eMarketer has suggested that Twitter’s growth could nearly double to 20 million users in 2010. But Nielsen thinks otherwise.

Nielsen has been looking at Twitter’s retention rates. Everyone knows someone who has signed up, tweeted a couple of times and then become fed up of waiting for followers, action, something! So I don’t think it’s surprising that Neilsen found only 40% of new users stuck around. This would keep Twitter’s growth to 10% – hardly explosive.

Nielsen has compared Twitter to Facebook and MySpace when they were starting out – their retention rates were twice as high. When they went through their explosive growth phases, retention went up. Both sit at nearly 70 percent today.

Hmmm – I guess we just have to see what happens! Twitter has been called a one-trick pony compared to FB and MySpace. So I guess it’s up to Twitter owners – and passionate tweeters – to prove this fab micro-blogging tool is anything but.

Thanks to Mark Evans from www.twitterrati.com for the stats, graphs and info used in this post.

Today we’re tracking the top Twitter Users with Twitterholic, Toptweet and Twitrank. Why? Because there’s a reason they are the top brass – they are very interesting. And if they RT anything you say, you’ll get gazillions visitors to your site or blog. More importantly, you’ll get Twitter kudos.
Twitterholic

Robots scan the Twitter public timeline for new twits to tweet. A few times a day, they calculate individual statistics for each twittering twit in their database.

This list is being constantly updated so you can find out who the most popular twitter users are almost in real-time. To be seen on the site, do what you love to do – twitter constantly. If you deserve to be on the list, they’ll find you. The most popular users on twitter are crawled every day, everyone else gets crawled randomly.  You can also tweet the top 100, 200, 300 to your friends.

Twitterblogger rating: 7/10 (I do like it – a bit elitist but at least I’m there!)

Toptweet

TopTweet lets you stay up to date on all the best conversationalists from around the web. Tired of trying to explain Twitter to your less enlightened friends? Don’t have a Twitter account yet? You’ll only find the cream of Twitter users on this site – a cross-section of personalities to get you hooked!

Twitterblogger rating: 8/10 (they are right – it is the cream of the crop)

Twitrank

Twit Rank by Twittown is a list of the top 150 Twitterers. Select to sort by followers, followed, number of updates or following (the number of people that user is following).

Twitterblogger rating: 6/10 (does what it says on the tin!)

Yesterday we looked at what’s hot and what’s not right now on Twitter. Tomorrow, it’s all about tracking keywords. Want to be the first to know when it’s live? Follow me on Twitter and I’ll tweet as soon as I post it.

Take care, have a great Tuesday!

Tin

Just about everywhere you look, it seems everyone is jumping on the Twitter bandwagon. That’s not a bad thing at all. But most people don’t know how to use it. Some people (you know who you are) even roll their eyes when I mention it. ‘How are you supposed to get any juice out of 140 characters?’ Well for all of you eye-rollers, here are some brilliant ways to use Twitter – and believe me, you CAN get serious value out of this nifty little tool.

1. Get the latest news before the…uh…news. Hudson River? Plane? Crash? You saw it on Twitter first. That’s if you were on it – well were you? (sniff) Twitterers post the latest news on Twitter faster than the old-school news channels can clamber out of their clunky vans with all their heavy equipment and report ‘live’ an hour later.
2. Meet new people. Most people on Twitter are nice. If I was going to NY, and I regularly tweeted with someone on Twitter (and trusted them), I would probably meet up (or tweet up, as they call it). I’ve heard it happening LOADS on Twitter. I think it’s quite cool – makes it the community social media should be. And because you choose who you follow, you’re always going to have something to talk about.
3. Manage lots of conversations. For the multi-taskers amongst us – Twitter is pure heaven. You can have 20 conversations at once. And if your friends or colleagues are on Twitter, you can keep in touch easily without hassling each other with constant phone calls. Cheaper too.
4. Track buzz. What’s that new Twitter-like application that Microsoft has in Beta at the moment? Well, if you’re on Twitter you’ll know. Look up ANYTHING on search.twitter.com and you’ll find a million conversations about that very topic. Pick the links you want to follow and voila – you’re at the forefront my friend.
   
5. Help your business. If you’re an expert, Twitter can do wonders for your business. People will follow you for your links, advice, tips and anything you’ve got to say. So, it’s fine – once in a while – to promote your blog, product or service. Just please don’t overdo it – you’ll piss everyone off and lose followers in a snap.
6. Find top industry blog. Use one of the MANY Twitter tools (you’ll find loads on this blog under Twitter Tools) to search for the industry you work in. You will immediately get access to 1,000s of experts in your particular field. Yes, you COULD just Google ‘experts on Smurfs’ but you don’t get all that additional commentary that proves it’s the bees knees. You can also see how many people are following (and how many people they follow) to get an even better idea of how much kudos they have.
7. Start your own microblog or blog. We’re all passionate about something or an expert in some particular field. Maybe you know more than anyone else about beer.  Search.Twitter.com is your friend. Plug in your search terms and you’ve got a real-time stream of conversations happening on that topic. Engage. Help. Share your knowledge. You’ll get followers. That’s what I did. And then that made me think, ‘jeepers, I should probably have a blog to record all this Twitter stuff on. And now look – I’ve had over 4,000 visitors in my first month. Nice.
8. Advice – travel, money, books, etc. Planning a summer holiday to Mexico? Uh, maybe not. But no matter where you want to go or what you want to do, you’ll find all the news, tips and tools you need on Twitter. The ‘news’ gives you one side of the story but Twitter is like a keleidoscope of sides – you get the full story. So no matter where you’re planning to tan, check it out on Twitter first.
9. Spy on your favourite celebrity. I like Wossy. You might like Britney. No one’s holding that against you or anything…but anyway…you can follow your beloved celebrity on Twitter. Laugh at their jokes, share their pain, sing when they’re winning. It’s a beautiful thing…

Told you so

So eye-rollers, you thought twitter was for telling people stuff no one cares about. Well it doesn’t matter to me either that you’re ‘going to the bathroom’.

Twitter is so much more these days. It’s engaging, fun and useful. So sign up, stop complaining and just make damn sure you tweet something interesting or I’ll unfollow you – and then who looks silly?

What’s number 10?

I’ve racked my brain, but there’s not much left of it today. So why not share your ideas on how you use Twitter and we’ll make it a top 10 ways to get the most out of Twitter? We’ll all be grateful (even the eye-rollers).

So what are the latest and greatest trends on Twitter? Find out right here. I’ve got 8 great tools today – and I’ve rated them all to save you time.

Twitter Search

Find out what’s happening in the world beyond your personal timeline. You can also search for the latest trends on Twitter. Right now they are: Swine Flu, #swineflu, Mexico, #rafw, #therescue, Chuck, Goodnight, Internet World, Wolverine, #nds09. How very random…

Twitterblogger rating: 10/10 (the best Twitter search tool bar none)

Twitscoop
Twitscoop helps you stay on top of twitter’s hot topics or discussions. Twitscoop displays the hottest topics in a Tag Cloud, using the following rule: the hotter, the bigger (no joke here).

Twitterblogger rating: 8/10 (I love how the clouds grow right in front of you)

Tweetscan
Tweet Scan searches Twitter, identi.ca and other Laconica-based sites with more being added all the time. You can search public messages and user profiles with results available via email, RSS, and JSON.

Twitterblogger rating: 7/10 (its main benefit is that it collects and organises search results from Twitter AND lots of other sites)

Twitterment
Searches Twitter users and topics.

Twitterblogger rating: 6/10 (it offers different search results from Twitter Search, but I prefer Twitter Search)

Tweetmeme

Tweetmeme analyses links that people have “tweeted”, organises and categorises them – and delivers streams of the most popular. You can also discover new content and tweet about it. Each link posted on Twitter adds increments the count on that story. The more tweets a story recieves, the more popular it is.

Twitterblogger rating: 10/10 (brilliant – great for ideas to RT and to really get the latest news in any category you can think of)

Twistori
Find out what twitterers love, hate, believe, think and feel. I’ve reviewed this before and I’m still loving it.

Twitterblogger rating: 9/10 (let curiosity get the better of you)

Twitturly

This tool is pretty much the same thing as Tweetmeme. I prefer the layout of Tweetmeme but this is still a good tool. Comparing the two is actually quite interesting.

Twitterblogger rating: 8/10 (Good, but not as good as Tweetmeme)

GoodBadMe
GoodBad.me is a twitter mashup that keeps track of your good and back deeds. You can compare your good deeds with bad ones or just get a feeling for what kind of evil is going on in the twitterverse.

Twitterblogger rating: 7/10 (it’s a cute little tool for a bit of fun)

Tomorrow’s tools are all about finding out who the top Twitter users are – so you can follow them and find out why they are so damn cool.

Sign up to my blog to get all these great tools delivered to your inbox and you’ll also be in to WIN some fab prizes – ipod shuffle, twitter books…

I’ll be tweeting the WINNERS on 2 May.

Follow me to find out if you’ve won!

Here’s what you can look forward to this week:

• Monday 27 April. Find Tweeters like you with these directories and search tools
• Tuesday 28 April. Find out what the latest Twitter trends and stories are
• Wednesday 29 April. Track Twitter users and discover who the top Twitterers are
• Thursday 29 April. Track keywords  on Twitter with these sites
• Friday 30 April. Find out what happens when you mix maps with Twitter

Monday 27 April

Directories, search tools, contacts…there are no shortage of these on the net. But for Twitter? Here are four of the best, but please let me know if I have missed any…

Twellow
This is a great Twitter directory that’s sorted by occupation – it also shows the most popular trending categories

Twitterblogger rating: 9/10 (it’s pretty comprehensive)

Just Tweet It

A twitter directory sorted by interest – Choose a category and find other Twitter users or list your name to let people find you!

Twitterblogger rating: 8/10 (good for businessy types)

Twubble
This tool finds people who have the same interests as you.

Twitterblogger rating: 7/10 (sometimes recommends some people you already follow)

Twittie Me
TwittieMe is a place to advertise your Twitter page for free and get more followers. Once approved, your page will go live on the site.

Twitterblogger rating: 5/10 (I submitted mine but haven’t heard back – if it works and if the site has loads of visitors, I imagine it could be quite cool)

Lazytweet

@lazytweet lets your followers know you’re asking a question, and hopefully you get an answer from one of them. Your question also appears on LazyTweet – so you get exposure to a wider audience. The whole Twittersphere isn’t following you, so if your followers don’t have an answer, hopefully someone on Lazytweet will. And if you do get an answer on Lazytweet, they’ll let you know in a tweet from @lazytweet.

Twitterblogger rating: 8/10 (they do get answered!)

Secrettweet

SecretTweet lets you share secrets anonymously. After looking at all the secrets I am SO going to follow them. Check out these little gems…

• I’m 48 and I sleep with a teddy bear – it’s comforting
• I fix things manually on our test servers so QA thinks they’ve gone crazy, because they don’t know what they’re doing and I hate them
• I steal my neighbour’s newspaper in the morning

Twitterblogger rating: 9.5/10 (Voyeur!)

Foamee

Follow ioubeer and/or ioucoffee to get started. Then send an I.O.U. to a deserving recipient, e.g. @ioubeer [Steve Jobs] for depleting my bank account.

To redeem an I.O.U. you stamp it as “REDEEMED” to let the world know it has been cashed in.

Twitterblogger rating: 7/10 (I like it, but would prefer to call the person up and just say ‘thanks, can I buy you a wine?’

Twitterlit

The first sentence can make or break a book, so this site saves you the work by serving up literary teasers twice daily. They post the first line of a book, without the author’s name or book title, but with a link to Amazon so you can see what book the line is from. Why? Because it’s fun! And for logophiles or aspiring writers, Twitterlit’s twice daily delivery of first sentences may be the most condensed form of education and enlightenment you can get.

Twitterblogger rating: 8/10 (Curiously addictive, but then…I am a writer)

Hope you enjoyed today’s entertainment. For more fun, follow me on Twitter and I’ll make sure you find out as soon as I’ve posted next week’s tools – all very exciting of course! (I’ll announce tomorrow morning what I’m posting for the week)

To regular blog visitors, apologies for the delay on getting this out – WordPress issues! Hang on, one more rant: Do you know what I’ve noticed with these tools? Hardly any bloody websites give you much info on how to actually apply the stats. It’s annoying. So, to all Twitter tool webmasters out there – try an ‘about’ page.

Tomorrow (Sunday) I’ll be posting some very cheeky tools to help you have the MOST fun on Twitter. One I’ve just been tinkering with has had me in stitches. If you’d like to find out when I’ve posted it, sign up to my blog (it’s not like Hotel California – you CAN leave any time you want). Enjoy!

twinfluence.com

TwInfluence measures the combined influence of twitterers and their followers, with a few social network statistics thrown in as bonus. The significance is that not all followers are equal. Imagine Twitterer1, who has 10,000 followers – most of which are bots and inactives with no followers of their own. Now imagine Twitterer2, who only has 10 followers – but each of them has 5,000 followers. Who has the most real “influence?” Twitterer2, of course.

Twitterblogger rating: 6/10 (Quite techie. If you watch Numbers – TV show – you’ll probably like this)

twitgraph

Ah pie charts – it’s like stats for dummies. This simple, non-fussy site shows you tweets by day, top 5 @, top 5 words and top 5 links – all in easy to decipher pie charts.

Twitterblogger rating: 7/10 (not much to it, but it’s quite a nice change really)

tweetstats

Tweetstats.com is in use by over 100.000 users and graphs Twitter Stats like tweets per hour, tweets per month, tweet timeline, reply statistics.

Twitterblogger rating: 8/10 (it’s better than most other tools like it – unless you can tell me any different?)

Who doesn’t want more followers on Twitter? As long as they’re in the zone of course – loving what you love, waiting with baited breath for your next tweet. But you don’t want to do it dodgily or you’ll end up with a whole load of pimps and weirdos who don’t really care what you’ve got to say anyway.

Well today’s tools aim to help you find the kind of followers you’ll love and who’ll love you back – and one tool even tells you who unfollows and what you tweeted to make them leave – shame on you (and them).

Tweetbeep

TweetBeep helps you to keep track of conversations that mention you, your products, your company, anything!  You can even keep track of who’s tweeting your website or blog, even if they use a shortened URL (like tinyurl.com). All this means you can see what people are saying, send them a message, follow them…all in the hope that  they’ll follow you back.

Twitterblogger rating: 8/10 (hey these people are HOT – they’re already talking aboout you so surely the next step is to click ‘follow’???)

Twitrank

Twit Rank is a list of the top 150 Twitterers. You can sort by followers, followed, number of updates or following (the number of people that user is following). It’s updated daily and it changes daily too. The great thing about this tool is that you can follow the top twitterers and if they follow you back and RT what you’ve got to say, guess what? Their followers become yours.

Twitterblogger rating: 7/10 (kind of a slim chance you’ll get any of these big wigs to follow you – but if you do…then expect a follower onslaught)

Twiturls.com

People post links in their Twitter feed. Twiturls.com  grabs them, visits them, counts them, scores them and lists them. They are today’s most tweeted links. The list refreshes every minute – and it includes photos and videos – very interesting. But more importantly, start tweeting about the stuff that’s popular, use hashtags and get in on the conversation. People are actively looking for this information and if you give it to them, voila – more followers.

Twitterblogger rating: 9/10 (love the picture and video innovation from a curiosity perspective)

Qwitter

How dare anyone stop following you?! But when they do, you’ll be the first to know with this cheeky tool. Qwitter e-mails you when someone stops following you on Twitter with a message like this: John Gruber (gruber) stopped following you on Twitter after you posted this tweet: “What’s the difference between Arial and Helvetica?” Just tell them the Twitter username you want to track and your e-mail address and they’ll happily do the rest.

Twitterblogger rating: 9/10 (Wow – so going to set this up. Then I can know everyday the answer to “where did I go wrong?”

Love these tools? Hate them? Leave a comment and let us know.

‘Til next time

Tineke

www.twitter.com/tinekebright

Today, it’s all about those 140 characters. How do you make the most of them? How do you communicate when you’ve got so little space to do it? How do you supercharge your tweets?! Easy, when you know how…

Twitter keys

As you might know, Twitter accepts more than just basic text. The service is UTF8 compatible. Huh? Okay, well basically that means that instead of tweeting “I love you” you could say “I ♥ you”.

TwitterKeys also provides you with a floating window so you can use loads of different symbols in Twitter.

Twitter Keys

Twitterblogger rating 8/10 (I ♥ it…just don’t go overboard or you’ll look like a psycho)

URL shorteners

You already know about tinyurl.com. But did you know about bit.ly? Bit.ly creates even shorter URLs AND it tracks all of the clicks your links get. I’ve talked about bit.ly already on this blog. But I didn’t realise how nice and easy the tracking was – it shows you a screen-shot of your page and everything. Nice one, thanks bit.ly. Or should I call you Mr Li?

http://bit.ly/

Twitterblogger rating 10/10 (gave it a 9.5 last time but didn’t clock the analytics)

Twitzer

Twitzer is a Firefox extension. It lets you post text longer than 140 characters on Twitter.com. It also resolves TinyURL links to actual links.

This extension does just what it promises, and is very useful for some Twitterers

Twitzer

Twitterblogger rating 6/10 (Good for some…but I think the best thing about Twitter is having to fit what you’ve got to say in 140 characters  – don’t you think?)

Twitsay

Twitsay is easy peasy. Just call the number below and leave a message. Then go to your Twitter page and listen to your voice message. All your followers can listen to it, too…

• +43 720 702 580 (Austria)
• +49 180 1020 650 6812 (Germany)
• +41 325 102 263 (Switzerland)
• +44 845 867 6679 (UK)
• +33 1 706 17828 (Paris, France)
• +1 646 845 1924 (New York, USA)

http://twitsay.com/

Twitterblogger rating 8/10 (great if you’ve got a nice sounding voice, scary if you haven’t)

Twitxr

With Twitxr you can share pictures from your mobile phone, automatically publish them on Twitter and add your location to your pictures and status updates. Pictures seem to pervade everything – phones, emails, Facebook. And now they can take over Twitter too.

http://www.twitxr.com/

Twitterblogger rating 6.5/10 (there are loads of photo applications so I’m taking a point off for innovation)

Post like a pirate

I like. I like a lot. Hehe. Just translated my Twitter bio, which normally reads:

“I’m a twitter blogger and copywriter. Follow me for tips, tools, articles and news – all about Twitter. Visit my blog for more www.twitterblogger.co.uk”

But with Post Like a Pirate, it reads:

“I be a twittArrr blogger ‘n copywriter. Follow me fer tips, tools, articles ‘n news all ’bout twittArrr. Visit me blog fer more www.twitterblogger.co.uk”

http://postlikeapirate.com/twitter.php

Twitterblogger rating 8/10 (I love it – but some of the characters went all funny like-arrrr!)

There you go. Tomorrow’s tools will be based on ONE thing – followers. Tune in if you want more of them (followers AND tools).

Tin

P.S. Follow me and I’ll update you when tomorrow’s fab tools are live and kicking.