My Travels on the Net

A simple 140 character message is an excellent way to stay front-of-mind with all the people you are connected to. And maybe you haven’t noticed but Twitter isn’t the only micro-blogging platform out there. Many other social networking sites including LinkedIn, Plaxo, Facebook and even Flickr have a micro-blogging feature too.

The primary benefit of micro-blogging is that when you update your status, it shows up on the home page of all the people you are connected to. If done right, there is no better way to say to your network “Give me your attention! Now I’m going to share something interesting with you.”

Here's what the micro-blogging feature looks like on my LinkedIn home page:

Here's what the micro-blogging feature looks like on Facebook:


Posting updates on each of your social networking profiles would turn a 3 minute task into a 20 minute task. For many things we do in a day, 20 minutes isn’t a lot of time but when you’re trying to fit social networking into an already jam packed schedule, 20 minutes is too long. On the other hand, 3 minutes is doable and you’re much more likely to do it if it only takes a few minutes.

Personally, I don’t follow people who use Twitter to tell me where they are in the airport, conduct private conversations or to blatantly promote their products. I follow people who provide valuable information and as such, I also try to provide value. I consume a lot of media in a day and I really like to share the helpful and interesting stuff I come across in the course of my travels on the internet. So, most of my Tweets include a link I want to share with people.

To make sure what I’m sharing gets in front of the most people possible, I have developed a micro-blogging process that enables me to send my Tweet out to all my networks in 3 minutes AND tells me how many people clicked on the link in my Tweet. Here’s what I do.

When I find a link I want to share, I:
1. Go to http://www.budurl.com/ and get a custom link.
2. Go to >www.HelloTxt.com and post my Tweet with my BudURL link.
3. Sometime later, go back to www.BudURL.com and see how many people clicked on the link.

There are a couple of things you need to know about these websites to make this process work. First, when you create your http://www.hellotxt.com/ account, you will need to enter your login info for all the social networking sites you want to update. This can take 20 to 30 minutes but it will save you much more time than that over the long haul. Second, to get the click data, you will need to pay http://www.budurl.com/ $4 a month. They do have a trial offer, if you want to check it out for a while first.

Not only does this process tell me what people are interested in, it’s also made me a better writer. Sure, you have to be concise to fit an idea and link in 140 characters or less. But I’ve also found that I think about how to word my Tweet so people will want to click on the link. This short daily exercise of asking myself “How can I make this compelling to the reader?” is great practice for all the other writing I do in a day.

The process I describe takes about 30 minutes to set up and costs $4 a month but in my experience it has been well worth it! I’m sure my Tweets reach a wider audience and I know more about their value than people just using Twitter.

Labels: micro-blogging, social networking, Tweets, Twitter