Buzzom crosses 200,000 pageviews a month

The team at Buzzom was eagerly awaiting this day. A lot of hard work, imagination and creativity has paved way for Buzzom to hit its 200,000 page views a month milestone.

We’ d like to thank all Buzzom users for helping us achieve this. You all have been amazing and we value each of your feeback.

Be with us and help us get better. We are listening.

5 Exploitations of Twitter

R U ready to face it? That the more then 50 % of tweets you recieve are spam and stupid marketing jargons. Now I can understand that marketing is THE reason twitter has gained popularity among the business firms. But, there are dos and don’ts in marketing too. Most successful tweeple are not spammers, even though they are good marketers.

Here I present 5 ways in which twitter has been exploited.

1. Mixing the LINK and @username

In twitter, only a mention of @usernamer in tweets will allow the message to be visible in the replies of @username. This has been exploited to force user to click on the link, creating a high traffic to the website. These accounts do nothing beside tweet redundanct links again and again.

LINK and @Username

2. Flooding with redundant information

The kind of messages seen below must be flooding your twitter account. Now, why should the update been sent in the replies when there are so many other ways to do so. This has casued lots of noise in the twitter. Not to mention that these accounts tweets nothing beside this.

Redundant Information

Redundant Information

3. Automated Direct Messages

The only way to communicate privately in twitter and look what has the auto DM done!!! SPAM SPAM SPAM. Even the genuine DM gets lost in this sea of DM.

Automated DM

4. Using Trending Topic

False Trending topic is no new in Twitter. These days its quite easy to get your topic to the trending list by causing tweet strom. Few months back, an application doing this was band. More to this, these day, trending topic has be miss utilized by stuffing tweets will all the available topic to get yourself noticed. This is another noise to the twitsphere.

Trending Topic

Spamming with Trending Topic

5. Hijacking your Account

This one is the most irritating of all. Some how weeks earlier, my account started tweeting things on its own. Some how the soul of ghost entered into my account and started flooding it’s own marketing jargon. I had to change my password to reset it.

Hijacking Account

If I have missed any other ways, Lets share to make people more aware of the happenings in twitter, cause there are people who have been victimized.

Buzzom: Spankier and friendlier than ever.

After an eventful week, Buzzom is finally up with the much awaited new and fresh look. The verdict is out and the chosen one has been made live.

So, here we serve you the old wine in spanky new bottle.

There was this lack of fun factor which actually called for the new look and we hope that the new Buzzom would make up for that. It is the result of the hard work of the technical team and they surely deserve applaud here. Buzzom has been tested on Internet Explorer 8, Firefox, Chrome and Safari. So if you face any issue in any of those browsers, please let us know.

A lot is happening in our labs and this is just the beginning of a number of developments that’s going to take place in the months ahead.

As always, we’d love to know your thoughts. You can share your thoughts as comments or get in touch with us here. Let us know what you think, we’d be waiting.

Is it possible to follow all your followers and use Twitter effectively?

Well this is the most difficult question I have at present. I have always followed all my followers, and also went on finding and following interesting people around. I had good success in getting huge number of followers, and the journey has been great so far.

I got decent success in marketing my blog and company products. Buzzom is one of them. Buzzom now stands being one of the most successful Twitter Application Service, is close to getting 200k pageviews a month. With Account Statistics, SPAM Control and Public Profile, we should be getting close to half a million pageviews per month soon.

All this is fine, but slowly a poison is getting inside my Twitter Account — SPAM. On a simple thumb rule testing, I found half of my friends are Spammers. These Spammers are of following types:

1. Grow and Sale Accounts

There are people who create huge number of accounts and start running automated script to follow new people. They target reciprocators like @GuyKawasaki, @leplan (I), @unmarketing, @cheth, @dollars5 etc. and follow them all. They unfollow people who donot follow them back. When they reach a decent size of around 5 thousand to 10 thousand followers, the account is sold for some price.

I have least problem with these people. What they do is not of value to me; but it does not harm too.

2. Twitter Stream Marketers

I have been getting many ads targeted to me in person. This is not bad and many of them is of some value too. But these ads sometime force me to follow only what they write, and they don’t stop after I start using their service. This is painful.

I get a lot of  replies ‘@leplan’ from one or a group of accounts with same information. This simply floods my Twitter stream and I have no way to weed out these replies and only follow the genuine ones.

Note : We are very sorry to have used this strategy once. We stopped it immediately after getting complains.

3. Information Dessimators

There are some accounts, which continuous monitor other account performance, and provide the information on them. Below is one such example.

Followermonitor does a good job of monitoring unfollows and reporting; but take a case you unfollow 50 people and you get 50 such messages. This is painful again.

I like @TwitLandMark and @MrMileStone, and I have no complain with them. I don’t see my followers count daily, and it is good to know any landmark I attain.

4. Forceful World of Mouth Marketing

There are few companies, who have their policy of Tweeting from user account while the user uses the service. I feel good services deserve some form of credit, and the user can atleast tweet about the product. But the problem is to get hundreds of tweets, and at regular intervals from the service users without their knowledge.

Few companies have put in policies and terms of service; but this is not enough. If I am using a Twitter API based third party tool, I not necessarily like to Tweet about it. If I like it, I will certainly make a pro-service Tweet. What pisses me off is automated tweeting from my account.

One of my friends used one such service yesterday and it was Tweeting a pro-service Tweet automatically from his account every four hours. He didn’t know about it before I told him. He then had no other options but to change his password.

When you use any third party tool, make sure you understand it.

5. Genuine and valuable; but just too much

These are people who are genuine, and their tweets are of good value. The problem is the information overflow. I know many good Tweeters who tweet more than 50 per day; and worst part most of these are feeds from his or his friend’s blogs.

I feel so much pain when he continues to do the same even after I complain. What he forgets is -  if 1000 people post 50 Tweets per day, then I have 5,000 Tweets to read from them. This is a problem for many. We get too much information, too less time to consume.

I would rather love to get 5 Tweet from one person per week, and hear from 50,000 people.

6. Chatters, the Social Dudes

These are the people by whom Twitter lives. They constitute the majority of the Twitter users, and they own majority of the Twitter stream. They are very responsive and are damn helpful. I love to talk to such people.

The problem is here: if I have 5000 friends in my list and are talking to each other through replies ‘@’; it floods my Twitter stream. I have no way to filter them out. I am helpless.

This is much like death of a person in the Atmosphere of Nitrogen. We know Nitrogen is not harmful; but sadly people die because of lack of Oxygen.

I would suggest my dear friends to talk more in DM or have personal discussion in Facebook, Orkut or Messenger. Twitter can best be used for broadcasting messages, and consuming messages of public importance.

7. Welcome DMers

Welcome Direct Message is good; but do we need to send it? Once someone follows me, he will be more happy to get quality Tweets from me than a welcome message. I am sure if someone does not like my Tweet, he will unfollow me and won’t be thinking of my sweet welcome message before pressing the ‘unfollow’ button.

There are lots of follow and unfollow work going on in Twitter. Welcome DMs are the worst among all type of spam, and this has made DM almost useless. We will need to do something here.

—-

Now we know some types of spammers. Can we weed them out and remain happy? NO. Strict SPAM control will only make Twitter useless.

I have identified certain rules to live with it:

1. Unfollow immediately, whom you don’t want to listen; you can follow them back anytime again, if needed.

2. Don’t spam and ask your friends not to.

3. Tell the spammers that you feel they are spammers (feedback help sometime)

4. Remain cautious in using third party tools; specially those without 0Auth implementation. Someone saving your password can use it anyway, and may harm you.

5. Follow all your followers who are non-spammers; don’t reciprocate the spammers. Anything that gets rewarded gets repeated. Be aware.

–

I end the article here. What do you feel? Do not forget to share your thoughts. Would love to hear from you and have discussion.

If you like this article, follow me @leplan.

Why should you Retweet?

Retweet, a way of broadcasting someone else’s tweet to your followers. The viral effect that Twitter has can be contributed to this phenomenon. To retweet you just need to copy the original tweet and add an ‘RT’ followed by an ‘@’ to the username who had originally posted the tweet.

Retweeting is the best example of word of mouth marketing. I would always trust the opinion of my friends and people I know before making a purchase. A post retweeted by someone I am following builds the same trust on the post.

Many people retweet to get into the good books of the person who had original posted the tweet. This holds true most of the time and is remembered as favor. The advantage comes in form of return of favor (retweet of your post) or a recommndation on friday (in terms of followfriday). It also helps you create a rapport with the people and helps your PR.

When someone enjoys a good post by you, they are more likely to pay attention to your other posts as well. While the retweet drew traffic to someone else’s link, the next post having your link would bring the equal amount of traffic to your link.

Having said that, you can not blindly retweet all the posts of your favorite person. While an informative retweet can delight your followers, an uninteresting retweet can have the exact opposite effect.

Reasons, why your Buzzom doesn’t work sometime.

Twitter is not perfect. Remember this fact. Lots are gone into creating a better experience, especially when their are millions of people tweeting and following each other. Thus in this midst of technical sophistication, twitter has exposed its API, which is what makes all the third party twitter application exists.

All the twitter applications utilizes Twitter API to access the data from twitter and work on it. This model of operation causes lag in the system, hence most of the API based applications are slow. Further, there is a limit imposed by the twitter, of maximum call that an application can make to twitter’s system.

Now, lets see how things work when you click on any buzzom’s operation. In simply steps:

1. User’s request is sent by Buzzom to twitter.
2. The request gets authenticated by the twitter.
3. The request then gets acknowledged by both the party.
4. Twitter serves the request on its server.
5. After completion, twitter sends the work completion status to the Buzzom.
6. Buzzom than makes an update to the user.

So you can see different levels on which your operations are performed. Most of the time, the issue always reside in the twitter’s section because the system is heavily dependent upon the twitter’s API. Thus any issue unresolved with twitter’s API remains carried to the system utilizing them.

Further, any break in the operations in these 6 steps will cause for failure. The parameters affecting can be your interenet traffic and your allocated bandwidth, cause any twitter API Applications require lots of data transactions.

What can you do about it?

When ever you come across such anomolies, the best would be to wait. Why wait?? This is because most of the time user crosses their limit and it needs to be replenished by twitter. Thus waiting and clearing your cache and restarting fresh solves most of the problem related with such issues.

Some resources from the Twitter’s forum.

People you followed or un-followed appearing or not appearing in your profile

Trouble following people

Fixed: Trouble un-following people

Can’t follow- hit a limit when I’m within my limits?

Therefore, if you are having any kind of random glitches in your operation then do give us the detailed description via email in buzzom@in-rev.com.

Buzzom becomes the Most Global Indian Site

I was going through various Indian sites and studying their global performance today. Found some very interesting facts and figures. Let me share here.

Here is the Alexa Ranks for Top Indian Sites.

Buzzom has Alexa Rank of 32836.

The above mentioned sites have good traffic and represent big Internet Companies in India; their Indian traffic competes with the traffic of Global Web biggies like Yahoo, MSN and Google.

Below is the graph with percentages of their traffic coming from three big nations — US, China and India.

(Fig: Percenatge of Vistors from US, China and India; Source : Alexa.com)

Above graph shows that Buzzom is the only Indian Site with significant international traffic. Most other sites are centered to India.

(Overall US Traffice — No. of Visits; source compete.com)

According to compete.com, Buzzom is clearly in the big league beating the Job Portal Major Naukri.com and others in US Traffic. It is also closing gap with sites of HDFC Bank, Ibibo and Moneycontrol. Also, it is important to note that Buzzom has one of the highest growth rate in the last three months.

These days the weight of the site is also known from its Google Page Rank too. So, tet us now look at it for these sites.

Railway Ticket booking site irctc.com, ICICI Bank corporate site icicibank.com and Network 18’s Stock Market Information Site moneycontrol.com have the highest Page Rank. They all have 8.

Buzzom is only above travian.in, and has page rank of 3. It has long way to go from here.

Buzzom has the growth rate of about 200% on month-by-month basis since the start. And now, Buzzom has become the most global Indian site, which has achieved the feat in just 5 months. We thank all our users for their support and promise to better service in days ahead.

What is #followfriday?

It’s Friday again!! Today you would find numerous users using the phrase ‘followfriday’ and an equally enthusiastic number reciprocating. So, what exactly is followfriday? In the Twitter world, Friday is a day of showing your gratitude and thanking fellow twitters. How do you do this?

Simple. You just recommend them to your followers by mentioning their name/s and adding #followfriday with the reason you are recommending them for.

If you have never done this before, you can modify the text “#followfriday @inrev_buzzom great app” and tweet.

Happy followfriday!!

A sneak peek of the the new (awesome) Buzzom interface!

Let’s face it. We love buzzom, don’t we?

Well, now that being said, we, at Buzzom, want to thank our tens of thousands of users who trusted us all the time and took interest in the Buzzom services. And now I’d like to give a small hint of what have we been cooking inside the Buzzom labs for the last few weeks!

The last few weeks were full of internal meetings and discussions about Buzzom. We read every feedback we recieved (kudos to those senders), analyzed every request in every email, read almost every technology blog on the blogosphere, read thousands of tweets by thousands of users (& retweets of course)! And after all these, we came up with some great ideas to improve Buzzom based on your experiences!

So here is a quick preview of what you can expect to see in Buzzom, in the coming weeks!

New brand concept and colors

Read the rest of this entry »

Buzzom breaks the language barrier, now present in 8 languages.

This should be an awesome news to all the people who are not comfortable with English language and would prefer their own local langauge. Buzzom team have known that Twitter is used by the people from all over the world and that their are many people who prefer to Tweet in their own langauge. Understanding this need and the goal of serving to larger audience, Buzzom has come up with an option to view in different languages.

Right now we have : English, Hindi, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, French, Bengali and German. With time and need, we will expand our reach to whole world.

In order to view different languages, the steps are very easy. Go to the top right bar and in the language bar, click and chose the langauge of your need.

Menu Bar

We would like to mention one more thing, we have used Google’s Translate to convert the content and few are done on our own. Therefore, if there is any mistake or problem with the conversion, do let us know. We are working to get the text translated properly, so we would appreciate your help. You can mail us if you want to help at buzzom@in-rev.com.

Help us translate

Further, if you want to share the link of each individual language with your friends than, you can get unique link for each language.

The direct link would appear like http://www.buzzom.com?lang=hi

The last two characters are the language code here. The supported languages and their codes are –

English    en

Hindi      hi

Japanese   ja

Chinese    zh

Spanish    es

French     fr

Bengali    bn

German     de

Hope you will enjoy this features.

P.S. How I wish I could get this blog written in different languages, so that all would recieve the message across.