View Click Stats on Bitly or Goo.gl Short URLs

You may already know that you can view click stats on Bitly short URLs by adding + to the end of the URL, like this:

http://bitly.com/LH9pqK+

But did you know adding + also works for any other service that shortens their URLs through Bitly, like Amazon?

http://amzn.to/wZsYV5+

You can also view data on Google short URL clicks by inserting the shortened ID of a goo.gl URL into a longer Google URL like this (I find that I have to click this link twice to see the metrics):

http://goo.gl/#analytics/goo.gl/9bHF1/week

How to Get More Twitter Followers Legitimately

The best way to get more Twitter followers is to follow more Twitter accounts. People who may not be aware of your account or who wouldn't find it any other way will be notified that you have followed them. They then become aware of your account any may choose to follow you - or block you if they suspect you are a spammer. If too many people block your account too fast, Twitter may suspend your account. The trick is to find accounts that will follow you back and not block you.

I tested two methods to identify Twitter accounts who are more likely to follow your account, and less likely to block you when you follow them. I call the first method Collaborative Following: accounts that follow several accounts similar to yours. This method resulted in a 49% follow back rate in a test of 495 follows. I call the second method Mutual Following: accounts that follow and are followed back by an account similar to yours. This method resulted in a 31% follow back rate in a test of 491 follows.

Method 1: Collaborative Following

1. Use Twitter's APIs to download list of your followers and people you follow. You can do this in Excel with data connections, or with web server scripts and a database.
   
   Download Twitter IDs of your followers (up to 5,000 IDs at a time):
   https://api.twitter.com/1/followers/ids.xml?screen_name=YourScreenName
   
   Download Twitter IDs of people you follow (aka friends, up to 5,000 IDs at a time):
   https://api.twitter.com/1/friends/ids.xml?screen_name=YourScreenName
2. Import the lists of your followers and friends into Excel or a database. Augment the IDs you get from those APIs with full information about the accounts. You can do this by pasting REST URLs in your browser, saving the results, and opening the files in Excel; of with web server scripts and a database.
   
   Download details about accounts (up to 100 at a time):
   https://api.twitter.com/1/users/lookup.xml?include_entities=false&user_id=1234,2345,3456
3. Identify 10 accounts you trust with between 4,000-10,000 followers each. If you don't know which accounts to choose, you can go with mutual follows (accounts you follow that follow you back), or with accounts from your competition or for similar interest groups. For example, if your account is about cats, you might use other accounts about cat lovers. These will be your targeted accounts.
4. Identify a few accounts with 4,000-10,000 followers each whose followers would not be interested in following your account. For example, if you account is about cats, you might choose accounts about dog lovers. These will be your anti-targeted accounts and will help you exclude users who are not interested in your subject area, or spammers who follow everyone.
5. Identify accounts that are willing to follow other accounts. Use the APIs described above to download IDs of accounts that follow your targeted and anti-targeted accounts. These are your prospects.
6. Generate counts of how frequently each prospect ID appears in the lists of those who follow your targeted accounts. You can do this in Excel with a pivot table, or in a database with SQL. If you identified 10 targeted accounts, this will be a number from 1-10.
7. Exclude anti-targeted account IDs from your targeted account IDs.
8. Exclude any IDs who follow fewer than 4 of your targeted accounts. These accounts have not expressed enough interest in your subject area.
9. Use the lookup API described above to augment the remaining IDs with full account details.
10. Remove IDs for any account that hasn't tweeted in the past 7-14 days. These accounts are not active enough to read your updates or follow you back.
11. Remove IDs for any account whose friends count is less than 90% of their followers count. These accounts don't show enough willingness to follow others.
12. Twitter only lets people follow up to the greater of 2,000 accounts or 10% more accounts than their own followers count. Remove IDs for any account who will be allowed to follow fewer than 10 more people. These accounts are going to be stingy with choices of whom to follow.
13. Remove IDs for any account that follows more than 10,000 accounts. These accounts get so many Tweets, yours will be lost in the noise. These accounts are more likely to be spam or brand accounts who may not really read Tweets anyway.
14. Identify a few negative words that identify accounts who would not be interested in your subject area. For example, if your account is about cats, you may want to avoid people who mention "dog" in their profile. Remove IDs of accounts who use these negative words in their descriptions.
15. These exclusions generally remove 42-48% of prospects. Of the accounts that remain, follow about 100 per day. This moderate rate of following will help keep the number of any account blocks per day at a low level.

Method 2: Mutual Following

1. Identify an account similar to yours with 4,000-10,000 followers that also follows 4,000-10,000 accounts. Accounts with comparable counts of followers and friends may indicate that the account owner has done some pre-filtering of follower quality for you.
2. Use the followers and friends APIs described above to download IDs of the targeted account's followers and friends.
3. Identify IDs that appear in both the followers and friends lists. These are your prospects.
4. Use The lookup API described above to augment prospect IDs with full account details.
5. Follow the same exclusion steps described above to remove anti-targeted accounts, inactive accounts, low following rates, limited following, high following counts, and negative words.
6. Of the accounts that remain, follow about 100 per day.

More SEO and Social META tags for Twitter and Google

Here are some more HTML META tags I just discovered:

Twitter Cards

Twitter Cards (announced in June 2012) are extended tweets that can show more than just 140 characters. Here are META tags to add to your page HEAD section to help Twitter pick the right parts your site's content.

The twitter:card tag can be summary (for a news article, blog post, or text-based page), photo (for an image or picture), or player (for video).

<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary" />

The twitter:site and twitter:site:id tags let you identify your own Twitter username, and official Twitter user ID. Most people won't know their Twitter user ID. If you don't, you can omit that META tag.

<meta name="twitter:site" content="@YourTwiterScreenName">
<meta name="twitter:site:id" content="1234567890" />

The twitter:url tag is for a link to your page.

<meta name="twitter:url" content="http://www.YourSite.com/path/pagename.html" />

Other tags are pretty self-explanatory:

<meta name="twitter:title" content="Your Page Title" />

<meta name="twitter:description" content="Your page description." />

<meta name="twitter:image" content="http://www.YourSite.com/image.jpg" />

Google+ OpenGraph

OpenGraph (og) META tags help Google Plus pull the right information from your page, in case anyone ever shares it on Google+. These are pretty self-explanatory.

<meta property="og:title" content="Your Page Title" />

<meta property="og:image" content="http://www.YourSite.com/image.jpg" />

<meta property="og:description" content="Your page description." />

<meta property="og:site_name" content="Name of Your Site"/>

Google Search Thumbnails

Google also uses a thumbnail META tag to present small images next to its search results from your site.

<meta name="thumbnail" content="http://www.YourSite.com/image.jpg" />

Twitter Advanced Search Operators

I just noticed Twitter documents its advanced search operators. The :) and :( searches are intriguing for brand research.

Operator	Finds tweets...
twitter search	containing both "twitter" and "search". This is the default operator.
"happy hour"	containing the exact phrase "happy hour".
love OR hate	containing either "love" or "hate" (or both).
beer -root	containing "beer" but not "root".
#haiku	containing the hashtag "haiku".
from:alexiskold	sent from person "alexiskold".
to:techcrunch	sent to person "techcrunch".
@mashable	referencing person "mashable".
"happy hour" near:"san francisco"	containing the exact phrase "happy hour" and sent near "san francisco".
near:NYC within:15mi	sent within 15 miles of "NYC".
superhero since:2010-12-27	containing "superhero" and sent since date "2010-12-27" (year-month-day).
ftw until:2010-12-27	containing "ftw" and sent up to date "2010-12-27".
movie -scary :)	containing "movie", but not "scary", and with a positive attitude.
flight :(	containing "flight" and with a negative attitude.
traffic ?	containing "traffic" and asking a question.
hilarious filter:links	containing "hilarious" and linking to URLs.
news source:twitterfeed	containing "news" and entered via TwitterFeed

Here's their Advanced Search form. You might also be interested in handy search bookmarklets from one of my previous posts.

Competing Against Free

It's not hard to understand that the most difficult problem the music industry faces today is the pervasive availability of free music. Now, when I say free, I mean stolen, but that is merely a semantic difference that is immaterial to how people are finding, playing, and acquiring music today. So I will call it "free" for the rest of this post.

Many people I talk to think free music went away when Napster went legitimate, or when the RIAA started suing their customer base. But free music is still as easy if not easier to either stream or download from the internet. Some sites only let you stream music, while others let you download. Many services are run in countries far from the music industry's influence. Other services skirt the illegal sharing problem by acting as hubs that link to music on other servers.

Here are just a few sites that let you play or download free music:

SkreemR.com - An MP3 search engine. SkreemR scans the web for MP3 links and adds them to its search index. Type a song or artist name and get a list of MP3 download links. Sure they also link to places like Amazon or ThumbPlay where you can buy MP3s or ring tones, but you can also stream and download the song for free. The finally-out-of-beta Songbird player (shown below) makes it even easier to download: it integrates a SkreemR search right in the player and converts free MP3 search results into a list complete with download buttons. You get free music to download to your PC or take with you on your portable MP3 player.



Songza - An MP3 search engine. Songza only lets you stream the results in an embedded player on their site, often in the form of a video from YouTube, but sometimes from MP3 audio source. As long as you don't mind playing music from your PC, you get all the free streams you want.

SeeqPod - An MP3 search engine that also powers other music experiences. SeeqPod only lets you stream results in an elaborate embedded playlist manager on their site. Warner filed suit against SeeqPod in January 2008. EMI filed suit in February, 2009.

Blip.fm - An addictive Twitter-like micro-blogging service with free music streams. Blip.fm lets you search for songs, and play them for yourself and the site's social network. Songs are served either from a web server where the MP3 was found, or from Amazon's AWS hosting service. Blip lets its users upload music. Though they tell users to only upload original content, they serve plenty of copyrighted music from AWS. They're ripe for being shut down by Amazon.

Project Playlist - An MP3 search engine with Facebook application. Project Playlist only lets you stream results, and add songs to a playlist on the site. You can find other people's playlists and play them. The RIAA filed a lawsuit against Project Playlist in April 2008. They claim that since they don't host MP3 files, they aren't liable for theft. EMI, in what gives the appearance of blackmail, dropped its suit after Project Playlist agreed to license their catalog.

Sideload.com - Organizes links to MP3s on other people's web sites into a streaming, locker, and mobile sideloading site. EMI filed a lawsuit in January 2009.

Note that several sites play music for free legally, either because they've negotiated on-demand playback rights from the labels (e.g. CBS Last.fm, Lala.com), or they play non- or minimally-interactive radio style playlists under US compulsory license laws (e.g. Pandora).

Though some of the illegal free music sites have no business model, or have a model that would collapse if any royalties were actually paid, the preponderance of these extra-legal sites is evidence that content owners would benefit from a simple, legal way to let innovative services access streams for a reasonable price. Without such a service, music will continue to be played, but no artists or labels will be paid for the usage.