photo credit: 顔なし

Since my last post about how I add followers on Twitter, I’ve received some questions about the metrics I use to choose who to follow back (or not). Then I posted a tweet that generated a much bigger response than I expected:

Can’t believe how many “Internet Marketing experts” follow me who obviously have no concept of Twitter etiquette. Not so impressive.

Based on the flurry of “are you talking about me?!?” messages I got, I clarified:

Specifically talking about the (self-proclaimed!) experts who are following 2k, followed by 15, and only tweet links to their own sites.

Still, it made me realize that many new Twitterers don’t really know what the culture is like, and they’re trying to get started without adequate information and wondering if they’re inadvertently offending people. (Although, honestly, if you’re worried about offending people, you’re already better off than the people who just charge ahead regardless!)

Some people will tell you that you can do anything you want on Twitter, because people have a choice about following you. That’s true, but presumably you’re not hanging out Twitter just to yell into a void; most people hope to get something from it (whether that’s friends, interesting conversation, website traffic, or leads). There are things you can do (or not do) that make your time on Twitter more effective.

Of course, these guidelines are my opinions only; hopefully others will weigh in with comments or posts of their own.

Figure out who you want to connect with and why

What are your goals for using Twitter? You might want to get new clients, or you might just want to find funny sites and videos to amuse yourself. Many people use Twitter with the hope of getting more blog readers (probably most of this blog’s readers fall in that category!). Those are just a couple of examples.

Think about the kind of people who can help you move towards your goals. If you are looking for more readers or clients, then you probably want to connect with people who are similar to your existing readers or clients—people who need to know something you are an expert in.

If you’re looking for entertainment, you’ll want people who are on top of the latest viral videos and send things before everyone’s seen them.

Once you know what you want out of Twitter, you’ll be much better prepared to make connections and participate intelligently.

Post regularly on topics of interest to your followers

Okay, so you might not have anyone following you yet. Pretend you do, and that they’re the people you really want to connect with. Then write your tweets for their benefit. What kinds of things do they want to hear about?

This doesn’t mean you can’t ever post updates on frivolous, personal stuff—that’s par for the course on Twitter. But keep your tweets somewhat balanced, and try to make your frivolous updates as interesting as you can.

This brings up the point of sending out updates about your blog posts: do it in moderation. Start by being realistic. Not every post you write is that great—so save the impact for the ones that really deserve attention. By picking and choosing, you’re showing respect for your followers and highlighting your best work.

Again, balance is key. Figure a minimum of maybe five to ten “normal” tweets per link to your own work. These other tweets can point to other people’s work that is interesting, or quick comments on something, anything useful to your followers, but remember that people will follow you when they get some benefit from doing so.

When you send out an update about your blog post, try and make it interesting and help people understand why they should care. If your post answers a question, use that question as an intro. This is always more helpful than just saying “My latest blog post: ” and throwing in the link. (And yes, this usually means sending these updates manually, rather than using an auto-tweet service. If you’re being selective, you’ll be sending them manually anyway.)

Start slowly

The temptation is always there to follow everyone and anyone in hopes that they’ll follow you back. This generally doesn’t work.

The main reason is what we call “social proof”: if you follow thousands of people and have very few people following you, you look incredibly boring. People subconsciously think, “Wow, nobody cares what this person is saying,” and write you off.

And that’s the most charitable version. If your tweets look entirely self-promotional, or you don’t have any updates, they’ll assume you’re a spammer and that you are only following people to accost them.

Let’s face it: we’re all approaching Twitter with a measure of self-interest. If we didn’t hope to get something out of it, it wouldn’t be worth spending time there. So from a purely self-interest perspective, realize that you’ll be much more effective at reaching whatever Twitter goals you may have if you are a little bit strategic about the process.

The best approach is to follow a few people, keep posting great updates, and be patient. When a few people follow you, follow a few more people. It’s easiest to start with those you already know or have something in common with (like location—I’ll follow almost anyone from my town).

When you’re expanding the people you follow, look at your profile page critically. Will the people you want to connect with see an obvious “hook” in your recent tweets? Will they immediately understand why they should follow you? If not, post something better.

Some of you more analytical types are probably wondering: exactly how many people should I follow? I’d say start with 30 or fewer, and then keep it to a ratio of 2:1 (following:followers), erring on the side of following fewer people. Obviously that’s arbitrary and just my opinion, but that’s what I’d do if it was me.

Engage with others

This is the whole point. If you’re not interacting with others, you might as well be muttering to yourself.

Pay attention to the people you are following who particularly interest you (if you want technical tips on how to do this, let me know and I’ll post something). When they send out a good tweet, use the @reply feature and tell them so.

Ask questions, and listen to the answers. Thank people who help you out or provide you with good ideas. Pass on particularly useful tweets that your followers might find helpful.

If you forget about trying to follow a kajillion people and instead focus your time on helping the people who already follow you, you’ll find you get more followers without much effort at all.

photo credit: luc legay

Having been on Twitter for a while, I find that a dozen or so new people follow me every day. To be honest, I’m not sure why they follow me (I’m only moderately interesting and tend to talk about work too much), but still, they do, so I’ve had to decide what to do about it.

When people follow me, I like to take a moment and view their profile, and decide if I’d like to follow them as well. I have a pretty open attitude towards following people; if they’re interesting, I’ll follow. I use tweetdeck to organize people of particular interest into groups so I don’t get overwhelmed with general chatter, and then rely on serendipity for the rest.

The time management pit of managing Twitter followers

The haphazard nature of new followers makes it easy to waste a lot of time. If I checked out a profile every time I got a new follow notice, I’d never get anything else done—because if I’m being haphazard about it, I don’t just look at the profile… I also click links, follow @replies, and generally wander (delightfully but aimlessly).

I’m a big fan of Tim Ferriss’s obsession with batching regular tasks, so that’s an obvious first step. Instead of jumping off track with every new follower, I let the notifications gather and go through them once every few days or so.

My tools and tactics for evaluating Twitter followers

From here on, this post is going to talk about specific technologies and tools that I use. They’re certainly not the only ones available; they just happen to be the ones I’ve picked.

I’m admittedly a hopeless optimizer; if you have less Twitter activity, more time, or more sanity than I do, this may be overkill for you. I encourage you to look through my list and play with the ideas that appeal to you, and not worry about the rest.

Getting to the essential information

With my Twitter notification settings, I get several types of notices:

• Email copies of direct messages sent to me through Twitter
• Notifications that I’m being followed (by someone I’m already following)
• Notifications that I’m being followed (by someone I’m not following)

I like to glance through the first two types for general info, but only the last group is relevant to the process of evaluating new followers for potential follow-back.

Sorting through email messages is not a good use of time, so I started using filters in Gmail to help with this some time ago. I noticed that only the third group of messages use the phrase “you may follow” (encouraging me to check out their profile), so I easily set up a rule to “mark as read” any message from Twitter that doesn’t say “you may follow”.

That was a good first step. In conjunction with a filter that routed all mail from Twitter to its own folder/label for easy batching, I could tell at a glance what kind of message it was.

Breaking free of email

When it comes down to it, though, email is not really a good tool for this process. The emails themselves don’t contain enough information to make a decision (except in cases where I happen to recognize a name)—it’s the link to the profile that I want, and clicking through dozens of emails just to click one link each is not very efficient. But what would be a better tool?

There are probably other tools that would work, but RSS is the one that comes to mind for me. With an RSS feed, I can very quickly scroll through an expanded list, ctrl-click the links to open them in new tabs, and be on my way.

The only trouble with this idea is that (to my knowledge) there is no RSS feed of recent followers. Enter MailBucket, a tool that takes email and turns it into an RSS feed on the fly.

With MailBucket, all I have to do is edit my Gmail filter to send “you may follow” messages from Twitter to my MailBucket email address, and then subscribe to the resulting feed in Google Reader. If you don’t actually use an RSS reader, you could even take it a step further and run the feed through FeedBurner, subscribe via email, and get one “daily digest” of all new follows.

Edit: The MailBucket feed doesn’t make the profile URLs clickable, so I’ve done a little magic with Yahoo! Pipes to remedy that. The specifics are probably beyond the interest of most readers, so I’m leaving them out, but if you really want to know how I did it, leave a comment and I’ll post more info.

See follower quality at a glance

With a lot of followers comes a lot of cruft. Having specific standards helps weed out the worst. I generally won’t follow those who:

• Only tweet with links to their own posts (if I wanted to subscribe to your blog, I would)
• Don’t ever @reply to anyone (it’s not very interesting to listen to someone who’s talking into a vacuum)
• Don’t have any tweets at all (do you understand the premise of Twitter?)
• Follow way more people than follow them (this seems spammy, or at the least, desperate)

Obviously some of these are very subjective, so they’re just general guidelines. You’ve basically got eight or nine tweets to catch my eye (that’s how many show up in my first screenful).

For the last item on the list, I also use a cool little Greasemonkey script called Twitter User Classify that visually shows me the user’s ratio of “following” to “followers”. (Like all Greasemonkey scripts, it’s only for Firefox, but that’s my primary browser so it works well for me.) The ratio is not the be-all-end-all, but it’s a helpful clue.

When to un-follow?

Honestly, I hardly ever un-follow people unless they’re downright annoying (sending inappropriate direct messages or other forms of spam).

A lot of the interest factor of Twitter is in wandering into conversations that I would never otherwise encounter. Being fairly entrpreneurial, I like to “cross-pollinate” with industries outside my own and see what I can learn and apply to my own projects. Following a lot of diverse people is surprisingly useful to that end.

How do you manage your Twitter account?

I’d love to hear how you handle the info-challenges of Twitter. Leave comments or post on your own blog, and by all means, if you have any questions (about specific tools, my philosophy, whatever), leave those, too.

And follow me on Twitter.

Social media websites such as Digg, Netscape, Reddit, Del.icio.us, and Stumble Upon send thousands of visitors to blogs and websites everyday. I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of articles about becoming a top user of these sites to build your traffic. While they are all tremendous sources of traffic, getting a significant number of visitors from these sites can take a lot of effort—especially with Digg, Netscape, and Reddit.

If you’ve avoided social media marketing because you don’t have hours every day to spend submitting articles and voting on those submitted by other users, you are missing out on countless potential visitors.

For the average user the main problem with the most popular social media sites is that it can be difficult to generate any kind of traffic to your site. Most of us are completely overlooking the opportunity to benefit from 2nd tier social media sites that send decent levels of traffic and can make it easier for the time-starved blogger to succeed.

Literally hundreds of lesser-known social media sites exist that present far less competition for the top spots. Yes, they will send less traffic than Digg, but if you choose the right ones to use you can see substantial results.

Some of My Favorites

DZone: A community for developers that allows users to submit links. Other users then vote for links they like or dislike. The best ones make it to the “popular links” page and get sent out to over 8,000 RSS subscribers.
Alexa rank: 5,196

Sphinn: Targeted towards search and interactive marketers, Sphinn is a new site that was the beneficiary of some good publicity from SEOmoz recently. Sphinn is similar to Digg or Netscape with a voting system for posted articles, but it also has an area for discussion and networking.
Alexa rank: 109,326

Ma.gnolia: A social bookmarking site similar to Del.icio.us, but with a more attractive appearance.
Alexa rank: 7,418

Furl: Another social bookmarking site similar to Del.icio.us and Ma.gnolia. Like Del.icio.us, Furl’s homepage also shows the most popular items.
Alexa rank: 4,052

Listible: Social site that has a voting system for user submitted articles.
Alexa rank: 25,921

This is just a small sample to give you an idea of what’s out there. I have a list of social media sites at www.vandelaydesign.com/socialmedia/listofsites.htm. As you’re looking for sites to join, look first for those that specialize in your particular niche. Those that are of a general nature probably have users that prefer a certain type of content. Take a look at what is popular there and see how you would fit in.

With less users competing for the top spots, these sites can all help to increase your traffic and readership quickly. The best method is to pick one or two of these sites that you want to target, sign up, and become an active member.

How to Succeed with 2nd Tier Social Media Sites

1. Provide good content. It’s the same key to success at any social site, large or small.
2. Be active. Read what other users have submitted and vote for the articles that you like. Also, submit other articles than just your own writing.
3. Build your network. If your blog already has some readers, write a post about the site that you are targeting and encourage your readers to sign up as well. With some of your readers signing up and voting for your articles you will be on your way to being one of the top users.
4. Make it easy to submit or vote for your site. After you join, many of these sites will give you the option of placing a button on your page (similar to a “Digg This” button) for readers to vote for your page. This is especially effective if you’ve already introduced the site to your readers.

The Possibility of Even More Traffic

If the amount of traffic that you can generate from these sites doesn’t excite you, take a look at the bigger picture. People who use these 2nd tier social media sites are probably also using some of the leaders. They may find your website at Furl or Sphinn and add it to Del.icio.us or Stumble it.

In fact, that’s exactly what happened to a few of my articles recently. I am an active user of DZone, and I’ve seen the rolling effect that social media sites can have. Getting to the popular page with DZone is not that difficult with the right content and it can easily bring a few hundred visitors in a day from one article.

I had one of my articles (that was generating little traffic on its own) become popular on DZone and within a few hours I got an email that it had made the front page of Del.icio.us. Sure enough, over 500 people have now booked the article. A day later that same article started getting traffic from Stumble Upon. In the next week Stumble Upon sent several thousand visitors to that page. The point of this example is that all of the traffic I received from major social media sites would probably have never happened if it hadn’t started with DZone.

Make the most of the time you spend marketing your blog by getting involved in some lesser-known social media websites. You may be surprised by the results.