Razvan Antonescu

NOTES:

• as always, this article doesn’t apply to promoting regular junk spammy websites. Not because I find it immoral, but it will simply won’t work and you will only loose your time;
• during testing, one of my twitter accounts got suspended for aggressive following so consider yourself warned and try to stay below the radar;

A few weeks ago, Google decided to penalize one of my websites. Instead of jumping to correct whatever Google thought it was inappropriate, I saw this as an opportunity to identify additional traffic sources.
After playing around with twitter and some tools here are the results:

Goals:

• Increase the number of followers on Twitter in a short amount of time

Tools you will need:

TwintIn: In the beginning I used Flash Tweet but this is now a payed service. Buzzom is one of the best free tools on the market. Here are a few important features:

• Cross follow – this allows you to give a twitter ID and start following followed or followers of that account
• Lock - this feature is pretty unique across twitter tools. Basically allows you to mark (lock) a twitter ID to prevent unfollowing a certain group of users or to send multiple requests to the same user (if you repeatedly follow/unfollow users). If I would have used this feature from the beginning my suspended account would be active right now
• Find users by keywords they twit or in their bios

Hootsuite: This is a twitter manager tool that gives you the following:

• Use multiple twitter accounts
• Post a feed to a twitter account of your choice
• Track clicks on the links from the tweets you send

Cotweet: The features that this service has are already implemented in Hootsuite but I like it’s clean interface and the archive options.

Steps:

1. Create a twitter account. Customize it (background/colors/avatar/bio). Don’t forget to add a link to your website
2. Start posting content. Use Hotsuite to post your feed
3. Identify key players on your niche. Wefollow is a good start. If that’s not enough, look on the top blogs on your niche. There is a great chance that they use twitter. Look what people this players follow. Start engaging in conversations. Reply, retweet, participate in the follow friday hashtag
4. Once you have a decent amount of tweets (more then 100 for example), start following users. You will do this by using Cross Follow feature of TwitIn to “steal” the followers of the users identified in step 3. In order to prevent suspention don’t get greedy. Follow a maximum of 3-400 users/day.
5. After 24-72hrs, start unfollowing people that didn’t followed you back. Use the Flush&Lock feature of TwitIn. This will prevent you from sending multiple requests to the same person and get your account suspended
6. Use cotweet to monitor the messages you receive and reply to them. Don’t even bother to reply to automatic messages, and even better you can unfollow those people right away. In most of the cases they are just spam bots
7. Repeat steps 3-4

Conclusions

If not abused, this short tutorial will bring you a nice followers base (4-6000) in apx 1 month and a half (numbers might vary from niche to niche)

If you re new with twitter or if you would like to know more about the subject, check out this books:

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Incoming search terms:

• twitter mass follow
• mass follow tuto
• twitter mass follower

I’ve been using Google’s Chrome as a default browser both at work and at home since it’s lunch. I was pretty aware of the fact that’s a beta product and that some additional stress is mandatory. But after 2 months I’m done. Switching back to Firefox.

Here are my main reasons:

1. Is 2008. No browser is an island anymore. I expect from my browser to be connected to web services and my browsers from different locations. Scared by bad PR Google has done no integration with its services (that’s if you don’t count Gears) and that’s a big down for me. Here is what Google could have done or at least offer the options for the users to enable/disable:

a) Browsing history. In IE / FF, if you have installed Google toolbar, Google keeps a record of your history online and makes that searchable from any point. Some might complain about privacy issues but considering my daily activities the gains are bigger then the looses

b) Bookmarks. Google has a pretty decent bookmarking service. Of course you can use the bookmarklet option but there’s no integration with the browser default bookmarking system. Kudos for Foxmarks on that.

2. Again is 2008. Every user has a wide range of browsing habits and patterns. You cannot make everybody happy and because of that you make your software extensible. FAIL. Maybe in time extensibility will be added and extensions will be created. But I think that’s a distant future we are talking about. Core extensions I missed during this period

a) Google Toolbar

b) Foxmarks

c) Stumbleupon

d) GTDInbox and Xoopit

e) Yahoo’s new Inquisitor (I wished for that from the moment I saw it available for Safari)

f) SEO for Firefox (DUHHHHH)

g) Twitterfox – this is the only app I use for Twitter. Usage pattern has decreased since using Chrome but that will be fixed from now

3. Plugins integration. That was one of the main causes of frustration and cursing. C’monnnnn is 2008 again. Make the god damn flash work. I’m depending on YouTube for my business and I’m a big fan of South Park, John Stewart and Colbert. Constant crashes (can’t remember if I ever played a clip without crashes), slow streaming and so on. Google Analytics is becoming unusable. And let’s not get to Silverlight that I need it for Live Mesh

4. Resources. Chrome is fast. Fast to lunch more precisely but that’s all. I was using DivxLand Media Subtitler that’s using my processor up to 99%. I cannot do anything on my PC and Chrome was dead. Not loading any page. Today I tried Firefox and works like a charm.

Conclusions

I won’t uninstall Chrome. But is not my default browser anymore. I’ll use it mainly for it’s incognito mode to login to multiple accounts without using all my available browsers (7 or 8 i think ). Perhaps in about 1 year Chrome will get better but so far Firefox fits all my working/entertainment/communication habits.

This morning I’ve noticed that Google Analytics had a slightly different user interface. Due to the fact that usually this kind of changes is associated with new features I rushed to check but with no results. Now Google Analytics blog confirms that this is just a minor UI change. Bleah. No goodies today 

Looks like Apple is not interested in Microsoft’s efforts to port Silverlight to Iphone. This could only mean that Live Mesh will never make to the Iphone either and through this we will never see an intelligent syncing solution between Apple devices and Web/Windows over WiFi. Too bad. But this is just another reason to wait for an Android power phone that I would like

Incoming search terms:

• apple sucks big time

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