Pandia is a project we as editors have rund since 1998 on our spare time. It has been a labor of love, but we readily admit that it has not always been easy to combine with our offline life and our daytime jobs.

At the moment we find that we are not able to deliver the amount of original content our readers should expect from us. We have therefore decided to take a break while we consider the future of the site.

We might find ways of engaging other writers, or we may pass the torch to others interested in search and social media. We would prefer to keep the current content, however, and will not sell the domain to be used for other types of content.

Susanne and Per Koch

Digital curation is the selection, preservation, maintenance, collection and archiving of digital assets (according to Wikipedia). Curation used to be the domain of archivists and librarians. But the brunt of curation has moved over from the shelves and archives onto the Web.

These days your daughter and your grandmother might be doing it. And recently the Web has added a social aspect to curation: You don’t just collect and preserve information, you share your collections with the world. This is social curation and here is a look at the best social curation sites right now

The belle of the ball

Pinterest is the big thing in social curation right now. Numbers from Alexa suggest it has surpassed veterans such as Delicious and Reddit (below) in traffic. Pinterest is like a collection of online pin boards where you pin images that fascinate you.

But even though Pinterest has a visual and aesthetic focus, there is more to these “pins” than meet the eye. Each image links to the page or article where you found it and you can add a comment or excerpt when you save it to one or more of your pin boards.

So each pin is essentially a visual bookmark and the pin boards are tematic collections of such bookmarks, where you add context to the information you collect.

The social aspect means that your pins are public and others can comment on them, making each item a potential discussion forum. Other users can also add items as favorites (“like”) or add them to their own pin boards (“repin”). This way the item gathers even more context — a way to gather lots of potentially useful information.

Pinterest is not just a place to store information. It is also an excellent place to find information. You can browse the most recent pins in some 30 categories and re-pin what you like. Or you can find people who post information you are interested in and follow their activity or just the most relevant of their pin boards. There is even an RSS feed for each person.

For some reason there are not feeds for individual pin boards, though, which is a shame. Another problem is that the visual character of Pinterest makes search hard. The objects often have little meta data, which makes for inaccurate search. And even though I can find a lot of info by searching Pinterest as a whole, I can’t search my own pins. This is why I’m leaving Pinterest after three weeks.

The veteran

Digg and Reddit are among the veterans of social curation. On these sites, you can add stories or items, like or dislike items entered by others and leave comments. Items that are liked or commented by many, rise to the top of the front page.

Reddit has recently had a surge in popularity. Here you can add items (URLs) or browse those of others: choose the main tabs (hot, new, most controversial and top scoring stories) or browse by category.

You can also create communities, where people with common interests share stories. Communities can be private or open.

Reddit extracts images from posts to add a thumbnail to the preview, but the site is still not very pretty — the years are showing.

For the pros

Social bookmarking is not what it used to be. Many of the services that used to be big have lost importance next to other ways of sharing and curating, such as social networks and yes — social curating.

Some of these sites have redesigned their service to emphasize the curation aspect. Diigo and veteran Delicious have both succeeded very well in this.

Even though social bookmarking has always been about curation, the recently introduced stacks adds to Delicious’ credibility in this respect. With stacks, you can bundle bookmarks on a theme go your choosing and Delicious will present them with illustrations and excerpts from the web pages in question in something reminiscent of a magazine.

Diigo is a far more powerful tool. In addition to sharing bookmarks and building a network, you can join groups. Any tag or topic can have a group where like minded people discuss common interests.

Diigo also adds a community to each page bookmark, so you can see who else has added it and what comments they have added — a nice starting point for your research.

And there are other social aspects to Diigo. Here, I want to mention one more: annotation. You can highlight passages and/or add sticky notes with comments to the pages you bookmark to leave your point of view on any page you bookmark. Your annotations will be visible to the people you choose to share them with. This feature is great for collaborative teaching and learning and has made Diigo very popular in education.

Your own newspaper

If these five great tools are still not exactly what you were looking for, perhaps presenting your finds as a newspaper sounds tempting?

Another aspect of social curation are the newspaper style services like paper.li and scoop.it.

On Paper.li you add streams from Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or any RSS feed. Paper.li then automatically generates a “newspaper” with daily or weekly news, which you can choose to publish to friends and followers.

This service is especially popular on Twitter. If your Twitter stream is focused on one topic or a couple of related topics, this can make for interesting reading for people in the same field.

Scoop.it also publishes a kind of magazine, but it is not generated automatically. Here, you set a topic and add items one by one. Scoop.it extracts images and adds layout and makes it all pretty and easily accessible.

Who’s missing?

In this particular field, the good stuff is not created by the old giants. Notably, neither Yahoo more Google have succeeded with social curation. Google’s Search Wiki and Knol were both recently shut down.

Yahoo chose to sell Delicious just as social curation became a big thing. This is another strange diction from Yahoo, which is even neglecting Yahoo Bookmarks and Flickr — two other popular social curation style Yahoo properties.

Microsoft has launched MSN Now, where you can see stories that are popular on Facebook, Twitter and Bing. And you can comment if you choose. So the curation aspect is not strong. This site has not been a huge success so far.

Bing And Google Gain Market Share While Yahoo Drops
Search Engine Watch/Comscore:
Google: 66.4 percent (vs. 65.4 percent a year ago)
Bing: 15.3 percent (vs. 13.6 percent a year ago)
Yahoo: 13.8 percent (vs. 16.1 percent a year ago)

With a New Design, Vevo Asks Music Video Fans to Stick Around
All Things D: When you log in to the site using your Facebook credentials, Vevo will have already “socialized” you — even if you’ve never used the site and none of your friends have, either.

Can’t Confirm That Quotation? Search Google Books
Mindshift: Luckily, traditional print materials (in the form of books) often include the kind of citation information you might need and Google Books allow you to search the full text of books.

ufind.it – The Ultimate Web Search Tool
P Bradley: This is a multi search engine, which pulls its results from a variety of search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Twitter and more.

PDF search and comments features added to Google Docs
Techworld: Users of the Google Docs office productivity suite will be able to do full-text searches within more documents in PDF format, expanding on a recent improvement to the suite’s PDF search capabilities.

Pew Report: 65% View Personalized Search As Bad; 73% See It As Privacy Invasion
SE Land: Personalized search? Both Google and Bing will tell you that it provides better results. But two-thirds say they don’t care. They view personalized search as a “bad thing,” a new survey finds. Nearly three-quarters also view gathering data to personalize results to be a privacy invasion.

Ask.com Launches New Visual Q&A App “Pollroll”
SE Land: Pollroll, according to Ask, “is designed to facilitate the creation, distribution and sharing of poll questions and results.” In addition to answering polls users many annotate their responses with comments.

Yandex Tries to Solidify Search Dominance, Keep Google Down in Russia
SE Watch: The search industry is one of the most competitive in the world and has been for many years and on so many levels, but recently Yandex has been able to overcome Google’s threat of dominance and claim of cracking its local market share.

Google Adds Feature for Local Search Across Devices
Marketing Pilgrim on a Google service that allows desktop searches you conduct about local questions to be viewed on your mobile device when you are logged in and doing a search from Google.com.

3 things you need to know about Yandex search
Search Cowboys:
1. Yandex prefers Russian sites
2. Yandex takes geographical regions into account
3. Yandex values links more than content

Inept Lobbying By Anti-Google Front Group Does More Harm Than Good For Microsoft
Marketing Land: Microsoft directly and indirectly funds multiple anti-Google lobbying efforts in the US and EU.

Google Waltz Lab teaches Stanford students to think on their feet
Stanford University: Renowned Stanford dance instructor Richard Powers teaches the value of improvisation on the dance floor and beyond.

Why Search Engines Can’t Just ‘Fix’ Search Results The Way The MPAA/RIAA Want
techdirt: It’s become clear in the past year or so that one key “target” in the legacy entertainment industry’s game plan is to force Google to change its search results to have “good sites” rise up and “bad sites” be pushed down.

Google: Providing a springboard for women entrepreneurs in India
Google Blog: Women Entrepreneurs on the Web teaches participants how to use web-based technologies to improve and grow their businesses.

More Allegations about Fast Search Impropriety
Beyond Search: Norwegian authorities have accused former CEO John Markus Lervik and former sales director Torbjorn Kanestrøm company FAST Search & Transfer ASA (Fast) for violations of the Accounting and market manipulation.

See also:
Search engine marketing wrap-up
Social media wrap-up

Facebook Introduces Interest Lists, ‘Your Own Personal Newspaper’
SEW: Facebook has announced the launch of Interest Lists, a new feature designed to help users curate the content of Pages and public figures in which they’re interested. The service promises to deliver the top posts from each interest group (list) in the user’s newsfeed.

How to Cross Post From Twitter to Your Facebook Page
Graywolf: I don’t believe all the social media gurus riding on unicorns who preach that social media is about the conversations man (best said in a hippie voice for dramatic effect). Social media is about giving you an alternate channel to connect with new or existing customers, demonstrate your expertise, solve problems, or promote products with the goal of providing customer service, building loyalty, and making sales.

How to Teach Your Boss About the Social World Outside of Facebook & Twitter
SE journal: Whether you’re selling a company Google+ page or trying to open your boss’s eyes to the joys of Pinterest, here’s your ultimate guide to explaining the likes of Tumblr and StumbleUpon to your technophobe boss.

Pinterest Phishing Expedition: Scammers Target Unsuspecting Pinterest Users
SE Journal: Scammers have descended on the popular network and are promising Pinterest users free gift cards and merchandise in exchange for re-pinning an image and completing an online “survey.”

New YouTube Features Add Efficiency to Video Viewing
Marketing Pilgrim: Whether you’re sneaking a peek ahead, scanning backwards, or using a thumbnail to find where you stopped watching a video, you’ll soon have three options to instantly look through YouTube videos.

Think Before You Pay Too Much for Social Media Monitoring
SE Journal: Before you spend between $50 and $1,200 bucks a month for a tracking system that may well drown you in a sea of meaningless data, determine exactly what you want to track and why.

Google Showing G+ Conversations and shared Videos in Personalized Search
State of Search: It seems as if Google is putting not just Google+ posts as personalized results in the SERPS, but if necessary they will also add the conversation into the result pages.

Pinterest drives more traffic than Twitter
memeburn: According to the latest stats from Shareaholic, a third-party social measurement tool, Pinterest not only beat out Twitter, but also referred Google traffic and organic Bing searches.

The Secret, Selfish Side Of Social-Curation Sites
Fast Company: Social curation is incredibly self-centered. Pins of things that I want, pictures of food I ate, tweets about stories I read. There’s no sense of community–no we, ours, or us involved. People only post and repin the things with the hope that someone might like it,

How To Optimize Twitter: Be Real, Profiles, RT, Hashtags & More
SE Watch: Make sure you mix real personality and a real voice to your tweets and avoid being a robotic-like Twitter messenger (a.k.a., spammer). Don’t be afraid to mix a couple few human tweets in with your business related tweets.

5 Fun & Fringe Twitter Tools
SE People: These Twitter tools do genuinely useful stuff but less people know about them.

Twitter Grows Faster Than Facebook
State of Search: eMarketer says Twitter saw a growth of 31.9% in 2011, which is more than in 2010, where they saw a 23.5% growth. Facebook on the contrary went from a 38.6% growth in 2010 to a 13.4% growth in 2011. The expectation is that the numbers will continue to decline in the next few years.

Norway: One in three with social media profiles don’t know how to use them
Social Media Nordic: Only half of Norwegian men feel confident they know how to use social networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter. But digital literacy is on the rise in the Norwegian population.

See also:
Search engine marketing wrap-up
Search engine news wrap-up

The four faces of link building
State of Search: I always say linkbuilding is a profession of its own. It is hard work which not every SEO can do. And even with all the changes Google is making links will continue to play an important role in optimizing your website.

4 Reasons Your Boss Might Hate Your SEM Campaign
SE Land: Management doesn’t have time to study the details and aggregated reports can make great performance look mediocre or worse.

Are You Using the Right Keywords On Your Site? A Simple Three-Rule Test
Search Engine Journal: Just as there is no shortage of good keyword tools, there is also no shortage of metrics that you can use to determine the value of any given keyword.

Bing Search Quality Insights: Whole Page Relevance
Bing Community: The richness of the results page leads to a number of interesting, and novel, search quality questions. Under what conditions are you better served by an answer versus a traditional link to a web page? How do we rationalize making a result more prominent if it makes other results harder to find?

Google Says How Long It Takes For Updates To Places/Maps Listings
SE Roundtable: Vanessa fron the Google Maps / Places team has documented the typical turnaround time for the various types of Google Maps updates.

Santorum’s Changing “Google Problem” — & Search Engine Land — Make The Rachel Maddow Show
SE Land: As we covered last week, Google’s search results for a search on “santorum” have gotten a lot cleaner recently. The change was featured on The Rachel Maddow Show last night, and Search Engine Land’s coverage got a big shout-out.

See also:
Search engine news wrap-up
Social media wrap-up

You can search their index by entering a regular query, like on Bing or Google, or you can benefit from their structured data by formulating advanced searches and get precise results.

What is Sehrch

Traditional search engines index documents like pages, images or videos. But documents do not offer much information that is understandable by machines. Sehrch gathers semantic web objects instead of documents.

An object can be for example a person, city or event. Objects have properties: a person has a name and date of birth, whereas an institution has a date of establishment. Objects can also relate to each other, for example one Person may be the parent of another Person.

Sehrch is a collection of such objects and has a kind of “conceptual awareness” by harmonizing, grouping or relating objects within the semantic web. There is no limit to the number of properties that can be stored for a given object.

How does it work?

Object search on Sehrch requires you to form search patterns based upon object properties. To do this you have to learn how to use their operators. This might seem like a hassle. But if you are an information professional or you are simply of the geekish persuasion, you might want to give it a try.

A search like “name:Tony Iommi (type:Person)” will present biographical data about Mr Iommi instead of a list of links to pages that might hold relevant information. Even though there is a short intro to formulating queries, I found that it takes practice to get the results you are looking for. With the right query, it’s beautiful, though.

Operators:

Object searches are not appropriate for all queries, for instance those where there is no prevalent conceptual relationships. For such queries the search engine defaults to performing a direct document search, while presenting secondary object suggestions. Users can always override an object search with a document search at their discretion.

Sehrch is still in Alpha.

PS: Sehrch should seriously consider finding another name for their product. It is really hard to remember the spelling of Sehrch.

Google and Cuil
Beyond Search: Founded in 2008 by two former Google employees and one from IBM, Cuil was forced to close its doors in 2010. Before the end, though, the company claimed to have indexed 120 billion pages; that’s more than Google had managed at the time. Now Google has bought the patents.

Google’s Eric Schmidt offers his vision of the future
memeburn: Google’s chairman Eric Schmidt took the stage at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona to talk about the role of technology in the “world we live in today” and how it will shape the societies of the future. Schmidt, for example, noted that the number of people who use smartphones is still very small, but “think how amazing the web is today with just 2-billion people” and what will happen when another 5-billion get online.

Google on Google’s new Privacy Policy
Google: We’ve included the key parts from more than 60 product-specific notices into our main Google Privacy Policy—so there’s no longer any need to be your own mini search engine if you want to work out what’s going on. Our Privacy Policy now explains, for the vast majority of our services, what data we’re collecting and how we may use it, in plain language.

Google Privacy Policy Strikes Out With EU, Others
Inside Google: The Web’s leading search company drew fire early Thursday from Consumer Watchdog, which called the plan to offer a unified privacy covering all of Google (GOOG) Web products nothing more than “a spy policy.”

Google Fiber: Can ultra-fast internet change a city?
BBC: Google is installing super-fast fibre optic internet service in Kansas City. Will it usher in a new era in industry and society – or just enable faster web browsing and media downloads?

Google Music said to be floundering as user count declines each week
BGR: Google’s answer to iTunes, Spotify, Pandora and other popular digital music services may be in serious trouble.

Google’s Personal Guide to the Internet
SE Roundtable: Kelly from Google posted in a Google Web Search Help thread a new guide from Google named Your personal guide to the Internet.

Apple gets into app search
Battelle: It took longer than I thought it would, but it’s finally happened. Apple’s admitted that it needs real search to bring it’s tangled app universe to heel, and purchased Chomp, a leading third-party app review and search service.

FairSearch.org comes to Europe
State of Search: The American FairSearch.org organisation has been fighting to ‘foster and defend competition in online and mobile search’ for a wee while now. Since its inception in October 2010 by Microsoft and Foundem, many other businesses have joined the FairSearch cause, which is specifically aimed at Google and what FairSearch denounces as Google’s anti-competitive monopolist behaviour.

Get Real-Time Search Results from Google with a URL Tweak
lifehacker: Google offers a few preset search filters for time—past hour, day, week, etc.—but if you want much fresher information, you can tweak the URL. This will limit results so see what’s happening in more of a near real-time flow of information.

Baidu To Take On Google In South America
Multilingual Search: Chinese search engine Baidu’s dominant position in the world’s largest internet market is unquestionably very desirable, but analysts have speculated that the Chinese market alone does not provide enough room for Baidu’s continuous exponential growth.

Google Plus: Average User Spends Only 3 Minutes Per Month!
SE Journal: Google has unnaturally propelled its growth by automatically creating Google+ accounts for all new Google users.

See also:

Search Engine Marketing Wrap-up March 4
Social Media Wrap-up March 4

Learning SEO? Here are some tips
State of Search: The SEO community’s favorite online resources.

Is SEO Really SEO Anymore? Index Search Down 50%, Apps and Social Search Exploding
SE Journal: Search has moved to sites like Wikipedia and other popular content sites. Search in the app store is up. People have made a the statement that they prefer branded content form apps they trust, rather than sorting through links on a SERP.

The Madness Of Keyword Monomania: The Pathological Obsession With A Single Keyword
SE People: So you’ve got a brand new SEO client and they want you to take them to number 1 for the biggest keyword in their sector.

Google Image Search Optimization Now More Important To SEO
WebProNews: Images were already important to SEO, but if they’re going to inject more images into the first-page organic results mix for more queries, this is another opportunity to get your content in front of searchers’ eyeballs.

Search quality highlights: 40 changes for February
Google presents the latest changes in its search algorithm, presentation and products.

The Late, Great Bounce Rate Debate
SEO Theory: 1 question and 2 very brief but complex responses from SMX West 2012 are already receiving undue attention and emphasis. On a panel with two search engine representatives Danny Sullivan asked if “Bounce Rate” is used as a factor in their ranking results. Several journalists and bloggers boiled it down to “YES”, but what the search representatives ACTUALLY said was more along the lines of “Bounce Rate combined with other signals may affect your site’s performance in our results”.

How Google Makes Liars Out of the Good Guys in SEO
seomoz: It’s sad to think that if I wanted to rank well for keywords in my industry, writing this post, getting comments on it, and engaging in the community by answering questions counts LESS to help us rank well for targeted competitive keywords than me getting 20 anchor text links on a tag page? (See also John Doherty’s response to this post).

78 Resources For Every Internet Marketer’s Toolkit
SE Watch: Dave Davies has put together his 78 favorite resources based on what they yield and what they procude from a dollar-in-dollar-out perspective.

Non-Google Link Strategy: An Example of Stealth Link Marketing
Eric Ward: To begin, let’s rid ourselves of the term “link builder.” Link building is a terribly inaccurate description of the approaches that savvy link developers and link marketers can use for generating links to client’s content.

How to Do Keyword Research
SE Journal: Inforgraphic that tells you how to find the stages that you should pass selecting proper keywords.

See also:

Search Engine News Wrap-up March 4
Social Media Wrap-up March 4

Facebook game maker Zynga launches Zynga.com, to expand beyond Facebook in a big way
Gamesbeat: The move has big implications for the entire social-game industry, and it has been long-awaited by observers who felt Zynga was overly dependent on Facebook.

Social Share Buttons: Just Pick Three
Pushing Social: We have a social media equivalent of flair. We call them social buttons and we enthusiastically litter our blogs with them.

3 Steps to an Effective Social Media Strategy
Social Media Examiner: Start with a single question: “Why social media?” The answer will dictate everything you do in this first phase. Assessment is to evaluate where you are, where you want to go and what the wins will be along the way.

Twitter Archive: Datasift Selling 2 Years of Searchable Tweets
SE Watch: In 2010, Twitter donated an archive of all the tweets ever made on Twitter since its founding in 2006 to the U.S. Library of Congress, but the tweets can only be accessed after a six-month delay and for non-commercial research purposes

Tweet a Link, Save a Link
Delicious Blog: The new Twitter Connector on Delicious gives you the option of tethering your accounts together, so any link you tweet, retweet or favorite on Twitter is also saved to Delicious.

Twitter auto-translating feature – Powered by Bing
Search Cowboys: A small percentage of users can see the option to translate the text of a tweet with Bing Translator as part of an experiment.

Every 60 seconds in social media
VB: Every 60 seconds in social media, two million videos are viewed on YouTube, 700,000 messages are delivered by way of Facebook, 175,000 tweets are fired off into the ether, and 2,000 Foursquare check-ins tell the world where we are.

Path: The Social Network That Stole Christmas
Gizmodo: Imagine a social network that combines the voyeurism of Facebook with the visual intimacy of Instagram, the real-time newsreel of Twitter with the exclusiveness of a backyard barbecue. It exists. It’s Path

10 Little Known Social Media Tools You Should Be Using
Entrepreneur: And as the number of social networking sites grows, so does the number of services that are created to measure, track and monitor those services. What’s a marketing professional to do?

Flickr Uses “Nopin” Meta Tag To Keep Some Images Off Pinterest
Marketing Land: Flickr is adding the “nopin” tag to photo pages that are marked as private, marked as non-safe, and — this is the most common implementation — on pages of Flickr users whose privacy settings don’t allow photos to be shared socially.

22 social media management tools – a wiki in development
Fresh Networks: Social media management tools can help businesses listen to, manage, measure and respond to conversations about their brand on the social web.

Yandex adds Twitter deal to power real-time search
GigaOM: The deal gives Yandex access to Twitter’s firehose, and allows users to search it at twitter.yandex.ru, giving them almost instant access to vast troves of data.

See also:

Search Engine News Wrap-up March 4
Search Engine Marketing Wrap-up March 4

Why should you use Twitter in your online marketing?

There are at least three answers to this question:

1. Given that tweeps (those that use Twitter) often refer to sites, posts and articles in their tweets, Twitter may generate traffic directly to your site. If these tweets are retweeted by other Twitter users, the traffic may become significant.

Note that many bloggers and journalists use Twitter to find stuff to write about. A link found in Twitter may lead them to your site. They may refer to it in their writing, generating a link that can be very valuable search engine optimization wise.

2. Search engines are using social traffic as one of the factors in their search engine algorithm. Links from Twitter to your pages may boost your rankings in the search engines.

To what extent Google make use of Twitter data is unclear, as Google no longer has access to Twitter raw data (which is one of the reasons they are trying so hard to promote Google+ as an alternative), but tweets may find their way into other sites that are indexable by Google (like Delicious, Posterous and Reddit), so this effect may still be important.

3. If you can build a standing as a useful and reliable source of information in Twitter, your are essentially strengthening your personal “brand” or the brand of your service or company.

If tweeps find your tweets being repeatedly retweeted by others, they will interpret that as a sign of your trustworthiness, which makes it much more likely that they will follow the link to your site.

The importance of building a Twitter following

We have seen online marketing “experts” that recommends that you put up a lot of twitter accounts and then send messages or tweets to a large number of people enticing them to go to your site.

This may work for affiliate scams and for the distribution of malware, but this tactic will ruin your reputation and any chance you have of being considered a serious and trustworthy provider of information, services or goods.

There is only one way to Twitter marketing success and that is the hard one.

You have to build a sufficient number of followers in your area of expertise, i.e. people who are likely to find your tweets interesting and who are likely to retweet them.

The retweeting part is important, not only because it leads to more direct visits to your site, but because retweets will expose your profile to a larger number of people, helping you generate more followers. That is the virtous circle you want get into.

The number of followers required may vary, from industry to industry and from language group to language group. If you are promoting a bicycle repair shop in Oslo, Norway, that will require fewer followers to have an effect, than — for instance — if you want to promote soft drinks on the global market.

How to get more followers

To build a sufficient number of followers takes time. In the beginning progress will normally be slow. Ultimately, however, you will reach “critical mass”, where the number of followers start to accellerate. This tipping point is reached because an increasing number of followers start promoting your tweets and your profile through retweets and comments.

If you continue to push good content and interact actively with your followers this tipping point may be reached when you get some 1500 to 2000 followers.

Before you get to that point, there are a few tactics that might be of help:

Identify influential Twitter users

Identify tweeps that should be interested in your topic or knowledge and follow them. A simple way of finding such people is to go to the most influential tweeps in your field and look at the people who they follow and who follow them. You may also find their Twitter identity on web sites and business cards.

There are also Twitter directories and — of course — Twitter’s own Who to follow feature, which becomes more useful the more followers you have.

The 2000 restriction

Twitter has put in place a 2000 followers restriction. That is: before you yourself has reached 2000 followers, you are not allowed to follow more than 2000 people. Remember also that seasoned tweeps will look at your following to follower ration to determine whether you are a serious actor. If you follow 1999 and have only 10 followers, you are most likely a spammer, and they will not follow for your tweets.

Because of this you need to prune your follower list from time to time, to remove those that do not follow you back.

That is extremely hard work using the normal Twitter interface, but there are — fortunately — tools out there that makes this easier. You can for instance use Social Bro to identify tweeps who are passive (who do not tweet themselves) or who do not follow your back.

By all means: Do keep the tweeps that provide you with good info!

Promote your Twitter acount

Make sure to promote your Twitter account outside of Twitter.

Sign your blog posts with your @name. If this is a company account, include the name in newsletters, magazines, letter heads, business cards, and posters. Add the @name to other social media accounts like Facebook, Linkedin, Pinterest and Google+.

Delivering content

You would obviously like to use your Twitter account to promote your own services. Adding a tweet regarding your latest promotion is OK and necessary, but remember that people are not normally going to follow your account because of those promotions.

Thet are only going to follow you if you:

1. Entertain them with funny and provoking tweets.

2. Engage in interesting and meaningful conversation.

3. Tweet stories and links that will interest them.

Tactic No. 1 is highly effective, but also very demanding and risky, as humor may be misread and lead to antagonism.

Be social!

Tactic No. 2 is very efficient. Replying to and commenting on the tweets of others is an efficient way of generating interest and followers. Most experts in the field will tell you that this is the way to go. But it is extremely time consuming.

Remember that Twitter is alive 24/7 and if you are planning to develop the services or good you are planning to promote, you cannot spend more than some 30 minutes a day on Twitter. So, unless you have the money to hire two or three full time tweeps, full and real time surveillance is out of the question.

Because of this most social media marketers stick to checking on the “Interactions” and “Mentions” with regular intervals, and comment and retween when possible and necessary.

Find rare and useful content

Tactic No. 3 is essential and doable. You need to produce a steady stream of tweets that will be of interest to your audience. This means that you have to go beyond tweeting about your own store, company or organisation (unless you are the Queen of Great Britain or the President of the Unites States, that is).

If you have a bicycle repair shop, tweet bicycle news. Give infomaltion about new bikes, biking travel desitinations, maintenance tips and so on.

Try to find news sources that are not covered by others. In the field of social media and search engines, everybody tweets the latest Search Engine Land or Mashable article. If you can find valuable information from less known sites, you will be considered a more valuable curator of search and social media news.

Do also retweet tweets you find interesting and useful. Preferably use the old fashioned way of retweeting (RT @susanneanette), as this means that the tweet will be clearly marked with your image/avatar in Twitter. That photo or logo should be an important part of your Twitter branding!

By retweeting informative tweets you also please the original tweep, making her or him more aware of you and your online work. Your followers will also appreciate the fact that you reward other Twitter users in this way. In other words: This kind of retweeting adds to your social standing, which is a good thing.

Spread your tweets

If you spend 30 minutes a day curating content and tweeting about it, you will soon end up tweeting 10 to 20 tweets in a very shot time. Sending out several tweets in one go may actually be efficient as it makes your profile more visible in the Twitter stream. But if there are too many of them, many Twitter users will get annoyed and suspect you of spamming.

You therefore need to schedule your tweets for a more even distribution throughout the day. There are several tools that let you do this. Take, for instance, a look at HootSuite or Social Oomph.

What not to do

If you establish a Twitter account, make sure you follow up. You do not have to send out 10 tweets a day, but you do have to keep the account alive. Finding a “dead” Twitter account reflects badly on your brand. As an absolute minimum, tweet once or twice a week, so that Twitter users find it worth while to become a follower.

If you want to build an interested and efficient following, however, you must to much more than that!

One more thing: If you have managed to generate an enthusiastic and engaged following on Twitter, do not waste it by linking to crap content on your own site! All of this is worth close to nothing if your own site is of a bad quality.

Pandia’s editors Per and Susanne Koch are tweeting as @perkoch and @susanneanette.