For some reason people think Digg is the only website that can send them traffic in their social media campaign. I am here to tell you a secret so devious, so true in nature that it may be shocking: Digg is not the only source of social media traffic. Whether you have been unpleasantly banned from Digg, or you are looking for a new network to establish yourself in, it’s time to start looking.

I am not an SEO and have no formal SEO training (who needs it?) but I do know that relying on Digg alone is pretty much like relying just on organic search rankings. You can’t put all your eggs in one basket, certainly not when it comes to social media marketing.

Digg as a time waster.
Obviously reaching the front page of Digg can bring a lot of goodies but let’s look at something else for once. The time and effort you spend trying to get there. For most Digg users trying to make the front page may seem like luck while for some it seems like every post becomes popular. While there is a small bit of luck involved it’s more Digg itself that has become the problem. The community is full of highly volatile users who love to bury content at even the slightest hint of linkbait.

Which is better in the end?
You can spend countless hours trying to get the immature Digg audience to promote your content, or you can move on. Move on to a variety of new networks that not only drive traffic and backlinks but help build a more targeted audience. For most, if you put the amount of time into other networks that you do at Digg, you will reap much larger rewards.

Design Float [Design]
A network focusing on design across many mediums, Design Float does not send much traffic but gives you access to many bloggers in the niche.

Bazooka Buzz [General News]
This is a Swedish network that sends a few thousands hits per popular story. The great part, stories can be written and submitted in English.

eBaumsWorld eLinks [Offbeat]
eBaums world has been around for a long time and has the power to drive a lot of traffic and links. Funny images and videos are the norm so if that’s your niche you are good to go. On another note the kid who started the site (Eric Bauman) went to my high school and turned the website into a multi-million dollar giant over the course of 2 years. The website started with videos of teachers getting pissed off in class at him for pulling pranks.

Cracked Pipeline [Offbeat]
This is more of a humor based network that you can exploit like Fark. If you are taking an offbeat approach to your linkbait, this is a network you defiantly want to try.

Meneame [General News]
A popular Spanish social media site that can easily send you a few thousand hits per submission, and even more links to go with it.

Lipstick [Celebrity]
Think of Lipstick as the Reddit of celebrity news. It won’t be crashing your server but a decent post can bring targeted traffic and great backlinks.

SugarLoving [General News]
By submitting your content here, you run the chance of having it pushed to other blogs in the Sugar Inc. network.

Keep in mind that I left out a few that you should already know like Mixx, Sphinn, Shoutwire, and Fark as I have covered them in various posts. Also don’t forget about all of these social networks as well.

Now that you know how to make a Twitter bot you may be looking to add some more functionality to it. One problem you may run into after some time is that you keep recycling or re-sending the same messages to Twitter. For example, you have 100 facts about your self and you don’t want any of them to appear twice but you want everything to be automated. How do you do this? Easy, just add a status field to your `tweets` table.

Step 1 – Add the field.
To add the field you can use the simple graphical interface in phpMyAdmin or use the SQL tab (or alternative) to run this code:

ALTER TABLE `tweets` ADD `status` VARCHAR(10) NOT NULL;

What this will do is create a new field in your tweets table with 10 characters of space for that messages status. We will be setting them all to “ready”, and later changing our PHP code to update them as we go along.

Step 2 – Set all tweets to ready.
After you have the new field added to your database you will need to set all of the tweets you want to use to ‘ready’ status. In this example, only tweets with the status set to ‘ready’ can be randomly selected.

While inside of phpMyAdmin (SQL tab) or what ever tool you use, go to the page that allows you to run MySQL commands on your tables and enter this code:

UPDATE `tweets` SET `status` = ‘ready’

Alternatively you can pick which ones you want to use if you already have some tweets that you wish not to recycle. This SQL command will update every tweet/message you have in your database so use it wisely.

Step 3 – Modify PHP to update tweet status in database.
Our third an final step is to modify the php script so it will change the status of every used tweet. To do this, we will make a few simple changes to our original code.

First off, we have to change the MySQL query so it will only pull random messages with “ready” status:

For our second change, we will need to get the ID number of the tweet from the database and pass it to the sendTweet() function we will modify in a moment:

Then we modify our sendTweet() function to handle the tweet’s ID, and then change its status if the message is successfully sent to Twitter:

Now it’s all ready to role. Now every time a message is pulled from the database and sent to Twitter (successfully) it will have it’s status changed to “used” taking it out of the possible messages to send. Just upload your new php file, re-activate your CRON job and have some fun.

There are quite a few uses I could think of for an automated Twitter bot that posts new tweets for you throughout the day. While this sounds like it would be a hard task it’s actually quite easy and a great project for anyone who wants to learn how to use the Twitter API within PHP. Lets get started.

Step 1 – Create your database.

When creating your database there are a number of things you may want to think of ahead of time. For the sake of making things easy I chose to tone down the code I use and show you how it works. We will create a simple table to store all of the random tweets in.

Run that SQL and you should have a new “tweets” table in your chosen database. Notice how we limited the `tweet` field to 140 characters as well so we don’t have tweets that are too long to appear on Twitter.

Step 2 – Create the PHP to send the tweet.

The next step is to create a php script that will randomly select one of your tweets, and then send it to your Twitter account via Twitter’s API. While this sounds complicated, its very easy to do.

Not to bad right? Our custom sendTweet() function pretty much takes care of all the dirty work in sending the message to Twitter. Just make sure you edit the code with your password and username for Twitter, and the MySQL login. Once you have your database populated you are all good to go and test the script to see if it works. Just upload it, run it, and you should see either “fail” or “success” on your screen.

Step 3 – Automate with CRON.

After going to Twitter and checking your account to confirm everything is copacetic, it’s time to let your monster loose. Depending on what host you use, CRON access may or may not be available to you. Luckily for me I am hosted with MediaTemple so this is not a problem.

• Script Location - When using CRON you normally want to upload the file being run into a folder that nobody has access to from the web (root). After you have it in this location, just plug it into CRON with ‘php’ in front of it. Example: php /home/user/root/TwitterBot.php
• Set The Time - I don’t think I have ever used a control panel that required you to manually enter the time format… I’m pretty sure most people use cPanel which also has drop downs to select when you would like the script to run. I like to run my Twitter bot every 25 minuets or so to keep my Twitter account fresh.

That’s it! Not to hard right… If you have any in-depth questions on the code or need help, feel free to leave a comment. Also leave one if you have usage ideas, new features that could make the script better. As you can now see, this is a valuable tool to have in your chest.

UPDATE 5/8/2009

I have released a full blown version of the script packed with features and a complete backend GUI. This has proven to be a great Twitter marketing too! Unlike all the others, I support mine and its not a billion dollars. Check out the site for all the details.

Get Twitterbotscript now!

A lot of making something popular in social media is who you know. Exercising a few of these techniques and learning from your mistakes will allow you to create better content, and network with people who can make it more visible. If you want your content to go popular on social networks, it has to be good. People won’t just promote it because it’s there. They may promote it just because of the headline, but not just because its there.

The headline is not up to par.
Without a kick-ass headline your dead before your pretty much DOA. Headlines are a tip that I seem to stress over and over because even still people do not listen. I have seen great content that fails on social media sites because the writer decided to use a dumb ass title that had little or no bite to it. Take a few minuets to write up a list of other possible titles, and see if you find one that you like.

Who da’ fu©k is you?
One thing I have found that a lot of big bloggers hate, is when their content is submitted by a nobody on a given social network. Why does it bother them? Someone who spams and does not take the time to build an account often does not have the number of friends or likely visitors to promote content and make it popular. If you are not yet in a position to submit your own content, make sure whoever does is up to the task. Don’t waste your good content on nobodies.

Find your target.
Finding your target audience has also been covered about a billion times. Pretty much every type of marketing requires you have some idea of what your target audience is and social media is no different. Even if you are just trying to drive some traffic to a blog you will need to place your content in front of the right eyes. There are many ways to do this and its imperative you take advantage if you want you content to become more popular.

Why do you submit at dinner time?
Timing can be very important, especially on some social networks like Digg, Mixx, and Sphinn. Submitting your content in the evening and late at night seems to do no good so learn from other’s trials. If content performs better earlier in the day then why do you continue to submit your content at 5 PM? The topic can also come into play with the time. For instance business related news probably won’t perform well on the weekends considering most business takes place during the week. Think about what you are doing when you go to submit your content.

How does it look?
Make your content easy to read, easy to navigate, quick, and to the point. Remember you are online and people move fast. Dragging out every bit of information will not get you anywhere, and most likely create more people who don’t like your site than those that do. Make sure some part of the content is above the fold and the font is easy to read. Another fun tactic is to insert an eye catching image or graphic to go along with your content. Also take into account your ad spaces and whether or not there may be to many, if I go to a site and the first thing I notice are three giant AdSense blocks that tab will be closed in seconds.

Content with no audience.
Lets face it, people like what they like and chances are that more popular topics will be easier to create a website around. If you are creating content for crap flavored soda you might have a hard time getting people to read about it. In order to have something become popular, you will need a large amount of people interested in that topic or niche. Even if your niche is not that popular, learn to go outside of it and draw traffic with the use of other niches.

Tag and categorize correctly.
This is very important on sites like Mixx, and more importantly StumbleUpon where your tags and categories will play a heavy role in the content’s visibility on that network. Use big broad keywords that describe your content and appeal to large groups of people. For instance instead of tagging your post about Dog food with the keyword “dog food,” you can use terms such as “pets”, “animals”, “food”, and others. Broad categories receive more traffic which means more possible eyes for your content.

Be prepared for failure as it is inevitbale. Not every piece of content will become viral and bring you all kinds of traffic, comments, and backlinks. That’s why its important to know where you can go wrong, and capitalize on those making the same mistakes. Practice using these tips and I can assure you that your content will get better and better. I find that most of the people who fail are those thinking strictly about monetary gains. There is nothing wrong with this but most of the time people have a tendency to overlook some of the easiest ways to make the content more valuable.

You should know by now that Twitter has become a pretty powerful player in the social media space and it should defiantly be a tool you have under your belt. For the number of people it allows you to connect and quickly chat with it has obvious benefits of use. So how can you use it to find hot trends across the web?

• TweetMeem – Allows you to track and search memes in a useful threaded style. It will also show you exactly how many Twitterers are passing around the meme as well.



• TwitScoop – In the form of a tag cloud, TwitScoop shows “what’s hot right now” and the latest hot trends can be found on the “Hot Trends” list. You can also browse the list of discussions by hovering over an item.



• Twitter(url)y – This is another TwitterMeme type tool that tracks Tiwtter memes in a Digg style manor where Tweets are to the memes, what Diggs are to Digg stories.



• SiteVolume – This is another handy tool that also pulls data from other social sites as well. Using the Goolge “site:” search operator, SiteVolume pulls data for Digg, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, and Twitter to compare up to five terms.

There are plenty of lists of Twitter tools but I wanted to point out a few specifically that could be used to track trends and discussions across the web. Although the tools are Twitter based, there are a lot of Twitter users talking about a lot of different things making it a good place to look for trends. Using the the tools you can find trends that are hot, or that may become hot in the future.

A new survey of data from the Opinion Research Coproration (1,092 consumers) found that 85% of social media users thought companies should interact with them through social media. For those trying their hand in social media marketing to gain traction this is a good thing to hear. The trend is becoming apparent and web users are becoming more fickle. They are tired of being bombarded with ads, and instead are looking for interactive and well managed social media marketing campaigns.

Out of all the people in the study, only 5% of them felt companies should not be in social media at all. On the other hand 8% of the subjects felt it would be ok for companies to have a presence in social media but not interact while 51% felt that social media marketing was ok if the interaction was somewhat limited. The remaining 34% of the study group felt companies should go full throttle with their social media strategies.

As always looking through the charts will show that online retailers are early to the game. With an ever competitively growing market, looking for new ways to connect with consumers has been priority number one for most companies lately and that’s exactly what social media marketing allows them to engage in. While there are tons of social media sites to network on, companies seem to be sticking to the big boys like Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube.

While the line between interaction and advertising becomes more grey it should be interesting to see how spam plays a role. Many users often feel like online ads are intrusive but when you think about it social media marketing is even more intrusive but the key is making it transparent and credible. These people have accepted brands and business into their online social network and now those companies have their foot in the door.

I was just on Google Analytics doing some late night stat checking (I’m addicted) and aside from noticing the slick new layout I noticed another thing that is now bugging me. I was checking out some of the top content here on smmguru.com for yesterday and noticed that a few of the top pages had been submitted to SocialBrowse. Any link that gets submitted to SocialBrowse basically becomes non visible because the layout gets messed up by the SocialBrowse icon next to the link.

If your lucky then you will still have part of the link to hover over or click to see what the URL is. Otherwise it may be hidden and you might want to pop open Firebug to check them out until there is a fix. I did some searching and didn’t find much on the topic so let it be known, the more people that know the faster SocialBrowse can fix this and the faster I can close Firebug. Thanks.

Listed below is a huge collection of Twitter tools, along with information and links to articles and reviews on each. If you have any to add, leave a comment as I will be updating this post as I go on. (Shit, AJAX is the bomb.) This should become your number one Twitter resource starting now mmmmkay.

Web Applications                  
1. Twitt(url)y – A service for tracking popular URls that are being shared across the Twitter network. Useful for identifying hot trends and topics within social networks.
   1. Twitturly: Tracking Popular URLs On Twitter [The Startup Review]
   2. Twitturly Cracks The TwitterMeme Nut
   3. CrunchBase – twitt(url)y company profile
2. FollowBack – Gives you a color-coded view of people who are following you, and if you should follow them back.
3. Group Tweet – Anyone who wants to broadcast and share private tweets to a specific group of people can do so for free with Group Tweet. Think of it as Yammer but within Twitter.
   1. Privacy Disaster At Twitter: Direct Messages Exposed (Update: GroupTweet Is Likely Culprit)
   2. GroupTweet to blame for Twitter security ‘compromise’
   3. GroupTweet Enhances Twitter
   4. CrunchBase – GroupTweet Company Profile
4. Tweetmeme – Tracks hot topics on Twitter bases on the links people are sharing. 
   1. CrunchBase – Tweetmeme Company Profile
   2. TweetMeme Returns Following Months-Long Forced Outage
   3. Meet Tweetmeme, The Sweeter Way to Track Twitter
5. TwitLinks – Aggregates links from the worlds top tech Twitter users.
   1. TwitLinks: The Techmeme Killer of Twitter? – ReadWrtieWeb
   2. TwitLinks Company Profile – CrunchBase
   3. TwitLinks: Not Useful, Not A TechMeme Killer – TechCrunch
6. Favrd – Offers channels of the most favorited tweets on Twitter with options to search and identify topics by keyword.
   1. FAVRD: Entertainment for the Twitter Attention Span
   2. Fail Whale for the Favrd
7. TweetLater – Schedule tweets for a particular time or day and also allows you to auto-follow and one who follows your account. They even offer a auto-welcome feature that sends a welcome message to your followers.
   1. TweetLater.com – Tweet into the Future
8. Twist – An aggregation like service that looks at trend comparisons and volume between keywords and tags.
9. Twubble – Introduces and recommends new people you may want to follow based off your friend graph.
10. WhoShouldIFollow – Pretty much like Twubble.
11. Twellow – A very useful tool for finding people who matter in your business, industry, or niche.
12. TwitDir – A very effective people search tool for Twitter.
    1. 1 million Twitter users according to Twitdir
    2. A showdown of Twitter user directories – TwitDir vs. Twitterholic
    3. Tracking Your Twitter Growth With Twitterholic, TwitDir, Tweeterboard & Others
13. Twerp Scan – Keeps an eye on the friend / follower ratio of your friends and their friends.
14. Tweet Pro – A paid service for creating a solid niche based network. Great for use in business/branding.
15. Tweet Scan – A search engine for Twitter with advanced topic and trend/keyword tracking features.
16. twInfluence – Measure Twitter influencers based on reach, velocity, social capital, and more. 
17. TwitterGrader – Measures the relative power and authority of a Twitter user by calculating the number of followers, the power of the network of followers, the pace of updates and the completeness of a user’s profile.
18. TwittAd – Micro ad network that connects advertisers to Twitter users to create opportunities for paid product placement and website promotion directly on a Twitter user’s profile.
19. Twitterise – Advertise on Twitter and track the success of branded communications with your customers.
20. WhatsYourTweetWorth – Analyzes your account and network to recommend what your tweets could be worth on Twittad.
21. Twitterific – Lets you read and publish tweets from the desktop, iPhone and iPod Touch.
22. TwitterWhere – Provides the ability to update Twitter with your current location.
23. TwitterFeed - connects your blog to Twitter and automatically feeds posts into the timeline with each new update.
24. Tweetbeep – Allows you to monitor conversations that mention you, your brand, related or competitive products, as well as links to your website or blog, even if they use a shortened URL, such as tinyurl.com.
25. Ping.fm – A central distribution service for sending updates to multiple social networks, including Twitter, with one click. 
26. Hellotxt – Provides the ability to instantly update status as well as view the status of your contacts across multiple networks (Facebook, LinkedIn, hi5, Plaxo, Pownce, Plurk, FriendFeed, Identi.ca, BrightKites, etc.) – all from one dashboard.
27. Matt - (Multiple Account Twitter Tweeting) provides a platform for broadcasting one update to multiple accounts.
28. FeedTweeter – Connects social services that offer RSS feeds to you Twitter account.
29. TweetWheel – Visually presents your social graph, who’s following you and who you are in turn following.
30. Twiffied – Shows the headlines of the Websites your Twitter friends have listed in their profiles to see what they’re linking to or blogging about.
31. BrightKite – A location-based social network that connects directly to Twitter.
32. TwitterLocal – The ideal service for quickly finding active voices within a specific city, state, postal code as well as the vicinity, ranging from 1 mile to 20.
33. SnapTweet -  Links your flickr account to share updates seamlessly to Twitter.
34. DoesFollow – Lets you know if one person is following another. That’s it.
35. TwitPic – Provides a bridge from your camera phone to Twitter. Pictures can either post to the Twitter public timeline from phone via email or through the site.
36. Tweet2Tweet – Provides you with the ability to view a history @replies between two Twitter users.
37. Qwitter – Will send an email to you when someone unfollows you and will link the action to the most recent tweet that you posted.
38. FollowCost – Estimates the potential attention (or annoyance) cost of following a particular individual or account.
39. TweetPad – Provides a visual representation of Twitter feeds and statistics with dynamic typography.
40. Twitzu – An event invitation management service for Twitter. You can create an event, broadcast it to followings and manage RSVPs.
41. xefer – Reviews your Twitter account and presents a rich visual analysis of your tweet volume, concentration as well as their resonance (measured by replies) by day, time, week and hour.
42. LiveTwitting – A streamlined solution for livetweeting (covering) conferences.
43. TwitterKeys – Enhances Twitter conversations by replacing words with UTF8 compatible images.
44. Twalala – Adds a mute button to Twitter allowing you to focus your stream as necessary without completely unfollowing someone.

Twitter Clients

45. Twhirl – A social desktop dashboard that centrally manages activity, messaging, and updating for Twitter, FriendFeed, Identi.ca, and Seesmic.
46. TweetDeck - An Adobe Air desktop app that enables uers to split their main Twitter feed into topic or group specific columns.
47. Google Twitter Gadget - Twitter gadget from Google thats pretty much an add-on for Google Desktop.
48. Twitteroo - Has some nice features including URL shortening, sound notification and many other features which help you speed up your tweeting.
49. Spaz – An extremely customizable desktop Twitter client which is available on Windows, Mac and Linux.
50. Witty – A good looking Twitter client which works with Windows Vista and XP.
51. TwitBin - Available to Mac, Windows and Linux owners, TwitBin is a plugin for Firefox 2.0+.
52. Tweetr - Available on Mac and Windows, Tweetr is a great looking Twitter Client. There are alternatives with more features however it’s still worth checking out.
53. Snitter – One of the best looking desktop Twitter clients available.
54. Twitter Opera Widget – A Twitter widget for Opera with basic features.
55. Twibble - The Twibble desktop client is available on Mac and Windows. It allows you to add multiple profiles and even lets you see where you’re Twitter friends are via google Maps.
56. Pwytter - Available on Windows, Mac and Linux, Pwytter has been translated into a whopping 14 languages.

Mobile Twitter Tools

57. Twitterfon – A fast, simple Twitter client for the iPhone and iPod Touch. It is focused on 80% of your tasks in Twitter such as viewing friends/replies/messages in the timeline and also sending/replying tweets.
58. Twinkle – A location-aware network for the iPhone and iPod Touch that helps you discover, connect, and send messages to the public timeline and also to people nearby.
59. Twittlelator – A Twitter client for the iPhone. You can manage multiple user accounts, update your accounts, share pictures, a map of your current location, connect with other Tweeps, read tweets from your contacts, and direct message (DM), and reply all from one app.
60. Twitterberry – A full-featured Twitter client to read and post updates from BlackBerry phones.

Social media is a great tool for business but time and time again I see businesses fail. Either because they just don’t know any better, or they have no real goals and plans for their social media campaign. Here’s 21 reasons why your business blog may fail to perform.

1. You are on Blogger or WordPress.com. If you are a business you should have your own dam domain name people.
2. You are using TypePad which means your blog is most likely ugly and not hosted on your own site.
3. Like one and two, you have no integration. Integrate your site and blog for a better content flow.
4. You think your business blog is only about your business. Post customer reviews and testimonials as well.
5. The last time you posted was Christmas of lass year. People read your blog to stay informed, so stay up to date with your information.
6. Commenting is turned off. This really blows, give your visitors a way to interact and make sure your comment features are working.
7. You think blogging is advertising. It’s not.
8. You are using the WordPress default template with no company logo… Again you want to integrate the blog with your company website/branding.
9. You don’t know the difference between a post, and a blog.
10. You don’t know how to write to your customers on a blog.
11. You for some reason never link anything. Maby it’s to hard or you just don’t know how. Either way your readers are tired of Googling everything you are writing so link up.
12. Your posts plain suck. If this is the case: You are a business so hire someone who can set your blog on fire and create buzz for you.
13. You went overboard with SEO tips and now you have a Frankenblog. If you don’t know what you are doing, pay someone to do it for you as things change rapidly online and as a business you don’t have the time to spare.
14. You have all content approved by a lawyer. Useless, the best types of content are those that create legal problems.
15. You have a CAPTCHA for every user related action. How annoying are you?
16. All of your content is written by the marketing department and sounds like a sales pitch. Save it bitches, I’m looking for your business’s news and development. 
17. You require visitors to register or create an account before they can have any interaction with your business blog. FAIL.
18. You don’t have any spam protection. There’s nothing more embracing than a business with comments for penis pills and porn all over the place. Again you should be aware of the technology and service like Akisment that are available for your blog.
19. Unless you are dyslexic or something your content should be created write from your admin interface. Having Marv down in copyrighting come up with a post in Word and then send it around the office will most likely create an end product that no one will care to read.
20. Your business blog does no business, for your business.
21. You don’t know why or how people are getting on your business blog.

The other day I was going through some of the recent profiles on Twitter who added me as a friend. While picking through them I remember thinking “dam, I wish there was a tool to rank my followers.” So I made one. The FollowBack tool will give you a vary basic but powerful ratio to rank the people following you. Based off the ratio of how many friends/followers a given user has you can draw a lot of information from what they use their account for. FollowBack will give you three different color coded levels that indicate whether or not a person is worth following back. The tool can also help you hunt down spammers and those with suspended/private accounts which do not help you when trying to build a powerful account.

Another nice Twitter tool that has popped up is Qwitter. What it does is it check your followers and notifies you of people who have stopped following you on Twitter. The service checks as often as possible but with a large amount of friends and followers it all depends. You will get an email letter you know whats good, as well as a link in every email to remove yourself from the Qwitter service. All you need to do for sign up is enter your email address, and your Twitter user name. Then your good to go, the service will do everything else for you. Again, just another little tool for anyone trying to build a power account over at Twitter. These two will defiantly help you.