Is Twitter Useless?

Two years ago I remember having a conversation with a few friends of mine and telling them about Twitter.  I really liked the idea of Twitter, even though I didn’t really fully understand it for what it turned out to be today.  What I instantly saw with Twitter was that it could be used as a time saver for all the useless conversations people typically have by phone.

Let me explain.  Imagine you have five really close friends who call you all the time.  Now let’s say that you are going for a job interview and your friends know that it’s a big interview that you’re really nervous about and you really hope you’re going to land the job.  So you go into the interview, and you find out that you didn’t get the job.  What typically happens next? 

You either call the first of your five friends, or they call you, and you tell them “I didn’t get the job.” and they proceed to say stuff like “Ohhh…that’s too bad, oh well something better will come along.” and you go into a 15 minute conversation with them.  Then, you call the next person, and the next and the next until all of your friends are “updated”.

In my eyes, Twitter could save you the hassle of doing all that.  You could simply post on Twitter “Just got back from an interview.  Didn’t get the job.”  Then your friends, if they are curious, could check their Twitter accounts and see that you didn’t get the job.  Way more efficient, and it would save a lot of cell phone minutes every day wasted on REPEATING information.

That was my first impression of Twitter.  Everyone I told about it didn’t really get the point of it.  The typical reaction was “Why would anyone want to know what you’re doing all the time?”

I setup a Twitter account, but to be totally honest I haven’t really been utilizing it very much until today.  As of right now, I have 158 followers and I haven’t done any kind of promoting of my Twitter account at all.  I really haven’t had time to dive into the power of Twitter yet.

This evening I decided to start playing with it a bit.  So here’s what I did.

Fixing My Twitters, Twitts, Tweets, Or Whatever They’re Called

Firstly, I realized that my Blog posts haven’t been making their way onto Twitter at all for some time now.  I’ve been using a plugin for WordPress called Twitter Updater.  It used to work perfectly, creating a Twitter post every time I wrote a new Blog post.  However, at some point it stopped working and I didn’t notice.

I think it may have happened when I started using Windows Live Writer to write my Blog posts instead of writing them from WordPress directly.  I use Windows Live Writer to not only write the posts, but also to publish them and I bet the Twitter Updater plugin only works when you click the “Publish” button from the WordPress interface.

I didn’t want to monkey around with it too much though so I did a bit of research to find out what everyone is using right now, as the Twitter Updater plugin I found a long time ago and I figured there might be something better out there.

Sure enough I found a site called TwitterFeed.  This website basically links your Twitter account with your RSS Feed.  Here’s what I did to set things up:

1. Went to TwitterFeed, clicked on the Login button.  Used my Google login credentials to login.  The site supports OpenID so you don’t have to create a new ID if you already have a Google account or another OpenID account.
2. Once I logged in, I clicked on “my feeds” in the top right hand corner of the screen, and then I clicked on “Create new feed”.

   

3. This then takes you to the next page where you are able to create the link you need.  Here’s what the page looks like:

   

   Ok, so on this page I clicked on “Authenticate at twitter” which took me to Twitter and asked me to Allow access for this application.  I clicked on Allow of course.

4. Then, it brought me back to the same page and I filled in the rest of the info as:
   RSS Feed URL:  http://feeds.feedburner.com/inspiredmoneymaker
   Update Frequency:  Every 30 Minutes
   Post up to 1 new updates each time.
   Include … [ Title Only ]
   Include Item Link: [ Selected On ]
   Shorten Link Through: [ bit.ly ] ** See Next Point on This
   Post new items based on: [ pubDate ]
   Prefix each tweet with: [ New Blog Post: ]
   Active: [ Selected On ]
   Clicked Update.
5. Ok, now a word about “bit.ly”.  What in the world is “bit.ly” anyways?  Basically it’s a URL shortener which is something you need with Twitter since Twitter only allows 140 characters per Tweet, so you can’t afford to be posting long Blog URL’s on Twitter. 

   Essentially it converts a Blog URL like this:
   http://www.inspiredmoneymaker.com/2009/05/20/shifting-the-focus-of-inspired-money-maker/

   Into something like this:
   http://bitly.com/19lMcy

   See how nice and tiny that URL is now compared to the long one you see above?  Well, that’s part of the power of “bit.ly”, but the cool part about it as compared to other similar services such as TinyURL is that bit.ly shows you stats on your URL’s. 

6. So I went ahead and registered an account with bit.ly as well, and logged in.  I then clicked on the account button in the top right hand corner of the screen and it showed me my API Key which looks something like this:
   R_f2f2d7e44c3c54477d732b9fcd15596b4 (no this isn’t my real API code)
7. Then I went back to my TwitterFeed account and clicked on the link that says “I have a bit.ly account” in the “Create New Feed” screen from step 3.  If you already created the feed, you can edit it instead.  Once you click on that “I have a bit.ly account” link, it pops up two text boxes and allows you to type in your API Login and API Key.  Your API Login is simply your login name for bit.ly. Then I clicked Update on the bottom of the screen to save everything.
8. Ok, I know this may seem kind of complicated to some people but once you get it all setup it’s pretty neat how it all works.  Essentially here’s what happens:
   (1) You post a Blog post on your Blog.
   (2) TwitterFeed checks your RSS feed every 30 minutes for new posts.
   (3) Once it finds a new Blog post, it sends the URL to bit.ly using your login credentials for tracking, and bit.ly creates a shortened version of the Blog post URL and sends it back to TwitterFeed.
   (4) TwitterFeed then takes that shortened URL and posts a Tweet on Twitter which says that you just posted a new Blog post.
   (5) Whenever your Twitter followers click on the link, bit.ly tracks that and gives you stats.
9. After setting all of this up, I checked back about 30 minutes later and sure enough TwitterFeed went into my RSS feed, found my last post and sent a Tweet on Twitter linking to it.

Now the cool thing about all this is that when I went back into my bit.ly account, it showed me that 7 people clicked on the URL already.  Considering it’s 2:38am right now, and the fact that I only have 158 followers so far I think that’s pretty good.  Not only that, but it also reported that 2 of them came from the US, 2 from Romania, 2 from Canada and 1 from the UK.  It’s pretty cool to be able to get specific stats like that.

So, combining the power of Twitter, TwitterFeed and bit.ly I’m able to send out an automatic Tweet every time I post a new Blog post and be able to see which of those posts people are clicking on from my Twitter account.  I think that’s pretty cool.

Of course this is just one way to use Twitter to stay connected with your community of readers, but once you set it up there is virtually no extra work involved in leveraging these tools on top of writing your regular Blog posts, so why not take advantage of it?

I’m going to keep playing around with the different ways to use Twitter and see if I can figure out this miracle child all the Internet marketing guru’s seem to be completely infatuated with. 

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