If you’re a fan of social media marketing (or even an avid celebrity watcher), the Twitter tidal wave is unlikely to have passed you by. With everyone from Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore to CNN and Al Gore getting in on the act, the micro-blogging site has made it easy to win friends and influence people online.
If you or your business is already successfully Tweeting, you may like to spread your wings and try these other micro media…
Full of functionality, there’s little you can’t do with Tumblr. The site allows you to personalize your entire experience, making it easy to brand your Tumblr page with company logos or corporate colors. You can choose from a library of themes or create your own original theme, use your own domain name (e.g., change marco.tumblr.com into marco.com), email your posts directly to your blog, use Google Analytics, update Twitter each time your post to Tumblr, phone in your posts, create photo sets, and bookmark your favorite web content! Tumblr also claims to have the best iPhone publishing app in existence and be search-engine friendly with URL slugs and XML sitemaps. Whew!
The short messaging system allows ‘plurks’ of less than 140 characters to update friends and ‘fans.’ Information is presented on a timeline, which is your user homepage, allowing you to scroll through and see who was up to what, when. Audiences can be sectioned into cliques for small-scale behavioral-type targeting, which allows you to categorize followers according to interest and then ‘plurk’ them accordingly.
Mobile multimedia discussions are easy with Utterli – a useful site for sharing text, video, and audio from your PC or mobile. The site allows cross-posting so updates can be seeded to other social media properties including Flickr, Yahoo Groups, and YouTube. Messages can be private, public, or group-specific, and tagged according to message content.
Identi.ca is a micro-blogging service which posts user updates on a public timeline. Account holders can post up to 140 characters per message. Much like Twitter, you can subscribe (“follow”) to other users to receive automatic notifications when updates are made, and follow them either online or via an RSS feed. Although fairly basic, the service subscribes to the OpenMicroBlogging Protocol, allowing messages to be posted to other micro-blogging sites for ease of use. The service uses an open network service so if you don’t like how Identi works or fancy adding your own functionality, you can take the source code and your data and set up your own service. Developments are promised as the Laconica software used to power the site evolves.
Owned by Google and maintained by the search engine’s engineers on a volunteer basis, the site offers users the chance to share updates via the web, instant messenger, SMS, and API. Messages can be posted to channels, which are maintained streams about a specific topic of conversation. This means you can target messages via interest group and exclude those not subscribing to the channel from reading the message.
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About the Author
I am the operations director at SEO agency AppleJupp and trained as an online journalist. I head up AppleJupp'ssearch engine optimisation team which means being on top of industry trends, attending and speaking at conferences and testing new initiatives.
Tags
Micro-Blogging, Social Media, Twitter
