I don’t know about you, but I have been on Twitter for a couple of years now. In these years, I have managed to meet a lot of great people online and learn from them. No matter how successful you are in a channel, you want to take the steps necessary to get more out of your efforts. In the case of Twitter, it’s always nice to have a tool that shows you what you need to do to improve your Twitter strategy. Klout is such a tool. It helps you figure out what areas you need to focus on to take your Twitter game to the next level.

Even before using Klout, I knew what areas I needed to work on to get more out of Twitter. I spend a lot of my time reading articles and going through other people’s works on a daily basis. I have been more of a listener on Twitter, learning from what others have been sharing and looking for ideas for my new projects. Klout can easily figure that out. It not only tells you what topics you have been focusing on, it even identifies flaws in your strategy.

Klout shows you your true reach, your amplification score, and your engagement level with other influences on Twitter. The service analyzes your number of friends, retweet percentage, in/out message ratio, list inclusions, and all kinds of other metrics to help you gather some actionable information about your Twitter account. The service is not perfect, but it has done a great job helping me change my ways on Twitter. A must try for everyone on Twitter.

Twitter is one of the most popular social networking sites around. It’s another tool that can be very valuable for bloggers if used the right away. Just like any other social network, there are numerous ways one can go about building a huge following. Lots of people have over 20,000 followers on Twitter. But quantity is not everything. You can almost tell what type of Twitterer you are dealing with by looking at someone’s Twitter page. The type of content that people share with others and the way they communicate with their tweeps say a lot about them. If you are planning to follow some quality folks on Twitter, you may as well look at their Twitter pages beforehand.

There are many ways to interpret one’s Twitter page. Here are a few obvious things that your Twitter page says about you:

• Are you communicating?: if you are constantly posting quotes and pictures to your Twitter page without taking time to communicate with others and respond to their questions, it’s going to show on your Twitter page. That’s not necessarily bad if you are tweeting valuable content for your followers. It’s definitely not the way to get the most out of your Twitter page.
• What you are offering: why are you tweeting?: You don’t do it for the sake of doing it. You have to offer something. Talking about what you have had for lunch or putting nonsense on your page (like spammers who take advantage of trending topics) is not going to be ideal.
• Replying to Others Questions: no matter what niche you are in, there are going to people who have questions about the topic you are writing about (if there aren’t, then you may be in too narrow of a niche). It’s nice to tweet things that you find valuable to your followers. But when someone asks you a question, you should take time to answer it properly.
• Spreading the love: Twitter is a social network. That means you get to do some networking on it. No brainer, right? One of the best way to find new friends and build relationships is by giving credit where its due. So do not hesitate to retweet stories that you find valuable.
• Who you are following: if you are following everyone that follows you, it is going to show. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. But keep in mind there are a lot of spammers around that use fake accounts to follow other people. Am I guilty of following some of these people from time to time? Yes. I have been tricked before. But I always try to check who’s following me and only follow back if I see a reason to. I do not believe in auto-follow-back philosophy that has been adopted by some of the top Twitter tools around.
• Helping others: Twitter is a network, so you should treat it as one. If you know someone who needs something, and you know someone who can help them, there is no reason not to connect the dots. By looking at your page, I can almost tell if you are doing this. It’s not as obvious as some of the other things mentioned in this post, but it’s still fairly easy to identify.
• Your Strategy: you do not want to be on Twitter for the sake of being on it. It may take people some time to develop a solid Twitter strategy. That’s perfectly fine. But a chaotic Twitter page can say a lot about how you view Twitter as a tool.

Twitter is a tool, nothing more or less. If you use it the right way, the sky’s the limit. Otherwise, you are wasting your time and effort.

Have you ever been in a situation where you have wanted to host a chat about a specific blog post on your website but didn’t know how to get it done? Thanks to Nurph you can now turn any page into a Twitter chat room. All you have to do is provide Nurph with the URL of the page you want to send your visitors to and Nurph takes care of the rest. It puts a Twitter chat room on the top of that page and gives you an easy link to share with others you want to invite to your chat-room.

Here is how this site looks like when submitted to Nurph:

The process is quite simple. Your visitors will need to log in to your chat-room using their Twitter account, and they are ready to go (it’d be nice if the service supported other social networking sites as well). The service is still in beta, so you can expect a lot of changes to happen in the near future.

Here is the fun part. You can just pick up a Nurph It button from the site and turn every single page to a chat-room (if that’s what you are shooting for). The tool comes very handy for those who have gathered a following for their blog on Twitter and want to interact with those folks in real time. There is no better way to do it than having a real-time chat using Nurph. The web app is free and simple. It does not do the chatting for you, but it gives you and your followers an easy way to connect on your website.  Have fun Nurphing!

So you spend hours everyday updating your Twitter profile? Whether you use your Twitter account to keep track of your favorite links or just want to share your experiences with the world, you may have the opportunity to turn your Twitter posts into blog posts that make sense. For that to make sense, you will need to have Twitter updates that can be truly useful to your readers. It could be a collection of your links or other people’s stories that you have found interesting. But you want your Twitter posts to make sense. If you have a Twitter account that has some valuable content you can repackage as a blog post and run your blog on WordPress, Twitter Digest is your friend.

Twitter Digest for WordPress goes through your Twitter updates each day and creates a blog post from them. You can define post frequency, which is useful if you are not too active on Twitter.

The plugin is pretty flexible as well. You can modify your posts’ titles and even classify your Twitter posts under their own category (recommended). You can also change the order of your tweets and define the minimum number of tweets per each post.

Twitter Digest is not for everyone. If you are not taking your Twitter account seriously, you should stay away from this plugin. It can hurt your blog if nonsensical tweets are posted to your it by accident. Of course, if you have followed your Twitter plan so far, you already have an exclusive Twitter account for your blog. In that case, you should not have trouble using this plugin.

There are many people who spend hours everyday posting to their Twitter accounts and building relationships. In fact, all bloggers need to take time to get involved on Twitter and connect with others in their niche. Many assume that the more followers you have, the better off you are. That can’t be further from the truth. The quality of your followers is more important than the quantity (though I have to admit sometimes quantity can outweigh quality). Plenty of Twitter ranking tools pay more attention to the number of followers each Twitter user has instead of the quality. Now there is a tool that addresses that issue.

Trst.me is a simple to use Twitter tool that ranks you based on the quality of your followers, instead of just the quantity. It not only counts the number of followers that you have towards your ranking, but also the number of followers your followers have. In many ways, the algorithm used by Trst.me is similar to the one used by Google for its PageRank program (though there are differences).

Here is what my Twitter account looks like when using this service:

While it may be disappointing to be ranked that low by this service, this information can give me ideas how to improve the quality of my followers and take my account to the next level. I do tend to follow anyone who’s been kind enough to follow me (as long as they are not spamming). I have probably not done a good job connecting with more top Twitter users. These are things that can be fixed. It’s nice to get 100% Twitter scores on some of these sites, but the goal is not to have the most followers.

The service is still not perfect. The score is not niche specific. Let’s say I have an account on everything iPhone. Influential iPhone twitterers should get a higher score than those who just happen to be interested in iPhone news. So it’d be nice if one could get rankings in various categories or based on keywords. The good news is the tool is free, and the developers have promised more improvements in the future. It’d be interesting to see what they have in mind.

We have been hearing about the idea of smart social search engines for a while now. The current crop of search engines do a decent job of helping you dig up data and find new content to consume. But wouldn’t it be nice if you could have a tool that would analyze all the data and help you make decisions based on social networking communities’ feedback? That’s where RankSpeed comes in. It’s an innovative search engine that lets you find the best products and websites by conducting a sentiment analysis on twitterverse/blogosphere. The search engine goes through user-generated content online and searches for specific keyword phrases. It will then tell you how many people have given positive or negative feedback about the product your are searching for.

Here is an example of the information you will get when you use RankSpeed to search online (in this case I searched for the term “netbook”):

You can update your search results by applying good, popular, and other filters available to you through RankSpeed. You can also change the time-line and the matching criteria for your searches as well. What I like about RankSpeed is that it gives you the source of its information as well. So you can easily figure out who has tweeted about your product or website. It’s also possible to find people who are interested in (or are talking about) your brand.

RankSpeed is still in its early days and not perfect. But it is based on a very decent idea and can provide value if you need feedback on a website or product. If you are looking to go beyond what Google has to offer and want to find out what Twitter thinks of your product or service, RankSpeed can be a very useful tool.

There was a time when you could count solely on services such as Google to dig up information and get your research done. But these days it’s hard even for Google to keep up with all the content that is being generated in top social networks such as Twitter. While it’s true that Google and Bing are taking steps to integrate as much user generated information as possible in their search results, there is a lot of work ahead of them. Thankfully, there are powerful social search engines out there that help you go through user generated content on the web and get ideas for your blog or even your next product.

If you are looking for a search engine that lets you search through user-generated content on the web, these 5 social search engines may help you out:

Social Mention: a powerful social search engine that lets you search through blogs, microblogs, events, and other social networking services. You can think of it as your Google Alerts for social media as well.

Collecta: a real time search engine that can help you stay on the top of your niche and find out what people are talking about online in real time. Very powerful.

Topsy: one of the best Twitter search engines around. A lot of people are hooked on Tweetmeme, but I personally prefer the way Topsy presents information about discussions going on Twitter. It shows you who the influential twitterers are and what content they have tweeted about. It helps you find new content as well.

Twingly: Twingly not only allows you to search through micro-blogging platforms such as Twitter, it also enables you to find the best blogs on the Internet as well. A great tool to keep track of hot stories on the web.

Feedmile: as its slogan suggests, Feedmile is a feed search engine that can help you find what you are looking for by searching through social networks, blogs, podcasts, and other public media sources.

What’s your favorite social search engine?

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just write your blog posts and rely on your readers to spread the word about it on top social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook and connect with you on those sites? You can always use your blog to promote your social media profiles. In order to do that you will need to have proper call to actions on your blog to make sure your visitors do what you need them to do. If your content is top notch, people will have no problem connecting with you and following you. But don’t expect them to go out of their ways to do it. That’s why you need social media buttons on your blog. Social Follow is a simple service that lets you create your social media buttons and add them to your blog to give your visitors an easy way to connect with you on Twitter, Facebook, and other top social networking websites.

You can think of Social Follow as a profile aggregator. All you have to do is provide the service with your accounts information, and the service does the rest. Whether you are on only a few social networking sites or have presence on a dozen of them, Social Follow makes it easy to add them all to your blog fast.

You don’t necessarily have to add just Facebook or Twitter to your Social Follow button. There are plenty of other communities that you can choose and add to your button. You will need to have an account on those networks to do so. I do like the fact that you create buttons for your foreign visitors as well.

Overall, Social Follow is another one of those services that make it easy to share your social media profiles with the world. If you happen to have a popular blog, you owe it to yourself and your blog to encourage your visitors to connect with you on Facebook, Twitter, and beyond. The more people know about your content and connect with you on those sites, the better chance you have of getting your content checked out by more people.

Bring Twitter to your website is one of the best ways to get more traffic. One way to do that is by adding your content to Twitter from time to time. Of course, if you can get people to re-tweet your posts, your traffic is only going to grow. But there is more to Twitter than just sharing your posts on it. You can also use it to solidify your existing community and build new relationships. Jotabl is one example of a service that lets you do just that. It’s designed to help you integrate a shout-box on your website. Your visitors can use the box to give you instant feedback or share their thoughts about your posts on Twitter.

The process is pretty simple. You’ll have to have a Twitter account to take advantage of this service, but you won’t have to post to Twitter when you post an update to the shoutbox. When you are creating your shoutbox, you can filter swear words just to keep the trolls at bay.

The system gives you control over messages and users as well. You can delete messages that you deem harmful to your community. You can also ban the trolls from your shoutbox to allow others to enjoy a better conversation on your blog through your shoutbox. As mentioned above, you can also choose if you want to post your message to Twitter.

If you are looking for a simple way to build a more solid community around your blog with the help of Twitter, Jotabl comes in handy.

Here is a question a lot of new bloggers struggle with: how do you drive traffic to a blog? New bloggers are often less patient than the more experienced ones, but the question is very valid. Without traffic, you are not going to get the exposure you deserve for your work, and you are not going to be able to properly monetize your blog. It’d be hard to stay motivated if you work hard on your content only to see others who have much lower quality content get all the exposure and traffic you are not getting. But traffic may be nearer than you think. The social media is a great place to start if you want to significantly improve the amount of eyeballs that visit your pages. Websites such as Digg, Twitter, Reddit, and StumbleUpon are all very effective traffic drivers in their own ways, so you do want to make sure your content is being shared on those networks.

You can always add your content to the top social networking sites by yourself. But a better way to approach this is by giving your audience the tools it needs to spread the word about your content. You’d be surprised how effective this tactic can be. With that in mind, here are 5 methods to bring the social media to your blog:

Digg Digg: one of the best social media plugins for Wordpress platform. It’s very flexible and designed to enable your readers to add your content to their favorite networks fast.

Boost Post: if you don’t want to mess with plugins on your blog, you can always use this service to install the appropriate code on your blog. Add the services you prefer and copy & paste the code. That’s all.

Tweetmeme: not only one of the best web services to find out about the hot content on Twitter, it comes with widgets and chicklets you can use on your blog to encourage your visitors to follow you on Twitter and retweet your posts.

Socializer: it’s a simple bookmarking service that gives your readers even more options when it comes to sharing your content on the web. Great for more niche blog and those who just want their content to be promoted everywhere.

MyBlogLog: a cool service by Yahoo! that lets you build a more solid community around your blog. You can also grab the widgets available through this service to promote your activities on social networking websites.

There you have it. 5 exciting services that let you empower your readers and encourage them to share your content online. Of course, your content needs to be of high quality if you want to succeed.

Your take: what services are you using on your blog to help others promote your posts?