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  • Is it possible to follow all your followers and use Twitter effectively?

    Posted on July 23rd, 2009 Bhupendra 18 comments

    Well this is the most difficult question I have at present. I have always followed all my followers, and also went on finding and following interesting people around. I had good success in getting huge number of followers, and the journey has been great so far.

    I got decent success in marketing my blog and company products. Buzzom is one of them. Buzzom now stands being one of the most successful Twitter Application Service, is close to getting 200k pageviews a month. With Account Statistics, SPAM Control and Public Profile, we should be getting close to half a million pageviews per month soon.

    All this is fine, but slowly a poison is getting inside my Twitter Account — SPAM. On a simple thumb rule testing, I found half of my friends are Spammers. These Spammers are of following types:

    1. Grow and Sale Accounts

    There are people who create huge number of accounts and start running automated script to follow new people. They target reciprocators like @GuyKawasaki, @leplan (I), @unmarketing, @cheth, @dollars5 etc. and follow them all. They unfollow people who donot follow them back. When they reach a decent size of around 5 thousand to 10 thousand followers, the account is sold for some price.

    I have least problem with these people. What they do is not of value to me; but it does not harm too.

    2. Twitter Stream Marketers

    I have been getting many ads targeted to me in person. This is not bad and many of them is of some value too. But these ads sometime force me to follow only what they write, and they don’t stop after I start using their service. This is painful.

    I get a lot of  replies ‘@leplan’ from one or a group of accounts with same information. This simply floods my Twitter stream and I have no way to weed out these replies and only follow the genuine ones.

    Note : We are very sorry to have used this strategy once. We stopped it immediately after getting complains.

    3. Information Dessimators

    There are some accounts, which continuous monitor other account performance, and provide the information on them. Below is one such example.

    followermonitor

    Followermonitor does a good job of monitoring unfollows and reporting; but take a case you unfollow 50 people and you get 50 such messages. This is painful again.

    I like @TwitLandMark and @MrMileStone, and I have no complain with them. I don’t see my followers count daily, and it is good to know any landmark I attain.

    4. Forceful World of Mouth Marketing

    There are few companies, who have their policy of Tweeting from user account while the user uses the service. I feel good services deserve some form of credit, and the user can atleast tweet about the product. But the problem is to get hundreds of tweets, and at regular intervals from the service users without their knowledge.

    Few companies have put in policies and terms of service; but this is not enough. If I am using a Twitter API based third party tool, I not necessarily like to Tweet about it. If I like it, I will certainly make a pro-service Tweet. What pisses me off is automated tweeting from my account.

    One of my friends used one such service yesterday and it was Tweeting a pro-service Tweet automatically from his account every four hours. He didn’t know about it before I told him. He then had no other options but to change his password.

    When you use any third party tool, make sure you understand it.

    5. Genuine and valuable; but just too much

    These are people who are genuine, and their tweets are of good value. The problem is the information overflow. I know many good Tweeters who tweet more than 50 per day; and worst part most of these are feeds from his or his friend’s blogs.

    I feel so much pain when he continues to do the same even after I complain. What he forgets is -  if 1000 people post 50 Tweets per day, then I have 5,000 Tweets to read from them. This is a problem for many. We get too much information, too less time to consume.

    I would rather love to get 5 Tweet from one person per week, and hear from 50,000 people.

    6. Chatters, the Social Dudes

    These are the people by whom Twitter lives. They constitute the majority of the Twitter users, and they own majority of the Twitter stream. They are very responsive and are damn helpful. I love to talk to such people.

    The problem is here: if I have 5000 friends in my list and are talking to each other through replies ‘@’; it floods my Twitter stream. I have no way to filter them out. I am helpless.

    This is much like death of a person in the Atmosphere of Nitrogen. We know Nitrogen is not harmful; but sadly people die because of lack of Oxygen.

    I would suggest my dear friends to talk more in DM or have personal discussion in Facebook, Orkut or Messenger. Twitter can best be used for broadcasting messages, and consuming messages of public importance.

    7. Welcome DMers

    Welcome Direct Message is good; but do we need to send it? Once someone follows me, he will be more happy to get quality Tweets from me than a welcome message. I am sure if someone does not like my Tweet, he will unfollow me and won’t be thinking of my sweet welcome message before pressing the ‘unfollow’ button.

    There are lots of follow and unfollow work going on in Twitter. Welcome DMs are the worst among all type of spam, and this has made DM almost useless. We will need to do something here.

    —-

    Now we know some types of spammers. Can we weed them out and remain happy? NO. Strict SPAM control will only make Twitter useless.

    I have identified certain rules to live with it:

    1. Unfollow immediately, whom you don’t want to listen; you can follow them back anytime again, if needed.

    2. Don’t spam and ask your friends not to.

    3. Tell the spammers that you feel they are spammers (feedback help sometime)

    4. Remain cautious in using third party tools; specially those without 0Auth implementation. Someone saving your password can use it anyway, and may harm you.

    5. Follow all your followers who are non-spammers; don’t reciprocate the spammers. Anything that gets rewarded gets repeated. Be aware.

    –

    I end the article here. What do you feel? Do not forget to share your thoughts. Would love to hear from you and have discussion.

    If you like this article, follow me @leplan.

    Perspective, Social Media Management, Twitter , , ,
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