(This low number also, incidentally, explains in part the recent hype – and reaction – to Twitter’s 60% drop-off rate amongst new users, as Nielsen, who took the measurements, only accounted for Twitter.com, and not all the external clients, which make up the bulk of all interactions with the service, certainly from seasoned members.)

There’s a good reason why – Twitter.com is an entirely limiting way to interact with the Twitter stream. That statement, true as it is, is pretty insane for any website, let alone a social media platform. Somehow, Twitter gets away with it; at least, for now.

Even the most basic functionality from the site is missing. I’ve discussed recently on this blog the importance of the re-tweet, an event that takes place millions of times a day within the Twitter stream. So frequently, in fact, that’s it’s an accepted part of the experience, but Twitter.com, despite many upgrades, hasn’t considered it significant enough to provide us with a re-tweet button. Has the world gone mad?

Perhaps, but there is a solution. In fact, there are three.

Why Do We Need A Re-Tweet Button?

If you’re unsure of the significant of the re-tweet, please read my article, “In Defense Of The Re-Tweet.”

Okay, like me, you might predominately use TweetDeck or a different Twitter client for all your networking. That’s great, even admirable. But think of everybody else. Lots of folk have to use Twitter.com – maybe they’re restricted at work, or their computer isn’t powerful enough to run an external client.

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I’ve written many tutorials, guides and ‘how to’ articles on this blog, and felt it made sense to pool these entries into one convenient resource: Twitter 101.

Twitter 101 breaks down all the help articles within Twittercism into clearly-labelled sub-sections.You can access my guides on Getting Started, Twitter Etiquette, Finding Followers and  Statistics & Data, as well as tutorials on #followfriday and TweetDeck, tips on designing your profile background and instruction on how to fight off spammers and trolls.

You can find the link to this section at the top of the screen. The page will be updated continuously as new material is published.

If you have introduced friends to Twitter and they’re not ‘getting it’, please forward them towards my Twitter 101 page. The full URL is:

• http://twittercism.com/twitter-101/

Thank you!

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“Twitter is a land where 140 characters is all you’ve got to express yourself. If you think you don’t have enough interesting data to share 140 characters of your own, but instead need to piggyback on someone else’s tweet, then maybe you should rethink why you’re using the service.”

Louis earlier suggested that begging for re-tweets is lazy; that repeating what somebody else has said doesn’t add anything to the conversation.

He isn’t alone; Dave Winer and others this week have been beating the re-tweet into submission, suggesting that what Twitter needs is the ‘like’ service that other social networks use (Friendfeed, Digg, Reddit etc).

While I agree that there are right and wrong ways to re-tweet submissions – or, indeed, to ask for them to be re-submitted from your followers – I think completely dismissing the re-tweet is misguided. It serves a purpose on Twitter that makes it unique to that platform.

The Re-Tweet Gives Credit

However you choose to re-submit a tweet – using RT, re-tweet or via (I will address the differences later) – it’s important that credit is given to the original poster. The re-tweet does this effectively and with a minimal waste of characters.

Additionally, the re-tweet is (or should/can be) an endorsement of the person, too. When I re-tweet somebody I’m fairly mindful about whom it is I’m re-tweeting. Even the most obnoxious ass is capable of at least one good tweet, much like every amateur is capable of one pro golf shot. It doesn’t mean the rest was up to par. I take that into consideration when I RT; I’m saying to you, this content is good, and this is a good guy.

Because you give credit, the original poster has an excellent chance of picking up some new followers and meeting some new folk. And vice versa.

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In the first part of this article, I wrote about how the impact of the StalkDaily and Mikeyy worm exploits on Twitter were, in a roundabout way, beneficial to this blog. By providing timely and helpful material to folks who were infected by the worms, I received an enormous amount of re-tweets, traffic and praise on Twitter and around the internet, and this blog’s ‘status’ rose considerably.

In this post I will share what I learned about this experience. Can anyone use Twitter to leverage their blog? Is Twitter a great source of traffic? Will Twitter followers become part of your blog’s community, and even subscribe?

Yes, yes and yes, and it can all be achieved by observing a few simple steps.

Build Your Twitter Profile

This one is a no-brainer, right? Without lots of followers, there’s not much point in sharing your own content, is there? Well, yes and no. I think it’s far more important to have the right types of people following you than to have an enormous amount of folk who have little to no interest in what you tweet about. Would you rather have five hundred followers who regularly clicked on your links and engaged with you and your content, or ten thousand who rarely did and didn’t care either way?

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There really is no point in following:

1. Spammers
2. People who ignore you
3. People who tweet content that’s of absolutely no interest to you
4. People who never tweet at all

This article will focus on how you can remove this last group from your network.

How To Find Inactive Twitter Accounts

Yesterday I wrote about how you can use the statistical data on Twitter-Friends.com to analyse your presence on the Twitter network. We’re going to use one of the many features on this site today to clean up our inactive followers.

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Midway through the article is an interesting quote that I want to share with you:

“You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”

The line is attributed to Jim Rohn, an American author and motivational speaker. I don’t know much about Rohn (like me you can look him up on Wikipedia), but I found his statement of enormous interest. The more I thought about it, the more it resonated with me, and I began to think about how it might apply to Twitter.

Your Twitter Inner Circle

Consider for a moment the people you most converse with on Twitter. If you follow a modest number of people this is probably fairly easy to work out. If you follow thousands, it can be trickier, and the results might surprise you. I used Twitter-Friends.com to evaluate my data and invite you to do the same. (TwitterFriends doesn’t require you to enter your Twitter password, but if you do the data is a lot more thorough. It also has a cool ‘online‘ feature that shows you which of your contacts are currently using Twitter.)

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Oprah

Oprah finally submitted her first tweet to the Twittersphere, and quickly received a lesson in social media from Shaquille O’Neal. It wasn’t long before she had an army of followers some half-a-million strong, giving a massive boost to the entire Twitter network. At the time of writing she is following 10 people, most of which are celebrities.

Here Before Oprah?

Were you on Twitter before Oprah joined? What about Ashton? Does it matter?

Researchers Turn Thoughts Into Tweets

The University of Wisconsin’s Neural Interfaces lab has built something that’s not far short of a miracle – a software system that reads brain patterns and converts those signals into Twitter updates.

Five Ways To Get Your Questions Answered On Twitter

Five sites that scan Twitter’s hive mind for the solutions to your problems, courtesy of Mashable. (Also from Mashable: “The Seven Ways To Approach Twitter“.)

Twitter Changes The Rules

As of April 20, Twitter has changed the number of accounts that a single user can follow in a day to 1000. It seems wise, but unless those people follow you back, what exactly can you do with that? Hard to spam somebody who isn’t following you.

Ignore Twitter At Your Peril

It’s been a big week for scandal. Amazon, Dominos and CNN all had some damage repair to take care of, thanks to events that broke and had legs on Twitter.

Twitter Personality Test

Have your Twitter personality tested with Twanalyst. Seems everybody who does more than a handful of submissions a day is a spammer.

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And every so often, somebody will ask me about a tweet I published a while ago; typically it will be something I submitted earlier that day, but it might be a week ago, or even longer. That’s a lot of tweets.

This was the tweet we were looking for. I knew I wrote it, they knew I wrote it, and I desperately wanted to be able to find it and re-share that great content. If you tweet as much as I do, it can take hours to go back through your timeline to try and find a single submission. Forgot the haystack; this is like a needle in a stack full of needles.

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In fact, you only need to be one of three things to make it on Twitter.

1. Be famous
2. Be useful
3. Be interesting

That’s it. We’re done.

Still here? Want some more detail? I wasn’t kidding. Any one of those three states of being will lead to Twitter success – guaranteed. Everybody on the network who matters – and you can measure that by popularity or status (or both), or any which way you like – has one of these traits in abundance. Some lucky folks have two. The gifted and relative few encompass all three. But the good part is that everybody can be one.

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Where’s the logic? Is it meant to protect us? If you’re following somebody and they’re spamming you with direct message after direct message, you can unfollow them. You can block them. They’re no longer an issue, because the direct message facility has been removed from their power.

It’s not so with @replies. Anyone can @reply anybody else at any time, whether they’re following you or not. In light of the policy regarding DMs, how does this make sense?

1. @replies go into the public stream, and are visible by everybody (you can read any user’s @replies by going to Twitter search and entering @username, i.e., @stephenfry).
2. Even if you block somebody, they can still @reply you. And while those replies won’t appear in your timeline, they will become part of the stream.

Meantime, direct messages are private: they can only be seen by the recipient. It doesn’t add up.

The potential for abuse here is enormous. It’s so big, in fact, that I’m not only surprised we haven’t seen a major event already, but that one doesn’t take place on a daily basis.

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The non-profit event to be held at Iris Digital on the 20th May is being sponsored and supported by Sky News, Telegraph, Iris Digital, Sun Microsystems, 6Consulting, Tweetmeme, Winston & Strawn Bootlaw, Times Online, Capital Business Media and Gorkana.

With speakers from mainstream media including BBC, The Times and Sky and their new media counterparts from Frontline Club and TechCrunch with a number of respected technology critics, commentators and academics scheduled to attend.

This event shows how the industry is starting to look across commercial boundaries to debate the impact of emerging trends such as twitter as the advertising and publishing markets feel the strain of the recession.

“Being part of this is important as it is an opportunity for us to discuss what twitter and similar services will mean for industry going forward. Critical to that is that this event is independent and non profit allowing a neutral platform for discussion.” ~ Laura Oliver, Journalism.co.uk

“The Twitter storm is with us and I had originally planned to run this event informally to raise money for Mencap as part of a charity run. As I started to talk to colleagues in the industry it started to grow organically and has shown how the industry is keen to debate these trends early and find ways to empower their businesses rather than shy away from them. “ ~ Andrew Gregson, Founder

Early bird tickets are available at http://www.media140.com. Twittercism readers can use the code Twittercism140 and receive a 10 per cent discount.

I’ll be in attendance and will be live-tweeting the event for Media140. If you’re going, drop me a message (or leave a comment on this blog) and we’ll hook up. I’m very much looking forward to it.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

For example, here’s a screenshot from today’s chart:

I have two problems with this.

1. It’s not Friday, and
2. How in blue blazes am I number one?

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Earlier this week I wrote about LinkNark, a website that allows you to preview shortened URLs to ward off nasty surprises. Another alternative to LinkNark is ExpandMyURL.com, and it works in similar ways. Punch in your shortened URL – it accepts all the leading formats – and hit the ‘expand url’ button, and away you go.

It’s very quick and very simple, and does exactly what it says on the tin. But so far, so LinkNark.

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For me, each week it gets more difficult. As my follower count grows I continue to interact and engage with a lot of great people and sometimes despite my best intentions (and a wealth of recommendations) it’s easy to overlook a few people, completely by accident. Because Twitter moves so fast and because I tweet so much, it’s very easy to forget what happened yesterday, let alone a week ago.

Enter The Twitter Tag Project, and their excellent Follow Friday! tool.

Enter your username enter the input box and hit the Go button, and seconds later the site will return a list of your most active friends – that is, those people you most engaged with over the last 200 tweets you sent – conveniently broken-down into tweetable chunks. Better, it presents you with ‘Tweet This’ buttons which allow you to quickly and easily forward these results to Twitter (or copy and paste into your favourite client).

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This time it appears to be another new variant. Messages are more cryptic and philosophical (examples: “Success is a relative term. It brings so many relatives.” and “Every man should marry. After all, happiness is not the only thing in life.”) and all end in ‘Womp. mikeyy’. Possibly the author meant to say worm instead of womp, but I guess we’ll never know.

Real-time Twitter search: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=mikeyy (safe link, and you can see all the examples of what to look out for here)

Again, it’s spreading super-fast. Thousands of infected tweets every few minutes. Whatever Twitter is doing, it isn’t working permanently. Meantime, the usual cure should work, and can be accessed on this blog at this link.

If you’re suspicious about short URLs, use LinkNark.

Please re-tweet and share with your friends, particularly those you note are infected. Thanks.

Updates as and when they come. Isn’t it curious this only happens on weekends?

UPDATE 1635 GMT: Twitter are reporting that things are back to normal, and Mikeyy does appear to have dropped off the search radar. Same time tomorrow?

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.