Connect Social Media

I get lots of questions each week from folks who are new to Twitter about the phenomenon called “Follow Friday,” so here’s a quick overview.

Follow Friday has become one of the weeks most popular Twitter “events” - and it’s an easy way to start getting involved on Twitter and building your Twitter network.  It’s essentially a recommendation service - you are recommending other Twitter users that you like by making a tweet that includes both their user name (with the @ in front) and the hashtag #followfriday. More about hastags here.

It’s also a great way to find new people to follow - just follow the users your friends are recommending.  How do you know who to recommend?  Everybody does it a little differently.  I recently posed that question for my #twitterguy hastag - you can see the responses I received here.  Here’s the RSS feed for all #twitterguy questions.

TopFollowFriday.com

A new site called Top Follow Friday popped up recently and is a good way to track the most endorsed Twitter users each week for #followfriday.  You can also click through and see a top users endorsement list - worth a glance.

So give it a try - just make a tweet and add your favorites and be sure to add the hashtag #followfriday, and before long you’ll be tweeting like a pro!

Online use of social media surpasses use of email

Catch Part 1 of our interview with Candis Hidalgo - what makes for a great Twitter background image?

If you missed it, here’s our interview with Kristi Colvin from Twitterface.

Here’s my interview with Hootsuite’s Ryan Holmes.

Browse my list of Twitter tools, featuring screen captures and videos, at Likaholix.

Learn more about my TwitterViews series here - I go one-on-one with the developers of the top Twitter and social media apps.

You can find Twitter answers to my #twitterguy questions here.

You can learn more about Twitter demographics and who’s using Twitter here.

Learn more about the new social media site Likaholix here.

Our Twitterviews series continues this week with Kristi Colvin, the founder and creator of the soon-to-be-released Twitter application called Twitterface!

Twitterface.me

Kristi talks about:

1. The release date for her app
2. The “cool factor” of Twitterface
3. Her advice for somebody who’s new on Twitter
4. The biggest mistake you can make on Twitter

And more….catch Part 1 of our interview here on Monday May 11.

If you missed part one of my interview with Ryan Holmes of HootSuite, you can see it here.

See my list of Twitter tools, featuring screen captures and videos, in my Likaholix list here.

Learn more about my TwitterViews series here - I go one-on-one with the developers of the top Twitter apps!

You can find Twitter answers to my #twitterguy questions here.

Learn more about how #followfriday works here.

You can learn more about Twitter demographics and who’s using Twitter here.

Learn more about the new social media site Likaholix here.

Likaholix is a new social media site created by several ex-Google employees where you enter things you like and their system finds them online and stores them in your Likaholix account.  The coolest part is how fast they find stuff after you enter a “like” (guess they’re using some of that Google expertise!).

As an example, let’s say you like Hannah Montana and her new movie (you can tell I have kids…who watch TV).  So you type “Hannah Montana movie” into the “like” box, hit the “look up” button and you get this:

Likaholix Step 1

Since I want to add the movie to my list, I select the first listing that’s shown. Now I get options to add comments about why I like this item, and to add photos or videos to my listing (shown at right side of screen):

Likaholix Step 2

So I add some content, add a few pictures they’ve suggested, and tags…like this:

Likaholix Step 3

And finally, this is what the listing looks like in my account.

Kind of a cool social site - it also offers recommendations to you based on the things you already like, and the community can also “like” your stuff as well.  Worth a look!

Here’s their official “about us”:

Likaholix is a fun and easy way to share and discuss your likes and discover new ones with people you know. You can like anything from a great book you have read to your favorite food to some art work that you love.

We have found that recommendations from friends, whose tastes, you trust are usually much better than most reviews on the web. Most people, when they are out on social occasions with friends, find themselves exchanging notes and discussing things that they like. We hope to bring the same experience online with Likaholix. Likaholix serves as both a self-expression and a recommendation tool. We provide personalized recommendations based on the people, topics and items you like.

See my list of Twitter tools, featuring screen captures and videos, in my Likaholix list here.

Learn more about my TwitterViews series here - I go one-on-one with the developers of the top Twitter apps!

You can find Twitter answers to my #twitterguy questions here.

Learn more about how #followfriday works here.

You can learn more about Twitter demographics and who’s using Twitter here.

Learn more about the new social media site Likaholix here.

Facebook and Twitter made key updgrades to their platforms this week.  Facebook has given users the ability to “invite” friends to become fans of pages they like, without any daily limit on invites.  It’s clear that FB’s growth plan involves making pages/public profiles more and more viral, as seen initially when they added the update stream from a page to each fan’s news feed.

Meanwhile, Twitter changed functionality of the listing of a user’s @replies.  The @replies list (which is now the @yourname list) now includes all mentions of your Twitter name, making it a great tool to track retweets of your own posts.  You may also have noticed that Twitter is serving new ads in the space below the bio, rotating a number of topics through that space.

A new Twitter application called Tinker debuts soon.  Tinker is a place where “users could input a handful of keywords collectively referred to as an ‘event’, which could be used to monitor current news as it happens in near real-time.” Will it make #hastags obsolete?  Maybe not, but Tinker will surely clean things up and give event planners more flexibility.

What are your thoughts on these upgrades? Please leave us a comment below.