to use it.  This is a fascinating piece of history and an excellent read to get a deeper understanding of its roots.

How to Use Twitter to Build Intelligence by Venessa Miemis [?]

A brilliant article which starts out with the question What is Twitter? and slowly creates a masterpiece of an explanation of how it can be utilized strategically once you have an objective.  If you are in doubt as to why to begin using it in the first place, please read this article!

For Beginners

10 Ways to be Useful on Twitter by Ryan Miller [1,958]

While providing basic advice on etiquette, I enjoy the positive spin on social networking that the article provides.

Top 10 Tips for Beginners by Sean Ludwig [?]

A very basic introduction to get you started.  Only for beginners but an easy read.

8 Useful Tips to Become Successful with Twitter by Paul Boag [?]

Good advice for beginners to ramp-up quickly.

Top 7 Mistakes New Users Make by Mark S. Luckie [?]

As you ramp up, make sure that you don’t make any of these newbie mistakes!

(I also wrote a Twitter Tip #1 for Beginners: Follow Lists Before You Follow People [52] which accompanied my  Twitter 101 with 7 Useful Tips for Those Getting Started on Twitter [44] blog post, both of which I recommend for beginners.)

Growing and Managing Your Followers

Ten Ways to Increase Your Followers by Kevin Rose [2,319]

The co-founder of Digg speaks out with great advice on how to increase the number of followers.

10 Tools to Organize Your Tweeps by Josh Catone [1,927]

Excellent collection of 3rd party sites to help you organize your followers.

47 Power Users’ Secrets to Getting Many Followers by Jacob Share [514]

Excellent article comprised of advice from a wide variety of social media rockstars including Dan Schawbel, Robert Scoble, and Ari Herzog.

9 Directories You Should be Listed On by Jayson Yormark [167]

A concise post with a good list of the top user directories.  One strategy to increase your followers is to get found, and making sure you are listed on these directories will help you do so.

27 Tools To Help You Find And Manage Followers by Dainis Graveris [?]

A great list of sites to help you find and manage followers.  Great resource to help navigate what is possible using 3rd party services.

(I also wrote a blog post on Twitter Followers vs. Following: What is the Ideal Ratio? [19] as well as HOW TO: Find Relevant New People to Follow on Twitter [16] that I recommend here.)

Intermediate Tips and Advice

HOW TO: Use Twitter Lists by Josh Catone [3,399]

Lists have changed the way in which we engage on the real-time social networking platform.  This article is a great primer on the potential for Lists.

HOW TO: Retweet by Ben Parr [2,927]

The Retweet seems so simple but actually has significant meaning.  Learn not only how to Retweet from this article, but also about the existence of a few applications to help you track your Retweets.

HOW TO: Get the Most Out of #Hashtags by Ben Parr [2,184]

I often get asked about Hashtags when I speak, and I believe that this article explains their use (and potential misuse) best.

How I Tweet by Guy Kawasaki [622]

You knew that Guy Kawasaki would make it on to every social media-related list, and this time it is no different.  This article is a classic in that it shows, in very authentic and transparent terms, how one Pro actually goes through his own work flow.  Read and learn!

10 Organizational Uses for Lists by Maddie Grant [133]

With Lists, you need to think outside of the box.  This article gives us some great ideas about how we can begin to utilize Lists to accomplish several different things.

Direct Messages – Best (and Worst) Practices by Kristi Hines [121]

A great look at the art of the Direct Message, looking at many examples.  A must read if you are automating your Direct Messages to everyone that follows you.

(I also wrote a piece on utilizing Lists that I recommend here: 4 Great Ways to Use the New Twitter Lists [128] as well as a piece on my pet peeve: Should I Send Automated Direct Messages on Twitter? [19].)

Advanced Tips and Advice

25 Apps to Manage Multiple Accounts by Jennifer Van Grove [1,573]

If you have multiple accounts you are already an advanced user.  You also realize the limitations of the Twitter.com user interface and why you need to use a 3rd party application to manage multiple profiles.  This Mashable article provides a great run-down of the options you have to manage multiple accounts.

Tweeting from the Web? Nine Alternative Web Clients by Orli Yakuel [1,034]

If you are a heavy Tweeter often sharing information from various sources, chances are you are tweeting directly from the Web and not going back to Twitter.com and cutting and pasting.  If this is the case, check out this comparison of nine different web clients to help you better manage your tweeting.

15 Free Services to Schedule Tweets by Malvinder Virdi [113]

Sometimes we want to be there when we’re not.  You know, I mean scheduling tweets to occur throughout the day instead of bombarding our followers with multiple tweets at once.  We may already be using a service like HootSuite to accomplish this, but you should know about all of the alternatives that exist and pick the best one for you.

The Best Twitter Apps for Your Mobile Phone by Amit Agarwal [?]

You don’t have to tweet on a cell phone, but should be at a stage where you really can’t live without tweeting wherever you are, check out this definitive post on all of the applications that are available for your mobile phone.

Personal Branding

HOW TO: Build Your Personal Brand on Twitter by Dan Schawbel [1,569]

Just as with my LinkedIn list, Dan Schawbel earns a spot on this Twitter list for his excellent article on personal branding and tweeting.

(While not a piece solely on personal branding, I did write on How to Use Twitter for Your Job Search [33] which I recommend you read as well.)

Profile Background Designing

Twitter Background Design How-To and Best Practices by Chris Spooner [1,267]

You can’t have a comprehensive list without something regarding those background images that occupy our profile pages and thus represent a vital part of how we are “branded.”  I particularly like this article because it goes through both best practices as well as a hand-holding, step-by-step tutorial on how to create a background using Photoshop.  Excellent read.

Effective Twitter Backgrounds: Examples and Current Practices by Saud Kahn [?]

This article gives loads of examples as well as advice to help you design your own background.  Just looking at the examples should spark your creative juices into creating something new for yourself.

Unique and Insightful Articles

The Art of Writing Great Headlines by Brian Clark [1,727]

If you want to get noticed, you only have 140 characters in which to do so.  Writing an effective headline for whatever you want to say becomes a necessity, and this article gives us some classic advice on the subject.

5 Ways to Get Your Questions Answered on Twitter by Stan Schroeder [1,288]

Tweeting provides a channel for both information as well as communication.  Many people ask many questions through tweets because it is the perfect hybrid channel for doing so.  If you really want to ensure that your questions get answered, read this great article.

How to Use Twitter Without It Owning You – 5 Tips by Tim Ferriss [?]

Tim Ferriss, the author of the 4-Hour Workweek, gives us tips on how to best optimize our time tweeting.  A must-read for every heavy user.

(If you’re reading this far down the list, I am assuming that you are a confident user.  At this juncture, you may want to make sure that you are not in violation of any official rules.  Read my 6 Reasons Why Your Twitter Account May Be Restricted (Without Your Knowing It) [15] blog post to make sure.

Business

40 of the Best Twitter Brands and the People Behind Them by Jennifer van Grove [1,194]

An excellent look into the people that tweet behind some of the most famous brands.  Great examples for companies to learn by.

62 Ways to Use Twitter for Business by Meryl Evans [1,171]

A concise list with a lot of ideas on how businesses can use the real-time social networking platform.

Twitter Success: You Gotta Show Up by Jennifer Horowitz [169]

Excellent article on how businesses can and should utilize the social media platform.  The author hand-holds the reader through every important aspect of tweeting.  A must read for businesses as well as any professional!

(See my post on Twitter Coming to a Store Near You…SOON! [18] for a further perspective on Twitter’s emergence in B2C marketing.)

Tips, Tools and Applications Compilations

The Ultimate Guide for Everything Twitter by Angela West [3,201]

An encyclopedic guide.  Great reference to complement this blog post.

The Top 21 Applications – According to Compete by Leena Rao [972]

Sure, there are loads of tools out there (probably hundreds of them), but which are the most popular and thus be those that you look into?  This is a list of the top 21 applications as ranked in terms of web hits by Compete.com.

99 Essential Tools and Applications by Paul Andrew [?]

A definitive compilation of the many 3rd party tools and applications that exist.

Just reading through all of these blog posts alone may take you until February!  In the meantime, are there any others that you recommend for this list?  Please speak up!

This is a continuation of my previous post, where I wrote about 7 useful tips for those getting started on Twitter.  Assuming that you have just signed up on Twitter and don’t know where to go from here, instead of following everyone from your email address book that is already on Twitter by selecting “Find People” from the top of Twitter, begin your Twitter experience by following Lists before you follow People.  The rationale is simple: Twitter gets a bad rap because of the “babble” that a lot of people are said to be tweeting.  That is why you should start your Twitter experience by just following user-vetted Twitter Lists and then finding your role models to follow that will fill your timeline with relevant content.  How to go about doing this?

First of all, for a primer on what a Twitter List actually is, please refer to my previous blog post on 4 Great Ways to Use the New Twitter Lists.  In essence, Twitter Lists are lists of twitter users selected and categorized by Twitter users like you and me.  Because every Twitter List is hand-picked, they offer a glimpse as to who in Twitter has expertise on various subjects.  They are a perfect guide as to who we should follow on Twitter.

1.) Align Your Twitter Objective with Keywords

Right now your Twitter timeline should be blank.  Instead of filling it with irrelevant messages that may lessen the value of Twitter for you, remember why you are on Twitter in the first place.  Searching for a job?  Marketing your business? Interested in meeting local people? Want to develop your personal brand and show off your subject matter expertise?  Regardless of your objective, you should be able to align it with a keyword.  For searching for a job that keyword might be “job seeker” or “careers.”  Marketing would be “marketing” or perhaps an industry name.  Location would be your local city or county.  Personal branding itself is a keyword.  By doing this it will make it easier for you to…

2) Find Relevant Twitter Lists to Follow

In a recent post on how to find relevant new people to follow on Twitter, I mentioned Listorious as the best way to find relevant Twitter Lists to follow.  Once you navigate over to the site, enter the keyword in the search box at the top right-hand corner of the screen and voila!  A list of Twitter Lists will follow.  If you chose a tag which is popular, not only will all of the Twitter Lists appear in descending order by the number of people following the list, the top “curators” who appear on the most Twitter Lists associated with that tag will appear in descending order on the number of lists that they are listed on.  This gives you a veritable plethora of information on a variety of Twitter Lists which you can now start to follow.  Follow one, follow a few, follow as many as you like: once you follow them, you can now switch between them from the “Lists” that will now appear on the right-hand side of your Twitter.com page.  If you couldn’t find any relevant tags for your keyword, selecting the most relevant of the top tags that appear on Listorious will hopefully help guide you to Twitter Lists of interest.

3) Monitor Your Twitter Lists for Relevant People to Follow

You don’t need to spend your entire day on Twitter.  Spend some time in the morning and maybe late afternoon and navigate between a few of your Twitter lists.  Look for information that you find relevant, and look who those people tweeting the information are.  After doing this for several days, you will start to find that some people are tweeting more relevant information than others, and you will quickly find your role models.  If you find someone tweeting out relevant information most of the time, go ahead and follow them.  By hand-picking people to follow from your relevant Twitter Lists, you will be filling up your Twitter timeline with your own virtual and ideal Twitter List.  More importantly, you will see first-hand that Twitter has become an amazing resource for information as well as an invaluable tool to help expand your network and communicate with other people in your field of interest.

Twitter Lists have all been user-vetted, so off the bat you can expect to find people that are less babble and more content.  By doing so, you will get up-to-speed on Twitter very quickly and should soon have your “a-ha!” moment which will leave your doubts about Twitter in the dust.  Give it a try and tell me what you think!  And keep coming back for more Twitter Tips for Beginners…

Image by Jrod2.

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Listorious: The Preferred Method for Finding Relevant Twitter Lists and Users

One of the questions I get asked by relative newbies to Twitter is how to go about finding relevant people to follow.  The problem that a lot of Twitter newbies have is that they either 1) upload their entire email address book and follow everyone and/or 2) they start following some of Twitter’s Suggested Users.  This has the tendency to fill the Timeline that one sees with LOTS of Tweets that may be irrelevant, or finding yourself following a few hundred people that may not be active Tweeters.  Right off the bat your Follower/Following Ratio is horrible, the inactive Twitter “friends” you follow probably arent’ following you back, and you have a Timeline of Tweets that are just overwhelming.  Help!  How do we rectify this situation?  Start your Twitter experience by first following relevant people to whatever your Twitter Objective may be.  Let’s look at the options we have of finding relevant people to follow: (and it is worth noting that Twitter even realizes this situation and is considering dropping their Suggested User List all together)

1. Twitter User Directories

As you will find during your Twitter journey, there are several third-party services out there that allow you to compliment your time on www.twitter.com, starting with famous Twitter applications like TweetDeck or HootSuite (note: more to follow but LinkedIn just announced their new “Tweets” application which will bring Twitter functionality to your LinkedIn Homepage).  There are also a number of Twitter User Directories, where user profiles are scanned and added or you can manually add yourself.  The most famous of these sites is Twellow, and if you haven’t registered or look for relevant people there yet, you definitely should.

2. TweetDeck Directory

The popular 3rd Party Twitter Client Application TweetDeck released their own version of Twitter’s suggested users just two months ago, grouping tweeters into industries such as “News & Politics”, “Business”, “Technology”, or “Entertainment” with further sub-categories within each parent category.  At the time this was a significant improvement from the Twitter Suggested Users, but I found a lot of quality Twitter Users were not included on the list.  Which raises the question of how TweetDeck actually selected users for their directory.  Considering that this is Social Media, I was never comfortable with one “authority” telling us which Twitter Users to include (and thus who to exclude) when looking for subject matter experts in certain industries.

3. Twitter Lists

Enter the emergence of Twitter Lists, which just appeared on Twitter a few weeks ago but are already fundamentally changing the way in which we interact with the social networking site.  Twitter Lists are how we can arrange the Tweets that we see on our Timeline by grouping people together, much like creating a Group in TweetDeck, which was the preferred way of doing this until now.  But by classifying Twitter users, we are seeing the beginnings of a truly democratic way of finding relevant people to follow: Twitter Users themselves defining who are the people we should be following by creating Lists.  We can now view the Twitter Lists that we appear on and get an idea of like-minded people who we have been classified together with that we may want to follow.

4. Listorious

Listorious is Twitter User Lists on steroids.  Just as you can enter your own profile information and add tags on Twellow, you can do the same thing for your Twitter Lists on Listorious.  Rather than digging through all of the User Lists in which you are listed, just go to Listorious and enter a tag or keyword that you are interested in.  Voila!  You can now see the top User Lists for that tag in descending numbers by the number of Twitter users following those lists.  In other words, these are lists that have been both vetted by real Twitter Users and now are sorted in popularity by these same real Twitter Users.  There are TONS of tags that are registered, and Listorious has added information for the Top 140 User Lists as well as the Top 140 People Listed on User Lists.  You can spend a long time looking at the data here and find lots of truly relevant people to follow.

Listorious is the ultimate child of the User Generated Content world of Social Media and is a true symbol of the democratization of information that Twitter User Lists has enabled.  And to think that it launched just two weeks ago!  We have come a long way in a very little time thanks to Twitter Lists and the Twitter Lists API!

By the way, I cannot complete this blog post without thanking the person who introduced me to Listorious, a good friend and Windmill Networker Phil Lauterjung.  Phil is on my Blogroll, so you should check out his blog as well, but he introduced it to me in the comments of my previous blog post on 4 Great Ways to Use the New Twitter Lists.  Thank you Phil!  And it just goes to show how much 1) commenting adds to the value of blog posts, and 2) what you could miss out if you don’t read all of the comments attached to a blog post!

What are your experiences in finding new Twitter Users to follow?  Have you been using Listorious?  Please share your experiences!

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New Twitter List Example (@NealSchaffer)

Twitter is slowly rolling out their promised Twitter lists to all of their users now.  Apparently, a great number of users just started receiving access to this new functionality yesterday.  If you now have access to it, you will notice it when you log into Twitter by the prominent text bar above your timeline with the red “New!” line.  Although Twitter has slowly been rolling out changes like the Twitter one-click spammer reporting or small changes in the user interface of deleting Direct Messages (it now says “Reply” or “Delete” instead of just an icon) or replying to tweets (it now says “Reply” instead of just an icon), this is the first new major functionality that has been added to Twitter in some time.  And it is a new functionality that you should be leveraging.

Four Great Ways of Using the New Twitter Lists

1) Organize Your Timeline

This is the most obvious use for the new Twitter List and the reason why it was created.  As you start following many people, you need a way to filter out users and make better use of the information.  Up until now, you had to install a separate Twitter application like Tweetdeck (or use the web service HootSuite) in order to create a group of people that you wanted to filter out of the main timeline.  Twitter Lists give you one more reason to use Twitter.com as your main Twitter interface (that is, if you don’t have multiple accounts…).  I haven’t seen a limitation as to how many lists you can create, and you can name them however you like.  There is an option to make your list either private or public when you create it, so if you make it public and it becomes public domain and thus seen by everyone and can even be followed by everyone, you may want to be careful as to how you name them.  Also, the people that you include on your list can find this information out, which is another good reason to name your list in a way that would flatter someone who is on it.  Note that the lists can only be created of users and not keywords, so this may not be enough to get everyone to switch from Tweetdeck or HootSuite…Twitter, are you listening?

2) Find Great Tweeters to Follow

By looking at the Lists of those people that you respect, you can get a good idea of who they follow which may give you some good people to follow yourself.  Sure, up until now you could go to Chris Brogan‘s timeline and see who he communicates with and follows, but it would take you a long time to decipher that information to figure out who you should follow.   Unfortunately, when I checked today, Chris hadn’t created any lists ;-(  (I understand, Chris, because I haven’t had time to create extensive lists either!)  But for instance you could go to another social media thought leader like Jeremiah Owyang and get some ideas by looking at the lists he’s created.  As more and more people create lists, it will be fun to see who they recommend you follow.  It is a mass improvement and a democratization of the Twitter Suggested Users List and even the Tweetdeck.com Directory, both of which I was never satisfied with (although the Tweetdeck does categorize tweeters by subject the selection process is unclear and questionable).  Indeed, some can say that is the birth of Twitter 2.0 by allowing the users to catalog users to help other users find relevant people to follow.

3) Get Tweeters to Follow You

Just as you may @Reply or follow someone new in hopes that they may notice you or follow you back, putting someone on one of your Twitter Lists is a sign of deep respect that just may get you noticed.  It can be used as a similar strategy, but don’t think Oprah will follow you just because you placed her on one of your Twitter lists  Which leads me to perhaps the most importan way of using Twitter Lists…

4) Brand Your Twitter Presence

Just as who you follow and what you tweet is part of your Personal Branding on Twitter, so is what types of lists you have and who is on your lists.  If you want to be considered a subject matter expert in your field to elevate your Twitter Brand, being the person that has created the best, most comprehensive lists for your subject matter will surely add to your Twitter Brand and further show that you are an expert.  The lists should be relevant to your brand, but it is another important way to help differentiate yourself from the other tweeple out there.

[Although not part of the original blog post, one of my Twitter followers Tom Voute had a 5th suggestion: use the Twitter List to "mirror" someone.  Have you ever wondered what the Twitter timeline someone else sees looks like?  You can make a Twitter List and add all of the people that that person follows on the list.  In doing so, you can mirror their timeline!  Definitely a creative and unique way of using Twitter lists, so thank you Tom for the input!]

[Another addition to the blog post prompted by another reader.  It isn't easy to figure out how to edit the lists once they are created.  One of the commenters to this post, Racer 48, asked how to add a new person to an existing list.  I thought that this should be possible, and I knew I had done it before, but I couldn't find any way to do this by looking at the options on my own profile page.  Another commenter, Sue, quickly pointed out that it can be easily done, but the catch is that you have to go to the profile of the person that you want to add or delete from one of your lists.  Thank you Sue!  Would be nice if this functionality was also added to your own Profile page...especially if you want to delete several people at once, it would make it much easier to do this from one page.]

Since Twitter Lists are new, the etiquette of whether or not you thank someone if they add you to the list has yet to be determined.  I suppose it is similar to a ReTweet or a #FollowFriday, but then again people could add you to a list just so that you notice them or follow you back as I suggested in 3) above.  Will you thank the people that add you to their Twitter List?

Finally, perhaps a year from now, the number of lists that you are on may say something greater than the number of followers you have as it is a sign of true respect.  I can see people using multiple accounts and making multiple lists of themselves to try to show off the numbers of lists that they are on.  And with this, I see the potential for Twitter limiting how many lists each account can create if people start using it in ways it wasn’t intended for.

Bottom line: Create, leverage and enjoy the Twitter Lists while you have them!

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