Buzzom/TWITin Helpful Twitter Follower Builder

I recently read a post on TechZoomIn about getting a good number of Twitter Followers within a month. The ideal is to utilize a service called Buzzom or TWITin to grow your following list by several hundred a week and then to flush the accounts that don’t follow you back. This is a good strategy and the Buzzom tool works well in accomplishing this. In fact, if you only want to flush current accounts that aren’t following you, it is a free resource for doing so.

You can enter your Twitter account and allow access for Buzzom and then set the tool to find users with similar geographies and interests that more than likely auto-follow Twitter users. You can then follow these users in large quantities, 50 at a time.  If you do this several days in a row and you can follow 200-300 new Twitter accounts per week. At the end of the week, you then ‘Flush’ or un-follow those accounts that have not followed you back. This keeps your ‘following’ to ‘followed by’ ratio decent.

The only downside to following a large number of users on Twitter is keeping up with the ones you really do want to read everything they post. But the new Twitter list feature will allow you to separate these important users out into a separate list that you can browse independently. The other issue is flushing accounts that you want to follow even if they do not follow you back. This can be overcome by ‘locking’ the important accounts with Buzzom and the service will never flush them from your list.

Transposh – Adding Translation to Wordpress

If you run a Wordpress blog then it makes sense to offer translation services when your content is not specific to one country. By adding language translation with a Wordpress plug-in like Transposh, you can increase the traffic to your site and have pages translated automatically for free. There are a number of translation plug-ins available but I selected Transposh for it’s ease of use and good reviews.

The plug-in is available from Wordpress.org in their extends area. Therefore you can install the plug-in without downloading it within the admin console for Wordpress. You can also obtain a copy from the developers at Transposh.org. At the developer’s site you will see the widget being used and can translate their page into one of 40 different languages.

Once installed, read through the settings and make your selections. I am allowing anonymous users to translate on my blogs for the most benefit for readers. There aren’t too many settings and it only takes a couple of minutes to setup. I would like to have a select all feature for the languages to support, but selecting the 40 available doesn’t take too long.

My site GotBusinessCards.info shows how I have setup the plug-in in one case. Getting the widget to appear on the site is the final step. This involves dragging the Transposh widget from the available list to one of the side panels and making three additional setting selections. I think it is worth the time to provide this feature to readers that arrive from foreign search engines.

GAControl for Google Analytics in an ASP.Net Control

We had the need to call the Google Analytics API directly from the code of an ASP.Net page and found this nice server web control to use. The control makes working with the Google Analytics API a snap. You can automatically track sessions outside of the current session’s domain. You can set ecommerce amounts for orders that have taken place that you want to track. And record page hits from the server code instead of the normal Javascript client code. This last feature was the one we really needed as the page we wanted to record overwrote the response object prior to the page loading.

Project Home Page Features

The software has comes with the MIT code license which you can read about on the project home page. It is hosted on Google Code which has some additional information beyond the control download. There is a Wiki with usage instructions, an issue log, and the source code. I pretty much follow the ‘How To Use’ of the Wiki without any issues. The Wiki demonstrates where to place the instance within your page markup, how to reference the control when placed on the master page, how to register a page hit with Google Analytics, and how to record an ecommerce transaction.

Here is the project home page: http://code.google.com/p/gacontrol/

HootSuite: What a nice Twitter & Facebook Client

I have had a Hootsuite.com account for some time but didn’t use it all that much until this past weekend. Maybe it was the extra time over the Thanksgiving weekend but I decided to begin creating Twitter and Facebook accounts for every website that I administer. And I really needed a way to track and send messages to each account without having to log in and log out many times.

Hootsuite is a great Twitter client that now supports not only Twitter accounts but also Facebook, LinkedIn, and Ping.fm. There’s an iPhone app if you want to interact with the client that way, but I am currently only using the desktop web-based client. You can track statistics of all your messages/tweets to see how popular they become plus they now provide support for Twitter lists. I am using the standard view but each account’s view is customizable to show whatever information you want to see.

Hootsuite monitors your branding (mentions) across the social network to make sure you are not negatively being discussed around the social sites. And they have a scheduling feature which allows messages to be sent in the future so you don’t have to be logged in when you broadcast a message. If they provided an autofollow option, I could stop using SocialOomph and would be set. Take a look at the service if you think it could be helpful for you. I am not an affiliate and this is not a paid posts.