Category Archives: Twitter

That little application called Twitter thats taken the world by storm. Quick easy and damn addictive, twitters got the world at its feet.

Should I unfollow everyone on twitter?

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Over the last few months, probably in combination with the huge increase in twitters profile and brand, many of the longest established and respected users on twitter have been rethinking their methods and usage of twitter and how they interact with the followers they have for a variety of reasons.

Why Unfollow everyone on Twitter?

The reoccurring theme for Chris Brogan and Darren Rowse here is something akin to spam, although to wholly class it as spam is a bit of a sweeping statement. Its more of a user error I believe, or basically a lack of understanding about how an action will affect the recipient, in this case, how a percentage of people don’t realise the effect they are having on Chris or Darren by using other services that they personally see little or no value in and which take away from their ability to use twitter effectively or communicate in a method that suits them.

By aiming to be fair to people who followed them they proceeded to return that favour to show that they value this act and appreciate it and are willing to open the lines of communication further it basically sounded the all clear for DMs to come racing in about all and nothing.

Rather than respecting the fact that they would have access to these people on a private level their followers have inadvertently abused it or not really realised the privilege they have thus forcing Chris Brogan and Darren Rowse to seriously consider the same actions as Jim Connolly and Seth Simonds.

So what did they do wrong?

Nothing. They did what they thought was best, remember Chris and Darren haven’t made any solid decisions yet but Seth and Jim where basically forced to take the step of reverting to zero, not something they enjoyed at all I assure you, because they simply could not communicate with people or where shifting though so much irrelevant info they where missing the important stuff.

What a terrible waste and if the Chris and Darren decided to take this course they will surely face some consequences and strife if they make the decision but little or indeed no other option is available to them it seems.

Personally I would support them 100% if they deemed this course of action the only viable option and it would not stop me from continuing to follow them but make your own decisions after you read their thoughts, these are their stories.

Should I unfollow everyone on twitter?Jim Connolly

First up was @JimConnolly. Jim explains why he made the decision to unfollow about 20,000 followers and begin again.

*Jim unfollowed everyone AND removed all his followers as well effectively starting from scratch 100%, rather than keeping his follower count, something he has clarified in the comments and which I felt should be mentioned here.

Twitter and Me.

Should I unfollow everyone on twitter?Seth Simonds

2nd came @SethSimonds. Seth wrote this post about making the decision to unfollow nearly 45 thousand followers on Twitter.

Why I Unfollowed Everybody on Twitter

Should I unfollow everyone on twitter?Chris Brogan

Next up is @ChrisBrogan. Chris hasn’t made the decision to unfollow everyone, yet. But is seriously considering the option it seems. These posts came about from Chris over the last few weeks.

Twitter MUST Stop the Spam Use of APIs Now

and

Quid Pro No

Should I unfollow everyone on twitter?Darren Rowse, Problogger

Finally, even Darren Rowse, or as he is more commonly known, @ProBlogger has hinted at his frustration publicly on twitter in these few tweets recently due to a deluge of Direct Messages that are of absolutely no value to him or which cause distraction.

Should I unfollow everyone on twitter?Heres the URL from the Tweet: http://twitpic.com/cb6y4

Should I unfollow everyone on twitter?
Should I unfollow everyone on twitter?

This raises another question, in my mind, of all those other twitter users out there who have 10′s of 1000`s of followers, if not more, who use twitter in a dffernet capacity to the guys mentioned in this post but rather, use it as a promotional platform based around numbers.

Are they “doing it wrong?”.

Probably not, that’s the way they want to do it and those that follow them seem to accept that but on the flip side, none of them seem to mind or worry about actually making personal connections with people or building networks or relationships. Its a list and that’s all it is but if it works for them then that’s fine!

What would you do?

What would you do in this situation?  Would you stick it out and continue or make the decision to unfollow and begin again?  Maybe you would consider doing something else entirely?

*UPDATE*

It seems that things are happening a little quicker than I thought. I just read this post on Jim Connolly’s blog with more of the “big players” on twitter making the same decision to reset their follower counts to zero.

Scoble, Twitter and the wisdom of the crowd!

It looks like the times and attitudes in social media are changing again and dramatically so.

Monitoring tweets about your brand with Google

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Another advancement on the ability to search for tweets, this time within a given time frame or date range.  Its a little more complicated to do, but still relatively easy and can be invaluable in researching what people have tweeted about your name, company or product over a particular period of time.

As usual, open Google and paste this line into the search bar:

site:twitter.com/* tweets“Nike”

And as expected we get results back with the tweets that have the word Nike in them.  Now we want to refine it down to a date range. The page should look like this:

Monitoring tweets about your brand with Google

Now hit the “Show Options” button circled below.

Monitoring tweets about your brand with Google

The page should expand along the left column to display this and just hit the highlighted “custom date range” indicated below.

Monitoring tweets about your brand with Google

Now just fill in the date range you want to get results for in the format shown.

Monitoring tweets about your brand with Google

And that’s how you can search for any given word, in any public tweet restricted by date. Its not super accurate but it seems to function fine for this particular example.  If no results are coming back, quite possibly there’s simply nothing there to show or the tweet itself has “expired” and no longer is indexed.

This process is a little long winded, though it only takes seconds and the search string query that can be used is possible but complicated as it uses the Julian Calendar to fix the date range. Im trying to figure out how to apply it atm and its making my brain melt so bear with me on that.

How to Google search a users tweets in twitter

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I wrote a post a short time back on how to use Google to search for interesting twitter users using a search string.

The full post is called Using Google Search to find interesting Twitter Users and it has full details on how to use the search for bio and location.

I just came across a tweet by @miralize asking if there was a way to search for words and phrases in the twitter users stream and decided I would try a nother variable on that search string as a shot in the dark and see if it worked.  Seems that I got lucky.

If you want to look for specific words or phrases specifically in the twitter users stream, open google and paste this search string into the search bar changing the red text to the words or phrases you want to find:

site:twitter.com/* tweets+what are you looking for

It seems to work. But the results are not exact.

If I change the string to:

site:twitter.com/* tweets+Get in touch with me if you want, happy to see if I can help.

I get this Google search result back.

The results listed are all tweets that have used the words in my search string, however they are truncated and spread out throughout the tweet itself.

So i decided to mess around a little more with the string and found that if I use this variable:

site:twitter.com/* tweets“Get in touch with me if you want, happy to see if I can help.”

I get the exact match on the phrase I am searching for.  All that was required was the removal of the + sign and the inclusion of the ” marks around the full term, as you can see above.

Might come in useful if you know someone said something a while back and you want to try and find that information again.

*Update*

Updated in a second post on how to apply date range search to tweets via a simple process.  Could be used to monitor a brand name, personal name or subject at a given time.  Hope it comes in useful.

Monitoring tweets about your brand with Google