Emma Brooks | Digital Media Enthusiast

Someone on my Twitter feed today posted about Twist, a site that lets you see stats for trending topics on Twitter.

This isn’t the first time I’ve been to Twist, or any other sites like it but I was just amused to see “Harry Potter” as a top trending topic.

Not surprised, mind you, just amused. After all, I went to the midnight screening last night (hello, geek alert) complete with Harry Potter-inspired scar on my forehead with my friends:

Like many of my friends, offline and online, we Tweeted about the film before and after the movie. Which is why this graph of the trending topic “Harry Potter” made me chuckle to myself:

You can tell exactly who was Tweeting about this trending topic, as it took a sharp downturn for the 3 hours the movie was playing in most eastern cities at midnight. Then back up again, as we raced to share our favourite moments, lines, scenes and characters.

Back in the day, before Twitter came along, I’m sure Yahoo! Groups, or MSN or even sites like FanFiction.Net would have seen a similar spike around movie premiere times. But thanks to Twitter, we now have an easier, highly addicting ADD way of talking about what we liked:

and what we didn’t:

Good times. I just wish I was running on a little more than 3.5 hours of sleep today!

If you’re behind the game, here’s a link explaining The Great Write Off of 2009. You can find links and discussion to all posts by checking out the Twitter trending topic, #WriteOff09.

So today is the last day of The Great Write-Off of 2009! I think it’s safe to say that if there was a “winner” for this challenge, it’s me. Dan kind of dropped off the face of the earth for a little while and hasn’t recovered since. Sorry you suck, Dan. :(

Nah, in all fairness, I think Dan has a lot less free time than I. Still, I’m a busy girl and I’m proud I did my absolute hardest to post every second day, on-time. It’s been fun and hopefully I’ll keep writing here.

One of the reasons I came up with this idea for a blog off was that I knew I needed to populate my website with more content and I also needed a promotion of some kind. I needed new eyeballs. Coming up with a challenge was the solution to forcing myself to create content but approaching Dan and baiting him into a blog off was my solution to getting new visitors to my site and hopefully new readers.

I’d say it worked, wouldn’t you?

In case you can’t see that very well (silly narrow content window!), traffic is up 532% over same time period last month (though it should be higher because, as you can see at the beginning of my month, I changed the layout and as a result my GA code got dropped). I have an increase of 524% in pageviews, and average time on site rose 28%.

Who doesn’t love statistics like that?

As you can see, my biggest spike in traffic was as a result of my interview with Zephyr of CollegeFashion.net. She posted a link to the review on her Twitter account, which has 3,950 followers, so of course some of them wandered their way over here.

I think my favourite post however, was the one about moving to a new city and trying to start over. It’s definitely a subject that is close to my heart (having done it in Toronto and then Sydney, Australia) so I feel I can talk to it with some conviction. Plus I do love Eric’s photo – it’s definitely one of my favourites of all of his.

In any case, it’s been fun and I’m surprised I’ve had enough to talk about, really. Some posts fell flat but some were well recieved and on the whole, I think I came out with some quality content!

Thanks for playing along, folks. It’s been grand!

If you’re behind the game, here’s a link explaining The Great Write Off of 2009. You can find links and discussion to all posts by checking out the Twitter trending topic, #WriteOff09.

We’re almost at the end of The Great Write Off of 2009! Tomorrow is the official end date and I’ll be posting then as well. Until now, onto today’s topic: Unsolicited Spam.

Was I ever angry when I logged into my gmail account today to see an unsolicited e-mail from a real estate agent. I rarely hand out my gmail e-mail as a preventative so I am angry and sad that I’ve been blasted. My question is really, “How did she get it?” I wish I could know.

The e-mail in question:

Ha! She left her Twitter account at the bottom – GREAT! I quickly Tweeted at her with this:

Well, I can’t undo the fact that she has my email address now but damn, if I don’t feel better about yelling at her. And who knows, maybe she’ll respond to me and I can figure out how she got it. One can dream…

I saw the following video pop up on my Twitter feed this afternoon at 1pm on the Leo Burnett Twitter account, with the tweet, “#culturalfuel Vendor-Client relationship in real life situations: Just found this on FB. No comment..”

I watched this video, laughed and marveled at how true it rang and then re-tweeted it on my account.

Since then I’ve seen it pop up at least 4 times on other accounts I follow on Twitter and on advertising blogs, such as AdJoke.

As of 5.47pm, this video has been viewed over 2,500 times and my guess is the majority of them were today. Already it’s received well over 63 comments – a much higher view/comment ratio than one would normally find on a YouTube video. It’s also been favourited 524 times, so clearly the video is clearly hitting a nerve in the ad industry.

Comments include things such as, “This made my stomach hurt. I have had this same type conversation three times this week alone” (shawngoesgreen) and “Five stars isn’t enough” (jforrest55).

This video was added to YouTube 5 days ago on an account that was made 6 days ago. Sounds like someone’s trying – and succeeding – in making this thing viral. Should be interesting to see what the numbers are like in a few days. I’m also curious to see whether “Mr Bennett” really did see this thing on Facebook or whether it was actually created by Leo Burnett itself.

I’m sure there a million posts on why people love Twitter. So I’m just making sure I add in my $0.02 and make it a million and one. These are my reasons for loving Twitter:

ONE. Free stuff.

Twitter is great for giveaways. Just today, I was quick enough to reply to this challenge that I’ve won a cooler from Canadian Tire:

Thanks, Canadian Tire!

TWO. Laughing at funny things friends write.

I love my friends, both on Twitter and off Twitter. I have some close ‘real-life’ friends that tend to crack me up with their random and insane updates and I’m glad they’re using Twitter so I can get a good daily dose of laughter:

Apologies for the language. Debated whether or not to include but it was just too random to not.

THREE. Learning about promotions and sales from companies I like.

One of my favourite reasons I like Twitter is that I can get updates from companies or services I have an interest in. I follow enough blogs that I don’t really want to necessarily add a corporate blog to my long list of blogs on Google Reader. Usually this is because I’m not terribly interested in new updates to the site, or company changes, but simply the sales and promotions. I find companies use Twitter to just push the sales and promotions, like this:

Because of this Tweet, I ended up purchasing a shirt from Cameesa. Just got it today! Thanks Cameesa for letting me know about the sale!

FOUR. Sharing and learning from great people in the industry.

Probably one of my favourite parts of Twitter is learning from people I find to be absolutely brilliant in advertising, marketing, digital and social media. I’m such a new player to this game, any and all information I can soak up, I will. So Twitter allows me to really take a seat in the back and watch the show. There are many really great minds on Twitter and I love following them all, such as this guy, Bud Caddel who works at Undercurrent in NYC:

The added benefit of listening and learning is that I am slowly building up my confidence with regards to my own opinions. I can own them more effectively when I see that there isn’t necessarily a right or wrong opinion to have on any given topic. There are many individuals in this industry that don’t necessarily agree on everything but this leads to discussion, which inevitably improves our thinking on certain processes.

FIVE. Funny links that users feel compelled to share and I’m thankful they do.

The internet is a strange and wonderful place and I welcome links sent to me over Facebook, messenger services or Twitter. Twitter, however, allows you to spam everyone on your friends list with funny and/or awesome links such as this one from Jessica:

I’m pretty sure my life would have been incomplete without that link. Just sayin’.

Bonus Love:

SIX. A Tweet from space.

Twitter doesn’t get any cooler than this!

So those are my Top 5 Reasons I Love Twitter (Really Six). There are many, many more reasons but these are definitely some of the main reasons.

What do you think? Can you name any additional reasons to love Twitter? Or perhaps reasons why you dislike Twitter? Feel free to share in the comments!