SocialOomph (formerly Tweetlater) had a major announcement today – and one that probably is causing panic among many Twitter users.

Essentially, they will be discontinuing the ability to set up ‘recurring posts’ and ones with ’spinnable text’ as this helps users violate Twitter’s Terms of Service with regards to posting duplicate content over the same or multiple accounts.

Now, when I first saw this I almost had a panic attack myself, but then I took the time to read many of the comments and questions on the blog.  They included several answers back from Dewald Pretorius, the creator of SocialOomph, Tweetlater and a fellow Maritimer on Canada’s East Coast .  The answers from Mr. Pretorius made me realize that the clients I work with will not be affected as they don’t use the recurring tweets function. Panic was premature and not necessary.

Primarily my clients use SocialOomph to setup posted dated tweets – but the majority of them are unique tweets that we do not repeat.   They use SocialOomph to send an automated Direct Message to new followers – and this will not be affected by the new change either.

Looking at the comments, the change will affect people who use the system to setup updates of the same type over and over at recurring times. Some even mentioned every 5 minutes!  Wow.  Not how I use Twitter at all – nor what I recommend to my clients.  I encourage my clients to get on Twitter directly and be real and authentic and to make connections and conversations with others.  That is how you can reach more people in a way that creates a relationship.  Sending the same message over and over is never anything I recommend or like to see.

So… for now my take on this big news is… I am okay with it, since it may help keep the spammers at bay and send them elsewhere to push their wares. Anything for reducing the spam in my twitterstream is fine by me!

I read a great article today posted in the Vancouver Sun newspaper. It refers to a report released Wednesday by Robert Half Technology . The survey is said to find that 58% of Canadian Companies surveyed prohibit social networking at work.

The concerns the businesses who ban social networking have are more about employee’s wasting work time to chat on facebook or twitter for non-work related purposes. And fair enough, that is a valid concern. As a business owner it would bother me if my staff was being paid to work and instead were doing something personal during that time.

There’s always been big debate about whether employees should be allowed to use Social Networking sites at work. The recent growth of Social Media for business is making this decision even more difficult. Businesses are looking to use Social Media but for many the concept of talking directly to customers via social networks is very new and they are learning.  Some the right way and some the wrong way.

Personally, I don’t think social networking works for everyone – or every business.  For business, there needs to be  a solid foundation (ie your website and marketing plan) on which to build these relationships and a good strategy to implement to achieve the desired goals.  If you don’t have this foundation, you may struggle and even fail.

Businesses, especially corporations who make the jump into social media, have to have a very strong foundation as well as a concise policy for employees who use the networks as a representative of the company.  They are acting as a  spokesperson and all parties must be clear on what can be said, and how and when and to whom…

So, what’s my take on the ‘bans’?  I kind of agree if the business does not use social media as part of its marketing plan, however technology is making it near impossible to block all access. Social Networking is new to business, so it makes sense there is a high number of corporations blocking these sites on their networks.  I do however, think that number will go down as time passes and more and more businesses join in this new way of networking directly with their clients.

There are a couple comments on this article as well… Jane Doe’s comment on how allowing staff access may mean taking a break is not a break at all – at least not one from sitting in front of your computer screen…she has a point.

Personally I can’t wait for the spammers to tire of Twitter. It is most annoying looking at tweets that have a link and a bunch of usernames…and nothing else of value to anyone at all. Do these users really think people are that gullible? That we actually hit any of these links?

I don’t click any of these links, not even out of sheer curiosity. What do I hit though is “unfollow”.

Even worse are the followers listed under one person as many, but in reality it is the same person and even the username is the same except for some numbers attached (ie Spammer16, Spammer25, Spammer32)

Having spent a bit of time lately finding connections for my clients I was shocked at the changes I see on Twitter now compared to 6 or 8 months ago. I see usernames that are almost duplicates of each other but with a different number added to each, and lots of them. One person’s follower list I was on the other day had more than two pages of the same person. That’s more than 40 followers in their numbers but in reality it is one person. That’s a real valuable connection to have – Not!

My recommendation to anyone looking to make useful and purposeful connections on social media is to ignore all these people and tweets. Don’t click any links and unfollow them.

The fewer people they are connected to the more of a waste of time they will incur. It does take time for these users to create the tweets and profiles they do – if that investment does not pay off they will move on to another venue to try ‘hocking their wares”.

Eventually they will get the message – keeping the twitterverse clear for the rest of us who get a benefit from it whether personal or business related.

Well… I got a glimpse of inbox chaos this week.

Something happened and my facebook notifications were changed.  A glitch I suppose, but the glitch meant I started getting email notifications when anyone friended me, wrote on my wall, made a comment, sent me a message…. You get the picture.  My inbox was jammed full of emails that I did not need to see.

Now, if you are asking “Why don’t I need to see them?”  I will tell you this and it is the number one trick to managing your social media profiles more effectively.

Look around when you are on Facebook and Twitter and Linked In. Answer people and make comments back to them directly in your social network. It’s a much more efficient use of your time, plus you learn to understand where you ‘are’ in your profile.

How?

On Twitter, when you sign in click on the @yourusername link on the right side of your home page.  See who has been ‘talking’ to you.  Answer them on the spot with an @reply. You only have 140 characters to type; it’s not a book and can be done quickly. Do the same thing with the Direct Messages.

On Facebook, follow the same principles.  Check your personal wall, answer people talking to you – or better yet talk to them – make a comment about their update.  Look at your inbox and send replies right there.  Check your fanpage and do the same. Look and see if anyone has posted on your fanpage wall.  You are using Facebook to connect with more people so it is vital you check in here and make the connections.

If you follow these practices you will soon find that the email notifications you have coming are redundant; and in fact take more time to clean out. Change your account settings and the way you ‘check’ your networks and you will find an inbox that requires less maintenance.

Every so often Twitter runs a purge of inactive users and accounts, when it happens you will see followers drop off your profile.   Even the folks at Twitter realize that it’s okay to hit unfollow, I do it all the time.  Shocked?  Don’t be.  There is nothing wrong with clicking unfollow and in some cases even the block button is okay to hit too.

Why do I do it? Well, in most cases it is because I get no value from that person and my connection with them. Many will argue you have just removed the viral-access from their connections (you tell two friends, they tell two friends and so on – well, on Twitter that number could actually be two thousand or even more), but sometimes those people may not be connections you want to have or be associated with.

I tell all my clients the two main standards I have for not connecting with someone; naked pictures and blatant swearing… though recently I have added overzealous sales pitches and using the @reply to mention other people along with a sales link.

I use social media primarily for my business as do my clients,  but a lot of my personality comes out too. Overall I try to keep it fairly professional and would rather not be associated with certain actions I deem unprofessional.

There will be many people that disagree with me wholeheartedly on these choices and that is fine.  The difference between us comes down to our social media strategy – our reason for being on Twitter.  The point is to remember that it is okay to click the unfollow button when you want. It is your choice and no harm can come from doing this; in fact in some cases it can free up space so you can see your more valuable connections more often.

Facebook fanpages or pages for business…many people use them as a support to their social media and marketing efforts. One of the biggest requests I have from clients who have hired me as their social media virtual assistant is to set up auto linking of twitter updates to fanpages. Until this past week there was not a simple way unless you used ping.fm

What changed was the latest update to tweetdeck.  Tweetdeck is similar to Hootsuite and Seesmic in that it is a management tool to help you keep on top of Twitter – your followers, special hashtags you follow or even certain terms. Everyone has their preference and opinions. Mine is Tweetdeck.

As with previous version, the new one – v. 0.30.4 – allows you to host multiple twitter profiles in Tweetdeck, letting you post updates from several different accounts should you need that service. The change to this version allows you to link to your personal facebook as well as your fanpage – or fanpages.

Plus, Tweetdeck has added many more features to this latest version, which originally came out September 3rd, but with a  facebook linking issue. The September 18th update has fixed that.

It takes a few minutes to access your settings, click add an account, then facebook account. Whatever pages you are an admin on, you will have the option to link to that fanpage.

Once you have it setup then a button appears on the top of your tweetdeck window. When you publish an update, you can pick and choose what account to go to.

For those who may not realize it, this also allows you to pick and choose what gets posted on your personal facebook. This option can really help curb your facebook posts especially if you find some of your closer friends and family always wondering why you have so much to say on facebook.

Try this new version out, I’m certain you’ll love the new features, many of which are intended to help users save time.

Recently Twitter has announced several changes… the latest ones are:

1. Terms of Services. Four main areas were affected by the Terms of Services – Advertising, Ownership, API’s and Spam.  The most important one to many users is the Ownership. 

Ownership—Twitter is allowed to “use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute” your tweets because that’s what we do. However, they are your tweets and they belong to you. Added to this is more notice to users that because of this term, you need to be sure to give credit where credit is due when retweeting or reposting other Twitter Users content.

2. Design.  Twitter has added four new background designs available under your profile, settings and design.

Great for people just wanting to use the templates, gives a few more choices. I still think most people should take the time to create their own custom background or have one created for you. We talked about this back in July and how important a background is to your branding.

Twitter is definitely evolving and trying to keep up with the needs of users yet make it a worthy and worthwhile service to users.  Great to see.

A few notes came through the grapevine lately that Fanpages could now book their user names without the minimum requirement of 100 fans.  Seems the limit has now gone down to 25 again, the original limit set.

Read this post from July to understand more about how to set your fanpage username.  If you have more than 25 fans now, go do it.  Better to get your brand name now than have it scooped up by someone else.

Don’t forget to add the Fan Box to your website or blog if you would like visitors to be able to easily connect to your facebook fanpage. You will find the link to this application under your fanpage profile picture.  Click on “Add a Fan Box to your website” and it will take you right to the application.

Time on Task Va Services

Promote Your Page Too

I have kind of experimented somewhat with Twitter these past few months when I opened a second profile.

When I started @timeontaskva I built my following one by one, picking people I wanted to be connected with and following them back if I made the choice.  Nothing automated about it.

With @mytwitrva I started it off with some followers and then sent it on its merry way with some automated systems for following.

The results are most interesting…

The profile I built by hand has more followers that have value to me, ones I enjoy connecting with. The more automated profile is building up contacts that seem to have tweets/updates that don’t do much for me.  Oh, there are contacts there that I do value, but the majority seem to publish updates such as: Make Money online guaranteed or Quickly grow your Twitter following go here …

The scary part is a few of these (not these two above) I recognized from having helped clients fix up some spamming and hacking issues with their twitter accounts. Each time, my clients had signed up and entered their twitter username and password to the systems promising lots of followers. Soon after, some funky stuff started happening with their accounts – spam posts/updates were published from their twitter accounts. In one case the account was suspended. Not good.

I keep cleaning out the second account so that it will give me connections I would prefer, but that takes more time and eventually I will have to spend even more time and energy to make the contacts I wanted in the first place.

Lesson learned from this is an age old one: Quality vs Quantity.

You can certainly build up quantity and have quality; but only if you seek out quality while doing so. Many of these promises and guarantees may not bring you the value you are looking for, not that I am saying they are all bad .

A little something to keep in mind as you go about “Building your Tribe”.

One of my clients – and one who is my best social media success story – recently had their Facebook fanpage disappear.

No warnings, no explanation – just gone. It was a fanpage we have been working on for a few months and one that had more than 500 fans and a lot of good interaction with the fans.

I sent off an email to several areas of facebook, but will not be holding my breath for a quick response. I did get the automatic emails stating they have received my request and that ‘we may contact you for more details’

Honestly, I expect nothing less from support of a ‘free’ platform that has millions of users. Users of any of these types of applications are at the mercy of the limited resources available to support them.

This loss of a fanpage is one more scenario that makes me think the unthinkable for many people.  Is it time for some of these applications to evolve and move to the next level? A level that requires users to pay (Yes, I said pay) for a service in order to receive more reliable support and service.  A service you can count on, especially when using it for business.

“You get what you pay for”, my Mom always said. A statement that certainly rings true when you are dealing with millions of people using a free platform.