Twitter Followers if reading this, I probably invited you to do so. Thank you for your favs and retweets. Please follow each other from the tweeted invite. I appreciate the encouragement and dialogue. I wanted to share with you some of the things I’ve learned about Twitter since I started using it this past March.
Do I view Twitter Followers as an extended community?
The answer to this question is at the core of everything I suggest below. If your answer is yes, read on. If no, then read a more relevant post.
The characteristic of your Twitter followers has much to do with who you follow. This would seem like a no-brainer, but the algorithm of who Twitter recommends you to as someone to follow appears strongly influenced by your following habits. So before you follow someone, know something about them. And ask, do I want more Twitter followers like them?
Be careful who you follow back
As an extension of the above, never follow back someone unless you read their tweets. Again, do they represent someone that I want to follow, and do I want to draw more Twitter followers like this person.
Develop a Following profile
Develop a profile of interests, what’s important, and what you don’t want, and add followers that fit this profile. I will not follow someone who repeatedly posts or retweets vulgarity. Semi-nudity or cleavage pictures, I ignore. I also typically don’t follow those that tweet or retweet over 5 times an hour or 40 times a day unless I really like their tweets. It fills up the feed, and you can’t see anyone else. I also don’t follow people that go for many days or weeks without tweeting. If your Twitter followers are never there, how can you have a dialogue. Of course you can always mute someone or block their retweets.
Trim your following
After you develop a profile, use it to trim those you follow and to narrow who will be drawn to follow you. I don’t follow primarily commercial tweeters because I don’t want more. Keep a list of those you unfollow so you don’t follow them again. Repeatedly following and unfollowing someone is a violation of twitter rules. I recently changed my mind on using JustUnfollow. Thus far, I like it. I think it is useful to know if someone isn’t getting your tweets anymore. Especially someone you’ve had dialogue with in the past or has retweeted your posts. Why do they no longer follow you? Who knows?
Be Careful in Conversation and Advice
A couple of days ago I happened to see a quote retweeted which I thought could be taken the wrong way, and I tweeted a response pointing out potential contradiction between it and the Bible (this person is a Christian). I meant it as a friendly dialogue. Instead it made the other person angry, they blocked me, and posted this response: ‘Are you so bored you watch twitter and cut your brothers and sisters down for there Rts! get a Life…’ Well like I said earlier, it is after all an extended community and misunderstandings occur. I forgive them and hope they will forgive me.
Block spam and Twitter follower peddlers
I block those who are peddling, ‘get more Twitter followers.’ Or those who appear to be following just to get more followers
Lists
Once you are following a number of people, your twitter feed can fill up quickly and it is hard to keep track of everyone. You can use lists for keeping track of those you follow that have the best tweets. A list of 40 or 50 people is very manageable. Also you can have people on a list that you don’t follow.
New people to follow
It seems from what I have read, if you add a whole bunch of people all at once, you risk losing your twitter account. For example if you have 10 followers but follow 500. I don’t know what the ratio is but this can create an unmanageable account for you anyway. So read the twitter rules and stay within the boundaries
People that fit your profile, who follow some of the same people, and who regularly retweet or fav are good candidates. If someone you follow is retweeted or faved, look at the retweet and fav list and see if their is anyone there that fits your follow profile.
I suspect that people who follow you who have many thousands of followers are probably using some kind of automated following tool. I usually ignore these followers because I suspect they are only interested in the count not the community.
Is Twitter a good way to promote my blog?
I don’t know yet. So far, I don’t think so. I’ll update this from time to time as my number of Twitter followers increases. I think it is important not to irritate your followers with excessive repeated requests for them to read your blog. Balance this with the knowledge that something shows up on the feed for a very short period. What I’m planning to do as an experiment for a while is to pull interesting quotes from the blog as tweets and then post them with the blog link. This way the tweet still has value even if someone doesn’t read the blog.
Also if I fit your following profile, you have my permission to follow all of the people that I follow. I expect many of them will follow you back. Just don’t add all of them at once, so you avoid being placed on the watch list. About 5% of those I follow deviate from my following profile for various reasons.
Update on 6/9/13
How to Create Lists
- Select little cog next the search box on your Twitter home page
- Choose or select Lists
- Select Create Lists
- Name it
Then after you have created a list, to add people
- Choose someone you want to follow
- Select shadow head box with arrow next to follow button
- Select add or remove from lists
- Check list name
- Done
