Argos (my Weimaraner) is 9 months old now, and as he’s a family pet (i.e. not for breeding) I decided it was time to get him desexed. Getting your pet desexed (spayed or neutered) can have many benefits both the owner and the pet, as well as being the responsible thing to do if it’s not a breeding animal.

I booked Argos in for his procedure with the lovely staff at Zillmere Veterinary Surgery and they were so kind as to take photos of the whole procedure for me. If you’ve ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes at a vet surgery, these pictures should give you some insight.

In addition to the castration, Argos also received his yearly heartworm injection. Before surgery, the vet ran a blood test to check for any pre-existing conditions, and also to provide a baseline for future tests. Zillmere Vet has a great article about why you should consider a blood test for your pet over on their blog.

At 32.7kg, Argos isn’t exactly a lightweight. I was intrigued to see some of the equipment used during surgery, including the “Pawsitioner” below. There are some more surgery photos below, but don’t worry – I left the gory ones out!

Above you can see the tattoo that’s placed inside the dog’s ear to mark that he has been desexed. Below is a picture of something unique that I’d never heard of before. Photonic therapy is being used to minimise swelling and help stimulate healing post surgery. Here some more information that Zillmere Vet gave me about the treatment:

“The McLaren Photonic torch is providing our patients with extremely high levels of pain relief. This laser therapy is useful for painful conditions including relief from arthritic pain, and chronic or acute pain following major surgical procedures or trauma.

The McLaren Photonic Torch was developed in 2003 and is based on information developed by Dr Brian McLaren, who has studied in depth the scientific reason for how light, stimulates tissue.

Photonic Therapy is intended to provide a simple to use, safe and painless healing process, through the use of single colour light to stimulate the body at the cellular level. To put it simply it is the scientific application of light to specific acupoints to activate or produce particular physiological results. Stimulating specific combinations of acupoints on the skin will cause the brain to release particular hormones and other neuro-chemicals to relieve pain, increase immune response and promote healing. Acupoints are areas of skin that have increased electrical conductance.”

Above: Some post-surgery cuddles aid in speeding up the recovery! (I’m sure)
Below: Argos recovering under a nice warm blanket.

Argos recovered from surgery quite quickly. The vet phoned me during the day to say he’d already woken up and had plenty of appetite, and that I could come and collect him early. He was a bit wobbly on his legs, but very happy. I couldn’t resist taking the photo below – he looks so dopey!

After a few hours, Argos was right as rain. He had to wear an Elizabethan collar for a few days, as he kept licking at the surgery site and I didn’t want him to rip the stitches out!

Thank you to the wonderful team at Zillmere Veterinary Surgery for their excellent care of Argos, their attention to detail, and their willingness to explain the procedure and take photos! I really can’t enough about how great everyone at Zillmere Vet is. They even called a few days later to see how the recovery was going. It’s no wonder they’ve won a Best Business Award from WOMO, and were finalists in the Quest Business Achievers awards. Keep an eye on their blog and Facebook page to keep up to date with the latest happenings.

I’ve written several blog posts on Socialable about some of my favorite and most used Twitter tools but I thought it would be a good idea to create a series of 101 of the top social media and blogging tools.  So here is the first in the series – and it made sense to start with Twitter seeing as it’s my social media “weapon of choice” and generates over 50% of the traffic to Socialable.

Dashboards

1. Hootsuite Hootsuite is undoubtedly one of my favourite and most used social media tools.  I literally couldn’t manage my own social media let alone all our clients without it.  A very easy to use dashboard for engagement, scheduling messages, responding to Twitter messages, direct messages etc.  It also has a host of reporting and measuring features although I prefer to use other tools for this.  It recently launched the ability to send messages at optimum times (similar to the Buffer feature which I love).  Also available on the go with your smart phone.

2. TweetDeck  Bought by Twitter back in 2011 you would think that this would be the top dashboard for Twitter.  Whether it will still be here for 2013 remains to be seen as the latest news cites that it risks closure over repeated failure to file financial records.

3. MarketMeSuite This great social media dashboard is similar to Hootsuite and TweetDeck. You can use it to manage and market on multiple social profiles, schedule messages across social networks, use Geo-targeting to locate customers nearby and many others.

4. SproutSocial SproutSocial has everything you need to enhance your social media effectiveness: monitoring, engagement, measurement and growth. You can use it to schedule updates, monitor your brand and your competition, find targeted customers, and measure your success with analytics.

5. Plugg.io This great management tool for Twitter and Facebook allows you to manage multiple accounts and separates Tweet streams, to make it easier to manage. It also helps you get more followers with their friend suggestions, and helps you “tweet awesome stuff” by plugging into your favorite blogs and news sources.

6. SpredFast A useful dashboard that you can use it to manage your social media as well as monitor and measure your voice (including uploading videos) across multiple social media platforms from one place.

7. MediaFunnel With MediaFunnel you can manage as many as 25 different social media channels. Features also include monitor brand and keyword mentions, talk with your audience from one place, assign and manage customer requests and drive traffic to your landing page and blog. It also allows for multiple users and roles.

8. Cotweet This is a great social media management tool that also has a free version. Use it for engagement, brand building, customer support, advanced workflow, analytics, third-party integrations and productivity tools. They also have a mobile app and show a very comprehensive profile of each of your followers that helps you understand them better.

9. Netvibes You can use Netvibes to keep track of news and trends, to create fun personalized widgets, monitor your account in real time, get your analytics and find out what people think of you.

10. Sysomos Sysomos is another great dashboard that has everything you might need for your social media engagement. They offer a real time monitoring dashboard, analytics and insights (including sentiment, demographics and influencers), engagement and management of all your social profiles, not just Twitter. No free trial though – but you can request a demo of this tool used by big brands such as Coca-Cola, McDonalds and Microsoft.

11. Argyle Social Argyle Social is a dashboard that you can use for all of your social media engagement needs: publishing content, engaging with followers, analytics and a new feature, Argyle Social Contacts, that helps you “connect the dots between social relationships and customer relationships.”

12. Splitweet this very basic free Twitter tool helps with the easy management of multiple Twitter accounts. As I said before, it’s very basic: you have all of your accounts in one place, where you can follow all of your contacts’ tweets easily and monitor your brand and reply to tweets.

13. BirdHerd This basic Twitter dashboard is specifically designed for Twitter management by teams and groups. Get your entire team to post, send messages and monitor Twitter accounts from one place, and control who posts what.

Automated Tools

14. SocialOomph is another great Twitter tool that I use on a regular basis.  As far as I’m aware it’s the only tool in the marketplace where you can send recurring scheduled updates. You can manage multiple Twitter accounts from it.  As well as scheduling tweets you find people, keyword alerts, send welcome messages to new followers and a lot of other great features.

15. Bufferapp is another one of my favourite Twitter tools.  You can schedule all of your articles, pictures and videos and Buffer will “automagically” share them for you. Their “optimum time” posting is a great feature and I mainly use Buffer for this purpose.  Also has the ability to manage multiple accounts and invite your whole team to use it. You can also get free and detailed analytics on all of your posts. Buffer also offer buttons and browser extensions and a mobile app for iPhone and Android.

16. Twuffer Twuffer is an easy and free-to-use Twitter tool that allows you to schedule tweets for the future. If you want to make sure that you never forget to announce your future releases, and that you appear to never sleep, than Twuffer is the perfect tool for that.

17. Dlvr.it If you are tired of having to schedule tweets and posts every time you finish a new article than try Dlvr.it. It’s a great way to remove the hassle of having to promote your blog posts all the time. And the greatest part is that it doesn’t work only with Twitter, but also with Facebook and LinkedIn.

18. Twitterfeed If you have a blog and want to link it to your Twitter feed with minimal effort, than Twitterfeed is another useful tool. It enables you to send a tweet just as soon as you publish your latest blog post.

Analytics

19. TweetReach is an interesting tool that shows you “how far your tweet traveled”. Simply type in your Twitter handle on this free service, and you can find out how many accounts you’ve reached with your last 50 tweets, what were your most retweeted tweets, who are your top contributors are and much more useful information.

20. TwitterCounter this is another free useful tool. It shows you all of your most basic Twitter stats in a fun, interactive way. You can also get different widgets and buttons to put on your blog or website that show your recent Twitter visitors and follower numbers.

21. TweetStats is a stats tool that graphs your Twitter stats for you. It can show you graphs of your tweets per hour and per month, your tweet timeline and reply statistics. However, because it is free, it takes quite long to load your stats, depending on how many other people are using the service at the same time.

22. Vizify A great, free and very fun analytics tool. Simply enter your name and you will see your basic Tweeter activity – retweets, tweets that got no response, geographic locations of followers, most retweeted tweets, best followers, favorite themes.  All of this information is presented in a attractive and very fun infographic.

23. Twitonomy this is an amazing and free tool that is still in its beta stage. I was really impressed with it because for a free tool, it has quite a few different methods of analysis: tweets and retweets, replies, mentions, hashtags, links, followers and people you are following, tweets per day of the week and per hours of the day…and the list goes on! They also provide some interesting ratios that will show you if you are on the right way or if you should change your Twitter tactics.

24. TweetGrader  A free tool that is powered by Hubspot. It’s a very simple and easy to use tool that will show you your twitter ranking/grade. It will tell you how influential you are on Twitter, based on a number of factors, such as the number and power of your followers and your level of engagement within the community.

25. TweetTronics TweetTronics looks at what people are saying to one another in real-time and then analyzes that data and converts it into “understandable results that you can act on”. It is an interesting tool, although it doesn’t offer too many features, like other analytical tools.

26 Twentyfeet Track all your Twitter and Facebook stats from one place. All you have to do is aggregate all your stats and they will notify you by email whenever your attention is needed.  I wrote a more in-depth review on Twentyfeet here.

27. Twitalyzer Twitalyzer is an amazing analytics tool that uses a plethora of different metrics. They also integrate data from Rapleaf, PeerIndex and Klout.

28. Backtweets if you want to know who is sending people back to your website, than there is an easy, quick and free way to do it: Backtweets. Simply enter the keywords in the search bar, and you will see all the tweets that link back to your site. And the best part is that URLs are found no matter the form they were tweeted in, whether they were full URL links or shortened URLs.

29. WhoTweetedMe this “contagious content analytics” from Hubspot will analyze URLs and shows you the most influential retweeters, potential reach and timelines. It works best on blog post URLs that are no older than 2 weeks.

30. Foller.me gives you rich insights into any public Twitter profile, with near real-time data about topics, mentions, hashtags, followers, location and more. It’s a great tool to find out not only how you are getting along on Twitter, but also your competition.

31. CrowdBooster If you want to get your Twitter analytics and suggestions and tools from the same place, than try CrowdBooster. Connect either with your Twitter account or with your Facebook account to get targeted recommendations, insights about each message, follower and fan growth over time and deep audience insights. You can also view your Twitter and Facebook accounts from the same, centralized place.

32. Visibli This social marketing and analytics tool helps you optimize your social media engagement. Visibli provides detailed, real-time analytics for all the links you shared on Twitter and helps you optimize your content for maximum engagement.  Their engagement bar is very useful and by using it I’ve seen an increase in my traffic.

33. Bottlenose This great tool provides you with live social intelligence by analyzing activity across all the major social networks. You can use it to search, monitor, analyze, target and engage in real-time – all from one place.

Get more engagement

34. InboxQ if you want to establish new relationships, get relevant followers and engage with more people, than try InboxQ. It is a great tool that will find questions on Twitter matching the keywords you choose. This way you can start a conversation with someone that is interested in the same thing you are. You can also add the InboxQ app to your Hootsuite account.

35. Tweriod this simple tool has a very specific feature. It analyzes your tweets and your follower’s tweets in order to find out when your followers are online. This way, you will know when the best time to tweet is, and you will reach a lot more people.

36. Tinker is a great tool that you can use to help with your Twitter (and Facebook) engagement. Simply enter a topic or a few keywords in the search bar and discover and join the top conversations on Twitter and Facebook.  Great way to build new relationships and meet new people.

37. ITweetLive This innovative tool helps you converse with up to thousands of different Twitter users every day in just a few steps. It uses a Conversational Artificial Intelligence search engine that uses advanced Natural Language Processing and clustering tools to gather similar status updates, provide response suggestions based on real-time Twitter analytics, and measure engagement levels.

Finding Followers

38. NearbyTweets find out who is talking near you, literally! Type in a keyword, and find out who is tweeting in your town using that keyword. A great way to monitor real-time buzz and for building new relationships!

39. TweetArchivist find, analyze and archive tweets with Tweet Archivist. You can create archives of tweets and then analyze them through visualizations made by Tweet Archivist of: volume over time, top users, top Urls, top words, language, source of tweet, user mentions, hashtags and media.

Cool Tools

40. Brandfluencers use this amazing tool to find out who brings traffic to your website via Twitter and reward them. Simply login with your Google Analytics account and see who sends tweets that bring you traffic to your website. You can then publish this ranking and offer a prize to the person who gives you the most traffic. Great way of motivating your followers to promote you on their Twitter accounts and getting more traffic!

41. GroupTweet if you have more than one contributor to your Twitter account, than GroupTweet is the tool for you. No matter how many people in your team, anyone can tweet from the same account. Contributors’ names can be hidden or shown at the beginning/end of each Tweet and they can login to the group’s private dashboard, or from their personal Twitter accounts.

42. ClicktoTweet this tool is used by top blogs, such as Hubspot. It basically makes your website’s content more shareable on Twitter. Write a preloaded tweet and then ClicktoTweet will generate a customized link that when clicked on by a visitor, it will be automatically added to their Twitter status box. It’s similar to a Retweet button, but it does more than simply advertise your blog title. Try putting in quotes and facts and figures, for example.

43. Twitrratr If you want to find out quickly what people really think of certain topics, products, companies etc., try this great, easy-to-use tool. Twitrratr distinguished between positive and negative tweets surrounding any word you wish. You’ll find out in percentages how many people are positive, negative or neutral about the particular product, brand, celebrity etc.

44. Woobox A great app that brings your Twitter feed to your Facebook page.  It is basically a Twitter tab for your Facebook page that shows your tweets, hashtags or search terms from your Twitter profile as a tab on your Facebook page.

45. TweetChat If you want to monitor and chat about one topic at a time, and stop the rest of the Twittersphere from getting in your way, then try TweetChat. Simply type in the hashtag that you want to follow and then talk to people in real-time. I love using this tool when I want to have a conversation, it works particularly well if there are lots of people joining the conversation.  They also have a feature called “smart pausing” which allows you to pause refreshing the page, so you can keep up and “user control” which allows you to block spammers and feature only the people you like.

46. TwitLonger Use Twitlonger when you simply need more than 140 characters to express yourself! Write what you want to and then a link to what you said will be automatically posted to your Twitter account.

47. Parrotfish Download this tool for your browser so you can see the full preview of each tweet. It’s great for those tweets that have links to photos and videos.

48. Twitcam If you want your followers to get more insight into you and your business, than Twitcam is perfect for you. You can use this tool to broadcast any video live – simply connect your webcam, login with Twitter and click the broadcast button. Twitcam will then post your video description and link to your Twitter account so that all your followers can see. You can also chat with viewers while broadcasting via twitter, right from the broadcast page. And once you are done, don’t worry about losing the video – it will be automatically archived by Twitcam.

49. TweetyMail Tweetymail lets you tweet via email, send and reply to Twitter DMs, follower users – all from your email! You can also use it to create custom email alerts for tweets, mentions etc. and receive powerful and detailed notifications for new followers and DMs.

50. Triberr If you are blogger and want “more eyeballs on your content” than Triberr could be of real help. I’m a massive fan of Triberr, which is a content distribution network for bloggers that gives them a platform to group into tribes. From there, Triberr makes it fun and easy for tribe-mates to share each others’ content via their Twitter.  Triberr is not only a fantastic way to generate more traffic but also a good way to network with other like-minded people.

51. Revisit Revisit is a real-time visualization of the latest tweets about a specific topic. You can use it to get a sense of the temporal dynamics in the Twitter stream.

52. TweetOldPost You can use this WordPress plugin to tweet about your old posts so you can get more hits for them and keep them alive in the twittersphere.

53. Twtvite Use this great tool to create events and groups on Twitter. You can use it to send invitations and sell tickets, create guest lists, nametags and even to take a post-event survey!

54. TweetBackup  this easy to use tool will backup all of your Twitter feed for free. Not only that, but it will also backup your entire list of Twitter friends. If anything happens to your account, you will have all of your data saved on TweetBackup’s online server.

Relationship Management

55. Commun.it is one of the best free relationship management tools out there. Manage your Twitter relationships from one place and find out who your top influencers, supporters and potential customers are. It’s a great tool that will help you get the most out of each and every 140 characters you tweet and will help you build relevant connections and relationships!  I wrote a more in-depth review of Commun.it which you can read here.

56. SocialBro is a great tool that helps you understand your Twitter followers better. You can use it to take group actions when managing your contacts (which helps save a lot of time!), and to understand your followers: find out who your influencers are, get rich profiles of each of your followers, and you can also see when your followers are online, so you’ll get a better reach!

57. Contax.io  is a free contact management tool for Twitter and Facebook.  It will track your followers and friends and provide you with all the details you need to decide when to follow back. Use it to manage relevant, real-time relationship data for your personal and business accounts.

58. FollowerWonk use FollowerWonk to get a better understanding of your followers. Find out who they are, where they are and when they tweet, find out who the influencers are in your niche and compare your social graphs to others.

59. MentionMapp Explore your Twitter network in a very innovative and interactive way. Find out who interacts the most, what people are talking about, find interesting and relevant people to follow and much more.

60. TrueTwit TrueTwit is a validation service that helps you avoid spammers, by verifying if the people you follow and are following you are not robots. You can try the TrueTwit Basic package, which is free, or TrueTwit Premium that has a few more features (though not the most useful of features…)

61. Tweepi this great tool helps you get rid of all the people who aren’t following you back, automatically follow back new followers and clean up all of your inactive followers.  And they have recently added a great feature – force undesirable followers to unfollow you!

62. ManageFlitter one of my favorite tools that I use to tidy up my Twitter account.  It has a useful feature to find out which of your followers are active/not active.  Not only does it have the ability to unfollow large numbers of people, but you can also find out when the best time to post is (based on your account) and get your Twitter analytics.

63. Refollow one of the best free tools that helps you sort out your followers. Use it to see who hasn’t tweeted for up to 90 days, who never tweets, see who is talking about you so you can follow them back and engage and see users’ bio stats before you follow them. This great tool also allows you to sort all of your followers with different measures.

64. TweetPsych can create a psychological profile of any public Twitter user and compares it to others in its database. It uses linguistic analysis algorithms on the last 1000 tweets to identify traits that are used more or less frequently by the analyzed user. Quite an interesting tool that helps you understand your followers better.

65. Twendz is another interesting Twitter tool that helps you get a feel for the sentiment surrounding different Twitter conversations. It highlights conversation themes as well as the sentiment of different tweets related to the topic you are interested in. Use it to understand your followers better and to get a better understanding of their emotional reactions.

66. WhoUnfollowedMe Use this simple tool to see who isn’t following you back and who you aren’t following back. It’s very easy to use (and free) and there’s no need to create an account, because you can sign in directly with Twitter.

67. FriendorFollow Friend or Follow might not be the only one of its kind, but it’s still a tool worth mentioning. You can use it to find out for free who unfollowed you on Twitter, who is not following you back, who you aren’t following back and also who your friends are.

68. Twimbow This web app uses vibrant colors to help you engage with your Twitter followers. It filters users into different groups, it catches important tweets among the others, it colour codes mentions, retweets and DMs and it distinguishes between different types of messages.

69. Twitblock is a great tool that will help you find out if your followers are truly fans or just spammers. Scan for spammers and get them all in one list – this will make it easier for you to block them or report them, all from one place.

Monitoring/Measuring

70. SocialMention  is similar to Google Alerts, only it is for social media only. Get real time social media search and analysis alerts about your brand, company or anything else that might be relevant to your business.

71. TweetLevel measures your buzz in real time on Twitter with this great tool. You can see how much people are talking about your brand, the Tweet Level of a topic or hashtag in order to boost your engagement, who the top influential tweeters are on any topic, what web links are shared the most and find out how influential you are on Twitter.

72. TweetBeep Anytime someone mentions you or your product or company, TweetBeep will send you an update. Well, not every time, but you will receive hourly updates by e-mail (if you want to receive them more regularly you need to upgrade to their paid account). It is a great tool that could really help with your customer care and your online reputation management.

73. RetweetRank Measure and track your retweets with this simple, free tool. Simply enter your username (or someone else’s) in the search bar to see your rank. Retweetrank will look up your recent retweets, number of followers, friends and lists, compare these numbers with other users’ and then assign you a rank. It’s a great way to find out how you stack up against the competition.

74. SocialPointer SocialPointer is a free real-time monitoring tool. It allows you not only to monitor your brand, but also to respond and engage in real time with other Twitter users. It is still in its beta version, so maybe there is more to come!

75. SocialSeek another great, free tool that is in its beta version. Choose any topic that you wish to know more about, and get all the latest tweets, news, videos and photos in one place. It’s a great tool for monitoring (but without analyzing) any topic you want.

76. Wildifire Social Media Monitor use Wildfire app and you can monitor your performance across all of your social media platforms. After you find out how you are doing in the social media realm, you can also check out your competition and see how your social media is stacking up against them, by follower bases.

77. Monitter enables you to monitor a set of keywords on Twitter in real time. You can also narrow the search to certain geographic locations. This way you can find out what’s going on in different parts of the world.

78. NutshellMail Use this tool to monitor and manage your Twitter and Facebook activity from one place. NutshellMail tracks your brand’s social media activity and emails you a summary on your schedule.

79. BrandChirp BrandChirp is a great brand management tool for Twitter. You can use it to effectively monitor, manage and resolve all brand activity. It also has a “target follow” feature that can help you reach a bigger audience and establish new connections.

80. SharedCount use SharedCount to track URL shares, likes, tweets, and more. Enter a website address in the search bar and you will find out how many people have shared it on different social media platforms.

81. Twilert Twilert is a web app that will send you email updates regularly of tweets that contain any keyword you want. It’s a great tool for brand monitoring – without the hassle of having to do regular searches on Twitter.

82. SocialMotus have recently launched this great social media marketing and monitoring tool for Twitter and Facebook. It allows you to manage, schedule and publish posts, monitor and engage and also to analyze and measure your performance.

83. TweetBig This free Twitter management tool has many useful features: an rss management tool that allows you to tweet from your favorite sources, analysis of the followers of your competitors in order to identify relevant users to follow, automatic follow back, tweet scheduling, follower gathering based on keywords and topics you are interested in, and red carpet finder (finding your most influential followers).

News/Content Curation

84. Scoop.it Connect with your Twitter or Facebook account, enter all the topics you want to follow and start scooping news.  And if you find an interesting scoop, you can tweet it right from their website.

85. Paper.li Publish your own online newspaper for free! You can use it to publish any web content, such as Twitter, Facebook or your blog, into an online newspaper. And Paper.li will monitor all of your content sources for you to update your paper automatically. You can also customize your paper, add your logo and branding.

86. Curate.me Use Curate.me to get the best news from your friends and the people you follow straight to your inbox. You can get personalized news based on your interests. This way you won’t miss any of the top tweets and shares.

87. Trap.it  is a tool that gets smarter as you use it more. It will discover high quality content and new sources for you, helping you to never miss any article that you might be interested in. It is quite similar to Scoop.it and Addictomatic.

88. Twylah You can use Twylah to share your tweets with “awesome looking” websites and widgets. Twylah basically takes your tweets and creates a website out of them. It’s a great tool that will help you get noticed beyond Twitter, get you more traffic from your tweets and bring your message into focus by automatically organizing by your trending topics.

Measuring Social Influence

As social media has grown there have been more and more tools that measure your influence online.  Below are 3 of the most common used ones.  It’s worth mentioning  that I’m not a huge advocate of them and take their scoring with a “pinch of salt”.  They are a useful guide but they’re algorithms change and often it’s more about quantity than quality hence my feelings.

89. Klout Use this tool to find out what your “Klout score” is. Connect your social networks to Klout (Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn) and then it crunches this data and gives you an overall score. There has been much controversy about Klout’s scoring and how their algorithms work, I wrote a post here about it.  They did however recently change their algorithms, another useful post which lots of experts chimed in on (including myself!) is here.

90. Kred is quite similar to Klout. You can sign in with Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn and find out how influential you are on each of these platforms. They have a few more extra features, such as Kred Story, which is a visual history of your social media influence; you can also see other people’s most influential content, the most popular tweets and words for any active hashtag and a lot of other interesting information.

91. PeerIndex is my personal favorite if you are going to use these tools.  It’s a free tool that helps you understand your impact in social media by measuring interactions across the web. With it you will learn not only who influences you, but also who you influence.  You can also receive PeerPerks depending on how influential you are.

Search

92. SocialBuzz can be used to search social networks in real time. Apart from Twitter, it also supports Facebook and Google+. It has several main features: search using multiple keywords, exact keywords and minus keywords tool, quick location filtering, search results analytics and three-column layout of the search results.

93. TipTop A  Twitter-based search engine that will help you discover real people that you can engage with, discover people’s emotions about particular topics and everything else that people may be talking about that is related to your search.

94. Twazzup Use Twazzup to filter Twitter – get only the news you want out of the live Twitter content. You can then find out who are the most influential people on a given topic.

95. PostPost With PostPost, you can see on your homepage all the topics, photos, videos and links from the people you are the most connected to on Twitter. They also have a search engine that you can use to find any Tweet, link, photo or video that you and the people you follow have shared with each other in the past.

96. SnapBird With SnapBird, you can search beyond Twitter’s history. Use it to look for tweets from your own timeline, tweets mentioning you, through someone’s favorites or search for a conversations between you and other Twitter users.

97. Tweepz It’s not always easy to find interesting, relevant people to follow on Twitter. That’s where Tweepz comes in – it lets you search for twitter users by city, keyword or names in their bios.

98. Twtrland Use this great tool to search for any name, location or tag from Twitter and let Twtrland visualize the social footprint of your keyword. You can use it to discover new people, get a glimpse of their social impact and find ways to connect and increase your network.

Hashtags

99. Hashtagify.me This is a free tool that could really help you compose better tweets with better hashtags. Simply type in any hashtag you can think of and Hashtagify will show you relevant hashtags around the topic. These hashtags are displayed in different sized bubbles, so you can find out in an interactive way which hashtags are more popular than others.

100. Tagdef Hashtags can be quite confusing sometimes and often times you might not even understand what a hashtag could possibly mean! That’s where Tagdef comes in: enter a hashtag in the search bar and this free tool will tell you what it really means.

101. WhatHashtag If you want more people that could be interested in you or your company to find you on Twitter, than hashtags are one of the best ways to go. However, it’s not always easy to get a hashtag right. That’s where WhatHashtag comes in. Simply enter your search keyword in the search bar and WhatHashtag will give you the most popular hashtags used worldwide to discuss that particular topic.

Final Thoughts…

Phew!  The above list are my favourite Twitter tools (in no particular preference order)  I hope you found this list useful, and if you think I have omitted any important tools, please let me know in your comments! What tools do you use to manage your Twitter account/s? Do you use a combination of more than two different tools? I’d love to know – so please leave a comment and share:)

]]> http://thrillmere.com/101-tweet-tastic-tools-2013/feed/ 0 http://thrillmere.com/australian-travel-project/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=australian-travel-project http://thrillmere.com/australian-travel-project/#comments Wed, 16 Jan 2013 00:01:28 +0000 Luke Chapman http://thrillmere.com/?p=1082

I’m launching an exciting new travel site in January called Top 100 Experiences which will feature write-ups about different locations, experiences, trips and things to do within Australia. People will be able to read lots of different articles and rate their favourite experiences to compile the “top 100″ list. The website launch will aptly be on Australia Day (26th January, 2013).

I’m currently looking for people to contribute articles to the site – either once off or on a regular basis. This is your opportunity to share your secrets with the world, and help build a user-rated database of exciting experiences in Australia.

At the end of any article you write, you will get a short author bio with details about you, including a link to your blog or website should you have one. This will help drive traffic to your website, as well as help out with SEO (helping you to rank higher in search engines like Google).

I’ve brainstormed a list of examples of articles that you could write. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but if you can’t think of a topic this might help! If you’d like to contribute, there is information at the Top 100 Experiences page.

1. Whitsunday islands (either individual like Daydream, Hamilton etc, or Whitsundays in general)/Great Barrier Reef
2. “BIG” things – e.g. the Big Pineapple, Big Merino, Big Prawn etc
3. Top things to do in xxx (Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne etc)
4. Foodies guide to xxx
5. Day trips from xxx
6. Phillip Island (penguins, or super bikes)
7. Uluru
8. Kata Tjuta
9. Kakadu
10. Daintree
11. Cairns
12. Kuranda skyrail/scenic railway
13. Gold Coast hinterland (Mt Tamborine, O’Reilley’s, glow worms etc)
14. Byron Bay
15. Wine regions (Hunter Valley, Barossa, Margaret River, McLaren Vale etc)
16. Monkey Mia
17. Wave Rock
18. Blue Mountains
19. Port Arthur
20. King Island
21. Houseboat holidays
22. White water rafting
23. Bridge Climb (Bris or Syd)
24. Manly (catch the ferry from Circular Quay, things to see/do in Manly)
25. Jenolan Caves
26. Undara lava tubes
27. Cape York trip
28. Train trips (e.g. The Ghan, Indian Pacific etc)
29. Sky Diving
30. Hot Air Ballooning
31. Whale Watching (Hervey Bay etc)
32. Turtles (Mon Repos)
33. Darwin war tunnels
34. Riverfire (Brisbane)
35. New Years on Sydney Harbour
36. Vivid Live (Sydney)
37. Great Drives (e.g. Great Ocean Road)
38. Gold Coast Theme Parks
39. Wedge Island
40. Valley of the Giants
41. Kangaroo Island
42. Victoria Harbour
43. Norfolk Island
44. Flinders Chase National Park
45. Mount Warning
46. Great Walks
47. Lord Howe Island
48. Shark Bay
49. Lighthouses of Australia
50. Longreach – (QANTAS museum, Stockman’s Hall of Fame)
51. Coober Pedy
52. Woomera
53. Stay at an Outback station
54. Mt Isa / other mining towns
55. Crocodile tours
56. Australia Zoo
57. Cane Toad racing
58. Greatest sporting events – Grand Finals – AFL, NRL, State of Origin etc. Australian Open
59. Lake Eyre
60. Best Surf Spots
61. Rottnest Island
62. Gordon River
63. Beach Camping
64. Cania Gorge
65. Best Camping holiday spots
66. Cradle Mountain
67. Top fishing spots/tours
68. Birdsville Races
69. 1770
70. Q1 Gold Coast
71. Parliament House (Old & New)
72. Royal Australian Mint
73. Camel/Horse riding on the beach
74. Sail a tall ship
75. Bondi beach
76. Australian War Memorial
77. Go fossicking for gold
78. Australian Antarctic Territory
79. Christmas Island
80. Old gaol tours/sleep-in
81. WWII places to visit
82. Cross the Nullarbor
83. Christmas Island crab migration
84. Fingal Head
85. Coffs Coast
86. Tassie fly/drive holiday
87. “Jump” (Melbourne)
88. Kimberley
89. Drive a V8 race car or rally car
90. Opera House Guided tours
91. Fraser Island
92. Puffing Billy
93. The Rocks walking tour
94. Bay of Fires
95. New Norcia
96. The Pinnacles
97. Freycinet Peninsula
98. Powerhouse Museum
99. Formula 1, Indy etc.

Facebook bashing seems to be a bandwagon that every man and his dog is jumping on recently. Obtrusive and unwanted advertising, privacy concerns and an increasing number of scams (sorry, Woolworths aren’t going to give you a $500 gift card) are all concerns that have been raised, but they’re actually valid concerns.

I spend a LOT of time on Facebook (both for work and personal use) and I’ve found myself disliking it more and more. I’m constantly being barraged by ads for things that have no interest to me, and having to hide posts more and more. A friend of mine posted the following status update today, which really sums things up quite well:

“Between people championing social and political causes they don’t understand, incessantly sharing and re-sharing the most obviously fake viral photos and stories, the active promotion and encouragement of bullying and a sick upward comparison compulsion, there is nothing left for me here on Facebook.”

On a business front, every update Facebook brings out seems to result in “Pages” having to fork out more money to actually reach any of their fans. One of the Facebook pages I manage at work has over 11,000 fans. These are people that have clicked “Like” because they like what we do, and want to stay up to date with what’s going on. Once upon a time we were able to reach most of those people by posting an update. Now we’re lucky to reach 1,000 fans with our updates. Why? Because Facebook now wants you to pay money to reach those hard-won fans.

Wise words from Dr. House

So what are my options?

Unfortunately Facebook has had a firm grip on the social networking throne, and there haven’t been many viable alternatives… until now.

Like many others, when Google released their latest attempt at a social networking platform (Google+) I jumped straight on to try it out. And like many others I gave up on it pretty quickly. Google+ was all too confusing. Everyone was used to how things worked on Facebook, and G+ was a break from the norm. People don’t like change. Not to mention the teething problems that G+ had at launch, including privacy concerns just like Facebook.

I left Google+ pretty quickly after not being able to find many people I knew using the service, and not fully being able to grasp the whole concept of circles etc. Why would I want to use this social network when the people I want to be “social” with (friends) aren’t here!? So back to Facebook I went, happy that I’d at least given G+ a look.

Fast forward to the present day and Google+ is actually a viable alternative to Facebook. Not only is it a viable alternative, I’d go so far as to say it’s much better!

9 reasons you should be using Google+

Here are my top reasons for using Google+ instead of Facebook.

1. No ads – One of my main gripes with Facebook is their obtrusive ads. I don’t mind ads being on the site, but make them relevant and don’t put them in the way of interacting with my friends. Google+ currently has no ads running, though given that Google is the world’s largest online advertising company.
2. Fewer idiots – I don’t know how else to say it; Facebook is filled with posts from morons. The community on Google+ seems to be very switched-on and friendlier than Facebook. I’ve seen so many discussons on G+ where differing opinions and points-of-view have been explored and explained, where on Facebook they would have descended into name-calling keyboard wars.
3. Hangouts – This is one feature that I absolutely love! Hangouts enable you to have a video/audio/text chat with up to 10 people at a time. You can even make your Hangout “On Air” which means that other people can watch it live on YouTube. Once the Hangout On Air (HOA) has ended, the video will automatically be uploaded to your YouTube channel for you to do as you please with it.
4. Communities – G+ recently launched “Communities”. Communities are Google’s answer to Facebook Groups, and allow anyone to create a community centred around a particular topic. Whether it’s cooking, photography or computers, you’ll be sure to find some common interests among the 500 million Google+ users. You can also start a Hangout with the community and can post straight to the community from your home page or any +1 button. Communities themselves can be organised with categories, similar to the online forums of yesteryear.
   
5. Better for photos – Google has combined the organisation and backup features of Picasa and the powerful editing tools of Picnik and put it all into Google+. If you use an Android phone your photos can all be backed up to G+ as soon as you take them! You can make all sorts of edits to them, or simply add some text on top of them when you post. If you’re viewing a high resolution photo that someone’s posted, you can even zoom and pan on it to see the full detail!
6. Animated GIFs – Okay, I concede this has the potential to be a terrible idea in the long run, but for now I’m quite enjoying seeing some of these animated GIFs!
7. Better mobile app – So many people I know have had issues with the Facebook mobile app. Non-responsive, missing features and just doesn’t seem 100% finished. Ever. The Google+ Android app isn’t perfect, but it’s a lot better than Facebook’s attempt. And it looks shinier
8. Better search – This one is probably a no-brainer, but as the world leader in search, Google has done a pretty good job with the search function on Google+. You can find communities, people and posts right from the top of any page. It’s quick and easy, just like Google web search. Hashtags can be used, too, just like on Twitter. This makes finding things a breeze!
9. SEO value – If you run a website or blog, Google+ is an avenue you should definitely explore. Google+ posts are all indexed in Google web search, and there are lots of options to link your G+ profile with your website (such as Authorship and Publisher markup).

Despite the attention-grabbing headline of this post, I’m sure you won’t give up on Facebook straight away. The fact of the matter is that 80% of your friends might not be on Google+ yet, so Facebook is still a great way to keep in contact and interact with them. But Google+ is gaining in popularity. Hopefully it will be a wake-up call for Facebook, and we’ll actually see some great innovation in the social networking space. Once Facebook gets back to doing some real innovation and these two social networks compete head-to-head I think it will create some real benefits for everyone (users, advertisers and Google/Facebook themselves).

What are your thoughts? Have you used Google+ recently? Would you consider moving away from Facebook as many have already done? Share your comments below.

AdAge has reported that Facebook may be bringing autoplay video ads to news feeds early next year. After yesterday’s debacle with the updated Instagram terms of service, it’s starting to look like they’re just being a typically greedy, money-grabbing corporation that doesn’t really care about users.

But they should. Users are the ones that make the site profitable in the first place. And users will leave when you start to introduce annoying features that get in the way of what they want to use. Facebook may have an advantage at the moment because they have a huge monopoly, and there aren’t any major competitors (sorry, but I don’t count the “new” MySpace as a competitor… Google+ may be the only one in with a chance in the long term) but Instagram users have a few other options to jump ship to.

What are your thoughts? Are you getting sick of all these ads and promotions on your favourite websites?

UPDATE: Instagram has obviously felt the heat and have decided to re-write some sections of their new Terms of Service, as noted on this blog post just now. Of particular note is the following quote:

“The language we proposed also raised question about whether your photos can be part of an advertisement. We do not have plans for anything like this and because of that we’re going to remove the language that raised the question.”

Well, that didn’t take long. I’ve been using Instagram for a few months, mainly because everyone else was, though it was also handy for publishing photos to Instagram, Facebook and Twitter at the same time (it’s a shame it doesn’t also do Google+). But a couple of changes in the last few days have resulted in me deleting my Instagram account (and I don’t miss it).

A few days back, Instagram stopped supporting Twitter cards, and then Instagram images stopped showing up in the Twitter stream. The reason for this? Instagram wanted to drive more direct traffic to their site. This was the first blow – I use Twitter all the time, and it was nice to be able to see the Instagram images in-line without having to click on a link to another website.

The second (and final, for me) blow was the update in their Terms of Service. As part of the update, Instagram say that they can display “promoted” pictures without identifying them as promoted. No thanks. I get enough ads already, but at least on other sites like Facebook and Twitter they’re identified as being “promoted. What’s even worse though is that your photos (including photos of you) may be used in an advertisement without your knowledge (that includes underage users)! Keep in mind that many of the new Terms of Service already exist on Facebook, but in my mind Facebook does a lot more for me than Instagram.

Direct from their new Terms of Service:

“…you agree that a business or other entity may pay us to display your username, likeness, photos (along with any associated metadata), and/or actions you take, in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions, without any compensation to you. If you are under the age of eighteen (18), or under any other applicable age of majority, you represent that at least one of your parents or legal guardians has also agreed to this provision (and the use of your name, likeness, username, and/or photos (along with any associated metadata)) on your behalf.”

So long, Instagram. I guess I’ll just have to post pictures of my lunch on Twitter instead.

(Update: if you want to download all your Instagram photos and then delete your account, Wired has a good article on how to do just that)

It’s a sad time in the SEO world. Some of the biggest SEO tools around (SEOMoz, Raven tools and Ahrefs) have received warnings from Google’s AdWords team that they will lose access to the AdWords API if they continue to scrape results. Ahrefs and Raven have announced they will no longer be providing keyword analysis/SERP data as of January 2013.

Between this news, and the rise of (not provided) keywords on the rise in Google Analytics, I’m starting to think that Google’s really cracking down on SEO. In the magical world of Google, they want website content and links to be 100% natural, which will never happen.

From a content perspective, it’s getting harder to see which keywords are really popular, and therefore what sort of content is wanted (and you should write about). Interesting things to come in 2013!

UPDATE: Looks like things are getting even worse, with iOS6 also hiding organic search details.

I was just looking back at some of the photos I’ve taken, and realised that most of the best ones come from when I’m on holidays. I’m not sure if it’s because I have more time to go and explore, because I’m more relaxed, or whether the scenery is more inspiring in other places. In any case, here are a few of my favourites from my last real holiday in New Zealand. I think it’s time to get away and take some more photos.

Christmas is almost upon us again, so I thought I’d share an idea for wrapping presents. It looks great, is really easy, and best of all it’s cheap! Just cut out names from coloured card, newspaper, old books, film etc and glue onto plain kraft paper. Another (quicker) alternative is to use some stamps for the names. Here are some examples that I’ve done in the past.

ManMade DIY has full instructions on how to do the cut-outs. Here’s one they did out of a book!

Do you have any great gift wrapping ideas?

Head of International Development at Twitter, Mike Brown, is currently in Australia. All signs point to Twitter opening a local office here in Australia in the near future. Recently they set up the official @TwitterAU account, have been verifying Australian sports teams and entertainment accounts (like AFL and FFA) and have even had some T-shirts printed.

While Mike Brown is in Australia, he’ll be attending some secret invite-only breakfast events organised by Sports Geek’s Sean Callanan, targeted at the sports and entertainment niches, as well as high profile Australian tweeters. Notable names include Darren Rowse, Wil Anderson, Charlie Pickering, George Calombaris and Wendell Sailor. Interestingly, Twitter has requested that media are not invited.

I’ll be one of the lucky ones attending the Sydney event. If you’re not attending, you can follow all the action with the hashtag #twitterbrekky

It makes sense for Twitter to have a local presence, especially considering their increased focus on advertising. Some social media experts are even predicting that Twitter will overtake Facebook as the number one brand advertising platform. What are your predictions for 2013 and beyond?