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“Twitter is like face book. In facebook you have friends, in twitter you have followers. I have enough friends. What I need are followers.” – ellen degeneres at Tonight’s show.

The way she said that was hilarious. Both ellen and Jay Leno admitted that they do not know what twitter is, But they both have started using it. Britney spears has 778,866 followers and RyanSeacrest is having 428,471 followers. Even Barak Obama is on Twitter.Twitter seems like the “it” thing. It is Hip to have a twitter account. But not a lot of people know why we even need a twitter account.

That lot of people includes me too. I do not want to get cornered being a blogger who is not Twittering. So I have an account here. I normally follow all the people who are following me. I really don’t know why we should do this.

Sometime it gets really annoying. :D So I did a search on google for the term “why we need a twitter account?”. It didn’t help. If some body knows why we really need a twitter account, please let us know in the comments section. I would love to hear your views on this.

One thing I know is, if you are in twitter, you need to have a lot of followers. If you do not have followers, there is no point having a twitter account. I learned that the best way to get more followers is by following lot of other people hoping that they will follow you back. There are lots of new web sites acting as good intermediaries for this purpose.

So, let’s get some followers shall we?

1. We Follow
They have categorized twitter users based on their fields. You can easily connect with people who you like to hang with. Links to lot of celebrity twitter accounts are available here.

2. Just Tweet it.
This is a cool site which lets you add your name to a “twitter directory”. Others with similar interests can start following you and you can do the same. They have a very nice, easy to use interface.

3. Twubble.
This is great web tools which searches your friends graph and select the people who you are most likely to have a connection with.

I found these web sites thanks to the tweet I received from Mr Problogger, Darren Rowse. I guess that is one use of twittering. You get to meet lot of interesting people and can explore lot of new web sites as most twitters are posting links through tweets. I am all open to learn other advantageous of twittering. Pro Tweeters, please share your expertise.

Follow me on Twitter, Itz a hip thing to do :D And I will follow you back.

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So I am writing back to back posts about Yahoo Buzz. I apologize, but this is the first time one of my writings was in the “top post category” in any social network. I have had posts which brought me over 1000+ daily Digg hits but none of them went even near the Digg Front page. Before proceeding to the analyzing part let’s see what I have experienced so far with Yahoo buzz.

My previous post titled “Will Yahoo buzz kill Digg?” had it 5 minutes fame in the buzz “top 10” page.

Spent 3-4 hours at the No 1 spot in the “up and coming” section. (This was the second day of Buzz launch. Now I have noticed they don’t keep posts in the “up and coming section” for that long. )

It spent more than 8 hours in the top 1-2 places in the business category.

Spent another 2 days at the No 2 spot according to voting count.

Overall, pretty good achievements. But the all important question is, did that have any kind of impact on my blog? If you think getting around 400 unique visitors is an impact, okay then there was an effect. Any kind of traffic is worth for a small scale blogger like me. Traffic is Traffic. Isn’t it?

But I have seen what 100 diggs, dozen Stumble up reviews, few vote ups in reddit can do to your traffic level. I have to admit, if there was no stumble upon and no reddit I would have said good buy to this blog long time ago and focus on my other businesses full time.

Yahoo Buzz is worth the effort for small time publishers. But it comes no where near the impact which other social networks, Digg / Stumble upon and reddit can give to you. That might be the reason why most of the industry giants do not have the yahoo buzz button in their web pages. But in the long run when Buzz attracts more readers this story might be changed. Yahoo got many things wrong in the recent past.
i.e
Sending out emails promoting you tube. You know, yahoo has their very own video sharing web site, what’s wrong with yahoo’s thinking machines? mmmm…Not thinking….Yeah, that is what’s wrong.

Featuring spammy type, made for adsense web sites in their top Buzz is not professional at all.

Did you notice the web site which was under the topic “India VS Srilanka ODI Live telecast”? There was nothing more than huge adsense blocks and few comments in that particular web site. That site made me realize it is really possible to game the Buzz system. Other wise no way in earth that site could come to the top 10 posts and stay there for 8 hours.

And there was another article in the top 10 which directed to a missing link. Yes, it said “the link you followed is not a valid link”. But it was in the top buzz under business category. Wonder how it ended up at the top.

So, Should you devote your time to get a limelight from yahoo buzz? I have a mixed feeling about this. Although they did not send me mind blowing traffic, the quality of the traffic is great. They have stayed on the site bit longer, clicked few ads, few even subscribed for my RSS. So I am not planning to remove the “yahoo buzz button” from my site any time sooner. But all posts will not do well in this system. Specially the posts in the niche MMO. I submitted few from my old posts but did not do that well. If you cover current stories, you have a much better chance of ending up at the top and to get more visitors.

To answer the titled question,” Is It a Big Deal To Be on Yahoo Top Buzz ?” I’d say NO. It is a decent achievement. But not a big deal.

For me the top 3 Social media networks in terms of impact is,
1. Stumble Upon – Give a fair chance to every one.

2. Reddit - You will start getting traffic from the minute someone submit your post to Reddit.

3. Digg – Will crash your servers if your post hits the top. But unless you have a huge following at the Digg community it is getting harder and harder to reach the top.

These days you cannot simply ignore the impact of social media networks. If you are running a product promoting web site or an online store then you do not need the attention of social media much. PPC will take care of your sales. Otherwise try to master at least 3 networks. It would be wise to get familiar with my recommended top 3 social media networks.

I feel, I went out of focus from my blog overall goal last week. It is time to get back on the right track and be back on turning cats in to Lions :-)

From tomorrow, I will be running a series of inspiring success stories of entrepreneurs who made it to the top of their lives. Real people who started from zero to become a hero. There will not be anything on morans who claim to made $10000 over night with affiliate marketing, Or with adsense. All the articles will be on real people with real identities who can inspire us with their true life story.

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