me, my passion & digital marketing
Posts tagged Twitter
Understanding Who You are Following
Jul 18th
The Story
I use an automated tool to reciprocate my followers, thus I have an equal number of those I follow vs those who are following me. I rarely filter, and it is becoming impossible to do so now that I follow close to 1,900 Twitterers. It is very interesting to find out that out of this amount, a very huge percentage of those I follow (voluntarily of involuntarily) are garbage (as termed by http://thetwitcleaner.com )
Yes – I am using a new tool called thetwitcleaner that is helping me to understand the Twitter ID I am following. It is very simple and it is totally free. Once you sign in and generate a report for your Twitter ID, you get to access the report which is sent to you via DM. The summary tells you pretty much and the detailed version is displayed below the summary. Here’s a summary of mine :-
Dodgy Behaviour 43.5% which is made up of 1.Trying to sell you crap 2.Multiple @s 3.Nothing but links 4.Tweeting the Same Links all the time 5.Tweeting idential tweets all the time 6.Other dodgy behaviour, now absent
No activity in over a month 4.1%
Not much interaction 10.7% which is made up of 1.Not active yet(fewer than 10 tweets) 2.Don’t interact with anyone 3.Hardly follow anyone
All talk, all the time 2.7%
Little original content 3.1% made up of high percentage of retweets and high percentage of quotes
That leave only 36% of of those whom I’m following that does not fall in any of the above four categories. I’m going to start evaluating those I’m following and will selectively unfollow them. It is going to be a tedious and slow process as I will see each Twitter ID one by one before unfollowing. The entire purpose of this is to ensure that I don’t miss the good tweets and filter out those that are in the dodgy behaviour category. Hopefully after cleaning this out, I can see all the quality tweets and filter out the blatant ads.
Using Twitter for Business
Jul 12th
“You should start a twitter”
A so-called ‘web consultant’ told my boss recently. I just listened and did not want to jump into talking about twitter. That’s the problem with me sometimes, I like to listen and think but talk very little. He went on saying that he managed to rake in interested people to buy his services just via twitter.. bla bla bla.
So – should any business start a Twitter account? Starting a Twitter account is easy. You just need to select a unique name and just register the account. What’s harder than clicking a few buttons? Its the maintenance that is difficult, not the starting. I see Twitter as a tool that needs proper planning and maintenance just like any other marketing tool.
If you have a Twitter account, you have to integrate it with your entire marketing plan. Because its ‘live’, it can give you feedback (positive & negative) that your other tools/channels might not be able to. Therefore, you need to monitor your twitter activities closely. Besides monitoring the conversation on your Twitter, there is also a need to check out what the rest are talking with regards to your brand / product / service and also what is going on in the industry.
Having a Twitter also means that your followers expect you to be online most of the time. Something like >12 hours a day, 7 days a week and 365 days a year. This is especially for consumer products and services, as your customers could just mention you for a response. While most are not expecting an instant response, a 2 day delay would definitely be not acceptable.
Most importantly, how to get followers to your Twitter account? There is no point tweeting to no one, right? Twitter has strict laws on following and unfollowing. I’ve seen many going on the follow and unfollow frenzy (because I have a Twitter mechanism tracking this!), which I do not recommend. If you get caught by the Twitter automated tool, the account will be suspended. Its not a very pleasant thing to happen. There are a bunch of ways to increase followers, one of it being the campaign method (do something to increase interest and have them follow you). I’d also like to reciprocate the follow, after all twitter is suppose to be an engagement tool so it should be two-way traffic.
It is also important to get ‘Industry Influencers’ in your list of Twitter followers because they can bring your message further to your targetted audience. Once they are in your list, then its time to engage with them directly. It takes a combination of research and the use of tools to weed out these Influencers.
So – starting a Twitter account is just the beginning. To maximize the use of it, its takes a bit of planning, reading, researching. Sometimes it makes sense to just outsource it to a Twitter expert… like me.. Hahahaha..
P/S : If you are keen to find out a simple Twitter Grading tool – check out Twitter Grader at http://twitter.grader.com and remember to check my ranking 
Twitter Bulk Unfollow Tools
Dec 19th
I’ve been so busy at work lately that I don’t have time to tweet or manually select those whom I want to follow and unfollow. I set an auto-follow via a twitter tool that I talked about previously, Socialoomph.com. One good thing about using this tool is that it automates the task of following those who follows me. For me, its a courtesy gesture to follow those who follow me. However, there are also those who are following others by the bulk to ‘jack up’ their follower list and those who are plain spammers. So, it gets quite a bit of work when I try to weed out those who really tweets and those who are just blasting endless useless advertisements.
This morning, I searched for tools to do bulk unfollow because I have close to 1,000 followers and going through all these one by one is going to be a very time consuming task. Here are the few that I found :-
Twitter Karma
URL : http://dossy.org/twitter/karma/
This tool shows you the whole long list of those whom you are following & whom are following you. You will instantly know whom you are following that are not following you and vice versa. You can tick boxes beside the names to do a bulk follow or bulk unfollow. Oh yes, you need to key in your twitter ID and your password to get this done. Its simple, fast & easy.
Friend or Follow
URL : http://friendorfollow.com
You only need to key in your twitter ID and they will show you a list of (1) FOLLOWING – Those whom you are following but is not following you (2) FANS – Those whom are following you but you are not following them (3) FRIENDS – Those whom are following you and you are also following them . From this list, you can then click on the respective icons that brings you back to their twitter profiles and you can make a decision to follow / unfollow. Ok, so you can’t do a bulk unfollow or follow but you have instant information on your fingertips to make a decision.
Untweeps
URL : http://www.untweeps.com/
With this tool, you can see whom has not been actively updating their tweets. This tool allows you to specify the total days of inactivity ~ so your report is customized according to your own criteria. They call it ‘stale tweeps’. With the whole long list, it is by default checked so you can just click on bulk unfollow if you want to. I had a long list, and I was thinking to myself.. if they are not updating their twitter for 30 days, I believe they have permanently abandoned it? If you have a long list of people you are following, you’d be surprised how big this pool of inactive tweeps can be!
Buzzom
URL : http://www.buzzom.com/
Once I key in my twitter ID, it gives me an option to Flush, Grow or Reciprocate. The idea behind it is quite similar to the rest – follow those who follow you stuff. An interesting add on is that it has a Twitter Statistics to measure your influence, retweet efficiency, retweet rank.. etc.
JustUnfollow
URL : http://www.justunfollow.com
This tool lets your unfollow a maximum of 50 just by signing up using your Twitter id. If you tweet their service, the limit increases by 100. Its quite easy because it will tell you how many people are not reciprocating your follow and you can select one by one whoever you want to unfollow.
[Updated on 30 May 2010]
I used Twitter Karma, Friend or Follow and JustUnfollow to keep my list ‘clean’.
On the other hand, I’m now using Qwitter [URL: http://useqwitter.com/ ] to be notified of whoever is unfollowing me. I just signed up for this service, whereby I only need to key in my twitter ID and email address to be notified of those who unfollow me. I can stop the service anytime by clicking on the link that has been emailed to me.
For now, I just want to keep my Twitter list clean.
