True, Twitter is an amazing social media tool that connects people together, but with 26 million users strong there’s bound to be a few bad apples in the mix. As Twitter’s popularity has increased so has the prevalence of spammers. So, if you’re finding yourself perpetually inundated with direct messages (DM) like “here is something you will like [insert Bit.ly link here]” then we’ve got some simple suggestions to help you cut down the clutter.

1. Follow @Spam

This is the official Twitter spam reporting site and it’s the first step in reporting spammy tweeps. Let them know who’s spam blasting by identifying the person’s Twitter handle. By reporting spammers you’re making it easier for Twitter to put a stop to their unwanted activities.

2. Report Spam Directly

If you’ve set-up auto-following through a service like SocialOomph you’ll need to comb through the list of people that you’re reciprocating follows with and determine whether they’re actual spammers so that you can manually report them. When you use an auto-follow feature and a spammer comes along to follow you, your Twitter account automatically returns the follow. The only way to remove and block the spammer is find them in your follow list, or by searching their Twitter handle and clicking the gear shift icon. This will open a drop down list where you can choose to report the account as spam.

3. Perform Routine Spam Checks

If you have less than 100 followers it should be fairly simple to do a manual check for any spammers and mark them for deletion (don’t forget to report them too). But if you have an account with thousands of followers how do you police it? You do it with a tool called Twitblock. This is a fantastic application and it’s simple to use. Just allow it to access your Twitter account and click the ‘scan for spam’ button. Depending upon how many tweeps are following you the scan can take a few minutes. Absolutely worth waiting for the results.

4. Use SocialOomph

A ton of people use SocialOomph to send out auto-DMs with their auto-follow settings. The nice thing is that as a Twitter tool, SocialOomph recognizes that not everyone wants to receive these unsolicited messages. All you need to do is follow the steps that @optmeout features on their Twitter account:

1. Follow @optmeout
2. Wait for follow back
3. Send them a DM
4. Unfollow @optmeout

Easy as pie.

Helpful Tip

Most people have a ton of DMs in their Twitter accounts. Unfortunately, Twitter doesn’t offer a simple way to bulk delete them. Here’s an easy work-around to get old DMs removed at the same time once and for all. Head on over to Damon Cortesi’s Blog and scroll down a smidge until you locate Bookmarklet: DM Whacker.

Next, make sure that you’re logged into your Twitter account. Once you are click the home link and then your direct message link. You must have your direct messages open in order to install and use the bookmarklet. Select the DM Whacker link and drag it to your web browser’s toolbar. Open your Twitter direct messages and click the newly installed DM Whacker and you’ll be presented with the option to delete all DMs or to delete based on who sent them to you.

You can further customize your delete options from this point. Click the delete button and the DM Whacker will work its magic. Instant bulk deletion.

Was this information helpful? Let us know about other Twitter tools you’re using to manage spam. We’d love to hear from you.

A retweet on Twitter is a simple, but powerful ways to take your content that you’re sharing with current followers and potentially making it viral. When someone retweets (RT) what you’ve posted the message goes beyond your personal follower pool. It’s instantly sent to other new tweeters, which exponentially increases awareness about your brand through your tweet. Similar to other social media phenomenon, a RT is more coveted than achieved, but by following some of the suggestions below you can finesse your tweets to make them retweet-worthy in no time.

1. Retweet Others

Famous Beatle and singer/song-writer John Lennon once said, “the love you take is equal to the love you make,” and that same philosophy can be applied to Twitter. You need to retweet other tweeps if you want them to retweet you. This doesn’t mean that you need to go on a RT rampage. Pick and choose good tweet content that is worth sharing and make it happen through a retweet. Include @reply so that they’re looped in on your generous efforts.

2. Embrace Hashtags

Overuse of hashtags can appear spammy so employ them sparingly. Because hashtags organize tweets so that people can follow them based on category you have a good chance getting your retweet pushed out to many like-minded tweeps at the same time. In other words, a hashtag is like a group. For instance, if you sent a tweet about your award winning chocolate chip cookie recipe and add #cookies to your tweet it will show up in the #cookies hashtag feed and everyone reading that feed will see your tweet. If you want to know how hashtags are trending or being used visit Hashtags.org.

3. Short And Sweet

Twitter has a 140 character limitation on all tweets. The character cap seems even tighter when you factor in a shortened URL, @reply, hashtag and retweet. So, when you craft your tweets think about the other elements that can encroach on the 140 characters. Your tweet should be short, succinct and simple so that your tweeps know what it’s about and when it comes through as retweet it won’t be partially dissected by Twitter.

4. The Best Time

A-list blogger and social media expert Dan Zarella spent some time analyzing and evaluating retweet data to determine if there were certain days or times that favored retweets in comparison to others. Zarella observed that beginning in the morning business hours on Eastern Standard Time (EST) the quantity of retweets steadily increases. Additionally, content that begins as a tweet during this same timeframe will gain a significant number of retweets than original content posted in during other times.

There has been additional debate about specific hours throughout the day that tend to yield more retweets versus others. Some people believe that the hours after lunch and at the end of the work day are when the largest percentage of retweets occurs, however, because concrete data is unavailable we’ve refrained from exploring this area in our blog post.

5. Ask For It

If you want to get something retweeted then ask for it in your tweet. Sounds simple enough, but surprisingly many people choose not to include a call-to-action on their tweets.

How are you using retweets to drive traffic to your blog? What results have you seen? Add a comment or two down below.

As powerful as social media is perceived to be there’s still quite a bit of mystery that surrounds it. Brands recognize that they need to be involved, but they’re struggling with assigning a dollar-value on social media exposure and how it equates to revenue. Because there aren’t any tools or systems in place that can spit out data on a company’s return on investment (ROI) for increasing its Twitter followers many businesses find themselves wondering if they’re just spinning their profit wheels in a social media mudslide.

It should come as no surprise that brands small and large share common concerns regarding social media. Even though concerns may be similar brands should be aware that they’ll need to exercise different strategies depending upon whether they’re B2C or B2B. Aside from defining goals and strategies, here are some of the social media obstacles that may confront brands.

1. Choosing the right social media channels.

Brands that know who their target market is and what communities they belong to can integrate those niche social sites into their strategies. Using a blend of social media dominators like Facebook and Twitter with other focused social sites might be a good launch point for some brands. The truth is that the right social channels are the ones where your audience engages itself and that are also right for your brand.

2. Converting fans and followers into customers.

You might be surprised to find out that most of your brand’s supporters are already customers. These people have interacted with your brand on some level and they’re proudly supporting it by liking, following or subscribing to the news that you share. Make it worthwhile for your brand loyalists to enjoy special perks, discounts and sneak previews that others might not be privvy to. Preferential treatment isn’t a bad thing in the land of social media. When word leaks out that your brand awards BOGO offers to Facebook fans each month you can bet that it will be taken advantage of.

3. Creating impactful social media campaigns.

Often brands will find themselves in a creative rut and unable to pull together a meaningful social media campaign. No matter who you are take comfort in knowing that we’ve all been there and this is a challenge that will probably surface from time to time. When you plan a campaign try to build it with your audience in mind, not for yourself. Remember that a campaign isn’t a press release or a widget – it’s an actual strategy. Position, objectives, strategy, tactics and key messages are the core campaign components. Layer in video, blogs, newsletters, PPC and other elements to make your campaign memorable, and sustainable.

4. Managing social media productivity.

One of the most commonly quoted challenges from brands is not being able to budget time and productiveness for social media. Without a plan in place, social media activity can be a major time suck. Execute each social media action with an objective in mind and keep your focus on the task at hand. If you’re responding to customer inquiries on Twitter, only respond to customer inquiries. Avoid jumping over to LinkedIn to see what your groups are buzzing about.

5. Increasing subscribers and fans.

Hands down this is one of the biggest challenges for all brands. Unless you’re a brand that’s been arounds for decades or who has a national presence like Starbucks or McDonald’s, you’re not going to have millions upon millions of fans. Keep scalability in mind and don’t get caught up in what other international brands are doing. Next, remember to share information that your audience would like to know and would appreciate having. This doesn’t mean an endless barrage of details about your brand. It means pulling good, credible data from other sources and funneling it down to your loyalists.

There are plenty of other challenges that brands are facing and will continue to face. This is just a handful to get your wheels turning and to think constructively about how to overcome them.

Let us know what some of your brand challenges are and share with us below.

From Denmark to Detroit, social media is a worldwide phenomenon that seems to be part addiction and part necessity. With Facebook’s recent announcement that it’s hit 500 million users and Twitter’s move toward advertising with @earlybird it’s becoming more apparent that if you want to get the word out about your business you need to step into the social media arena. However, all the excitement about social media doesn’t mean much if you can’t decipher what it means and what it’s doing. Analytics to social media are like a compass to a navigator – if you don’t understand where you’re at you won’t know where to go.

If the thought of analytics and numbers makes you shudder you’re not alone. There are more people than not who feel intimidated by numerical data. The two toughest aspects of social media analytics are interpreting information and deciding what analytic tools best meet your needs. Fortunately, basic analytics doesn’t require a PhD in statistics and the internet is filled with outstanding free tools and resources to help make metric crunching easy. So, if you can’t afford enterprise-level services like Scout Labs, Radian6 or Sysomos, you’ll want to check out some of the freebies below to help you get a grip on your analytics.

Blogs

Use PostRank to help rank your blog content and news and and to determine what your fans are reading, sharing and organizing. It also identifies what your most popular posts are in your RSS feed.

Think of BlogPulse as a search engine for blogs and their posts. It’s similar to Technorati, but it provides additional views such as trending and conversations so that you can see search competitive topics and how other blogs are ranking.

Comments

Beyond standard search for keywords and brand names you’ll want to penetrate what’s being discussed in blog commenting systems too. That’s where YackTrack comes in. Simply enter your keywords or terms to see a nicely organized list that you can drilldown to get specific mentions from.

Branding

One of the more substantial branding tools available is Social Mention. It aggregates user generated content from across multiple social media platforms and streamlines outcomes into a very simple and easy to interpret web page. The one thing Social Mention doesn’t do is show a report over time. A work around this missing feature is to create an Excel spreadsheet and manually enter daily data that you gather. Otherwise, it’s a great (and free) tool.

Perhaps more of an entertainment tool rather than a true metric evaluator, How Sociable measures your brand’s keywords throughout 32 different social media sites. There’s some confusion around the ‘visibility score’ that How Sociable has developed and not all data appears to be accurate. For example, if you run a search on iPhone it yields a visibility score of 9,453 and a Google PageRank score of zero. Odd to say the least. Looks like brand visibility metrics might have a few glitches, but it’ still worth exploring.

Trends & Topics

Head over to Addict-o-Matic and enter a unique search term, brand or product name or just about anything and it will perform a search that delivers the buzz (or results) broken down by social media platform. It’s a very convenient snapshot that let’s you look at your social reach and the social sites where you have more presence in comparison to others.

Twitter

There are so many Twitter tools available that deciding which one to use can be a daunting task. For the purpose of benchmarking your brand against your competition, Twitalyzer is ideal. It shows you what social media strategies are working and what’s not, which makes it easy to adjust social media campaigns to maximize better results.

The power of influence is a core component in any social media campaign. Knowing who has better reach and strength and engaging with them can help persuade your audience to promote your brand. Klout measures influence as it relates to your brand through Twitter. You can identify which customers and communities are more likely to become brand evangelists and work with them to drive conversations.

Another hand Twitter tool is TweetStats. You can graph how many tweets per hour, day and month, as well as look at your tweet timeline and reply statistics. TweetStats is a fantastic way to track your level of interaction and look at areas that need improvement.

Google

Google Analytics (GA) may leave you feeling unnerved, but it actually does a tremendous job on tracking numbers and data. We’ll save GA how-tos for a future post. In the meantime, use PageRank Checker to see what Google thinks of your site. Using a scale from zero to 10, with 10 holding the most authority, you can run a quick search to find out how you rank.

In order for GA to actually work on your website you need to install tracking code on each page that you want the Google bot spiders to crawl. To make sure that you’ve set-up your code use SiteScan to confirm that you’ve performed a correct installation. Although SiteScan and PageRank Checker aren’t direct analytic tools they are helpful in gauging Google-related tasks and standards.

Competitive

Quarkbase has been touted as the ‘imdb.com for websites’. By entering a website’s URL you are presented with names of people associated with the site, traffic data, social popularity, site description and sites that are similar. This is one of the best free competitive research tools available. Data can be used to help you better position your brand and establish goals and objectives.

There you have it. Granted, there are so many tools, free and paid, that accessible on the web, we hope that this short list gets you moving in the right direction.

What are some of the other free tools that you’re using? How do you make them work for your brand and what do you like best about them? Share with us.

If you’re looking for a Twitter solution that combines both marketing and management then you absolutely must check out Market Me Tweet. Before you roll your eyes at the thought of yet another Twitter tool you’ll be happy to know that Market Me Tweet is a true stand-out from the pack of Twitter apps that have permeated the social media realm. What sets Market Me Tweet apart from the competition is its branding capabilities and that’s good news for businesses small and large.

For the most part, Market Me Tweet is similar in scope to the Hootsuite dashboard and its functionality. Users can integrate multiple Twitter accounts to track and tweet too. It can monitor keywords, schedule tweets in advance, track conversation threads, follow and unfollow users, autotweet RSS feeds and much more. As previously mentioned, the big difference is that it allows users to ‘brand’ their tweets.

For instance, if you’ve ever sent a tweet using a tweet client like TweetDeck, Tweetie or Hootsuite, you’ve probably noticed each tweet is labeled with a backlink to the application used to generate the tweet.

With Market Me Tweet you have the ability to customize your own branded backlink that not only features your business, site or blog name, but let’s you choose the URL to link back to. In essence, you can optimize your brand and drive traffic back to your site.

The benefits of being able to brand, optimize and create backlinks to each of your tweets is a home run for your online social presence. For every single tweet that you send and that someone else retweets you’re creating additional exposure via a customized backlink. Incredible!

Of course all amazing tools come at a price, but the nice thing is that Market Me Tweet is reasonably affordable. There are several monthly price plans available to suit your individual or professional needs. The investment that you make will pay back in spades, especially when you consider how many backlinks your tweets will be generating throughout the Twitter-sphere.

Are you already using this revolutionary tool? What type of success are you seeing? Drop a line and keep us posted.