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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If you’ve read our previous posts on Topsy, you know that it’s a pretty robust tool offering real-time analysis of public conversations.

And it just got a little better at saving you time.

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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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In 2010 the National Retail Federation reported that some 212 million people went shopping on Black Friday, spending an estimated (and heady) $45 billion.

Social media listening service Mashwork analyzed over 270,000 tweets between September 26 and November 17 to discover where Twitter users will be this Black Friday (November 25), and what they’ll be spending their hard-earned money on.

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Big update from HootSuite this morning – social analytics.

New features include customisable reports (you can add your company logo and details and send them off to clients and prospects), both enhanced and quick analytics, and more.

Get a better view of your social campaigns with new, more powerful analytics tools, more ways to measure, and customizable reports that will give you a more complete and comprehensive picture of your participation in social spaces.

HootSuite Social Analytics closes the loop between your social messaging with real-time views into campaign results.

Seems like HootSuite might be going after Radian6 et al.

All this is great, but the best part? HootSuite is suddenly a ton faster. Refreshes are super-quick and everything feels slicker and a lot speedier. I like the design changes to the dashboard, too. Good stuff.