20 Mouthwatering Instagram Pics [FOOD PORN]

The Best of Instagram Series is presented by T-Mobile. Its 4G Tweet Race, a week-long campaign launching May 3, pits Twitter users against one another in a daily, frantic race for retweets. There are 7 races, and the winners of each heat win a new HTC One™ S phone with a year of T-Mobile’s Unlimited Value service, and the final winner takes home $4,000.
Instagram users often get a bit of flack for oversharing their food photos. Now that the photo-sharing app is available for iOS, Android and possibly soon Facebook, we expect the user base and the photo uploads to surge.
But that’s not to say all photos aren’t worth sharing. Sure, maybe there are a swarm of users who like to share photos of their Subway sandwich, but there are also tons of gorgeous pictures of food and beverages that will make your mouth water.
We’ve collected photos from Instagram users, professional photographers and even chefs to present you with 20 of the tastiest photos. (Note: You can’t actually eat them.)
Do you think your food photos have what it takes? Let us know in the comments.

11:27 by Robert dawne · 0

12 Most Effective Ways to Engage on Twitter

Even though Facebook tends to dominate social web, Twitter is an important tool for social sharing and for building your own community. Twitter is an ideal tool to use to stay informed and to drive traffic to social properties. Most importantly, it helps you build relationships with like-minded people.
Below are tips that enable you to increase engagement with your communities on Twitter.
1. Infuse personality into your profile
People trust people, not default profile images. Use a real picture of yourself and infuse your unique personality into your bio. This generates interest and encourages people to not only follow you but relate to your passions and keep an eye on your tweets. It all leads to more retweets.
2. Be the first to break the news
Choose a topic (or several topics) that are near and dear to your heart and consistently provide valuable information. That will allow you to position yourself as an expert in that area and your followers will come to rely on the valuable information that's hitting their Twitter streams.
If you stay on top of the latest and greatest, try to break the news to your followers as you get it. That will increase the number of retweets you get and will foster the conversation around your news.
3. Tweet consistently, leave space
I recommend tweeting consistently. However, most of us choose a time during the day to catch up on the news and do some research. We come across multiple data points and links that we want to share with our followers.
But sending 15 tweets within the same hour may be overwhelming to your followers and may be considered spam. So, I suggest you schedule the tweets throughout the day with at least 30 minutes between them. 4. 4.Ask and answer questions
Asking your followers a question is the best way to engage them (and get some valuable information in the process.). But if you want your followers to engage with you, you need to engage with them. Answer their questions, share your knowledge, participate. Also consider engaging in chats. Twitter becomes more beneficial to you when you provide value to others.
5. Connect people
Be a connector, in real life and on social networks. When you connect people with each other, your followers take notice and your credibility goes up. People are more likely to engage with you.
6. Be generous, promote others
Make sure you retweet your most passionate followers. Thank them and link to their social properties. #FF and #Recommend others and their work.
7. Craft your tweets
Make sure your content stands out. When you retweet, customize the copy and add your own thoughts. When you tweet the link, choose a quote or statistics from the article that you thought was impressive or interesting and tweet that instead of the headline.
8. Use under 140 characters
If you want to be retweeted, leave the room for others’ Twitter handles. Some folks prefer the old RT style to the new one. They retweet you more if you leave space for their handle and a little space to add their short comment.
9. Ask for a retweet
If you ask your followers, “please RT,” you usually see higher number of retweets.
10. Acknowledge the source
Always, always acknowledge people who shared the information with you, even if they shared it through other channels. If that person has a Twitter handle, credit them as a source.
11. Tweet the same content again
The Twitter stream moves very fast. There's a good chance that most of your followers won’t catch your first tweet. If you stumbled on great information or you want to share your own content, schedule multiple tweets in advance during multiple days. If your followers are spread across the globe in different time zones, schedule tweets during different times of the day.
12. Be open to new connections
Follow people back. This allows them to connect with you personally through DMs. And you expand your social network. I've made many invaluable contacts just because I was open to new connections.
Image credit: Thinkstock

09:58 by Robert dawne · 0

8 Crazy Things IBM Scientists Have Learned Studying Twitter

A team of IBM researchers spends their days sifting through Twitter. They use live streams of tweets to develop machines that are smarter than the typical computer, an area of study known as "machine learning."
Using these tweets, they've developed technology that allows a machine to understand that some tweets are just background noise and others are newsworthy and important.

For instance, a tweet that says "I urgently need my cup of Starbucks and a scone and before I head over to Staples" is distinctly different than a Tweet that says: "URGENT: I just bit into a scone from @starbucks to find over 10 staples baked into it. Please RT and be careful."

IBM scientists have also come up with ways to measure "sentiment" … to identify which tweets are saying something good about something important and which are saying something negative.
After two years of studying Twitter, their work wound up in an IBM social media monitoring product, Cognos Consumer Insight.

But it also led to lots of funny stories and interesting facts about Twitter. Rick Lawrence, who leads IBM's Machine Learning Group at IBM Research at Yorktown Heights NY, shared some of these stories with Business Insider.

06:10 by Robert dawne · 0