Posts tagged with 'twitter'
I’ve been using Crowdfire social media management tool on Android for a few months now, and I’ve been a paying customer for a while. So, I think it’s time to share my thoughts on it, and why you might want to give it a shot.
Disclaimer: a small promotional consideration was paid by Crowdfire for this post. But I probably would have written it anyway.
I work as a developer advocate, and a significant portion of that is using social media to promote, engage, build a follower base, etc. However, I have some problems:
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I’m forgetful: I need to remember to help promote posts of my friends and coworkers
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Scheduling: I’ve used Twuffer in the past (and I still occasionally do), but I’d like an easier way to schedule tweets on my phone.
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Tracking: I’d like to track how my follower count is doing, and how well I’m sending out promotional tweets.
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I don’t want my Twitter feed to only be a shill-broadcast of self-promotion. I use IFTTT for certain things, but I want to have some degree of control over what I post, the hashtags I use, the phrasing, etc.
There are a lot of tools out there for doing this, but many of them don’t solve all these problems (especially the last one).
I don’t remember where or how I found Crowdfire, but it’s now something that I use every day. Literally it’s one of the first things I do when I wake up in the morning.
It has a lot of capabilities, I’m only going to cover a few in this post.
What Crowdfire is not
It’s not a replacement for my Twitter client of choice. I still use the Twitter app to do all my reading and a bunch of my tweeting. If I turned over complete control of my Twitter/Facebook/etc account to an app like Crowdfire, IFTTT, etc, then I think I’d be missing the point of social media. I want to be a real person that people can talk to and not just an automated feed of links.
Daily Notification and "prescriptions"
Whenever a new post hits the Couchbase blog, I get a notification and prompt to share the post (whether I wrote the post or not). I also get a report every morning showing the number of followers and unfollowers since yesterday. This provides me daily feedback on whether I’m getting too annoying on social media or not. Also, when I share a post on Crowdfire, it will automatically schedule to tweet them up to 4 times over a 30 day period at the "best time" of day. I’m not sure how they calculate this, but it spaces out my tweets nicely, and I’ve found that repetition of tweets leads to more people seeing them and tweeting with me than before I used Crowdfire.
Scheduling
As I mentioned above, not only will Crowdfire remind me to tweet, it will also schedule tweets. Everyone uses Twitter at different times, so it’s helpful to send out multiple tweets (but not too many) to reach everyone that I can. In addition, I can manually schedule tweets. I find this helpful when promoting new podcast episodes.
RSS Feeds
One feature that Crowdfire has introduced after I started using it, is the ability to connect to any RSS feed. Previously I was limited to just WordPress or other well-known engines. But now I can use Crowdfire with my own site’s RSS feed. This way I can track which posts I’ve promoted on Twitter and which ones I haven’t.
Recommended sharing and following
I’ve given Crowdfire some keywords that I find most relevant. It will then recommend people to follow or articles to tweet that are relevant to me. To me, Twitter isn’t just about getting a bunch of followers, but it’s about doing a lot of following.
I usually find this helpful, but this is probably the area where I think Crowdfire could most improve. I get a few suggestions of people who don’t tweet in English, and articles that I’m not interested in, for instance.
Summary
Give Crowdfire a shot. They have a free version, which has some limits, but it’s absolutely enough to evaluate the tool and see if you find it useful. Crowdfire is in the Google Play store.
As a developer advocate, part of my job is starting conversations: on blogs, on twitter, on forums, etc.
And for better or for worse, my company's flagship product is measured on db-engines.com by hashtags and twitter activity.
This has had a side-effect of making me twitch a bit when I see a tweet that says "Couchbase" but not "#Couchbase". On one hand: I want Couchbase's ranking to improve. On the other hand: it's none of my darn business what you tweet or how you tweet it. But it occurred to me that maybe some people would put in a hashtag if they thought about it. Maybe they are just forgetting, or copy/pasting, or using an automated "share" button (or app), and calling it good enough. Or maybe they're a link aggregation bot.
This got me thinking that maybe by putting hashtags in blog post titles, it would increase the number of tweets with "#Couchbase" in them.
So instead of "Couchbase for Windows and .NET" I would title my blog post "#Couchbase for Windows and .NET". This isn't a terribly new idea. I experimented with it once, but I'm afraid to continue doing so because:
It might hurt SEO
I have no evidence to support this yet one way or the other (this post discussing it suggests that hashtags might actually help SEO), but Google/Bing might not ignore that '#' symbol in the post. It might help Twitter, but it might hurt search engine ranking. Which could be a net loss (in both db-engines and in general).
It might be obnoxious
I like hashtags. When they are used properly. When #every #single #word #is #hashtagged, I find that extremely annoying. I also find "hashtag as punchline" annoying #UsingAHashTagDoesntMakeItFunnier. A hashtag is something that should be used to help find tweets with similar content and ultimately find more interesting people to tweet with. Is a hashtag in a blog post title obnoxious? Would it increase the likelihood that you would bail on reading the post or watching the video?
It might become obsolete
Blog page and HTML titles probably won't be obsolete in 10 years. Hashtags, on the other hand, might be. Twitter (or Facebook or Google+) goes away or ditches hashtags, and now I have a huge archive full of blog post titles that have hashtags for no reason.
I would definitely like to hear your thoughts and opinions on hashtags in general, and especially hashtags in blog post titles. Tweet at me or leave a comment below.
Some other views on the topic:
- #Authors, why use #hashtags in your blog post titles?
- Do YOU Use Hashtags in Your Blog Post Titles? Yay or Nay?
- Hashtags and Ampersats in Blog Post Titles: A Good Idea?
- Using #hashtags in your post titles
Welcome to another "Weekly Concerns". This is a post-a-week series of interesting links, relevant to programming and programmers. You can check out previous Weekly Concerns posts in the archive.
- I've been exploring the Command/Query Objects pattern, specifically with the idea of replacing the repository pattern. I've started with Dustin's Brown post about Command/Query Objects with Dapper.
- How to setup Twitter Cards for your site (specifically WordPress, but blog post is helpful for everyone else too).
- Rob Gibbens posted about using Fody.PropertyChanged (an AOP plugin to the Fody IL rewriting framework) with Xamarin to use the MVVM pattern.
- EconTalk is one of my favorite podcasts. Check out this episode about the "sharing economy", in which they discuss the impact of technology like Uber, AirBnb, and so on, featuring my favorite guest: Michael Munger. Especially interesting to me is the discussion about taxi medallion investments.
If you have an interesting link that you'd like to see in Weekly Concerns, leave a comment or contact me.
