To be successful on Twitter – whether you’re tweeting on behalf of a major brand, a small business, or yourself – requires a well-thought-out content strategy.

Why are you tweeting? When are you tweeting? To whom? How will you measure success?

Even when you’ve crafted that solid tweeting strategy – committing to practicing great social customer service, pushing out high-quality content, and pulling in new followers with engaging tweets – success may still be beyond reach.

And here’s the one reason why.

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The staff of BuzzFeed FWD recently conducted an unscientific study to assess what’s changed about Vine since its launch in January.

Their finding? The teens have taken over, turning Vine into “Snapchat in public.”

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We mentioned before that piggybacking on trending tragedies to promote a business was ill-advised, but what about other human interest-style breaking news? If the story has a happy ending (but still a fantastically horrible beginning and middle) does that change things? Is it ever a good idea to promote your business on the back of others’ pain?

The answer is clearly no, right? Well, we have some extentuating circumstances to present for your consideration that may change your mind. Let’s see if you agree.

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Twitter is fantastic for making new connections and having crowd-sourced, quick conversations on various topics. The trouble comes when you want to DO something with the data.

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to organize #hashtagged conversations in a folder or, better yet, and interactive and easy to manipulate series of binders?

You guessed it – there’s a place to do just that. And put that credit card away, smart shopper, because it’s FREE.

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It wasn’t too long ago that promoted trends would run you around $100-$120k. And when they initially came out, you could snag one for a mere $70-$80k!

But not anymore. If you want a promoted trend these days, be prepared to fork over $200k.

Does that sound like something for only the “cash crazy” to consider? Maybe . . . or maybe it’s an investment you can’t afford NOT to make.

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The Super Bowl was a wild success for advertisers who knew how to leverage Twitter and other social networks, but many advertisers apparently still just don’t get it.

Twitter knows this, yet it doesn’t focus on the hard sell by aggressively advertising. Why? It doesn’t have to.

Twitter has its own brand ambassadors proving Twitter’s value every day. And there’s one VERY smart way Twitter has created a win-win scenario that is the stuff magnificent marketing campaigns are made of: sponsored tweets.

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As Shea shared last week, while 91% of online adults use social media regularly, just 22% of businesses have a dedicated social media manager.

This means that on average, companies respond to just 30% of all feedback they receive from their social media fans.

Not only that: confoundingly, Twitter seems to be alone among social networks in this inadequacy on behalf of users. As Ragan’s PR Daily points out, though fewer retailers are active on Pinterest and Instagram, most that have active accounts regularly interact with customers.

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Ever wondered how news breaks on Twitter?

When an event happens, and people instantly come to Twitter to search for the event, how do Twitter systems learn what the queries mean without any context, and collect them as a trend, before the search spike is gone?

Twitter’s official Engineering blog just released an in-depth look at how Twitter search works.

The results are pretty impressive – and enlightening.

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We’re two days into the new year now, a great vantage point for looking ahead and assessing how Twitter might perform in 2013.

The past year saw the introduction of Twitter photo filters, brand new Twitter profiles including the platform’s first-ever cover photos, significant Twitter mobile app updates and more.

2012 was also contentious for Twitter. This year, Twitter put new restrictions on what it would allow third-party developers to do, and went to war with former ally Instagram over photo-sharing dominance of social media.

What will 2013 bring for Twitter? Five predictions, below.

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You see them all the time – outrageous tweets making outrageous claims. You know the work-from-home scams are just that, of course, but what about tweets that pop up during emergencies? If you use Twitter for the latest breaking news, or worse – depend on the information it provides during an emergency – you may be in trouble.

Unless, that is, you could tell if a tweet was credible or not.

Well, we have some tips from people who have been studying just that.

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