For websites that offer a service (like ours), it’s important you get mentioned in publications and show practical examples of your services to a bigger and newer audience than your current users. It’s good for branding and strengthens your authority.

In this blogpost we want to share what happened last week when we reported on Justin Bieber passing Lady Gaga as the most followed Twitter user and how we got covered by some major news outlets. These included CNN, Reuters, Huffington Post, Mashable, CNET, Yahoo, MTV and Billboard.com (see the articles here).

Predict the future
Thanks to our prediction tool and investigative curiosity we found out that Justin Bieber was closing in on Lady Gaga who had been the most followed user on Twitter since August 2010. We determined that Justin Bieber would pass Lady Gaga in around five days so we created an early online press release that was optimized for social media with Pressdoc.com. (Like Twitter Counter, Pressdoc is another TNW Labs product)

Tip insiders
We wanted to give some websites an exclusive tip in the early stages of a (possible) news item and also give them the time to write up a good story and get it ready to be published. So we sent this press release to 20 journalists under an embargo, 5 days before Justin Bieber would pass Lady Gaga. These journalists are on our press list to receive special news tips that are related to Twitter stats.

Don’t push rocks, roll snowballs
Some journalists reported back to us and thanked us for the tip, others didn’t find it that interesting to publish (but hey! that’s the name of the game!). Of course our goal was to be the first with this prediction and try to break the news before the majority would pick up this story. By now, we knew our “news ball” was in effect and with a few journalists in the loop we released a blogpost with the news only 2 days before Justin Bieber was likely to pass Lady Gaga.

We spread the news via our Twitter account, also mentioned it in our weekly newsletter and when some websites started publishing it we saw the ball was really rolling. After Reuters picked it up we saw a tipping point and after that, more major websites picked up our prediction and mentioned it (AND us) in their posts.

So that’s how we got some nice coverage on something we discovered using our own tools! The end result? Over a 6 day period we received almost 50.000 more pageviews than we normally get in the same timespan.

Want to be on Twitter Counter’s press list? E-mail your credentials to: rey@twittercounter.com

It’s a new year! Have you thought about your digital goals and resolutions?
2013 promised to be an even more social year than the past few years, with Twitter becoming more mainstream and integrated into people’s lives.

Considering this fact, it’s a good thing to realize your presence on Twitter is ever changing and getting more important, both for brands and individuals.
So here are 5 Twitter tips & tricks to strengthen your influence on Twitter and keep your followers engaged in 2013.

1. Get your story straight
For brands, as well for bloggers, 2013 is going to be all about telling your story via multiple platforms. Each platform strengthens the other, creating a total story and/or experience. Get visual with videos or Instagram and tell your (brand) story across different platforms, including Twitter (point 3 below).

BUT, keep in mind to get (and keep) your story straight. Today’s connected generation already uses these multiple platforms in coherence to get their information. It’s important to use these platforms in the same way as your (possible) audience, this way you’ll be able to engage with your followers around a more lively story that connects on all platforms.

2. Keep it real
Being on Twitter is almost like being part of a cult. Rules and etiquette are (mostly) unwritten but ever present. Don’t try to overcompensate the story you want to tell via your Twitter account (whether personal or brand related). We’ve seen our fare share of badly created memes and supposedly funny retweets and @mentions by companies in 2012. Stop it.

Keep it personal and real, your followers aren’t stupid. They know there’s a person behind that @name and that’s why conversation is king. Your followers make up who you are as a brand or business, get to know them.

3. Get visual
Twitter is one of coolest ways to tell your story. The 140 character limitation forces you to really think about what you are sharing with the world. This means your tweets should be of strong content (and preferably around 70-110 characters) if you want them to serve as a trigger for interaction and engagement.

The best way to strengthen your message(s) even more is with great (and relevant) visuals. A picture still says more than a thousand words, so it will definitely help you to get your tweet some great traction.

4. Get ready for the weekend
If you really want to be a part of this whole Twitter thing and get on a personal level with your followers you’ve got to get ready to be tweeting in the weekend. Shown in multiple publications, Twitter engagement rates for brands are about 17 percent higher on weekends compared to weekdays.

This doesn’t necessarily mean your Twitter efforts will be less effective on Monday through Friday, but it does show that the weekend is the perfect time to get your story out in the Twittersphere.

5. Sharing is caring
Don’t be afraid to share other tweets and content that are not necessarily related to your business or what you do as a person. In essence, Twitter is all about learning and discovering new things and sharing those things with your community.

“Sharing is caring” sounds really corny but it can’t get more true than that. Try to share new and interesting content and you’ll see your followers will engage with you.
Part of Twitter is to help each other to reach higher levels and new grounds of knowledge. Don’t be afraid to jump into this, Twitter is still only speeding up.

That’s it!, we hope you’ll have a great year on Twitter in 2013!
Follow us via @TheCounter to see what we are up to this year!

There have been a lot of stories written on the web about spam and bots on Twitter. And with 140 million active users and more than 340 million tweet each day, Twitter unfortunately becomes a more attractive target for spammers. Spambots on Twitter is nothing new, and it happens to us all every once in a while. But last week we were notified by some helpful tweeps that there might be a link between Twitter Counter and spam followers.

Let us preface the rest of this blog post by stating that we would never purposefully send spam followers to our users. We also would like to apologize to users who have been affected by these spam followers. It was never our intention to give you a negative experience with Twitter Counter.

What happened?

This week we were approached by users of Twitter Counter, stating that they’d seen an increase in spam followers when they logged in to Twitter Counter.

1/7 @thecounter Strong possibility Spam Bot is using list of Twitter users logging into TwitterCounter to spread ‘Spam followers’ on Twitter — Paul Chatterton (@paulchat) July 31, 2012

Following our initial contact with these users we set on investigating where this might have come from. We quickly distinguished three possible sources for what had happened: our Twitter Widget, our custom follow button or one of our three Twitter accounts.

Our Twitter Widget keeps track of all visitors logged in to Twitter Counter, which could explain why these users were suddenly followed when logged in to Twitter Counter. We placed a couple forms of tracking on our (@TheCounter‘s) widget to try and detect whether bots were automatically loading the widget. By setting special session variables, and checking for HTTP referrers, we were able to analyse traffic for suspicious activity. Unfortunately this yielded nothing conclusive. 

We suspected, since it concerned spam followers, that somehow our button might be abused through automated clicks. We could, however, through tracing, find no evidence that any of the spambots mentioned by users affected, had used the button.

The third option was that a spambot had found one of our Twitter streams. We send out a couple of automated Tweets on these accounts, of people who’ve logged in to Twitter Counter. Through our own testing, and with the help of @anyapalmer, we were able to conclude that these automated Tweets were indeed the source of the spam followers. When users logged in to Twitter Counter for the first time, our @TheRemote automatically sent an @mention to that account. As we found out this resulted in being followed by spambots within the next few hours to days. As soon as we found out, we halted these automated Tweets.

Steps taken and the future

We’ve stopped with the automated Tweets, which should prevent any new users from experiencing what others have. We’re also monitoring those parts of our service which are vulnerable to being used by spambots. We hope that this will prevent any future events. We fully recognise that by Tweeting to users on our accounts we enabled spambots to follow you. Our failure to anticipate this is where we are to blame. We are therefore very grateful to those who voiced their concerns to us and were instrumental in helping us detect the source. For some users this is, regrettably, too late. We hope, however, that your experience with Twitter Counter going onwards will be better.

As a final word, if you ever find that you’re being followed by spambots, right after you’ve logged in to Twitter Counter, or have used any other part of our service, please notify us straight away via our support email support@twittercounter.com.

Have you ever wondered who holds the record for the fastest time to reach one million Twitter followers or who has the most followers on Twitter? According to Guinness World Record, the world’s authority on record-breaking achievements, social media records are one of the most demanded records by their fans and readers. As we have all the Twitter Stats right here, let’s dive into the ‘World of Twitter Records’. We picked out our most favorite records. Are you missing some important records that should belong in this list? Please leave your thoughts in the comments.

1. MOST FOLLOWERS ON TWITTER

Lady Gaga joined Twitter on March 26, 2008 and the undisputed Queen of Twitter has dominated for quite some time now. Surpassing Britney Spears in August 2010, Lady Gaga (at that time over 5.7 million followers) became the most followed person on Twitter and has kept that title ever since. The singer was also the first to break the 10 million followers milestone on May 2011, and has broken various other Twitter records along the way. We’ve been tracking Lady Gaga’s growth since December 24, 2008. Find out more about the history of Lady Gaga’s Twitter stats here.

2. MOST RESPONSIVE BRAND ON TWITTER

The most responsive corporate account on Twitter is Microsoft’s @XboxSupport, a.k.a. the ‘Elite Tweet Fleet’, which responded to over 5,000 questions in an average time of 2 mins 42 seconds between 12-18 March 2010. Nearly three years after the creation of the @XboxSupport handle, Microsoft’s @XboxSupport currently has 189,450 followers and they send an average of more than 791 tweets a day.

➤ Xbox Support’s Tweets per day

3. MOST TWEETS PER SECOND

On December 9, 2011 the 25-year-old anime movie Castle in the Sky was televised in Japan. During one point in the TV broadcast, viewers joined forces, sending tweets at the same time to symbolically help the movie’s characters cast a spell. They reached 25,088 tweets per second, placing the event on the number one spot on Twitter’s most-tweets-per-second list.

4. FIRST TWEEP TO AMASS OVER 1 MILLION FOLLOWERS

On April 16, 2009, Ashton Kutcher (also know as @aplusk on Twitter) became the first user of Twitter to have more than 1,000,000 followers, beating CNN in the “Million followers contest“. Kutcher announced via Twitter that should he win, he would be donating $100,000 to a charity which fights malaria. However, there have been several reports that Twitter manipulated the contest’s results by preventing users from “unfollowing” Kutcher or CNN.  Nowadays Kutcher isn’t even in the top 5 most followed users on Twitter anymore.  Don’t feel too sorry for the guy; he still maintains a healthy 11,418,883 followers and holds the #20 position.

➤ Check Ashton Kutcher’s Twitter Stats

5. FASTEST TIME TO REACH 1 MILLION FOLLOWERS ON TWITTER

Although he already registered the account in April 2009, Charlie Sheen actually joined Twitter for real in March 2011. With a bang he set a new Guinness World Record as the “Fastest Time to Reach 1 Million Followers”. Obviously Twitter Counter tracked his growth from day one and during that time the account got an impressive 129,000 followers per day – a ratio that no man or woman before him had reached on Twitter. It is even more impressive if you consider that in the first days he officially joined Twitter Charlie Sheen didn’t actually tweet anything.

Updated Jul 15, 2012.

Charlie Sheen has signed off his Twitter account last Thursday with the tweet, “Reach for the stars everyone. Dogspeed cadre. c out.” The tweet was accompanied by a picture of a bottle of Tabasco sauce on the dashboard of an airplane flying above the clouds.

➤ Check out why Charlie Sheen Quit Twitter

6. FIRST LIVE TWITTER FROM SPACE

On Friday January 22, 2010 Flight Engineer T.J. Creamer made Twitter history as he became the first person to send a tweet from outer space:

Hello Twitterverse! We r now LIVE tweeting from the International Space Station — the 1st live tweet from Space! More soon, send your ?s

— TJ Creamer (@Astro_TJ) January 22, 2010

➤ Check T.J. Creamer’s Twitter Stats

In case you weren’t aware yet, it’s Father’s Day this coming Sunday. Besides reminding their personnel to get their father a present, Marketing agency Euro RSCG took the time to find out how digital electronics, the Internet and social media are affecting how men parent.

Simply put, they divided fathers in to two groups: Digital Dads vs Average Joe’s. They found out some interesting differences between the two groups. Regarding tweeting, 43% of Digital Dads (vs. just 27 % of Average Joes) believe that the digital technology and entertainment make the bond between them and their teens stronger.

For more information on the Digital Dads study check out the cool infographic below or read more about the survey. You can even join in on the conversation on Twitter: #DigitalDads.

Researchers at Harvard took the time to dig into our brains to figure out why 40 percent of our daily speech is centered around telling others what we think and feel. And the reason? Because it feels so good!

In a series of experiments, they compared the feeling one gets from eating food, getting money or having sex with the feeling one gets from disclosing information about oneself. The study revealed that the feeling one gets from all of the above is strikingly similar, they all give the same feel-good feeling. This explains why we tweet and update about ourselves so often. It seems that self-disclosure activates the mesolimbic dopaminergic system of the brain, which is associated with the same rewarding feeling as getting money or sex.

So Tweeps, now you know what to do when you have the blues: start tweeting and updating your status!

Check out the video below or read more about the research.

In today’s blogpost we will show you how we used Twitter Counter’s compare tool, trying to ‘predict’ the winner of this seasons’ talent show The Voice US . The compare tool is a powerful Premium Stats feature that enables you to compare up to 10 Twitter handles on number of followers, relative growth and tweets. And because everybody – well at least here at Twitter Counter – is watching The Voice US, we thought it would be cool to use the compare tool.

How are the candidates doing on Twitter?
From the 12 contestants we compared the top 6 most promising candidates on last week’s live performance:

Jermain Paul, @JermainPaul, 15,955 followers
Chris Mann, @IamChrisMann, 20,620 followers
Raelynn, @Raelynn, 32,016 followers
Lindsey Pavao, @LindseyPavao, 18,021 followers
Erin Willet, @erin_willett, 10,935 followers
Jesse Campbell, @singjessesing, 9,642 followers

At this moment Raelynn is absolutely leading in followers: 32,016.

The black and white video for Madonna’s latest single, “Girl Gone Wild” dropped Tuesday night. And since its launch, a large number of people on Twitter are talking about the new controversial music video. A great chance for us to show you the awesome power of Twitter Tracker!

Twitter tracker allows you to identify general attitudes towards your brand, or any subject you would like to track on Twitter. In our case monitoring what people say on Twitter about the new Madonna music video. We’ve been tracking tweets since March 21 and based on those tweets 87% of the Twitter users in general think that the video is wild, hot and very well done.

The other 13% thinks it’s inappropriate, a reductive version of Alejandro by Lady Gaga and that Madonna is way too old to be doing a music video like Girl Gone Wild.

Check out our Madonna’s Twitter Tracker here or click on the graphs below.

MDMA, “Girl Gone Wild”

Well, do you like Madonna’s new music clip? Let us know in the comments.

Like infographics and data visualization? Then here’s your chance to create free custom infographics in seconds. Data visualization platform Visually launched an awesome service last week, that allows anyone to create and share infographics.

The service lets you choose from a range of five templates based around Twitter and Facebook stats. One of our favorite templates is the ‘Twitterize Yourself’ visualization which analyses your Twitter account to create graphic illustrating stats that compare you to any Twitter All-Star of your choice. And the best thing is: you can customize your own character! How cool is that?

Click on the image below to see how we compared our own Twitter Trailblazer Jorg Ruis with the undisputed queen of Twitter Lady Gaga. The results were very fascinating. If you would like to share your infographic, feel free to tweet them to @TheCounter. We would love to see them!

As we would like to help you get more out of Twitter, we continuously develop and add more features. With so many tools at your disposal, we want to make sure you’re finding exactly what you’re looking for.

That’s why we wanted to tell you about our top 3 Premium features you might be missing out on:

1. Stats of mentions and retweets

See stats on when, how often and who mentions or retweets you.

2. Compare multiple accounts

Compare number or followers, friends and tweets of your own Twitter account and your competitors.

3. Start tracking!

Track and analyze any brand, celebrity, word or topic you want. Get a clear graph of tweets, stats and sentiment.

We can imagine that with all these cool features you might be glued to your desk the coming weeks. And because this can’t be good for your body (backaches, eye strain, among other effects). Here’s a tip what we do at Twitter Counter to improve posture and get us into shape: