You probably recognise these kind of tweets because they are also common on Facebook as uninteresting status updates proclaiming that the user has just performed some sort of mundane activity, in a mundane and uninteresting way. In essence, there is nothing worth sharing here and, unless you are a super celebrity (with a very devoted following) most other twitter users won't care to receive such tweets. (The other exception is if you are a very talented writer/thinker who can make anything and everything seem interesting - in which case you don't need any advice from me on how to be successful with twitter).

The problem is that new or inexperienced twitter users sometimes don't know what else to tweet - which is why they either look around them, or into the past 5 minutes of their life, in order to find some potential content for a tweet. This is the same as walking around in the street and telling people 'I want some chips' or 'Can't wait for Christmas' - there's nothing wrong with this particularly except for the fact that those statements/utterances, however valid and true, are not likely to interest anyone else (again if you are Madonna or Britney Spears, then that would be an exception to the rule).

So, tip number one is to avoid the mundane statements about doing something mundane. Either the sandwich needs to be interesting - or your thoughts on it do. Both is even better, while neither is a waste of everyone's time.

The next point is to think about why you are communicating on twitter and with whom. If people are likely to follow you for professional reasons, then you might want to focus the majority of your tweets on related matters. If this is not why you joined twitter, then that's fine - but maybe make this clear in your info description (e.g. 'Joe Bloggs, CEO of a major corporation and keen fisherman. Follow me for thoughts about my favourite hobby' or something of the sort).

Finally, remember that if you want to get tweeting, the most interesting results will come from tweets that promote engagement from other users - and that the best way to do this is to offer something interesting or unique. Only users with established public prominence (whether celebrities, politicians, or high-profile companies) can count on getting users simply because of who they are. For the rest of us, here are two very successful twitter users who are good examples of how to either offer a unique concept (@shitmydadsays) or a variety of consistently interesting personal tweets (@stephenfry).

Anyway, as I said in the last post - the best way to get the most out of twitter is to use your intuition and play around with it and see what works for you. Happy tweeting!

1. Ask yourself this question: What do I want to get from my twitter experience? Do you want to use it for purposes of following all the latest news and developments in your professional area? Or maybe to keep up to date with what's happening in relation to your hobbies and interests? Do you want your experience to be one-way (i.e. you only want receive info) or would you like to also participate with your own tweets? If you choose the latter of those last two options, what is the purpose of your participation? For fun and leisure or for professional reasons such as building a social media profile, getting noticed by potential employers, or something else entirely?

You don't of course have to choose only one of these options - and indeed there are far more potential uses for twitter than the few mentioned above. However, one problem that users consistently find with twitter (as we shall also see in the next post) is that their experience is sometimes rather flat and doesn't quite fit with the rave reviews that some other experienced users are espousing. One common reason for this is that users haven't considered any of the above questions at all.

2. Avoid excessive noise. Some people/organisations/companies tweet endlessly and these users can quickly clog up your display so that they drown out the full range of follows that you have chosen. For users like this it is especially important to decide whether or not it is worth the bother, since many other tweets will simply get lost by the quick turnover of these very active accounts (news organisations especially function in this way, so if you follow the news using other apps/websites - maybe don't do so on twitter as well unless you're specifically focused on this one area).

3. Avoid duplication. This point is connected to the above and is again aimed to improve the quality of experience on twitter. For example, if you import all your Facebook friends into twitter and follow them all, you will inevitably end up with a lot of crossover between status updates and tweets (many people post the same thing for both). Again, not all users do this but, if you are an active Facebook user, you might want to seriously consider whether it's worth using twitter to connect with the exact same people - and in the exact same way - as you do on Facebook. This is something to be especially careful with when you're prompted to import contacts from other services (Hotmail, MSN, Gmail, Yahoo) upon joining twitter.

4. If you want to get involved by writing your own tweets - and especially if you are doing so from a professional position - then you'll need to consider the way you present yourself on the network. Choose a profile photo and a short description that makes sense to the people you'd like to communicate with. You might also want to limit the number of tweets unrelated to professional matters, otherwise people who follow you for work-related reasons might decide it's not worth the bother (maybe make a separate work account if you are highly active user on this front). Also, remember to add a disclaimer in your description that the views of your twitter account do not reflect your employer's views - it can help save a whole lot of hassle.

5. Remember that most other twitter users are also other people (they far outnumber organisations and companies on the network). The service is therefore at its best when you build connections with people that you otherwise couldn't reach so easily and build a communicative network that you don't have on Facebook or LinkedIn. Twitter is a bit like other social networks, but it also has many unique features which are most evident if you try to use it a bit differently than you would those other services.

Anyway, you might already have figured out that the best way to really get into twitter is just to start using it for yourself. The longer you play around with it, the more logical and intuitive it will seem and you'll probably be better positioned to work out exactly why you're there and how to make the most of it. Next time, I'll discuss the problem of 'I just ate a sandwich' type tweets, why, and how, to avoid them.

The frequency with which scandal erupts around a misjudged tweet or an offhand comment, caught on someone's iPhone and uploaded to Youtube, suggests that social media practically entraps people into such costly blunders with its pretty user interfaces and seemingly inconsequential virtual nature - and then the real world mess catches up with you. Last week for example, an English footballer was sacked by his club after posting a homophobic tweet in response to a TV show he was watching. I picked that example at random from my memory, but there were at least three or four others just from last week here in the UK (Ed Miliband, Diane Abbott, Tom Harris, Wojciech Szczesny etc).

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that we know better than ever what people are thinking - perhaps even to a detrimental degree - wherein thoughtless comments which people might not otherwise say in the company of others, get instantly shared with thousands. I'm not, however, here to debate the philosophical implications of all this. Instead, I'd just like to give a quick example where this insight into public figures' real thoughts can be quite illuminating.

Rupert Murdoch has recently joined twitter and has been using the service to share his views on SOPA (which he supports fully) and piracy (which he doesn't). His recent comments have now been excellently 'storified' by journalist and blogger Jeff Jarvis, who breaks down Murdoch's rants against Google and Barack Obama (in the wake of today's setbacks for SOPA) and illustrates the fundamental problem facing Murdoch in the internet age: he doesn't understand the web.

Ok, so this is hardly news (there was the small matter of Murdoch's News Corp. running Myspace, then the world's most successful social network, into the ground) but nonetheless, since usually his personal views reach us in a highly mediated form via his spokespeople, his media outlets and his press officers, we've never really had as direct evidence of Murdoch's web views as we have now.

The point is that, while we should be wary of reading too much into 140 character tweets, what is clear is that Murdoch personally does not display a huge degree of enthusiasm for the innovation that publishing industries are being forced into by the web and would prefer to merely port existing (but increasingly outdated models) over to the web - and protect them with prohibitive legislature.

Look at those tweets and ask yourself - would you invest in the man who wrote them if he came to you asking for funds for his web start-up business? Does he seem like someone who is gonna do something clever or new online?

The answer probably would be no. Murdoch doesn't need your money anyway (he has plenty of it already in all likelihood), but what his recent tweets illustrate, for me at least, is that he is involved with the web purely out of necessity and hasn't developed a massively sophisticated view of how the internet works. If I wanted some creative ideas and fresh views on the online publishing landscape for example, I probably wouldn't call him.

After a couple of days it was proving so successful in driving fan engagement that the team's owners asked the fan to hand over the account in return for courtside season tickets. Then they reconsidered - courtside season tickets and a job as social media manager for the team.

Now that's not a bad return considering the total time expended by the creative fan totalled only a few hours and cost him him nothing financially. And it's not only social media roles that get filled with the aid of social media activities. It's all kinds of roles...

Since 89% of employers claim to use social media in their recruitment efforts (up by 6% on last year) it is increasingly essential to have an 'employer-friendly' social media presence if you're looking for work.

The there's the concept of the 'twesume' - the 140 character twitter-based resume. There's a great post over at Mashable giving tips on how to maximise the potential of this idea - something which might only take 10 minutes to do but could be key in finding leads on the kind of jobs that would suit you.

Finally, in this little round-up of social media based job hunting tips and resources, there's some very handy analytics from Linked-In doing the rounds at the moment which reveal the most over-used words that users describe themselves with on their profiles (in English-speaking countries 'creative' came top of the list for example).

This can give you a good idea of how much your profile and CV actually stands out from the crowd (without having to stalk 100 other users to get an impression) and also an idea of what employers are looking for - i.e. what works.

Anyway, I'll leave it there for now but will return to this subject at regular intervals in the future as it becomes an increasingly prominent manner in which social media is shaping the world of work, even for those who don't work anywhere near the IT sector. Plus, in these cash-strapped and job-anxious times it's probably useful to have all the help we can get...

That's why I find this infographic over at Mashable (designed by JESS3) quite useful. It's called 'An Average Day on Facebook' and gives a little insight into the main ways in which users currently engage with the site as well as some comparisons between stats for 2008 and 2010. It only gives a quick 'at a glance' type of picture (there's simply reams and reams of data which could be looked at with 700 million users) but nonetheless could be handy for marketers trying to understand how their trade might be evolving with time on Facebook.

Take for example the average age of the Facebook user: 33 in 2008 and 38 in 2010. I would hazard a guess that it is now, at the end of 2011, higher still. This doesn't mean that all those young users have gone and are no longer reachable on the network (they are) it just also means that Facebook is now increasingly viable for social media marketing targeting older (and typically wealthier) consumers - which somewhat contradicts the stereotypical image of social media marketing being best for 16-25 year-olds for example.

All this is important as, unsurprisingly, Facebook remains the network with the highest daily engagement (52%) when ranked with Twitter (36%), Myspace (7%) and LinkedIn (6%). Social media marketers are therefore right to devote extensive time and attention to it - that fact won't be changing for some time at least - but the way their campaigns are constructed does however need to be constantly evolving, as the network does, if they are to maximise their potential.

However, it has also remained slightly too primitive in some ways (despite recently adding LinkedIn and Youtube data to its algorithm), perhaps in order to retain the simplicity of its Klout scoring system and also, lest we forget, because it does still remain in beta testing mode. Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that Klout is really quite good, and very much in demand, but that nonetheless it is a little limited in its current form.

That is why a new influence analytic, due for launch next week, seems to be attracting quite a degree of attention and buzz. It's called Kred and will apparently do pretty much everything that Klout does, and good bit more.

The main feature of Kred is its transparency, wherein users can get detailed breakdowns of exactly how their influence is calculated, which factors are taken into account, and how much they weigh in on the final score. The whole thing also runs in real time so should provide a whole new kind of data which non real time services couldn't.

This obviously sounds like a great extension of the kind of influence analysis social media marketers can access, but it does raise the tricky issue of whether or not users will be able to game the system once they are granted such detailed knowledge of its workings. Google for example keep their search algorithm a very closely guarded secret for precisely this reason.

If issues such as this were to arise, it would undermine the credibility of the entire venture, and thus this represents, in my view at least, a really key aspect in determining the success that Kred will enjoy.

There are also other major advantage points for giving Kred a go; namely the fact that it can use a wider range of metrics than Klout (including offline/'real world' accomplishments) and can thus more accurately represent someone's influence in a broader sphere as well as telling you their specific influence on Twitter for example.

Anyway, the site is open for signup now and will start offering functionality to users from October 6th. I suppose we'll get a much clearer idea of what Kred is going to be like when that time comes, but for now it looks like a welcome addition to the toolkit of social media marketers and anyone curious about the impact of their own, or someone else's, social media activities.

The main point of the article isn't really that for certain types of business social media is useless (which isn't the case) but rather that, without a well planned and implemented social media strategy, a badly executed attempt to engage with such media is almost always going to do more harm than good - even if only in the sense that you waste your valuable time.

Ultimately the pattern is usually the same for badly conceived social media campaigns - they are initiated because of the Zeitgeist perception that all businesses should have one, end up being rather aimless and, after an initial spurt of activity, slowly trail off as the ideas and content for a sustained presence are found wanting.

The aforementioned blog post covers all of these standard pitfalls, as well as giving handy tips (such as using the FBML app to customize your Facebook page so that it stands out from the crowd a little bit more).

In the end though, all of the mistakes discussed result in the same end product - a social media campaign that is static, uninteresting, and therefore ineffective. In other words, a Facebook page that is run like a web 1.0 website might have been - rather than a fluid source of content with which users engage with on a regular basis - something absolutely crucial to the establishment of a relationship with your business (and the whole point of social media campaigns in the first place).

The principle is essentially quite simple. First you register on various social media and web 2.0 platforms, before writing articles on each one that link both to eachother and also to the main page whose search rankings you wish to bolster.

It really is as simple as it sounds - a rare example of a tremendously effective SEO technique which requires zero development or programming experience to implement. The key to doing it effectively of course is not so much in the technical know-how of coding, but in writing effective articles which will draw attention and link well to eachother, and to your main page.

Though such a strategy has been possible (and evident in practice) for a long time, it nonetheless is now more appealing than ever before since the potential for creating a snowball effect (in a web traffic sense) is ever greater with the abundance of link sharing tools currently popular on the web (everything from Twitter, to Facebook's Like button and so on).

All in all, the link wheel represents a superb SEO strategy for those without extensive coding or development experience and one with very decent future prospects, whose efficacy will only grow the more it is employed (i.e. the more articles/posts you are able to create).

The overwhelmingly likely outcome is that eventually it will not be worth your while to use Myspace (even when one takes into account the various tools currently available to make managing accounts and updates quicker and easier) - so the question really becomes not whether or not to jump ship, but when and, more importantly, how?

The main challenge presented by the network's decline is not the lack of an alternative (Facebook, twitter, WordPress, duh...) but how to migrate users and activities seamlessly, without resulting in losing some of them - or in the nature of one's social media marketing campaigns being altered or affected (negatively) by the switch.

Many Myspace users of course already use at least one other network for their social media campaigns - but nonetheless, for a specific set of sectors and professions (bands especially, but also the likes of live venues, photographers, video and audio professionals and so on), Myspace has been the dominant and leading tool for upwards of four or five years.

So, with all this in mind, here's a few thoughts on the subject of migrating social media marketing away from Myspace and over to somewhere else:

1.) First of all; the question of migrating users. While the prospect of losing connections with Myspace friends does represent a challenge - it is also a fresh opportunity to 'refresh' or update one's fans/followers/customers and thus arrive at a more accurate image of who they are today (and not who they were in 2005), and how many of them are out there etc.

It's no secret that, since Myspace's predominant connection type was the 'friendship', it was possible (and far too often done) for one party to artificially expand user numbers by befriending anyone and everyone under the Myspace sun (most people would more often than not accept such requests, since Myspace was a little less 'personal' than Facebook and thus not so much of a privacy concern). Facebook's 'Like' relationship however is nicely differentiated from its 'friendships', and thus Likes represent a much more meaningful measure of how users are responding to your social media presence.

So, yes, while it might sound like a cliché to say that this (for many users, unwelcome) necessity to eventually ditch a tool, which has been used well for a number of years, represents an opportunity; in this case I really believe it to be the case. In summary - identify the network(s) you wish to direct most users to and start encouraging them to join you there. It's important to start this now (if you haven't already) so that in another three or four months (when Myspace's future will be even more uncertain) you'll be in a position to slowly wind down your activities there. And remember - it's actually quite useful to get an up-to-date idea of where you stand regarding user numbers and profiles...

2.) Secondly, while Myspace will slowly become increasingly useless regarding the impact you can make with it - it is nonetheless important to retain your domain and profile for a good while yet - even if, by this time next year, it simple resembles a re-direction point over to your Twitter and Facebook sites.

There's two important reasons for this:

• Never relinquish a formerly lucrative domain, even if it's now of little use to you (someone else might see some opportunity in it which might not go well with your wishes...) - especially when it's free to retain it as Myspace is.
• Myspace still ranks highly on search engines - so even though it hasn't as much influence as before, it is still useful as a static billboard type advert for keeping brand/band/whatever awareness high.

So, basically the answer of when to migrate is both now (start moving things as soon as possible if you haven't already done so) and never (don't reduce your Myspace presence to zero for a good while yet - obviously this becomes ever more important relative to your former weight and significance on the network).

3.) Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, be aware that different networks operate slightly differently and that the nature of your social media marketing needs to be slightly adapted - even if you make use of various apps which attempt to make the transition easier (such as the Bandpage app for Facebook for example, which allows for some of the same features that made Myspace so successful - at a glance tour-dates and a music player for instance).

In any case, I expect those who face the trickiest time and most headaches regarding the move will be bands - especially those who rely exclusively on social media for their marketing (promoting releases, tours, news etc) and don't have mainstream press coverage to fall back on. Anyway, that's it for now - let me know if you have any further suggestions for businesses/professionals/artists/freelancers facing this dilemma.

That's where Greplin really starts to look useful; it is a tool for indexing all your private documents and communications which currently exist in various cloud-based social networking accounts and the like. So, for example, if you wish to back up social media things like emails, messages, status updates etc and, not have them separated according to which service/network they were originally on, Greplin is for you. (And yes, they have a mobile version).

Simply indicate which services you would like to index (Twitter, Gmail, Facebook etc), give Greplin your login details and permission, and watch it add your stuff to the 30 million documents it's processing each and every day. It will then be able to offer you a searchable database of all this material so that you can sift through and find what you need quickly and easily without thinking if this or that info originally appeared in a status update on Facebook, or if so-and-so emailed it to you on Gmail, or whatever...

In short, the idea is pretty timely considering the huge volume of e-material we are each now generating on a daily basis (what with the rapid acceleration of use offered by smart-phones, Facebook's new quicker messaging service, or even just the fact that we increasingly use multiple networks on a regular basis). Obviously there's a security issue (i.e. do you trust Greplin with your details?) but if you already trust Myspace and Bebo etc, then presumably you wouldn't have any issues with another service such as Greplin.

Rather than building up confidence in its security (which it should achieve pretty easily), the real challenge lies in just what Greplin can do with all the data it is indexing. For example, can it recognise what the key information in a particular document is and thus classify it according to this aspect, thereby enriching the precision and flexibility of its search?

Judging by the qualities their jobs page shows they are seeking in new engineers, I'd say they're very clear that this is one of the places they'd like Greplin to go - the only question will be if they can get there before someone else does. As their impressive technical success so far indicates however, they're no slouches when it comes to a bit of code so you'd bank on them to only go from strength to strength after their great start since the February launch.

Moreover, we've had a few petty gushing reviews of Postling on here, championing it as a very useful social media aggregator for social marketing purposes. Well, at this stage let us add Greplin to this recommended arsenal for successful social media marketing - it could offer a very handy counterpart to Postling's already excellent services (it remains to be seen if the two will ever eventually overlap - my guess is that it is rather possible).

Whether you consider it 'the search bar for life' which is Greplin's slogan for their service (as opposed to Google, which would be 'the search bar for the internet/the world' presumably) or 'the other half of search' as Techcrunch have dubbed it, there's no doubt that the service is looking pretty well-defined, well-run and well-publicised even at this early stage. A sure-fire hit according to many, I'd have to say I definitely agree with them...