Twitter Counter has terrific stats for your Twitter profile. Here’s how I’m trending, as of today:

I’m going to be posting about followers over the next little while. Thought this would be an excellent place to start though!

Yesterday, I stumbled upon My Tweeple, a great site for analyzing your followers. Since Twitter is about relationships, I wanted to know who of my followers were mompreneurs so I could easily invite them to be featured in my other blog GoGoMamaGo or contact them about a free advertising offer that I’m running for my soon-to-launch stroller site. I also wanted them to be exported into a non-web format like CSV so that I could analyze and reformat the information.

Here’s why you might want to use My Tweeple:

• Compared to Twitter, My Tweeple provides a cleaner interface for analyzing your followers.
• Quickly see who you are following vs who is following you. See where the relationship is mutual.
• Easily exports data into CSV format so that you can analyze your follower information and your relationships.

Funny thing happened since I demonstrated HootSuite – they released a 2.0 version. It has the same features, plus additional functionality like horizontal browsing, group creations. It’s also sporting a cleaner design and is generally faster.

Here’s an update to my last HootSuite post:

I was going to post an exhaustive list of URL shortening sites, but in my research found that it already was taken care of by Mashable, who found 90+ (YES 90!!!) URL shorteners for your pleasure. Here’s the link to see the complete list:

URL Toolbox: 90+ URL Shortening Services

Incredibly, since writing this post over a year ago, I came across yet another (ow.ly) and am sure there are several more out there since the boom of Twitter this past year.

Personally, I’ve just recently abandoned TinyURL for ow.ly, but then have started using bit.ly because of its stats.

I remember TinyURL when it first came around 9ish years ago and recall thinking that its use would be limited to shortening those links that wrap and get cut off when you send emails. I wonder how many of these tools popped up because of Twitter.

Anyway, in the next few weeks, I’ll be demoing a few of the shorteners on this list.

I use HootSuite on a daily basis and find it incredibly useful as an extremely powerful and valuable Twitter productivity tool. View the video below to see some of the features I use.

My challenge was that I was getting bogged down by Twitter and I needed a way to post quickly, and most importantly, assign rights to another user to tweet on my behalf. GoGoMamaGo.com has a regular series called 5 Questions. I use a virtual assistant (VA) to post these articles in my blog, as well as schedule a tweet for the day that the article will be going live.

I’m also online only a few times a day and didn’t want to blast my followers with updates from a 10 to 20 minute period. I rather stagger them throughout the day – especially ones where it’s just mentioning an article and isn’t very time sensitive. HootSuite allowed me to do that pretty easily.

What I love about HootSuite:

• I can manage several accounts and post from the simultaneously.
• I can delegate responsibilities to editors, especially for repetitive tweets.
• I like the schedule tweet interface and can schedule tweets easily from several accounts if required.

Some Feature Requests:

• Maybe make it easy to use from my iPhone. I haven’t tried it yet, since I typically use TweetDeck on my iPhone.
• Fix that refresh issue I mention in my video. When you schedule a tweet, the dashboard does not refresh and show you the new tweet you’ve scheduled.
• Add an “edit editor” feature so I do not have to delete a user if I just want to change their credentials or details.

You can also see my review of HootSuite on GoGoMamaGo.com.

This weekend, I downloaded my first product from Clickbank – Bill Crosby’s Twitter Traffic Machine.

I downloaded it because I wanted to know what other people were doing to grow their follower list fast so I could do the same for my Twitter account @gogomamago, the account I use for my other blog GoGoMamaGo.com. Now that I’ve gone through the module, I can give you an honest review of the product.

Note: It is true that you can use this tool for serious spamming. Bill also throws in a final video showing you how you can set up an affiliate link to his program and insert it into your welcome message to encourage people to buy his program so he can make more money, etc etc.

However, if you are like me and just want some good ideas to maximize your Twitter productivity and don’t want to spam people to death, and still plan on using your account to engage in one-on-one conversations with your followers, then this product is worth a look.

Who the Twitter Traffic Machine Is For:

• Anyone who is interested in growing their followers quickly and in an automated way.
• Anyone who is wanting to augment their content (their “real tweets”) with automated content.
• Businesses who have a Twitter account and want to put tweet content on auto-pilot.
• People who have been using Twitter for less than three months and want to amp up their Twitter participation and followers.

What You Get:

After purchase, you’re directed to a pretty straight-forward and simple page that contains six videos and a document available in both Word and PDF formats. The page is not pretty, but it has some really great material. The videos make up the majority of the program and give you tons of information, including:

• How to set up your profile, including how to create a customized backround quickly and easily.
• How to automatically follow people, as well as send them a welcome message whenever you get new followers.
• How to quickly and easily eliminate the people you are following that are not following you back so that you can protect your 10% limit of people to follow.
• How to set up automatic content so that your Twitter account stays fresh with tweets, without much work from you.
• How to find and follow people who are tweeting about topics relevant to the product or service you are marketing.

The videos are extremely easy to understand and they are well planned and executed. But in case you missed anything, the document that comes with the program walks you through his tips step-by-step, with all the URLs, resources and tools he’s provided in the demo. Make sure you download this document since the page is only available for 7 days. Although you’re access is available for life, you will need to email Bill to reinstate your access for another 7 days.

My Reaction:

I have to say, I was originally skeptical when I saw that first page. But I will tell you that I was shocked at how many times I thought, “Wow, I did not know that!” – and I’ve been building web sites and on the Internet for 13 years! My husband got bored of me telling him how much I had picked up. I’m also certain that whatever I put into the cost of buying the product, I’ll get it back in dividends.

Verdict (Buy or Forget): BUY, if you are a novice or intermediate user of Twitter. Those wanting to do good and not evil can benefit from the Twitter Traffic Machine.

Click here to find out more about
Bill Crosby’s Twitter Traffic Machine.

Today, I joined Twitter.

Well, according to my friends today I officially came out to my friends with a Twitter account.  I’m actually running several Twitter profiles at the same time for quite some time and have garnered a bunch of followers from all over North America.

I thought I’d start a blog about, well, Twitter. It’s really a current obsession of mine. I was holding off for quite some time, but I think it was because I could feel hours and hours of time being slowly sucked and eaten away with this little obsession.

No wonder: apparently I’m right on track.

In an article titled “The Twitter Cycle: Curiosity, Abandonment, Addiction. Global Visitors Hit 37 Million,” Tech Crunch author Erick Schonfeld writes:

The adoption cycle for Twitter is a bit strange. It goes something like this: Ever-increasing waves of hype, links, and attention bring in the newbies to Twitter.com where they get their first taste of Twitterdom. Some portion of those set up an account out of curiosity or a fear of being left behind. They try sending out a few Tweets, look around, get bored by the initial banality of the service and abandon it for other pursuits.

But that is not the end of it. A lot of them come back…

The funny thing is – I went through all of those Twitter adoption phases, but completely offline. Three years ago when I first encountered Twitter, I was entirely unimpressed with the people around me who were joining and raving and didn’t really see much value in it. I suppose I was already inundated with Facebook. I adopted Flickr wholeheartedly and with abandon. I think I was protesting that enough was enough on this social media thing and it would just do what I did with MySpace and waited until the phenomenon passed – and which Twitter will undoubtedly do one day.

And now, as I embark on launching a business, Twitter made sense. I can easily connect with other people who are interested in my services and direct them to my web sites (more on that another day). And as I went along, it seemed more and more relevant to open several profiles, although this strategy might prove to be a bit to fragmented, not to mention take additional effort to keep going.

Anyway, I’ll be sharing tools to help your Twitter productivity, reviewing products, demoing tools, sharing Twitter tips and tricks, as well as blog about the latest news stories about Twitter.

Happy Tweeting!