Friday, May 27, 2011

Twitter: How to Pre-Schedule Future Tweets

Often asked is how to best reach and engage your audience via Twitter.

The answer is twofold, in my opinion, (1) choose your words carefully so as to best capture the essence of the message to make it compelling AND (2) include a call to action.

Since the readership of your tweet (your followers, for the most part) is done serendipitously, you can not always be sure that your message will be read. In any case, a good idea may be to time the post (tweet) for lunch time or at the end of the day, when your followers might be taking a break from their work, and dipping into the Twitter stream.

So, you could pre-schedule your tweets. There are several tools to do this with. For example, here are some articles that review these tools:

Over the next couple of days, I will review these.  Does anyone use any of these and/or have a favorite tweet pre-scheduling app?

Thursday, May 12, 2011

How to get a QR code of a shortened URL

QR Code: URL <a href=http://sk.wikipedia.org/" style="border: none; display: block;" width="300" />

Image via Wikipedia

Here's how to get a QR code of a shortened URL.
  1. Go to is.gd
  2. Enter a long URL
  3. Hit the Enter/Return key or click on "Shorten!"
  4. see the shortened URL, which is pre-selected for immediate copying
  5. Click on "Give me this URL as a QR code"
For example, here is the shortened URL and QR code for google.com: is.gd/5JJNDX


QR code for google.com looks like this:


By The Way (BTW), and I quote...

The ethics of is.gd (and why you should support us!)

Our URL shorteners is.gd and v.gd are not only be fully featured and easy to use, but are also guaranteed to be run in a completely ethical manner. Here are some of the things that we feel make us an ethical service that you can trust, with some further information below: -

  • We pledge to support is.gd as a free service indefinitely and to not introduce charges for services we previously offered for free.
  • We pledge never to place 3rd party advertising on the site.
  • is.gd doesn't require registration and doesn't collect or track your personal details.
  • We are fully carbon neutral.
  • is.gd's development is driven by its users' interests, not by investors or shareholders.
  • We are hosted and run entirely from the UK and comply fully with its laws.
  • We make an API available free of charge so that other applications can harness is.gd.
  • We have a clear policy on what we don't allow is.gd to be used for. This includes use for spam, phishing, viruses, adware or child pornography.
  • We're one of the most proactive URL shorteners in preventing spam/misuse.
  • In running and staffing the site we will never discriminate on the grounds of race, age, gender, sexual orientation, disability, religion or how much you like cake.
  • We have a "small and friendly" approach to support - your emails will not be answered by a mindless corporate drone, in fact they're most often dealt with personally by is.gd's creator.
  • Our other URL shortener, v.gd, is the only major one we know of that makes a link preview page the default when visiting shortened URLs, so consider using that instead if the confidence of people who click your links is important to you (we'd have liked to do this for is.gd as well but had to drop the feature since it caused issues with some legacy uses of our URLs).


Related articles

Zemanta helped me add links & pictures to this email. It can do it for you too.

Crowdsource the policing of being spammed in Facebook "I know I should never speak about this here in fb, but I thought I would mess..."

Here is an example of what it looks like being spammed in Facebook. And I quote...

I know I should never speak about this here in fb, but I thought I
would message yóu from my new i Pad 2 that I just simþly obtaained for free.
Don't say to anyone but now there is a weebsite sendiing out free stuff tó
aany one that signs up.

that is wheré I got mine btw:
New Apple Company i Pad2 Marketresearch

Simply click on "Report Spam" and ignore the message. This helps the more people who report it. In other words, stop the bullying of spammers by reporting them. As soon as enough reports come in, Facebook will do something about it. Probably using a "Terms of Use" policy.

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