Getting more targeted followers on Twitter

October 3rd, 2009 § § permalink

If you have followed the tutorial that I posted here, by now you should have a pretty decent list of followers and most likely you have more than 2000 followers, moving over past the first Twitter limit. But also you might have come to some limits in finding new, targeted followers. Here are 3 tips that will help you move on:

  • Do not focus only on the followers of the your vertical leaders. More important than those, are the people that they follow. This are pretty hard to get persons, but also more valuable so the effort is worth it
  • Use Buzzom to identify people that use your niche keywords on their bio.
  • Use Buzzom to identify people that interact with your vertical leaders. For this, use the people search option and look for @username (where obviously username=the profile of your niche leaders). Those are very important profiles because they have 3 important traits: they are interested in your niche, they are active users and they interact with others from your niche

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Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) errors

August 17th, 2009 § § permalink

As I previously mentioned, a few days ago I was testing some new features on Google CSE. Unfortunately nothing worked as expected. I tried using the forums and directly contacting one of the CSE team members with no results. Today, using a new account, I started fresh and everything worked as advertised.

Looks like Google’s Achilles Heel is client support and this doesn’t look like a issue to be fixed soon as Google is betting on crowdsourced support rather than investing in it. Short lesson: if something doesn’t work in Google and is not vital (gmail/adsense/adwords) create a new account and start from scratch

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YouTube Related Videos Trick

August 17th, 2009 § § permalink

Each youtube video gets on the right side 2 sets of recommandations:

  1. More from: [AccountName]: Videos from the same account
  2. Related videos: Videos with similar characteristics (name tags and so on)

Unless you are a YT partner, the “More from” is going to be collapsed. This means that there is a high probability that any user viewing your video will leave to see an item from “Related videos” element

If you want to keep the user within your account, tag all your videos with a unique tag sequence. For example you can have the same repeating sequence of tags (3-4) and after that add the unique tags for the videos. Doing this will cause the “Related Videos” to show videos also from your account.

  • Upside: once a user gets to one of your videos, the chances that he will see other videos from you are higher
  • Downside: you are giving up on traffic generated by videos from other accounts

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Photosynth in Google Street View

August 15th, 2009 § § permalink

Google LatLong blog is anouncing that now Microsoft Photosynth is available on Google Maps’s Street view. Oh wait, is not Photosynth is only Picasa integration :)

Looking how similar the products are I’m curios how long it will take until the patent lawsuit appears. And who will win…

Twitter Mass Follow (a short tutorial)

August 15th, 2009 § § permalink

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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