SEO Consulting Blog - Seo Smarty» Social Media Marketing

HOW TO: Force Facebook to Grab the Best Image from Your Page (WordPress)

Ann Smarty — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 13:58:59 +0000

When you “share” a page on Facebook, you will – in most cases – have the range of various image thumbnails to choose from. More often than not, these thumbnails will be random, to say at least: banners from the sidebar, commenter’s Gravatar photos, etc. Obviously, you can always choose the best image, but will your readers do the same?

What is more, when a reader “likes” your article (which most users are more likely to do as that’s just so much easier), there will be no option to choose the thumbnail and your post will be placed on that user’s Facebook stream with an absolutely random and (in most cases) irrelevant image.

How much more interest could you great article result in if it *always* had a great and relevant thumbnail to go with the update?

Unlike Google Plus (which is much smarter at marking up the page and grabbing the most relevant information from the page), Facebook should be clearly “pointed” to what should make it to the update. Like it or not, it benefits you (in the first place) if you spend an effort to explain your page in a language Facebook understands.

For the lucky WordPress bloggers, there are a few plugins that will help you point Facebook to the best image to go in your Facebook “likers’” updates:

First Things First: Clear Facebook Cache!

If you try experimenting with different images as a thumbnail, you will instantly face a problem: Facebook page caching. Facebook would cache your page as soon as you (or anyone else) like it and will show you the same thumbnail each time (no matter which image you have in the meta tag).

Use this tool that clears Facebook cache of the page and creates a new one.

You can also use that tool to preview how Facebook “sees” your page before you even try to “like” it:

1. Custom Image SRC: the Simplest Option

Custom Image SRC is a handy plugin that lets you specify the image you want to be in the page preview on Facebook when anyone “likes” your post. The plugin works on the “Edit post” level:

Basically, the plugin adds the following code in the individual page section:

With this code in the header, the random preview image is overridden by the image that you specify.

Let’s see if it works!

Here’s what the page we are “liking” on Facebook looks like:

Before activating the plugin:

(Absolutely random image from the sidebar is grabbed as the page thumbnail after someone likes your page)

After:

(The image *you* want is grabbed as the page preview):

2. Facebook: Open Graph Plugin

There’s another way to control your page Facebook “snippets”: WP Facebook Open Graph protocol which adds Facebook Meta information to your blog pages (the plugin requires your a Facebook User ID or App ID for it to work).

When it comes to generating the image preview, the plugin will:

Try to use the page “featured” image;
If you don’t have a “featured” image, it will pull the first image in the post/page content;
If there are no images in the post, it will default to using the image you put into the plugin settings in the admin panel.

Besides, controlling the post thumbnails on Facebook, the plugin will also handle the proper title / description within the snippet on Facebook user’s wall:

Here’s the info the plugin has added to my post:

3. Also:

It’s rather a speculation (but one I myself have seen evidence of), but Facebook seems to prefer .JPG images
In order for the plugins above to work properly, make sure your image is self-hosted
The image must be at least 50px by 50px and have a maximum aspect ratio of 3:1. Facebook will make it square if you don’t.

cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by joannapoe

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The Evolution of Three Home Pages: Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn

Ann Smarty — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 15:48:24 +0000

I haven’t watched MySpace or Digg evolve, however I can proudly say that I’ve witnessed the three other giants develop: Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn – and moreover, I’ve been an early adopter.

It’s fun to look back one day and remember how it has started and unfolded. It’s impossible to remember and describe everything that has happened in one post but at least we can watch their designs evolve. The three sites have much in common:

At the beginning, the home page had to explain the concept;
The sites are total mysteries for the outsiders (unregistered users);
They are all user-generated and have been growing (in terms of features and options) together with the user base.

I have got nostalgic and collected the screenshots of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn home page designs through the years and compiled them into short presentations. Enjoy!

Update: Looks like Slideshare decreased the quality of the screenshots (they are a bit blurred in full-screen view), so please preview there and download the original presentations here: Facebook evolution, Twitter evolution and LinkedIn evolution (all .pptx files)

1. Facebook

Facebook was founded in February 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg and his college roommates and fellow computer science students Dustin Moskovitz, Eduardo Saverin and Chris Hughes.

The website membership was initially limited to Harward and then expanded to the Ivy League, Stanford University and the Boston area.

Milestones:

In 2004 Facebook was incorporated, moved its base of operations to Palo Alto, California and received its first investment from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel;
In 2005 the current domain facebook.com was purchased (it dropped “the”)
In January 2009 Facebook was ranked as the most used social networking service by worldwide monthly active users, followed by MySpace (Compete.com)
On September 26, 2006, Facebook was opened for everyone of age 13 and older with a valid email address.
In October 2008, Facebook announced that, for the first time, it earned more money than it spent last quarter.
In March 2011, more people visited Facebook than Google for the week (according to Hitwise)

2. LinkedIn

LinkedIn was launched by Reid Hoffman and founding team members from PayPal in May 2003 with strong focus on business networking for career development. LinkedIn’s CEO is Jeff Weiner, previously a Yahoo! Inc. employer.

Milestones:

In November 2003 and October 2004, LinkedIn closed venture capital rounds of $4.7 million and $10 million
In 2005 LinkedIn Premium services were launched. Premium services ranged from
In March 2006 (just seven months after the introduction of premium services) LinkedIn announced it finally became profitable
In October 2008 an “applications platform” was launched. The platform allowed selected third-party developers create application to embed other online services within a member’s profile page.
In February 2008 the mobile-friendly version of the website was launched;
In June 2010, LinkedIn a European headquarters in Dublin, Ireland was opened.

The LinkedIn home page has reflected the platform evolution:

3. Twitter

Twitter was launched in July 2006 by Jack Dorsey. The idea of “daylong brainstorming session” is said to have been inspired by Flickr (originally the project was called twttr) and the five-character length of American SMS short codes.

Milestones:

2007 on South by Southwest (SXSW) festival the usage of Twitter increased from 20,000 tweets per day to 60,000. At the event, for the first time, huge screens were installed to broadcast Twitter updates;
On January 22, 2010 the first off-Earth Tweet was posted from the International Space Station by NASA astronaut T. J. Creamer
2010, a record was set during the 2010 FIFA World Cup when fans published 2,940 tweets per second
September through October 2010, the company began rolling out “New Twitter”.

Noticed Any Similar Trends?

It seems that the modern trend requires that we give the option to join the site without any extra clicks (registration forms instead of large buttons). Besides, all the three designs have notably become minimal and laconic. In any case, it’s fun watching the huge sites evolve!

Note: History outlines from Wikipedia.org, most screenshots from Archive.org. Image credit

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Special Symbols (Wingdings) for Social Media Branding (Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Plus)

Ann Smarty — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 13:43:02 +0000

When I click through the email notifications of my recent Twitter followers, I can’t help noticing one trend: people have widely started using special symbols – Wingdings – to grab viewer’s instant attention.

Wingdings are a series of dingbat fonts which render letters as a variety of symbols.

That being said, a “winding” is a tiny ~~image~~ symbol that looks exactly the same in the source code of the page and in the front end.

While, essentially, there’s nothing new in using them, when it comes to social media profile branding, it appears you could achieve some positive results (there’s no substantial testing behind this assumption, by the way. I only rely on my own impressions).

1. How to Insert Wingdings on Your Social Media Profile

Here are a few noteworthy examples of Wingdings which can be used both in your “Name” and “Description” fields of your social media profile (we’ll see the actual examples of that below).

**** To use any of them in your Twitter description or LinkedIn display name, just copy-paste:

Hands	☚ ☛ ☜ ☝ ☞ ☟
Music	♪ ♫ ♩ ♬ ♭ ♮ ♯
Arrows	← ↑ → ↓ ↔ ↕ ↖ ↗ ↘ ↙ ⇐ ⇑ ⇒ ⇓ ⇔ ⇕ ⇦ ⇧ ⇨ ⇩ ⇽ ⇾ ⇿
Stars	✡ ۞ ★ ☆ ⋆ ✩ ✮ ✯ ✰ ☆
Writing	✉ ✍ ✎ ✏ ✐ ✑ ✒ ⌨
Check	✓ ✔ ☐ ☑ ☒
Smilies	☺ ☹ ☻
Zodiac Signs	♃ ♄ ♅ ♆ ♇ ♈ ♉ ♊ ♋ ♌ ♍ ♎ ♏ ♐ ♑ ♒ ♓
Cards & chess	♔ ♕ ♖ ♗ ♘ ♙ ♚ ♛ ♜ ♝ ♞ ♟ ♠ ♡ ♢ ♣ ♤ ♥ ♦ ♧
Contact! (phone / email)	✆ ☎ ☏ / ✉

Here’s a huge list of them together with their Unicode equivalents.

2. Wingdings: Browser Compatibility

Web developers advise against using Wingdings in web pages (and recommend using Unicode instead). Obviously Unicode is not the option for social media profile editing;
Wingdings are not available on all computers, and so the symbols may not appear on computers running non-Microsoft operating systems such as Mac OS 9, Mac OS X 10 or Linux. (I am on MAC and I am able to see most of them though);
The only browser that should display all Wingdings as they should be is Internet Explorer. Others might have a problem with them. However I tried in Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc. And all seems to be working fine.

3. Examples of Using Wingdings to Brand Social Media Profiles

While Wingdings have been around for ages, the rise of social media has resulted in the font re-birth. The lack of characters available for a social media update and the quick associations the tiny lightweight symbols are able to create – these are the two main reasons why Wingdings are being used more and more often.

Let’s take a look at real-life examples:

Twitter

To create a quick association (in a profile name):

To create a quick association (in a description field):

To fake Twitter profile verification:

To stand out is social media search results:

Google Plus

For “Name” field, Wingdings won’t work:

But it will work for the “Description” field:

Facebook

Not supported for Profile Names: When you attempt to insert a symbol in your “Name field” on Facebook, you’ll get “The name contains too many apostrophes.” error.

4. Google SERPs Branding?

Google won’t let your social media profile listing dominate SERP users’ attention through Wingdings (It will display nothing in place for a symbol).

But the symbol will still make it to the meta description as well as the search listing snippet:

Conclusion?

In some cases, Wingdings seem to be a good thing to experiment with. They are widely supported nowadays and are actually becoming a popular trend. You don’t want to overdo, but if you find a good one creating a quick association with your business niche, why not try using it?

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Do You Optimize Your Title Tags for Twitter?

Ann Smarty — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 14:23:39 +0000

I know, I know, that sounds so awfully familiar. But this post is *not* about using your keywords in title tags. We’ve talked enough about title tag SEO (and most of those old tips still apply btw!)

Today’s post is about making your title tags retweet-friendly, about encouraging Twitter comments and making it to Twitter trends.

1. Simple Mathematics

This one is pretty simple and obvious: be short, be catchy.

We only have as many as 140 characters to fit the title + URL + your credit to the twit without it to be stripped. And the more character are left, the more flexibility your promoters have!

See:

The (shortened) URL of the tweet will contain minimum 13 characters.

Now add your Twitter handle that follows the tweet: at least 7-8 characters (mine is 10 including @) + 3 characters for RT

Now add your post title (for example, this post would result in 45 characters and it is not long at all!)

What do we have now?

13+10+3+45=71 (min!)

Thus your most valued readers and promoters have maximum 69 characters to share their thoughts, ask for RTs, include references, etc

And remember that Tweets containing personal comments and feedback are the ones that get the largest number of retweets, shares and other types of interaction. And the shorter your post title ( that gets grabbed by the Twitter button and turned into the Tweet), the higher probability is that the reader will want to add a comment.

Look how much your readers can do if they have character-flexibility!

They might add a call-to-action (which means more clicks!)
They might add hashtags (which means wider reach!)
They might add comments (which means more retweets!)

So make your readers’ lives easier: make it easy for them to tweet, retweet and tweet-comment your blog updates!

****If you plan a linkbait, make sure to come up with the shortest title possible while keeping it catchy and original (that’s obviously hard but very essential).

Old Question:	Old Answer
How long should the title tag be for it not to be stripped in Google search results?	64-70 characters
New Question	New Answer
How long should the title tag be for it the post to be shared on Twitter?	The shorter, the better

**** Another bright idea: Would you like more Tweet-comments (Tweets of your post that contain a personal comment)? Ask a question in your title.

2. Using @ and # in the Title Tag

One Golden lesson in branding: when blogging about your business or event, don’t forget to use @your-business-handle or #youreventhashtag in the title tag.

This way, they are most likely to make it to the tweet (even if the Twitter user will *not* use your Twitter button, and will Tweet through his browser tools or even copy-paste instead!) and if you are lucky enough will make the daily Twitter trend!

Example:

An SEO WordPress plugin (like wpSEO) that allows to set a custom title tag for each particular post works great for that:

Results in this:

Question:	Old Answer
Should you add your brand name at the end of your title tags sitewide?	Yes, that works well for branding.
	New Answer
	If your Twitter handle is short, it’s probably wiser to use it instead

You can actually go even further and use hashtags to brand important sections of your site. For example, instead of “SEOmoz QA”, this could be

@SEOmoz #QA

Which could result in a much more interesting Tweet:

****(Again: This way @SEOmoz makes it to the tweet even when a user doesn’t use your button but instead creates a tweet using Bit.ly bookmarklet, HootSuite button, etc).

As for Google search results branding, that doesn’t hurt at all, as Google doesn’t care if it’s a hashtag, a Twitter @username or a word.

Quick common sense note: While using hashtags and Twitter usernames may be a bright idea in some instances, you don’t want to overdo with it. I’d suggest experimenting with it only for social-media-essential parts of your sites, for even-specific and brand-focused pages or articles, etc.

Takeaways:

The shorter your title tag is, the easier it will be for your readers to add a short personal comments in a Tweet (which usually results in much more Twitter interaction)
If you need more feedback and comments in a Tweet, make your title in a question format
If you need more exposure for your official Twitter profile or hashtag, include it in the title tag

Now, what is your experience? I am sure you’ve been playing with blog post titles a lot and couldn’t help noticing its impact on social media shares. Let me know your opinion!

cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by quinn.anya

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The Working Guide to Reaching out to Influencers Using Social Media

Ann Smarty — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 12:42:30 +0000

I am back.

There are a lot of things going on in my professional and personal life: the main thing, I have resigned from editing SEJ to focus on my own personal projects. I am now a full-time solo entrepreneur!

In the middle of it, I have managed to have an unforgettable time in Paris, contribute to Search Marketing Standard and grow the team of MyBlogGuest.

I am full of inspiration and have plenty of plans – and I am back with my blogging here with my short (but hopefully actionable and useful) pieces of advice.

You may know that I do business from far away, I have no way to meet my business partners and contacts in the real world, but despite that I am fairly well-connected.

So here’s my recipe to building connections online: reaching out to niche influencers through social media.

Whether you are trying to pitch a guest post idea, get a review of your book or discuss a potential partnership, here’s the most efficient way to start a working relationship with your niche influencers:

1. Get Introduced: LinkedIn

LinkedIn has been the most efficient in terms of connecting to influencers. All you need to do is to ask your first-hand connection to introduce you:

This usually works because people feel obliged to respond when they are asked by a person who knows them well.

I haven’t tried Branchout for that yet, but they also offer a similar option:

If you target a blog or a company rather than a specific person (or if the specific influencer is not on LinkedIn at all but his company is), you can use Linkedin-based tool called My Web Career. It will show you how you are connected to any company:

Red Links = current position
Blue Links = previous positions
Link Thickness = time at company

Here are my own connections at About.com, for example (how cool is that?)

Quick tip: even if your current contact may be no longer involved with the company in question, chances are he has left plenty of colleagues there (especially if he was there for quite some time). So use the above chart to find second-hand contacts in the business you are interested in.

2. Follow up: Twitter

Here’s the truth: Twitter is not the best tool for the first-time connection. There’s too much clutter to get a proper first introduction to the important and busy person.

Twitter is great for subtle reminders and follow-ups though. So, after you get properly introduced in the step above, don’t forget to follow the same person on Twitter (and probably add him to the corresponding list to quickly find later).

If you are not sure what is considered to be an acceptable follow-up on Twitter, be sure to read this post. Referring to the terminology in the linked post, I tend to use my “Inside Voice on Twitter” and I want to think I am up for “good uses of it”:

- Commenting on content posted by someone else

- Joining a conversation in progress by adding relevant information or commentary

- Introducing yourself or striking up a conversation with someone you’d like to get to know

3. Avoid: Facebook

No matter what’s your attitude to Facebook (I for one use it quite actively), I haven’t found it an appropriate place to get a business introduction (especially with the influencers who usually have thousands of connections and thus have lost hope to ever sort their Facebook inbox out).

So if you are serious about the connection, don’t use Facebook to reach out (even if you are already friends there).

I may be wrong but Facebook has always been more about casual and friendly chatting rather than talking business. Trying to use your personal relationships to get some business benefit feels somewhat wrong, so I never do… (You may have a different experience, please share it in the comments!)

Keeping Sanity…

Now, this is the most important part of the whole post: never overdo. Yes, a reply may take quite long (not because that person you are trying to reach out to doesn’t respect you but because he is most likely to be too busy, have personal issues, etc).

The most reliable way to successfully get in touch with influencers is to become one. So use the time you are waiting wisely: grow your own network, get inspired and develop your ideas.

Good luck!

Post photos shared by ralphbijker and Tomasz Stasiuk

How Blocking Users on Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus Works

Ann Smarty — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 13:31:06 +0000

I am sure you have noticed that you have an option to block anyone on your favorite social media network.

Have you been wondering how blocking actually works?

Have you ever wanted to know what the person you blocked sees on your profile? Which of your information can he still access?

I’ve been wondering about that too. So I’ve been playing around making some tests and managed to make it more or less clear.

Here are the results of my tests:

Blocking on Twitter

You can block any user on Twitter using the drop-down menus option right below his avatar.

To unblock a user, simply click “Undo” below his avatar.

1. How can the user find out he was blocked?

If the user you blocked tries to follow you, he gets an error message that this account is available for following:

Your account may not be allowed to perform this action

Here’s what the blocked user sees:

2. If you block anyone, will you ever hear from him?

No, you won’t see any tweets from a blocked user (even those containing your Twitter username – these tweets won’t appear in your “Mentions” sections. I guess this has been introduced recently as it wasn’t like this earlier.)

You will still see his Tweets if you land on his profile page or use the Twitter search.

3. If you block someone, will he be able to see your public profile page?

Yes, unless your Tweets are protected.

Blocking on Facebook

Facebook lets you block any member using the “Report / Block This Person” link at the bottom of the profile:

This is how it looks if you are not friends with the user:

And here’s how it looks if you are friends:

To unblock a user, you’ll need to click “Account” in the top-right corner of your home page, select “Privacy Settings”, scroll down and click “Edit your lists” below the “Block users” section.

1. How can the user find out he was blocked?

If you were previously friends, the blocked user might notice something strange: not only will he lose any traces of you, he won’t even be able to follow any link to your name. For example, if he had a Facebook message from you, he won’t see your name linked in it and he won’t see your picture:

Before blocking:

After blocking:

2. If you block anyone, will you ever hear from him?

No, Facebook removes any mentions of that person for you. Once you block someone on Facebook, you won’t see if the blocked user and you are going to the same event, if you were both tagged in one note or if you were both mentioned anywhere.

You won’t even see any mention of the blocked user in Facebook search results.

3. If you block someone, will he be able to see your public profile page?

If the user is signed in to Facebook, he’ll see an error page returned for your Facebook profile URL:

If the user logs out, he’ll see your standard Facebook profile (that’s another way for him to know if he was blocked):

Blocking on Google Plus

You can block anyone on Google Plus using the link at the bottom of their profiles:

You can unblock a user any time using the button next to his profile page.

1. How can the user find out he was blocked?

It’s hard to tell for sure: your profile will be displayed as normal to him. The blocked user will even be able to add you to circles.

The blocked user might find it weird that he can’t comment on your public update. Attempting to do so, he’ll get a standard error message:

There was a problem updating your comment. Please try again

2. If you block anyone, will you ever hear from him?

You won’t see the blocked user’s updates and he won’t be able to comment on your public updates, but you will still see his profile as normal.

3. If you block someone, will he be able to see your public profile page?

Yes, the blocked user can see your “public” posts as well as your public photos, links, etc.

To Sum Up…

	You blocked a user on Twitter	You blocked a user on Facebook	You blocked a user on Google+
The user can see your profile (when logged in)	Yes	No	Yes
The user can still follow you (send a friend request)	No	No	Yes (can add you to circles)
You can still see the user’s public updates	Yes	No	Yes
It is easy for this user to tell he was blocked	Yes	Yes	No

Have you ever blocked anyone on social media sites? What’s your experience? Please share your thoughts!

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Rosaura Ochoa

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Everything About Passwords – a Guide to Managing Online Personas

Ann Smarty — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 18:11:37 +0000

There is one cool joke that the worst nightmare of a web hacker is that he suddenly forgets all his passwords. Password fatigue (or password chaos or identity chaos) is the feeling experienced by many people who are required to remember and manage a lot of passwords.

And how many passwords do you need to keep in your head? I am sure as an Internet marketer, blogger and/or active social media user you must have quite a few passwords to manage.

This post will attempt to make your life easier or at least to encourage you to take it easier…

Creating a Good Password

These are plenty naturally. Most will just generate a random combination of letters and numbers which will be impossible to remember. Others are more fun, they generate passwords based on some criteria you specify.

One of such tools generating memory-friendly passwords is PasswordBird which creates passwords based on your (favorite) second and last names and (your date of birth):

Facts: How Good Is Your Password?

1. This table shows the approximate amount of time required for a computer or a cluster of computers to guess various passwords. The figures shown are approximate and are the maximum time required to guess any password.

2. The following infographic visualizes the “breakability” of some of the popular passwords based on their strength – it might appear a little funny but lot of people are actually using those simple passwords (via):

3. There are also a few tools that help you measure the “strength” of your password: here’s one of them called Password Meter that checks how strong your password is based on the combination of the following criteria:

Number of characters;
Number of uppercase letters and lowercase letters;
Numbers and symbols;
Repeat characters;
Consecutive uppercase letters, lowercase letters and numbers;

Password Manager

Many people recommend LastPass, KeePass and Roboform.

As FireFox junkie, I am using a FireFox plugin for that (which probably is not really secure or..?). The plugin is Sxipper and I find it awesome and easy to use.

Sxipper claims to protect your personal data by keeping it secure on your computer and retrieving it for you when you choose to share it online. Besides, Sxipper recognizes OpenID forms and helps you manage your OpenIDs.

Immediately after the installation, the tool will offer you to import all your passwords in it:

After importing (or entering manually) your personal data in Sxipper, go to any page containing a login form and you’ll be able to select the username under which you want to login:

The tool has a plenty more options and features you can read about here including persona management, disposable email address, form auto-filling, etc.

Post img by by azrainman

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How to Create a Useful Twitter Retweet Bot

Ann Smarty — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 15:18:31 +0000

Twitter can be used in various, almost countless ways. In this post I am sharing a tip on how to create a useful Twitter RT bot that can be used to collect various Tweets around a keyword or a hashtag and retweet them. And before you start throwing stones at me calling me a Twitter spammer, let me give just a few examples of how this bot can be used to create real value:

Think of a Twitter RT bot that will be used to collect Tweets around some SEO conference. Thus all people who want to follow live updates from many members won’t need to keep track of hashtags and keywords associated with the event – all they need is to follow your bot.
Or, say, you want to introduce your own cool hashtag and get other people to use it (#FirefoxFriday for example) but you want to filter out all retweets and give people the way to only follow real first-hand Tweets – a Twitter bot is the best option to go!

So, I guess I made it clear why you might find this tutorial handy. Now let’s see how to create one:

Create a Yahoo! Pipe

1. Choose the keywords / hashtags to retweet

Once you decided to create a Twitter bot, I suppose you already have the topic. So what you need to do now is to create a new hashtag to filter the Tweets (or just use the one you want to retweet);

2. Use Yahoo! Pipes to create a feed

The reason I use Yahoo! Pipes to create a feed is that Twitterfeed (I am going to use to auto-tweet) does not allow to use Twitter-based feeds and also Yahoo! Pipes offer some cool options allowing to customize the feed. So:

Use Twitter search to grab the RSS feed:

Now, go to Yahoo! Pipes and click “Create a pipe”. Drag the “Fetch feed” item from the left-hand panel and provide your Twitter search RSS link. You should see the feed output at the bottom of your screen.

Filter your feed. Now, there might be plenty of retweets of the initial Tweet using your key hashtag – and you don’t want your bot to repeat one and the same update again and again. So you can go ahead and filter out all Tweets containing “RT” ( “Retweet”, “Retweeting”, etc):

Drag the Operator > Filter pipe from the navigation and add the following:

Now, connect all three pipes (feed, filter and output) together and you are done!:

You can also give credit to the initial update author (RT @username) for the bot’s update to look like this: [the initial message here RT @tweet-author]. This part is a bit more complex.

1.First, drag Operators > Loop Pipe and insert it before the “Pipe output” Pipe;

2. Now, drag String > String Builder Pipe right in the middle of the Loop Pipe and do exactly what is shown on the screenshot:

You should see now that the feed output contains the URL to the initial author profile:

3. Now you should cut the first part of the URL and make it @author. For that grab Operators > Regex Pipe and there in item.title replace http://twitter.com/ with RT @

(!) Don’t forget to connect the last pipe with the other ones – so that in the end our Pipe looks as follows:

And the output looks like this:

Save the Pipe and grab its RSS.

Set up the Auto Tweets

All what follows is quite easy:

1. Create your new Twitter profile to publish the Retweets,

2. Connect it to Twitter Feed and set up the auto-retweets there:

Congratulations! You are done!

Can you think of any really creative uses of this tip? (Please don’t spam Twitter!)

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How (and Why) to Maintain Several Online Identities

Ann Smarty — Thu, 07 May 2009 19:09:05 +0000

Ok, before you start calling me a spammer or anything like that, I’ll say there may be totally legit reasons why you would want to keep several online identities, for example:

You may want to separate business life from your personal life (really having your husband/wife and your clients on same Facebook account may be tedious);
You don’t want your partners and clients to know about your other projects (why would I want the SEO world to know that I own a creepy celebrity blog on blogspot and promote it on Myspace… and no, you don’t want to see that Myspace page!).

You know me as Ann Smarty, that’s my SEO pseudonym, and if you search this name on Google you will see only my professional profiles, professional comments and professional articles. But my SEO business is only part of my Internet life and I don’t want you to know (trust me, you don’t want to know that either:)) what stuff I stumble from my “private” StumbleUpon account and what comments I leave (or used to leave) on fellow Myspace profiles.

OK, I guess now you are intrigued to know that but that’s not the point.

The point is that if you want to live several online lives, that’s totally OK and here are some tools for that (yes, there are tools for that either!)

Create several FireFox profiles:

Imagine you can run several FireFox profiles simultaneously and be logged in to various profiles there at a time (again, this is not (only) for spamming). For example: you have one for stumbling professional sites and one for other fun stuff you don’t want people to know you like it.

I did a detailed post on how to do create several FireFox profiles previously and here’s a quick recap:

Exit FireFox;
(Windows) Go: “Start” button => “Run” => Type “firefox.exe -ProfileManager” => “OK” button;
Click “Create” in a profile manager and choose the name for your new profile, then click “Start FireFox”;
Repeat steps 1-3 to create as many profiles as you want;
Done! Now each time you want to switch to another profile or change the default profile, repeat steps 1-2 and choose the one you want.

Install this sweet FireFox extension to quickly switch between profiles.
Now save different sets of social media profiles on different profiles.

Quick tip: I name my FireFox profile same as my social media moniker I want this profile for.

Use multiprotocol instant messaging application

If you have several IMs installed or even various accounts on each one for various groups of your friends, you can connect them all in one handy utility.

DigsBy is by far my favorite such application because it connects so many IMs and social networks that you can hardly think of any suggested feature for it. Find inside:

IMs: GTalk, AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, Facebook chat;
Email notifications: Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL mail;
Social networks: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace.

My favorite features of the app are:

For each social network add as many accounts as you want;
Sort Gtalk (and other) contacts into groups (!);
Set tracking for any GTalk buddy: e.g. get notified when some person signs in or changes the status message;
Manage multiple conversations with tabbed conversation windows;
Set your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn status right from Digsby.

Use some extra tools to make your parallel lives easier:

This script makes it easy to switch between multiple Gmail accounts. It is pretty fast and can make my life much easier.
Use temporal email address to sign up: most sites require an email address to sign up. If you do not care about their updates, just use any temporal address for quicker registration;
I thought of adding a few tips on IP switching but then thought I’d look like a complete spammer in that case. So I’ll just stop here, hope I managed to do that before you thought I was a jerk and just left this site for good.

Post image by SideLong

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Sharing versus Manipulating: Where’s the Line?

Ann Smarty — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 14:01:31 +0000

I’ve been banned from StumbleUpon – not banned but put under review – the fact is, I can’t use it any more. I’ve been stumbling for a year, found great friends there and now I feel as if huge part of my life has been taken away. Anyway, putting the emotional part aside, this got me thinking: was I really manipulating the service?

The honest and painful answer would be: YES. I did thumb up the content I was related to in some way or other. I did shared it with some of my friends. I did ask others to promote my stuff.

But what is more important is that I drove more value to the community than I got from it. And I can honestly and open-heartedly state that I was a great stumbler! I rated and reviewed content daily – a lot of content. Many people contacted me saying how great my StumbleUpon blog was.

So did I really deserve the ban? In his recent interview Muhammad Saleem said reciprocal voting is a natural part of social media where people having common interests share content and vote for it.

Lisa Barone recently said marketers were to blame for any negative outcome social media manipulating can have. Follow the rules and you will be OK, she said.

So where in their rules do they forbid to review your own content? Or sharing it with those who liked it?

I had about 1000 friends there and I am sure none of them could accuse me of spamming them or sending them some promotional content.

So where is the line between being a power user and manipulating the network?

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Create several FireFox profiles:

Use multiprotocol instant messaging application

Use some extra tools to make your parallel lives easier:

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