With this change, EasyTweets can no longer post tweets as ‘API’.

All tweets will post as EasyTweets from now on.

We’re writing to let you know that your application, EasyTweets, breaks our Automation Rules and Best Practices (http://help.twitter.com/forums/10711/entries/76915). Specifically, it facilitates automated following of users that appear in “continuous searches,” which is not allowed. It’s best for both our users and your users if your application follows the rules, so please make the necessary changes to bring your application into compliance.

In the nearly two years that EasyTweets has been operating, our goal has been to provide easy and efficient marketing solutions for our users, and to do so within all of Twitter’s policies and guidelines.

Given the circumstances, we have had no choice but to remove auto following from EasyTweets or else risk getting blocked from accessing the Twitter platform. We still offer the “continuous searches” with real time alerts and daily summaries, but effective immediately we have removed the “set it and forget it” functionality to automatically follow users based on keyword or geography.

So here’s what we’ve come up with instead: a system to suggest followers based on continuous search criteria, and an easy way to process and either follow or ignore users.

It works like this:

Step 1: Specify keyword and/or geographic criteria via a continuous search, and enter how many follow suggestions you want per day.

Step 2: Navigate to the follow suggestion menu, via either the link in the followers tab or the upper right pulldown menu.

Step 3: Review profiles and select to either follow or ignore the suggested users.

You can learn more about how it works in this video tour:

Here are the slides from my presentation.

We took the EasyTweets web site down yesterday (Halloween night) with the intention of moving server infrastructure from our current multi-slice setup at EngineYard to Amazon’s cloud solution via the Heroku platform.

Unfortunately we hit some unexpected bumps in the road during the data transfer portion of the migration. After evaluating our options and consulting with the Heroku team we decided to put things on hold for a few days, while we iron out a few details.
We look forward to completing our migration to the cloud very soon.

Our team has worked tirelessly on this for the better part of the past few weeks. They also gave up their Halloweens and spent roughly 28 hours straight making final preparations and working on the migration. Though it has been a bit frustrating, this is a minor temporary setback that has produced some great “lessons learned” we plan to share in future blog posts.

I want to personally thank Morten and the other Heroku engineers that took a good chunk out of their Sunday to assist us with this process. They have been immensely helpful and responsive to our needs throughout this process. We are excited to leverage the power and flexibility of their platform for our upcoming release of EasyTweets version 2.0.

1. We launched our ‘Deck View’ – a powerful Twitter control panel that lets you read and respond to tweets, see replies, manage favorites, and unfollow – all within the Firefox browser. We also have some exciting Deck-related features in the works and planned for the future. You can see a brief video demo here:

2. We added more detailed follower statistics and data in the “followers” tab, including percentages of users that are following you back etc. This provides much more insight than just the number of followers.

3. You can now track RSS feed traffic in Google Analytics. This is an easy way to track traffic from Twitter and what the users do when they get to your site. Read our blog post for more details on this feature.

4. We added an option in the continuous searches to specify a max number of users to follow per day, instead of relying on a percentage of matching searches. This will allow more control, especially if you have multiple searches for one account.

5. You can now send e-mail alerts and daily keyword summaries to multiple e-mail addresses.

6. Many minor changes to views and user interface – too many to list. We also made good progress on new features coming soon.

7. We also launched this blog (with our post on Google Analytics) and recorded our first round of screencasts and demo videos featuring some of EasyTweets’ capabilities including video on how to use our bookmarklet tool in Firefox and IE 7.

8. And, to top it all off, we launched our new EasyTweets Affiliate Program, which offers affiliates a minimum of 20% recurring (monthly) commission for every paid subscriber they refer.

Haven’t checked out EasyTweets in a while? Here’s a tour of some of our favorite features:

If they are on a web site, your analytics will show that site (such as easytweets.com) as the referring domain. But if they are using a client app such as TweetDeck or Twhirl, these visitors will show as direct traffic. And as Joost points out, you are probably not properly tracking more than half of your web site’s visitors:

I’ve heard people say it’s up to 80 or even 90%, although Twitter Stats seems to report it as around 50%, and Twitstat.com as 60%. So you’re getting a lot of clicks that look like “direct traffic” in your Analytics, but are in fact, not direct traffic. These people will behave differently than normal people who come to your site directly.

You can get stats about clicks from a URL shortener such as cli.gs. But what if you want to know what the visitors are actually doing? What if you want to track how many people actually joined your site, or signed up for your newsletter, or bought your product?

If you are using Google Analytics, the solution to all of this is to append UTM parameters to your web site URL. It breaks down as follows:

Google has a URL builder tool that you can use.

But what if you are promoting your blog on Twitter? How can you track Twitter traffic to your blog if you are using a tool to auto post your RSS feed?

EasyTweets can do it for you (if you’re a subscriber). Just enter the UTM parameters when you add (or edit) an RSS feed. The UTM parameters will be added automatically, prior to shortening the link, whenever there are new feed items:

In order for Google Analytics to see the UTM parameters, you must be using your blog’s actual RSS feed – i.e. NOT a feed from Feedburner, Yahoo Pipes, etc.