This Week On Twitter: #AskObama, Google Realtime Ends, Fox News Hacked + New Tips & Infographics

Need a little weekend reading? We’ve compiled our top ten Twitter stories of the week, which includes why you shouldn’t connect your Twitter and Facebook accounts, a change to the way direct messages work for some verified users, a huge reaction to President Obama’s Twitter Town Hall, the end of Google Realtime Search and the hacking of a couple of major Twitter profiles. Here are our top 10 Twitter stories of the week: 1. Twitter Tip: Don’t Auto-Connect Your Facebook And Twitter Accounts Twitter has made it deceptively easy to connect your Twitter account to your Facebook account, but don’t be fooled. It’s usually not a good idea. Twitter and Facebook are two distinct networks with two distinct sets of etiquette and norms. Posting all of your tweets to your Facebook wall may sound like a good idea at first (I can keep my friends updated on everything going on in my life!), but believe me, neither your Facebook nor your Twitter friends will thank you. 2. UPDATED: Good News, Twitter Celebrities: Fans Still Can’t Send You Unwanted Direct Messages This week news broke that Twitter had made two-way direct messaging automatic on all verified accounts, which had huge ramifications for celebrities with millions of followers. The story turned out to not be entirely accurate, but Twitter has begun experimenting with out-of-the-box two-way DMs for some profiles. 3. 169,395 Tweets And 9 Million Followers For The President During #AskObama [REPORT] This week, President Barack Obama hosted a special and historic Town Hall on Twitter, answering questions submitted by Twitter users in the days leading up to the event. The response was pretty incredible – tens of thousands of tweets were sent to the President using the #AskObama hashtag. 4. Google’s Realtime Search Goes Offline As Deal With Twitter Ends This week when you headed on over to Google to search you’d have noticed something missing: real-time results. This includes tweets from Twitter, but also Facebook Page updates, Quora, Google News, new web pages, newly updated pages, Friendfeed and even (gasp) MySpace. In fact, so much is missing that Google’s Realtime Search has become entirely redundant and is now completely offline. 5. Marketer’s Guide To The Social Media Landscape [INFOGRAPHIC] This updated infographic takes a look at all the major social platforms – including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and more – and ranks them accordingly for how well they score for customer communication, brand exposure, site traffic and SEO. 6. Fox News Twitter Account Hacked, Declares President Obama Dead On Independence Day Fox News Politics (@foxnewspolitics) is a verified account on Twitter with over thirty thousand followers. The profile tweets in Fox’s normal way, sharing news and updates about the Presidency and politics, albeit with the network’s usual right-of-center bias. And it’s that bias that will inevitably make the reaction to this news more severe. About 3 hours ago, @foxnewspolitics was hacked. Worse, they’ve written a series of tweets about President Obama being killed, and those messages have spread rapidly throughout the Twittersphere. 7. How To Track Every Tweet Sent To (And From) Any Celebrity On Twitter (Or Anyone Else) Twitter’s search function is completely public, which is great as everything on Twitter (apart from protected profiles and direct messages) is public, too. That is, all tweets are freely searchable by everybody, 24/7/365. What this means is that we can also leverage Twitter search to apply those exact same techniques used to track our own Twitter mentions to follow the tweets of anybody else on the platform that we choose – both sent and received. 8. Celebrate #July4th On Twitter To Add Your Avatar To A Real-Time US Flag Made Of Tweets Monday was the Fourth of July, and what better way to celebrate Independence Day than with Twitter? Thanks to some nifty programming from the team at Code For America, you can help re-weave a US flag for the 21st century – simply tweet with the hashtag #July4th and your Twitter avatar will join thousands of others as part of the new ‘Old Glory’. 9. How Do Architects Use Twitter? [INFOGRAPHIC] Twitter provides branding, networking and information opportunities for all businesses and industries. Perceived limitations are usually pre-established and unfounded, and quickly fade away once the required effort is made. Digital marketing agency Pauley Creative set out to survey UK architects who are on Twitter to establish how and why they used the platform, who they follow, what they tweet about and their likes and dislikes. 10. Lesson To Marketers: Learn Your Hashtags, Or Suffer Embarrassment Hashtags are an integral part of Twitter. They organize content, indicate topic, connect tweets and create conversation. However, as one brand discovered yesterday, hashtags can also be a major source of embarrassment if you don’t check up on what they’re being used for first. Also this week: HootSuite hit a major milestone - two million user accounts Twitter has an updated valuation of between $7 billion and $8 billion The UK Paypal account was hacked on Twitter Twitter acquired Backtype, a social media analytics company Rumors are circulating that Twitter might be introducing a Facebook-like wall Did you know we have a newsletter? Sign-up to receive a daily digest of all things Twitter, sent straight to your inbox. Click here to sign up for the AllTwitter Newsletter.

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This Week On Twitter: #AskObama, Google Realtime Ends, Fox News Hacked + New Tips & Infographics

Shea Bennett

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Shea Bennett