In order to grow your Twitter following and provide value to your followers you need to be consistent with your “sharing”. However, time is a finite source and whilst we would like to keep up with all the activities of our followers on Twitter is it not always possible.

I’ve come up with a list of 10 useful things you could share on Twitter with your followers that provide value and at the same time doesn’t require a lot of time on your part.

1. Discovered a new app or tool that’s useful? Provide a brief description and share the direct link
2. Share a specific conversation or thread that might be going on – highlight it and link to it
3. A link to a poll taking place that might stimulate some thought and encourage interaction
4. A link featuring a special offer or product that might be of interest – create value for your followers
5. A link to a Twitter list you think is worth following and why
6. Share an event that’s coming up and possibly of interest to your community – link to the details
7. Share something light such as a link to a funny YouTube video
8. If you’re heading to an event, share the #hashtag and link to that event before, during, and after
9. Link directly to a relevant podcast
10. Link to a relevant free e-book

Hopefully the above tips are helpful to save you some time and still provide value and engagement for your Twitter followers. Share with us and our readers things you share to bring value to your followers!

The popularity of social media has created a need for real-time search engines in order to aggregate and search for information. New platforms are coming up in answer to these needs.

In this article we will be covering 3 real-time search engines that might be useful in helping you to stay up to date with what’s happening in social media relevant to your marketing strategies.

OneRiot

OneRiot is currently the largest real-time search engine for Social Media. It aggregates popular topics from Twitter and other social media sites. Articles are consolidated into one headline that when clicked on brings up a variety articles within the topic. OneRiot indexes its search results according to their current relevance and popularity.

OneRiot will save you lots of time by not having to search through all the news sites to find the information you are looking for. Just search by a particular topic and OneRiot will return all the search results for that topic across the web in real-time.

As an example, if you sell watches, linking to OneRiot results page with the most current information on the types of watches you sell will instantly give your customers a resource to help them make their decision.

Collecta

Collecta monitors the update streams of news sites, popular blogs and social media, and Flickr, so it will show you results as they happen.

If you like to keep up with important news stories as they are happening, then Collecta is for you because it will aggregate news stories by topic and then suggest three sources to give you the breadth of angles on a particular news story.

48ers

48ers is a social search engine that scans Facebook, Twitter and Digg for conversations. The site is great if you are searching for keywords and want to see what people are discussing about within a certain topic.

Some ways 48ers could be useful:

• You can track what people are saying about your company or brand across major social sites from one interface.

• You can engage your audience by using the sharing functionality directly from within the 48ers’ interface.

• You can build an audience by tracking what is being said about them in real time and respond accordingly.

These are a few of the real-time social media search engines that we have come across. Let us know if you use them too and how it’s benefited you. If you’re using a different social media search engine, let us know what it is and how it has helped you to manage all the information that is out there in the social media world.

Twitter announced last week that it will begin wrapping all links posted through their service with it’s own t.co domain. We will begin seeing these links on certain accounts that have opted-in to the service and it will be rolled out to all users by the end of the year. At that time all links shared on Twitter.com or third-party apps will be wrapped with a t.co url.

Twitter’s new url shortener will essentially do what any third-party url shortener service currently does which is to shorten a long url link to fit into the 140 character requirements of a tweet with the exception of providing the ability to track the clicks on links and any analytics that go with that. At least for the time being. Twitter’s vague statement on this : “We hope to use this data to provide better and more relevant content to you over time.”

This move by Twitter means it’s stepping up the competition for third-party developers. For marketers, it surely means the new service will be providing link tracking analytics directly from Twitter. When a user clicks on a wrapped link it will go through Twitter’s service to check for any malware at the destination site. It will then forward the user to the destination url.

Some say that as a result of the level of spam that has targeted Twitter it makes sense for Twitter to step up security by offering it’s own url shortener service. Others think that Twitter is trying to step into the url shortener service market and roll out it’s own revenue generating service to users that enable them to track the clicks on these links.

How about you what do you think about Twitter’s latest move with the t.co url shortener and how it could affect your marketing efforts?

As per a blog post on The Official Google Blog dated 9/8/10, Google is rolling out a way for people to search called Google Instant. In a nutshell, Google Instant is going to dynamically predict what you are typing into the search window in order to save you time. “Our testing has shown that Google Instant saves the average searcher two to five seconds per search. That may not seem like a lot at first, but it adds up. With Google Instant, we estimate that we’ll save our users 11 hours with each passing second!” according the blog post. The real question is how will this new way to search going to impact the way websites are optimized and which keywords to choose for meta tags.

From an SEO standpoint, Google Instant can be a curse or a blessing. It could be a curse because the dynamic suggested search terms might not be the ones that your website current ranks high for and could possibly decrease your search traffic. It could be blessing because now you know what keywords will be suggested when people are beginning to type your keyword into Google and alternatively, your website might now be gaining some new search traffic given the dynamically suggested terms Google Instant will be suggesting. The best thing a webmaster or an SEO professional can do to lessen the impact of Google Instant is to type in your keywords in to Google and see what search terms Google Instant is suggesting. Then write them down and see if your website is optimized for them.

Google Instant was introduced to help control or predict the search patterns of people. In turn they are hoping to create a better search experience by finding relevant results quicker. From an SEO standpoint, Google Instant is just another way to optimize your website to help it survive in the Google world of search.

Greplin is a personal search engine for all the data you keep in the cloud. It works a lot like the desktop search Spotlight where you search for a word or phrase and Spotlight will go through your entire hard drive looking for matching files and documents.

Greplin does the same thing but for your online data that you store on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Voice, Dropbox, Gmail and a bunch of other services. You can run a query and find public and private data on those sites. Tweets including DMs are shown as well as digging into the transcripts of your Google Voice voicemail.

Greplin uses OAuth and other APIs for authorization, so they never see your third party credentials. Since Greplin’s searches work on a variety of online sites it is invaluable to the small business owner who does business online by saving them a lot of time locating the exact information they need when they need it.

Greplin.com is in closed beta right now. Most of what Greplin offers will be free. A fee is charged for more features like searching within attachments. Below is a video illustrating how Greplin works. To register for Greplin go to http://www.greplin.com and pick the first index you’d like to use.

Let us know how you envision you could use Greplin in your personal life and business.

Greplin Demo from greplin on Vimeo.