Tag Archive - Twitter

Make it super-easy for people promote church on Twitter

March 12, 2012 in Social Media

Sometimes people benefit from a little help to turn desire into action.

They may want to use social media to talk about their faith and their church, but they might not know where to start.

Highpoint Church is providing ideas for how church members can promote church and its upcoming preaching series on Twitter:

Also check out ‘15 ways for churches to use Twitter‘.

Two excellents tools for scheduling social media posts

February 19, 2012 in Social Media

I discover a lot of interesting links that I like to share with my followers on Twitter (you can follow me here). This translates to me tweeting on average 7 times a day.

However, I don’t just want to tweet when I discover these links – otherwise I’d be very noisy at some times, and silent at others!

This is where scheduling tools come in handy. You can prepare tweets in advance, and then automatically post them at intervals throughout the day. For example, here’s the tweets scheduled to go out on Tuesday:

Here’s 2 tools I’ve used and recommend for scheduling social media posts.

Both tools support bit.ly as their link shortener, which (in my opinion) is the best link shortener available.

Continue reading…

Not a fan of the ‘follow and we’ll feed’

November 18, 2011 in Christian Living, Social Media

Fundraising and awareness-raising isn’t easy. I respect new ideas for using social media to do good.

But this kind of promotion makes me feel uncomfortable:

What do you think?

I’ve seen a couple of other similar examples – ‘Save a life and get a free book‘, and ‘Uncomfortable about child sponsorship incentive‘.

Tools to manage and grow your Twitter account (part 1)

September 4, 2010 in Christian Living, for Churches, Pastors

Twitter is a really useful tool for staying in touch with people, meeting new people with similar interests, and keeping up with news on the topics that you enjoy.

More tools are becoming available every day to assist you to manage and grow your Twitter account. I’ve been checking out some of these tools, and thought I’d share what I’ve been discovering with you over a series of posts. This will help me to remember what I liked and didn’t like about different tools, and perhaps (hopefully!) be helpful to you too.

I didn’t find any of these first five tools particularly helpful for my Twitter management, but give them a go and share what you thought, and how they can be applied in a ministry context. Over time, I’m sure I’ll discover some crackers!

1. BrandChirp

BrandChirp has a 30-day free trial, and costs US$12 per month thereafter. You need to sign-up with your PayPal account, and if you want to cancel your account, you need to do this through PayPal.

  • Brand Watch allows you to “follow Tweeters discussing your keyword, or reply instantly by clicking the related button.” This tool worked really well – mentions of keywords appeared almost instantly, and it’s very easy to follow the tweeters, or reply to their messages. However, it didn’t show me which people I was already following, and allowed me to follow people I was currently following. There’s also no way of sorting or filtering all of the mentions that start flooding in!

  • Follow Stats shows you who you are following, how many followers they have and when their last tweet was. This function is less unique – other tools such as Refollow and Tweepi can give you these stats and allow you to unfollow.
  • Target Follow allows you to follow the friends (followers) of another Twitter user, or follow users by search term (and even restrict by geographical location). Unfortunately, there’s no way of sorting this list, nor does the list reveal which of these people you’re already following. Tweepi’s Geeky Follow provides more tools for this type of following, and is free.

  • Other features include the ability to ‘Automatically tweet the title and link of any RSS feed to your Twitter account’, and schedule your tweets (I’m currently doing this with TweetDeck, which is also free).

2. Friend or Follow?

This free tool will tell you:

  • Who’s not following you back on Twitter,
  • Who you are not following back, and
  • Who your mutual friends are.

You can also export the results as a CSV file.

Unfortunately, there’s no way to bulk follow (or unfollow) people with Friend or Follow – again, you can do this with Refollow.

3. Twollow

Twollow offers a 7-day free trial, and accounts begin at US$14.99 per month. As with BrandChirp, you need to sign-up with your PayPal account, and if you want to cancel your account, you need to do this through PayPal.

The interface is basic, but I wasn’t able to test this out because when I tried to add my Twitter account I got an error message I haven’t seen before: “Invalid callback request. Oops. Sorry.”. This seemed to be a problem with the tool, and not with Twitter, so I gave up and cancelled my account.

4. Twitterator

“The purpose of this little script is to allow a Twitter user to “follow” a bunch of other Twitter users in one fell swoop—a Twitter friend list generator if you will.”

As you can see in the screenshot above, the interface is simply and gives you two options:

  1. Enter a URL that points to a list of twitter usernames, or
  2. Enter the list of usernames manually.

I’m not sure where to find a URL with a list of usernames, and I think that entering names manually could easily be done just by typing them into your browser. But perhaps I’m missing something?

5. TweetMetrics

TweetMetrics is a free tool that allows you to:

  • find out the hidden network of Twitter contacts that are really relevant for you,
  • visualize the network of your relevant contacts and their contacts,
  • see who of your Twitter friends are online this very moment,
  • read some stats about your Twitter account, and
  • take a look at the most conversational Twitterers or those who are posting the most links.

I had a lot of difficulties logging in to TweetMetrics with my Twitter account – it doesn’t use the same process as most Twitter tools, and repeatedly refused my password. Once I eventually got in I could see some interesting statistics that I haven’t come across in other Twitter tools (see below), but I wasn’t sure what I’d do with this information anyway. For example, what do I glean from knowing that my average tweet length is 104 characters?

3 ways to easily export your tweets

August 9, 2010 in Christian Living

Sometimes it can be useful to export your tweets (or someone else’s).

  1. Searchtastic. Type in a Twitter username, press enter, and you’ll get a link to download an Excel spreadsheet of all the tweets for that user. This is my preferred tool – it’s free, easily, and reliable.
  2. TweetScan Backup. This is also a very handy tool that allows you to select what you’d like to export – your tweets, your friends, direct messages, @replies, followers, favourite tweets – or a full archive. It will then export as a .CSV or HTML file.
  3. TwitPrint. You’ll need to sign-in with your own account (i.e. you can’t get an export of another user), but TwitPrint does include some handy features, e.g. the ability to only print tweets that include particular keywords. It will also enable you to get a pretty print-out of your selected tweets. A similar tool is Print Your Tweets.

For more on this topic, check out ‘10 ways to archive your tweets‘ from Read Write Web.

On a related note, Twitter Export allows you to export a list of the friends or followers or a particular Twitter user, as a .CSV file.

Update:

  1. twDocs is another nifty tool. One of the good features of this tool is the ability to choose the file type you’d like to export to – e.g. PDF, TXT, CSV and more.

Curious Twitter bio for a pastor

August 8, 2010 in Christian Living, Pastors

Do you think this Twitter bio is serious? It can be difficult to detect sarcasm…

I could understand that bio if someone else wrote it for him, but who outsources the authoring of their Twitter bio?!

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