0 Top 10 Tools To Search Twitter For Popular Bloggers

Twitter is a really great tool when it comes to looking up for news or getting updates from your favorite Twitterers. For bloggers, it's an especially good way to build interactions, and get ideas. In our blogging tips, we have countlessly discussed about following other blogs in your niche tio find out what's hot, and what they are doing. This gives you ideas to improve your own blog. But how to find such blogs? More importantly, how to look for people who share interesting stuff that relates to your own niche as well? Here are some tools that we believe could be invaluable to searchers looking for updates and ideas on Twitter.

1. Twitter Research

Twitter research should be the very first thing you do when searching for people to follow. Hashtags are a really smart way of finding information. People use hashtags to monitor conversations, and get their tweets listed in results. This also makes tweets publicly available easily. When you search for hashtags, you will get results from bloggers and other people who are interested in your niche. But mostly, you'll find bloggers. And the top bloggers in your niche are usually the ones talking about the niche often. Take a look at what comes up, and follow the people you think have a substantial following.

2. Bitly Realtime

Realtime is a relatively new search engine by Bitly that not only returns results from Twitter, but also other social media. It basically tracks the URLs that has been shortened through Bitly. And since many bloggers use URL shortners, this is a great way to find top influencers as well. Although the project is still in its beta phase, it already is starting to make a mark for itself.

3. Listorious

Listorious is a really great tool for finding popular people on twitter. It has more than two million Twitter users registered, and if you visit the site, you will see a list of niches you can choose from to see the top Twitterers for a specific niche. You can search for a niche too. And if you think you're popular, you can get listed too by signing up :)

4. FollowerWork

FollowerWork comes with SEOmoz PRO. It's another great tool for analyzing user bios, searching, tracking, sorting followers and users. All data is constantly updated, so you will get the latest results.

5. SocialBro

SocialBro has been specially designed for the purpose of discovering influencers based on user-defined criteria. It has full analytics data on followers, social contact, profile management, and more. It is a very powerful tool, but alas comes at a price starting from $6.99. Still, a pretty good tool for power users and analysts.

6. Klout

Klout is another very large application that lets you find influential people. it has over 100 Million registered users, and you can find from among them. You can also get listed by signing up with Twitter of Facebook.

7. Suila

A very simple application that's easy to use. It has gathered data from millions of users, and ranked the popular ones. You can search for a topic simply and find out the experts on that topic within seconds!

8. Twellow

A basic list of users based on popularity, there are a number of categories with users listed within. You have niches such as News and Media, Sports, Government, Education and more. You can find results based on smaller niches, location or other factors

9. Endorse

This app works on a relatively different concept. Rather than ranking users according to their number of followers and other data, it ranks them based on 'endorsements', or recommendations from others. The idea being, the best way to find out about influential people is through socializing.

10. SciencePond

This is a perfect site for the science geeks out there. It will help you find influential scientists on Twitter. SciencePond has a full list of scientists from Twitter, and whom better to follow than an influential scientist?

So, have you found any influences lately? If so, tell us about your experience, and how you came by them. Happy tweeting :)

0 Add Enhanced AddThis Sharing Tool To Your Blog

You might know AddThis from thesharing buttons you place on your blogs below your posts. The AddThis sharing tool is a really useful feature for bloggers. Not only does it provide you with a means to share your great content, it also monitors the information shared to analyze data and provide insights to publishers and note the latest trends. In the process, the AddThis sharing tool has evolved into a much faster and more powerful one which not only can easily be integrated with your website, it also provides a great and easy sharing experience to your readers. AddThis has recently released a sleeker, more elegant sharing tool which adds a lot of new features. Let's take a look at what's new, and how to get it!

What's new?

The most obvious change is the design. The sharing buttons look better, the compact menu is more streamlined, and the email form has a new look. In addition, the drop-downs make use of HTML 5 and JQuery, and load faster and are better optimized. Sharing from expanded menus has become faster as well. According to AddThis, the enhanced design has increased sharing by as much as 11%!

Then there is the great new on-page sharing feature. Normally, to share something, you have to open up a new window, and then click on the share/post button. This costs an extra page-load, which makes the process slower. The new AddThis sharing options provides you with the 'instant' inline sharing feature. Now, users no longer have to leave your page to share your content, as it can be done right from the AddThis buttons! This will be possible if users are logged into AddThis. And once they are, they will be able to easily share content (staying on the same page) on OTHER sites as well that use AddThis.

AddThis also makes sharing on Pinterest really easy. Simply put AddThis to any page on your site, and your users will automatically be able to see all the images on that page in a light-box gallery view to choose from easily, and pin to Pinterest. Simple, and effective!

Adding the AddThis sharing tool

Adding this functionality to your site is really easy! Just visit the Sharing button page, and choose the type of buttons you want. You can choose from among seven different styles, which you can live preview on the page. You can also go for plug-in based tools for WordPress and Blogger etc. Otherwise, you will just see some code, which you can copy and paste to your site wherever you want and the sharing buttons will appear there. I'd recommend going for plugins plugins if available, but it's totally up to you.

This is a great tool that you must try out on your blog. It's really fast, and analysis shows that it increases social sharing activity by as much as 11%, and up to 20% for Twitter. This is because it's more user-friendly, and doesn't inconvenience your users, who otherwise need to open separate windows and click multiple times. AddThis is easy to implement, easy to use, and provides an easy sharing option on your posts. That way, everyone goes home happy :)

That was a brief overview of the new service by AddThis. If you have questions, or are having problems, feel free to contact us anytime. We'd be glad to help. Peace :)

0 Now you can Create RSS FEEDS For Google Plus

As you might know, RSS Feeds are an alternative way of delivering your content to your readers. Not everyone that visited your site and liked your content will return again and again. Instead, you will have to deliver your content to them if they liked to your content, and say subscribed to your blog. They are, in fact, subscribing for your RSS feeds. These feeds will appear in their email inbox. Additionally, you can use your RSS feed to drive content on other sites of yours, or provide content to users on RSS readers. Feeds don't necessarily have to be from your blog. They can be from anything that's updated regularly, even your Google Plus. An engineer at Google developed a Chrome app, Feed+, that will allow you to create RSS feeds for your Google Plus!

Creating RSS feed for Google Plus

First of all, you need to add the Feed+ app to your Chrome. Do so by using the link given above. This useful app allows you to create Google Plus feeds for Pages as well as Profiles, hence giving you flexibility.

Once installed, open up Feed+, and it will ask you permissions to access some Google services that you are using. Accept them if you want to publish an RSS feed for your Google Plus page/profile. Now, you're set to publish your feed.

About the feed

The feed creation requires the app to be installed. But there's no processing involved on the client-side. All the feed conversions and publications happen on the cloud. You just need the Chrome app to manage the feeds, like deleting them of adding a new one. You can delete the feed from Feed+ menu. It's pretty simple!

The published feed is public, and anyone can subscribe to it, just like your regular FeedBurner feeds. Surprisingly though, FeedBurner doesn't recognize the feeds created from this service as valid, even though you can subscribe to it using any feed reader, such as Google Reader. Another problem, or rather, a short-coming of the app is, there's no option to create separate feeds for Circles. This is because Google Plus API's aren't very open-source about circles, and hence developers can't access their data.

But all-in-all, this is a great service. Once your feed is created, you can publish it to the world, and also use it to cross-share on multiple platforms automatically, such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and so on. Refer to more of our posts about cross-sharing, and share this post to let more people know :)