5 Twitter resources you're ignoring

There are lots of great ways to improve your Twitter experience. Unfortunately, lots of folks don't know they exist. So, today, let me share with you five Twitter resources you may be missing out on:

RSS Feed for Search
Did you know you can set up an RSS feed for keywords mentioned in tweets?

Go to Twitter's search page and put your search word or phrase into the box. This brings you to a page with all your query results. On the right nav bar there is an RSS icon that says "Feed for this query". Click it and then add that search to your My Yahoo! page. 

BONUS: You can also set up a search on Twitter directly. Go to the search box that's at the top of your profile or home page, and type in your keyword(s) and then hit search. Once your results are brought up, you can click the "Save this Search" on the top middle of the page. Going forward, you can see all your saved searches by going to the homepage > searches > and then selecting the appropriate search topic from the drop down box.

Using search is a great way to effectively monitor conversations about you or your product, or other news that's of interest to you!

For more on using search on Twitter, click HERE. 


Hope 140
Hope 140 is Twitter's effort to support philanthropy and nonprofits. It's a great way to promote causes and increase exposure for a charity that you work for or support. Learn more about it by clicking HERE. 


Blocking Yucky Lists
Most people think Twitter's block feature is merely to prevent creepy people from interacting you. However, there is a very handy and lesser known benefit to blocking.

If you find yourself put on a Twitter list you don't like and, for whatever reason, don't want to ask to be taken off it, you can block the person who created the list and you will be take off it. Then, if you choose, you can just refollow the person. And, no following the person again will not put you back on the list. Handy, huh?


Shortcuts
Twitter has some great shortcuts and, for some reason, lots of folks don't know about this useful little feature. To find out shortcuts that will allow you to tweet, check messages, reply, etc, here's all you need to do.

Go to the Twitter homepage and on the right nav bar (at the bottom, right after your followers, trends, etc.), you'll see a dozen or so links in a very small font. Look for the one that says "shortcuts" and click it. A box will then pop up (as pictured below) that shows you all the Twitter shortcuts.

Fewer clicks to do what you want to do is always aces in my book!

Widgets and Buttons
Twitter has a variety of resources to help you promote your content through Twitter. First off, the site has its own tweet button that you can add to your website or blog. This is a great tool that allows your audience to share your content more easily (Notice that I have a tweet button on this post so you can tweet it to your followers if you like it! Hint, hint...). To get the tweet button, click HERE and follow the prompts.

BONUS: The Twitter Resources page also has Follow Me buttons, widgets to embed your Twitter feed onto your website/blog or publish it onto your Facebook wall, and Twitter logos and icons.

As you may already know, Twitter is my favorite social media platform. Therefore, it's my personal quest to share information with you to make your Twitter experience even more enjoyable! 

Any neat Twitter resources I missed? Chime in below and share them!

Is anyone favoriting your tweets on Twitter?

I don't know about you, but I love the favorites feature on Twitter. It's a handy, but frequently underutilized option. For me, I use it to keep track of complimentary tweets (recommendations, you might say). For others, they might use it to bookmark links or other tweets that interest them. However you use it, it's great to favorite tweets that you like for one reason or another.

Anytime you visit someone's Twitter page, you can click on their favorites to learn more about them. But, in this age when we like to know who's saying what about us, I thought I'd share a neat website with all you Twitter fanatics. Favotter lets you see who in the Twittersphere has favorited any of your tweets! It's a bit voyeuristic, but it's pretty insightful to see who in your network liked what you said.

Not too long ago, I wrote about turning your Twitter stream into a newspaper. It was a pretty popular blog post and retweeted quite a bit. When I logged on to Favotter and put in my Twitter handle, I was quite surprised and pleased to learn that several people had even favorited the link to my post (thank you all so much!). It was really nice to know that people liked my piece enough to put it in their favs folder. I wouldn't have known had it not been for Favotter!

You can also use Favotter to see what tweets are popular right now, in real time, based on favoriting. Another tab lets you see the best tweets of the day and a third tab lets you search keywords that will search everyone's favorite tweets. If you're researching a product purchase or need other specific information, that option comes in handy since you're not searching everything on Twitter, but only the relevant tweets that people favorited.

Try it out and let me know what you think. I thought it was pretty nifty!

Turn that Twitter bird into blackbird pie

UPDATE: JANUARY 2012 - Blackbird Pie has been discontinued. To embed a tweet, check out this video tutorial: http://youtu.be/SojBeZO6cD4

No, this isn't a post on cooking; it's about the wonderful new Twitter feature, Blackbird Pie. If you blog, this is a real time saver, if you don't, well, it's still good to know about the tools that are available to you on the web.

Prior to Blackbird Pie, if you wanted to include an image of a tweet, you had to do a screen grab and then clean it up in Photoshop (here's an example from an earlier post I wrote on Adam Lambert complaining about his fans). Now, however, all you need to do is paste the tweet's url into Blackbird Pie and, voila, it spits out code you can just drop into your HTML. You can even click on the links in the image!

Easy schmeezy, huh? Feel free to enjoy your Blackbird Pie with a cup of tea and let me know how it goes down, eh?