Twitter Usage Best Practices

Excited to speak about my favorite social platform – actually Twitter became the source of my social success. It’s so great when your followers’ number grows and they are really your targeted audience waiting for some valuable content from your side every day. Love Twitter! Are you in the same boat with me? If yes, let’s go to some interesting facts on Twitter usage.

Hashtag Usage 

We all know that tweets without hashtags are almost useless. But bear in mind to keep the hashtags to a minimum - 1 or 2 will get you 21 percent more engagement than if you add 3 or more. Hashtags can occur anywhere in the tweet without limitations – at the beginning, middle, or end, the only important thing is to use hashtags relevant to the topic.  

Image Usage 

Along with hashtag usage, keep in mind to compose tweets with images. This gets twice more engagement than those without. Images catch attention as if making the reader anxious to see the content.    

URL Usage

Tweets can be composed with or without a URL. But the ones that include links are 86 percent more likely to be retweeted.

Topic Usage In general Twitter has no limitation of topic usage – you can speak of whatever you desire. In my opinion, it’s more useful to choose a few topics and make them your favorite ones. In this way you become a fan of the topic and you have a proper audience.

Character Usage
140 character usage is the only limitation on Twitter. But this doesn’t meant that we should use it all. The optimal tweet size is 120 characters, which makes it easy for everyone to RT, share, comment. Shorter tweets get more engagement that long ones. Tweets with less than 100 characters get 17 percent more engagement.

Mobile Usage
It’s not a secret that mobile engagement changed the online presence. Twitter says that 60 percent of its active user base accesses the service via mobile devices. Compete found that 18 to 34 year olds are 21 percent more likely to be logging into Twitter primarily via a mobile device.

Date Usage
Many of us use social platforms (mostly for brand engagement) throughout the week. Only 19 percent of brands tweet on the weekends, Twitter engagement is 17 percent higher on those days for brands. So it’s wise to use some services, which allow you to schedule tweets. It makes your life easier, you can schedule for weekends, whole week, why not for a month?

80 percent of world leaders use Twitter. What about you?

2015 – Starting a New Year with the Best Tech Deals

The internet of things? Can we learn about the future peering into the past? If so, this year will also be a promising one, as 2014 has been marked as the most active year in technology. Before that, 2000 was the most active one.

Numerous acquisitions happen each month, but to make my posts shorter, I select the most important deals only. Surely they are important from my personal point of view; anyway hope that my readers will share the same opinion.

The same “giants” all the time – as if conquering the heights. Do they need the products or the talents, or maybe both? Never remember any company announcing about that.

Year started with social deals – two Facebook acquisitions with two-day interval – not bad. Then Twitter joint the list with its ZipDial acquisition. Ok, let’s switch to the list, not to miss anyone. 

06 January - Facebook Acquires Wit.ai to Help Its Developers With Speech Recognition and Voice Interfaces
Facebook acquired Wit.ai, a Y Combinator startup founded 18 months ago to create an API for building voice-activated interfaces. Wit.ai already has 6,000 developers on its platform who have built hundreds of apps. The Wit.ai product lets developers add a few lines of its code to instantly build in voice control and speech recognition. The platform will remain open and free.  

08 January - Facebook Acquires Video Compression Startup QuickFire
Facebook acquired video-compression company QuickFire Networks, further underscoring the social networking giant’s increasing focus on video. Based in San Diego, QuickFire says, it can quickly convert video formats and allow them to be downloaded with less bandwidth and without a loss in video quality. 

20 January – Twitter Acquires India-Based 'Missed Call' Startup ZipDial

Twitter announced that it has acquired Bangalore-based ‘missed call’ marketing platform, ZipDial, which assigns companies a special phone number which their brands can use in print ads or TV commercials. Customers can call the number and hang up before they are charged for the call. In turn, brands can phone or send text messages about their business to the ‘missed callers’. ZipDial’s clients include Unilever, Disney, Gillette, Amazon, Facebook and, of course, Twitter, whose customers have used the platform for placing orders, receiving coupons or entering contests. 

20 January – Microsoft Acquires Text Analysis Startup Equivio, Plans to Integrate Machine Learning Tech into Office 365

Microsoft announced it has acquired text analysis software startup Equivio, which uses machine learning to let users explore large, unstructured sets of data. The startup’s technology leverages advanced text analytics to perform multi-dimensional analyses of data collections, intelligently sort documents into themes, group near-duplicates, and isolate unique data. 

21 January – Apple Buys UK Startup Semetric to Power up Its Media Analytics
Apple has acquired Semetric, the London-based startup behind music analytics service Musicmetric.  While Musicmetric seems an obvious fit with iTunes and Beats Music, Semetric has also been working on analysing data for games, TV, movies and books so will enhance Apple’s understanding of data around all the digital products it sells. 

23 January – Microsoft to Acquire Revolution Analytics to Help Customers Find Big Data Value with Advanced Statistical Analysis

Microsoft has reached an agreement to acquire Revolution Analytics - the leading commercial provider of software and services for R, the world’s most widely used programming language for statistical computing and predictive analytics. This acquisition will help more companies use the power of R and data science to unlock big data insights with advanced analytics. 

23 January – Mobile Network Three to Buy O2 in £10bn Deal 

Asia’s richest man is poised to take control of the UK’s biggest mobile phone network, after Three announced it had started exclusive takeover talks with its larger rival 02. The deal would create the UK’s largest mobile phone firm with 31.5 million customers, cutting the number of network owners in the UK from four to three.

Age of Mobile

Mobile, smartphones, iPhones - here what we hear every now and then. A little more than a decade ago no one could believe that in such a short time mobile will play such a big role in our life. By 2015, 81% of US cell users will have smartphones.

Mobile being a pocket-sized computing device has become an inseparable part of our routine. Remember yourself, when you, by a great mistake, forgot your phone at home – you are lost, you seem to be cut from the whole world. Or, imagine your child has left the phone at home - what happens to you? And you start to wonder: how could people do without a phone before?

Yes, mobile is really a great addition to our lives and now we use it not only for calling and messaging, even many people use it for other purposes more than for its main functionality. It became our newspaper, alarm clock, watch, photo album, map, radio, video, travel guide, organizer, game zone and much more. Even while shopping many people should look up other local stores’ pricing before buying something (73% of consumers say they have used their mobile phone in a store). In short – mobile revolutioned our lives.

Most of the population almost never leaves their phone - while watching TV, eating and even going to the bathroom. 75% of Americans admit to bringing their phone to the bathroom, Digiday.

Here are some interesting facts about mobile:

• 91% of all people on earth have a mobile phone, WalkDigital 
• 29% of the world’s mobile users live in India and China, Mobithinking 
• 50% of mobile phone users use mobile as their primary Internet source, WalkDigital 
• The average person checks their smartphone 34 times a day, WalkDigital 
• 39% of mobile users access social networks from their phones, Business Insider
• By 2016, 88% of local advertising will be delivered on a mobile device, WalkDigital