The Most Annoying Tweet Imaginable, in other words, would be overly long. It would contain stale information. It would #totally #overuse #hashtags. It would be excessively personal. It would be aggressively mundane. It would be whiny. All this, at least, according to a new study, released today, that explores what we like in our tweets — and what we find really, really off-putting. “Who Gives a Tweet: Evaluating Microblog Content Value” is the culmination of a year’s worth of analysis conducted by the researchers Paul André of Carnegie Mellon, Michael Bernstein of MIT, and Kurt Luther of Georgia Tech as they set to find out what separates value from vagary in a Twitter post. Last year, the team created a site, Who Gives a Tweet — essentially, a Hot or Not for microcontent — that asked users to designate a selection of tweets according to the emotional responses they provoked “positive,” “neutral,” “negative”. And then, intriguingly, to explain those responses in their own words. The team, with the help of Mechanical Turk, then analyzed the 43,000 crowdsourced responses they’d collected from the site, looking for patterns and takeaways that might help the rest of us to become better, more crowd-pleasing members of the Twittersphere.

via Be Better at Twitter: The Definitive, Data-Driven Guide – Megan Garber – Technology – The Atlantic.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon, MIT and Georgia Tech joined forces to get a sense of how most tweets go over. They created a website called Who Gives a Tweet? that was sort of like a Hot or Not for tweets: Users were promised feedback on their tweets if they agreed to anonymously rate tweets for people they already follow.Over 19 days in December and January, 1,443 visitors to the site rated 43,738 tweets from 2,014 accounts.The verdict? Respondents liked 36% of the tweets, disliked 25% and ranked their reaction to the remaining 39% as neutral. “A well-received tweet is not all that common,” Michael Bernstein, a doctoral student at MIT who worked on the project, wrote in a blog post. “A significant amount of content is considered not worth reading, for a variety of reasons.”

via Only About a Third of Tweets Are Worth Reading [STUDY].

It stands to reason that the United States, the birth-country of Twitter, would be the number one in terms of users. And it is. By far. But new stats have been unveiled that suggest that numbers don’t mean everything, and that the US is actually behind the Netherlands (and two other countries) in terms of how often they tweet.

Semiocast examined the geolocation data built into Twitter accounts (including time zones, language, GPS coordinates and declared location), and determined how many users various countries currently boast, and how active these users are on the network.

via The US Has The Most Twitter Users, But The Netherlands Is More Active [STATS] – AllTwitter.

What happened to the free Co-Tweet? The service’s parent company, ExactTarget, announced in a blog post this week that it will soon re-christen CoTweet as SocialEngage — a premium-only service the company says will feature enhanced integration and marketing powers. The free version will be gone forever.

via CoTweet Gone: Here Are 7 Great Alternatives.

Earlier today we announced a new version of Twitter that makes it easier for users to discover what’s happening now. As part of this release, we are introducing enhanced profile pages that help marketers create an even more compelling destination on Twitter for their brands.

via Twitter Advertising: Let your brand take flight on Twitter with enhanced profile pages.

Twitter isn’t the largest social network, but its users are very active and tend to be influential. As a result, more and more marketers are looking for ways to leverage the service. The challenge of course is that Twitter is distinctively different than other digital channels, so marketers still struggle to find the “right” way to engage.

In our just-published report about Twitter, we found that:

· Many successful uses of Twitter go beyond the marketing department. Alone, that’s probably not all that surprising. What’s particularly interesting though is that even when Twitter is used in non-marketing departments — like customer service, PR or even sales — interactive marketers are participating in the development of the channel to ensure that disparate accounts are strategically aligned.

· Twitter provides both an overwhelming amount of data and is dominated by a minority of influential users. This can be confusing to marketers because it often means that huge amounts of conversation are created by people who all seem to require a response. Handling that volume and depth of conversation can be particularly daunting. More daunting: Marketers need to be even more interesting and more relevant than the average influential user if they want to cut through the cluttered streams and engage their consumers.

· Perhaps to an even greater extent than other social networks you could leverage for your brand, Twitter engagement requires preparation. Marketers need to make sure that all stakeholders really understand the platform, how the brand’s customers use it, and the nuances of speaking with consumers on the brand’s behalf in just 140 characters. Then you’ll need to determine the purpose of each account the brand wants to open. Once those things are worked out, you can (and should) define your metrics and operational processes.

Forrester clients can read the full report here.

via Twitter: Is Anybody Doing It “Right”? | Forrester Blogs.

Twitter is a great way to gradually get to know someone, build up trust, and possibly create a relationship where there wasn’t one before. Most of what I’m about to tell you works in creating and improving many different kinds of business relationships, but I’m going to tailor this around public relations and getting to know journalists.

Here are 6 simple steps — that anyone can follow — to build credibility and relationships with journalists using Twitter. Done right, your publicity efforts can literally become inbound: journalists coming to you for quotes, interviews, and information. Here’s how to tackle the first steps..
Read more: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/29397/6-Easy-Twitter-Hacks-for-Schmoozing-Journalists.aspx#ixzz1iFPdoimr

via 6 Easy Twitter Hacks for Schmoozing Journalists.

Have you got the new Twitter.com yet? That was the question of the day at Mashable HQ Thursday, as the rollout of the service’s redesigned homepage seemed to defy rhyme or reason.Ostensibly, according to Twitter CEO Dick Costolo at Thursday’s unveiling in San Francisco, you would get the redesigned Twitter.com as soon as you downloaded the updated iOS or Android Twitter app. But that didn’t always work. Some of us got the new homepage without downloading an app; others downloaded the app and saw no change on the web.

via Hands on With the New Twitter.com [PICS].

Read also : http://mashable.com/2011/12/08/twitter-embeddeble-tweets-wordpress-posterous/

and : http://mashable.com/2011/12/09/new-twitter-tricks-tips/

As much as we tout Twitter for its conversational abilities — for its revolutionary capacity to create discursive, rather than simply distributive, relationships with news consumers — many major news organizations are still using the service as, pretty much, a vehicle for self-promotion. A new study, released today by Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, studied 13 news organizations, large and (relatively) small, from print, TV, and radio…and found that “mainstream news organizations primarily use Twitter to move information and push content to readers. For these organizations, Twitter functions as an RSS feed or headline service for news consumers, with links ideally driving traffic to the organization’s website.”

via Twitter, the conversation-enabler? Actually, most news orgs use the service as a glorified RSS feed » Nieman Journalism Lab.