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.

twttrlist – creating and sharing a list of your favourite Tweets

Posted on by
1

Favourite Tweets seem to be the flavour of the month for me at the moment with a few articles blogged this week regarding Twitter Favourites.

Coincidently Mashable today released a review of Squidoo who have decided to launched twttrlist, a way of organising and deploying your favourite tweets to friends and followers alike in categories, groups and under hashtags.

As Ben Parr says:

Although really simple, it’s a great way to create a mosaic of Tweets, to promote a hashtag, compile the best tweets about an event, or even promote yourself on Twitter. It also comes with the ability to reply or retweet individual tweets, as well as share the entire Twttrlist page.

It looks like cataloging and adding tweets to favourites might become very useful as a record of important information in the ongoing devleopment of twitter and I have now have ANOTHER app on my list to organise and maintain. Great!

Twitter Follower Count – The real benefit of people on Twitter

Posted on by
8

How to really benefit from twitter is a massive question among twitter users at this time with debates  raging on etiquette, forms of communication and regularity, requesting an RT (ReTweet) of your information, spamming, the infamous follower count number, bots and a whole lot more and of course, everyone has an opinion.

When you begin with twitter its a little daunting.  Its empty.  Twitter will suggest some people to follow when you begin but these suggestions are exactly the type of people you DON’T want to follow.  Mostly they are celebrities, or networks already familiar to you such as CNN.  Great for finding out the news or what ferrari they just bought (or crashed) but none will communicate with you directly (except possibly @stephenfry but even he cant keep up with half a million people).

Find People on Twitter

If you don’t have any real life friends to begin with then first of, just do a search by choosing the Find People option. (you will notice it says Find PEOPLE not followers!)

Search for a word that relates to you specifically, a good example is your town or city.

The result you get will show people who are talking about your area at that given moment or who have they town or city in their names.

For the sake of an example I will use Marbella.

Now remember that the results can change every 60 seconds.  Yep, that’s right, this isn’t Google here with a semi permanent list of results, its LIVE, when you look at the results for the search term Marbella you will see a different set from me.  But that’s good.

Click on each persons profile and check them out in their bio description, and certainly take the time to check out their website or blog.

Anything missing?

No Bio?
No Location?
No Website or Blog? Or have they put something silly in one of the fields, such as:
Location: Planet Earth. if so, seriously consider not bothering with them (but some people have a sense of humor as well so bear that in mind!)

Seriously consider the value of each person you follow, a follow doesn’t mean anything in real terms, but a conversation means conversions.

Limit your follower number to something low and manageable (say 50 but if you already know 100 people or friends then lets say 50 NEW people).

Get to know those people.

Consider removing the followers who are not benefiting you, remove spammers or people who are continually trying to sell you something, and be wary of the people who send you an Auto DM (thats a whole other debate but in short it means they auto follow you back, cant be bothered to actually write something specific and are trying to seel you something, but thats my opinion) and try and replace them with new interesting followers, but don’t pass 50 followers.

Give yourself a month to know these 50 PEOPLE on Twitter (the term followers in context is dehumanising) well and develop from there.

Solid foundations make for solid buildings.

Dont let follower count dictate the quality of your account, its an easy trap to fall into and one thing I cannot stress enough. Big numbers mean nothing, big relationships mean big reurns. You may well be tempted by schemes to gain followers quickly and easily, stop and ask your self WHY?

Do you go to a conference or networking event and dash around throwing business cards in peoples faces with no regard for establishing a relationship? If you did, would they take you seriously? If someone did it to you, would you take them seriously?  NO. I think not.

Following people back on Twitter

Also you may well decide to follow people back when they follow you.  Its not a requirement and don’t ever feel that it should be. If people follow you and you do not follow back, they can still send you messages with the @ function but just not Direct or private messages. This helps to see if they are really interested in getting to know you and not just adding you to their artifically infalted follower count.

Alternatively of course you can follow back and then remove them if they prove to be any of the unwanted types mentioned previously.

The Evidence of large follower counts

In my previous article, which I want to draw your attention to, Social Media People and the Twitter Follower Trend it has the perfect example of what can happen when the numbers take on more value than the people behind those numbers. Take the time to read it. Its evidence that the advice im giving above really is the best way to gain real benefit from twitter, for you, your following and ultimately your business.

At the end of the day, you are free to use twitter in whatever method you wish with whatever goal you have in mind but the point here is value, people and long term relationships. Whatever you choose, choose wisely!


Social Media People and the Twitter Followers Trend

Posted on by
10

Strong relationships can only grow through interaction and that’s a fact.  Much as the current trend is about having as many twitter followers as possible, something I believe is a fad and has no real worthwhile value, people are slowly realising that its the interaction thats important.

The important thing is people…

People such as @sethsimonds and @jimconnolly had relatively large follower bases on twitter (45k and 20k respectively) but made the difficult decisions to unfollow large numbers of people or simply start again from scratch.

The reason for Unfollowing?

Simply put, the numbers ceased to matter, in fact they became a serious problem. They both realised that it was the people behind the numbers who where the real value and found it extremely difficult to create meaningful relationships with such large followings and keep track of what was important to them.

After all, just how many people can you expect to communicate with or form relationships with at any given time and how do the people with massive follower counts cope?  In all honesty, very few of them care and if we cannot see that we simply serve as another notch on the belt or mark on the scoreboard that makes you even less significant and them all the more unreachable as you get drowned out in the static of the twitter stream.

Both Seth and Jim seem  much more comfortable and in control of the information they receive and much happier with the relationships they are forming or re-establishing.

I say hats of to you guys for making the right decisions even though it must have been incredibly difficult. Now maybe the rest of us can avoid making the same mistakes.

You can read both Seths and Jims stories on the links below:

Seth Simonds – Why I unfollowed everybody on twitter

Jim Connolly – Twitter and Me