Posts Tagged ‘Twitter’

Why Social Media fails

Not so long ago, the trend within companies was to jump on the social media train. And most of them did that because their competitors and everybody else was doing it. They just jumped without knowing where they were going, how much the ticket costs and what to do during the ride.

Read On…

Getting more targeted followers on Twitter

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

Twitter Mass Follow (a short tutorial)

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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Using twitter to create a community

It seems like twitter is having his momentum right now, with more and more people joining. So, here is a quick tutorial on how to use it in order to accomplish the following goals:

  • Bring constant traffic to your site
  • Create an interactive and dedicated community

First of all, this quick guide doesn’t apply to any of the black hat projects that you’d might have. It simply doesn’t work this way.

You will need to have a site that:

  • Is community oriented: this implies one or more of the following:
    • visitors can create accounts on your site
    • visitors can create content on your site
    • visitors can comment on the existing content
    • any other way of interaction between the visitors and your site
  • Is not static: this implies that you have periodically fresh content (news/articles)

Using twitter for traffic and community has 2 ways:

1. The passive way. This is pretty straight forward. Create a twitter account, announce that on your site, make a link on the homepage or on your template, add your website to your twitter profile and start using twitter. That rest will follow. Slowly but steady.

2. The active way. This is what this post is about.

  • First of all, start doing the steps from the passive way.
  • Than use twitter for 1-2 weeks, periodically adding content
  • Identify twitter users that might be interested in your site. Do that by searching in Google for: site:twitter.com [keyword]. Where the [keyword] represents the main keywords for your website. If you do that, you’ll get as results people that have used on their twits that keyword. Some of them have used them accidentally, but most of them will have a real interest in your topics.
  • Make a list of all the profiles identified. From that list eliminate all the profiles that are dead (no longer updated) and start following the remaining ones. Many of them will reciprocate.
  • Start interacting with the followed profiles, try to answer any conversations.
  • Make periodical announcements of new content on your website and be active in answering any feedback.
  • If you have an RSS feed for your site, for your own good don’t be an idiot and add that to your twitter account. Is one of the most annoying and lame behaviors and will soon result in people following you to use the block button

Well, that’s it. happy twitting and if you will use this mini guide, feel free to post in comments any results that you will get