<div>I see from my Twitter brand page that Big Boss is a trending topic for me. Not being something I would ever be interested in, I was surprised; until I remembered how I was outraged — when at a movie theatre — there was an announcement that Big Boss would like the audience to stand up for the National Anthem. Almost like sponsoring the National Anthem, really. So while I wouldn’t want to be known for an interest in Big Boss, enough tweets were exchanged over the issue to make the topic prominent on my page.<br /><br />Notice that I say page, not my regular Twitter stream, seen on Twitter.com or via any of the hundreds of Twitter clients that we use. This page comes from Twylah.com, a fascinating and immediately useful web application or service usable by individuals or businesses. Twylah is a startup co-founded by serial entrepreneur Eric Kim and his wife Kelly Kim in San Francisco. A bolt-out-of-the-blue idea triggered off the Twylah web service based on the fact that once you’ve done tweeting, your tweets just get buried in the stream. Apart from the few words that make up your profile and your immediately visible tweets, no one really knows what you stand for, sometimes not even you. Although Twylah is still in beta, has a lot going for it – and its users.<br /><br />Here’s what Twylah does: When you sign up and are accepted and sign in, a neat and beautifully laid out web page is created for you, dynamically. What this page shows is your profile from Twitter, right on top. Under that, is a row of topics, just as you’d see in the tabs of a website. These topics come from what you tweet most about and those of your tweets that are “trending” I your own network. On the page itself, you see the topics showcased with your tweets. Images and videos are picked up from your tweets to create a magazine style layout, making everything more attractive and engaging. You also have a choice of layouts to play with. The result may remind you of paper.li, but there’s a big difference. There, the focus is on the content. Here, the focus is on you, the creator, curator or influencer.<br /><br /><strong>Manage Your Topics For Branding<br /></strong>The first and most amazing thing that Twylah does for you is to give you the big picture of what you’re talking about on Twitter. Now, I love taking photographs but I’m no professional and certainly don’t deserve quite much attention for the photos I share. Yet, this topic is prominent for me. Twylah lets you front three topics, so I pushed photography down, letting tech topics come to the top. But this change only reflects on the Twylah page. To actually change things, I would need to increase my tweets about those other topics. This feedback is the first step towards better crafting your Twitter activity. Incidentally, you can also remove tweets from Twylah to clean up your page. So if you don’t want a rant about the government and its inefficiencies to be part of your branding statement, a tweet on the subject can be hidden. To get it out of Twitter, you would have to delete it, of course.<br /><br /><strong>Showcasing You<br /></strong>When anyone visits your Twylah page, they see instantly what you’re about, what you stand for, and the message is powerful, specially because it’s visual. You can highlight your page (or site, really) by embedding it on your own site, or by linking to it. But the other more interesting way to send users to the site is via Power Tweets, a recent addition to the service. To Power Tweet, add the bookmarklet to your browser. This can also be done on the iPad, which is good since so much content consumption is done on the tablet. When your browser is at a page you want to share (your own or other content) just click the bookmarklet to share to your Twitter followers – and you can add other services such as Facebook as well. When your followers click on your shared link, they will be led to your Twylah page from where they can further go to the content you shared. Power Tweets increase the engagement from your followers who come to your page and see more of your content. But don’t overuse the feature and end up annoying your followers. The ideal time to Power Tweet would be when you’ve been focusing strongly on some topic and want peope to see more of what you had to share, not just a single article.<br /><br />A big list of media types is supported by Power Tweet including content you share from YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, and Flickr.<br /><br /><strong>Up The Engagement</strong><br />Because of the arrangement of tweets by topic, your tweets are not lost and forgotten. On Twitter, they have a life of a few hours at the most. When a follower goes to your Twylah page, he or she can choose to explore ever deeper into tweets relating to a topic of choice. One can reply and retweet while viewing the tweet from the Twylah page as well. For people who are intimidated by the chaos of the Twitterverse, Twylah is a great way to make sense of content rather than scanning tweet after tweet in a stream without context.<br /><br />While Google and Twitter no longer play nice with each other, your Twylah page gives you another place from which to be searched and found. And anyone who deliberately looks for you by name, plus trending tweets or tweets related to a topic, will be led to your Twylah page within the first few search results.<br /><br />The next thing the Twylah team is working on is analytics. These are not available at all right now but showing them to Robert Scobble, Eric Kim demonstrated how a whole lot of interesting data can be pulled out, such as what topics get you the most tweets. Retweets are analysed separately. It’s not clear when this set of tools will be open to users and whether they will be part of a premium service or free. Twylah, like any service, needs a business model and as the application opens up to users, this will be what the team will explore. They already have several ideas including ads and even a revenue sharing format with users.<br /><br />Head to twylah.com and request an invite. I’ve been an early user and have now decided to be an active one. Looking at all that Twylah offers I was impressed afresh and felt rather lucky that I’d signed up soon after it went beta.<br /> </div>
BW Reporters
Mala Bhargava has been writing on technology well before the advent of internet in Indians and before CDs made their way into computers. Mala writes on technology, social media, startups and fitness. A trained psychologist, she claims that her understanding of psychology helps her understand the human side of technology.
