Today marks two weeks without using Facebook and three weeks without having the Facebook apps installed on my devices. Now that I am two weeks in, I have really started to notice the benefits of not being on Facebook. Here are a couple of things I have noticed.
I talk more with my wife
When I was checking Facebook periodically throughout the day, I would see all of my wife’s posts and when I came home, we would have nothing to talk about. To be honest, sometimes I would say that I didn’t see something just so I could hear her tell me about it. I had already recognized the fact that social media had taken away the ability to catch up with each other’s day before we went to bed. My wife still asks me if I saw the photo she posted with the kids earlier in the day and I can enthusiastically say that I have not and then get to experience it and the story that goes along with it. The rest of the world may have known about it already, but I get to hear about it from the source.
I am slightly more disconnected but this is a good thing
It was already hard to stay up on what my closer friends and acquaintances were doing but now I have to personally ask by sending a text message or making a phone call. Actually reaching out to people makes for more meaningful conversations. Sure it would be nice to know more of what is going on but do I really need that?
I am less worried about missing things
At first, I felt like I didn’t know what was going on in the world of the people I know. Now, I am less worried about that. We never used to know every little detail about what was going on in each other’s lives. We used to get together to “catch up.” I am looking forward to doing more of that.
I am more focused on writing
I have been blogging more often, which is a good thing. I don’t want to waste too many thoughts on Facebook because what happens when Facebook goes away? So will all of the time I spent posting to it.
I use Twitter more
I save my quips for Twitter where people seem to have more of a sense of humor. Twitter users also do not feel the need to comment on everything and give their opinion when it was not asked for. Twitter also has a different tone. There are a lot of business minds that I follow on Twitter and I have been paying more attention to their writings. I would rather ingest positive information that helps me grow than negativity and complaining.
Final Thoughts
Not going to Facebook to mindlessly scroll is kind of liberating. I have had several people reach out to me and ask that I continue to post to Facebook. I guess you don’t realize who actually likes your posts until you stop. I thought about posting to Facebook through another app but I don’t like the idea of putting stuff out there and not coming back to it to respond to comments. I am enjoying not being plugged in to Facebook for personal usage. As I have mentioned before, there is too much negativity on Facebook. Not everything on Facebook is negative, it just seems like there is an excessive amount of narcissism going on there and it’s too hard to filter through it these days.
The trends are changing. I noticed a huge shift with the engagement tools promoted in this years Superbowl commercials. For the last few years companies have done everything to get us to follow them on Twitter or like their Facebook page. What they have came to realize is that simply having a larger number of fans or followers does not necessarily result in engagement. Those of us who have been doing this social networking thing for a while now know that a small portion of your followers actually engage with you. Though having a large number of followers looks good, it is not a valid measurement of successful engagement in social media.
In this years Superbowl commercials we saw a switch from companies asking us to follow them to using hashtags in conversations. These companies were asking us to start conversations or if we were going to talk about them, to use a certain hashtag. This is a smart move because simply following them does nothing for conversation or engagement. Even though their commercials of the past may have talked us in to following their social media profile, if we talked about their commercial we most likely did nothing that tied it all together. Hashtags do this.
A social media hashtag is a word or phrase tied together in part of a conversation that provides a way of grouping messages together. On Twitter, hashtags are easy to search. They become clickable. When you click on them you see the group of all conversations that used the same hashtags. Hashtags are used on Twitter, Instagram, Google+ and countless others. Facebook however, does not use hashtags. Some of the most popular hashtags include: #love, #cute, #happy, and #beautiful but the most useful hashtags were created for a purpose, which is to start and engage conversations. Sometimes this happens as a result of a cultural movement and other times it has to do with products or services. For example, when Charlie Sheen spun out of control, the hashtag #Winning became the most popular hashtag in the world. This was due to a comment he made during an interview where he referred to himself not as bi-polar but bi-winning. The SanFrancisco Giants Baseball Team used the hashtag #BeatLA during it’s games against the LA Dodgers to get fans to start conversations about the game. I remember Tweeting out #BeatLA multiple times throughout the season and at least a dozen times during one of the Giants vs. Dodgers games I attended in the 2012 season. This also gave the SFGiants an easy way to track who was talking about their brand. If the majority of the conversations taking place include the same hashtag, you can track performance much easier.
Reaching Critical Mass
Something becomes popular because a large amount of people have began using it or discussing it all at the same time. It’s a lot harder to reach critical mass when your product, service or topic is very segmented. This is where hashtags make it much easier for critical mass to be reached in social media conversations. People use the hashtag because they want to be part of the conversation. Because hashtags group the conversations together it makes it much more likely that the topic will reach a critical mass then if these conversations were taking place without some sort of unifying element. Sometimes people will work the hashtag into a comment and other times the hashtag will be at the end of a comment to assure it is part of the group.
Here are two examples of hashtag use:
Congrats to the @SFGiants! #Worldseries Champions #2012
Going to see the @SFGiants crush the @LADodgers. #BeatLA
These are just examples of what has worked in the past. I know that most of us SMB (Small-Medium Business) owners will never become a trending topic on Twitter and that is ok. Hashtags are not just for large trending events and conversations. Conversation grouping is just as important for small conversations as it is for large conversations because it allows us to easily measure engagement.
Why Hashtags work
You wouldn’t create new social media profiles for each topic you were trying to turn into a conversation would you? That would be like starting from scratch each time. Most of us have a wide variety of conversations we end up in on our social networks. Our businesses have multiple products and services. How do we track our reach? Hashtags make this possible. As mentioned above, a hashtag works as a unified identifier that we can use to search and measure engagement even if that engagement never goes beyond Twitter. I often use hashtags in conversations I am having just to infuse myself into other conversations. If I am talking about my Photography, I will use the hashtag #Photography or #WeddingPhotography. This will infuse me into a grouping of conversations that have to do with Photography or Wedding Photography and sometimes results in retweets or new followers.
On Instagram, the popular photo sharing smart phone app, hashtags are used to include your photo into a group of other photos. For example, if I took a picture of a nice car I saw and used the hashtag #musclecar, it would group my photo along with other Instragram photos of Muscle Cars. If somebody was browsing the search results for the #musclecar, they would see my photo. I have gained countless new followers by using hashtags.
As you can see, hashtags work in different ways and have multiple uses. They help group conversations together so you can track online engagement and they help with discovery by grouping conversations together. It’s a recent movement that is gaining momentum fast.
In the commercials for the 2013 Superbowl, more than half of the commercials had specific hashtags and encouraged you to use them on Twitter. Very few of the commercials mentioned Facebook, Google+, Instagram or even Youtube. I have also noticed hashtags at the end of movie trailers for upcoming movies yet to be released. There were over 25 hashtags used in Superbowl commercials this year. Some of the hashtags included in this years Superbowl commercials include:
#betterwithmms – M&M’s Love Ballad commercial
#braverywins – Audi’s Prom commercial
#thekiss – Godaddy’s crazy model vs. nerd kiss commercial
The television show Community was going to be cancelled at the end of season 3 due to low ratings however it had a strong following. At the end of the season finale the hashtag #sixseasonsandamovie was shown and shortly after it started trending. Actor Joel McHale posted a thank you tweet in response to the popularity of this hashtag on May 18th, 2012.
At the time I am writing this, people are still using the hashtag when they post about the show or the fact that it will be returning for a fourth season. They started a movement and the networks listened. Community fans will get at least one more season out of NBC.
Tips For Creating A Great Hashtag
Keep it simple! Notice that all of the hashtags used by big media are simple. Make it easy to understand. Have you ever noticed that some words canbegroupedtogether and read easily while others are notaseasy to read when grouped? When you group some words together, it creates other words. You want to avoid this. A hashtag has to be grouped together, once you add a space or a dash, the hashtag breaks. Only letters and numbers can be used in a hashtag and they have to be grouped together.
Hashtags vs. Usernames
On social networking sites you typically create a username or handle for your account. My handle on Twitter is @Jeradhill. When you are having a conversation with someone on Twitter or you want to include them in a post on Instagram, you use their handle. For example, if I was going to include my friend @JamesMHorton in a tweet it would go something like this: “Grabbing lunch with the infamous @JamesMHorton today.” If I am reaching out to a Twitter user for something, I would also include their handle. See this Tweet to @Rdio where I inquire about a feature I asked about almost a year prior.
I wanted to get @Rdio’s attention so I used their handle and then I used a hashtag to get my point across and include my tweet in a stream of other conversations where people used the same hashtag.
Closing thoughts
Though many do not yet understand what hashtags accomplish, and many are annoyed by their use, they are the internets way of grouping conversations. Just like Twitter became a buzzword that even our grandparents understand, the hashtag will become mainstream as well. As we move through 2013 we will see it used more and more until the other social networks find a better way of measuring the engagement of conversations. The hashtag works because we can see their use in each conversation posted. Hashtags can be a part of any conversation, which is why they are so great.
Start using hashtags in your conversations and postings on Twitter and Instagram. I can promise you that it will result in more followers and increased reach. If you represent a company, product or service, you should find a way to incorporate the hashtag into your conversations to build buzz and even create a hashtag for people to use when talking about your product or service.
I have read many reports on what the best time is to tweet but what about user interaction? If you share something, when is the most likely time people will see it and click on your link? The popular URL shortener Bit.ly has some interesting data to help answer this question. The infographic below also helps us understand times of the day when we should avoid posting to Twitter and Facebook.
If you look at the times shown in the infographic it suggests that you should post important content during the hours of 1pm and 3pm. This is the few hours after lunch where people must ease back into work. It also suggests to avoid posting after 8pm on any day and after 3pm on Fridays.
I also think that the appropriate time to post depends on who your target market is and what kind of product or service you are marketing. If you are posting about B2B related content you may want to post earlier when business people are at work. If you are posting about video game related content you may want to post later in the day when people are home playing games.
Here is the infographic. What do you think? Have you had any success with posting during certain times of the day?
Today I am at TWTRCON in SF which is a Twitter Conference geared toward using Twitter in business. I attended this event last year in 2009 and ended up being the unofficial event photographer. I live blogged the event last year, which was actually pretty fun. This year I was asked to be the event photographer so I thought it would be fun to talk about my process and how I was able to take photos and live tweet as the event happens. I will also outline a few things that didn’t work as I prepared for today.
So how do I cover an event, live post images and write a blog about it all at the same time?
First I will start with what didn’t work, the Eye-Fi cards. Eye-Fi cards are SD cards that can connect to wireless networks. These cards are suppose to allow you to transfer images to your computer and then autopost them to a sharing service. I wanted to take pictures and have them automatically show up on Twitter. This just so happened to be one of the features they promote themselves as having. Upon testing this out it was a pain to set up. Two hours of tech support on the phone could not resolve my issues. I finally got it to work this morning but all it did was Tweet a link to the image gallery. I wanted links to each photo individually. Needless to say I decided to ditch the Eye-Fi cards and go back to regular SD cards.
I decided that I would just capture photos, transfer them to my laptop and upload them. My search was now on for a quick process to apply to the photos and get them online. This could be a time consuming process but it ended up being super easy. Let me share with you how I did this.
Step 1: Take Photos
I decided to capture a 1/2 session and then go back and upload. The viewers on Twitter don’t really know which frozen moment in time is being shown to them, it’s just important to see them while the speakers are still up there. I spent the first half of each session capturing photos.
Step 2: Import Photos
I insert the memory card into my laptop and drop the files into a folder on the desktop. Lightroom is opened and configured to automatically import files that are dropped into that folder. This allows me to quickly get the images off my card and get the card back in my camera. As the images import into Lightroom there is a Lightroom preset adjustment ran on each image and a color correction. This all happens with out me clicking a button. It’s all automated.
Step 3: Tag my Favorites
I then quickly tag my favorites. Most of them do not need cropping but on occasion I will crop a few of them to make the overall photo look a bit better.
Step 4: Upload
I select the photos I want to upload from that session, hit Command, Shift and E to export. I am using a plugin for Lightroom that exports photos to Twitpic. Twitpic auto posts images to Twitter and is one of the standards for sharing images on Twitter. The Plugin requires initial setup to your Twitter account. You can enter a message that you want sent with the Tweet. It is pretty awesome. The plugin cost me $3.50 USD, way less than an Eye-Fi card. The plugin exports each photo and sends them to Twitpic individually which then posts the Tweet to the account you entered when setting up the plugin. #AWESOME
Step 5: Go back to shooting
Capture the next session and repeat my process over again.
The entire process of Step 2 to Step 5 is about 3 minutes if I was to import 50 photos. More details below these photos.
I also had Caleb here helping me shoot outside of the event. There is a foyer with vendors and a place for the attendees to roam around in between sessions. Caleb is there to capture moments with attendees and vendors. There are a few authors signing books and other well known people who we can capture in images. These photos were uploading using the same process. Some of the time both of us would roam around and get some fun and creative shots to share on Twitter. Below are some photos that Caleb and I took.
Thinking about how things would have went if I was able to auto tweet each photo direct to Twitter using the Eye-Fi cards, I realize that would have worked out much worse. Using the Eye-Fi card everything would go live, even the blinked eye photos or those weird facial expressions you sometimes get on accident. This process is much more efficient and gives me total control. I was even able to throw a B&W adjustment on a couple of the images to make them look even better. I have had several people come up to me and tell me how awesome this is including the host of the event.
Social Networks such as Facebook and Twitter have been exploding over the last few years. Businesses have flocked to this new space because that is where the people are. Active business people, sometimes known as “Movers and Shakers” are usually the first to take part in using new networks to their advantage. However, the tone and way you go about communicating with people on social networks is far different then the way most are used to communicating with people, especially when it comes to promoting products and services.
Traditional print and media marketing is equal dumping a bucket of water off of a 50 story building. Some people will get hit, most will miss it. Before social networks there was no way for a business to connect one on one with their target market. Today, the target market is a friend request away. With out the right etiquette and mindset going into social networks, you can easily do more damage than good.
I am all about promoting business. I love making suggestions for products and services to friends of mine when I find that they have a need that I know one of my contacts can fill. For example, I was on Facebook yesterday and one of my friends posted an image of their car that was just damaged after hitting a dog that ran out in front of them. I personally know the owners of the premier body shop in the town that I live in so I contacted her directly and made a suggestion. Dealing with things such as who to trust with your car is a big deal and if I was in her shoes I would have appreciated any suggestions that could have been made. Knowing so many business people in my community I could easily take advantage of my friend’s desires to share their daily ins and outs with me, but I don’t give in to that temptation. I understand how good it feels to help someone out but I also understand when it is welcome and when it becomes annoying. Here are some tips and suggestions that I think should be considered when thinking about promoting yourself, your business or the businesses of others through social networks.
1. Always make your suggestions private.
Social Networks are super public. Most people allow anyone to see their posts and the posts of their friends. The average person on Facebook has 180 friends. This is very exciting to a business person who feels that they have something that could help. However, the public space is not where you want to do this. Although most will want to place their suggestion in public with hopes that all of their friends will see it the suggestion will come across as nothing more than a shameless plug. Shameless plugs = Annoying. I personally take offense to it, give one warning and then unfriend the person. In real life, if someone was to jump into a conversation with out being invited it would be considered rude. How is a person’s Facebook wall any different?
The right way to make your suggestion is to contact the person through their email or through private message. On Facebook you can message people privately as well as on Twitter you can Direct Message them. If the recipient of your suggestion takes you up on it and has a good experience I am sure they will post about it. They post about everything else so why not about their great interaction with your business? After business has closed and you feel the transaction went well you can even ask if they would post something to their Facebook wall or Twitter feed. How much better is a recommendation or testimonial from a happy customer then from your mouth?
Painful Example of poor Social Networking Etiquette: When I post something to my Facebook wall or Twitter feed about something and people make a shameless plug about their product or service that is not even relevant to what I was talking about. An example of this would be if the product or service was not available in my area. There is no relevance to what I posted nor that of anyone else who was posting comments under it, the plug was completely shameless and brought no value to the conversation. Why don’t you just slap me in the face while you are at it!
2. Invites to Groups, Fan Pages or Lists.
Creating a list, group or fan page for your business is a good idea. I have one and would recommend you get one for your business. You can even go as far as suggesting to all of your friends that they become a fan of your page, add you group or list as well. However, do not become relentless in attempting to get all people on your list or fan page. They saw it the first time. If they did not add it, they did not want to add it. If you continue to be persistant with getting people to add your page you are frustrating them and almost guaranteeing that they will never do business with you. This is equal to chasing people down and making them come in your door. Have you ever been to Las Vegas or certain parts of San Francisco where the bars and restaurants have people out front trying to get you to come into their establishment? It’s obnoxious, and you only put up with it long enough to walk by. Internally you are telling yourself that you will never go into that place and you probably even feel insulted.
To get people to become fans of your page, group of list you should ask those who are already fans to share it with others. Ask them to type a short message that they can send with the invite. This short message would explain how your business or product helped them. You are more likely to get fans who actually want to know more about you and your product this way.
Painful Example of poor Social Networking Etiquette: There is a local restaurant who has both a Facebook profile and Fan page. There is no indication of personality behind these profiles, they seem to strictly be there to be recognized and I have noticed no intention to be an active part of the community. This business would “suggest” that I added their page as a fan every single day. It was really annoying to click “ignore” every day as these suggestions would add up with the others and there is no easy way to “ignore all”, nor can you just ignore all future suggestions for a certain friend. You just have to unfriend them. This is exactly what I did. One week later they attempted to add me as a friend. Maybe they thought that somehow our friendship had been accidentally terminated, because you know how that happens all of the time. I decided to accept the friend invite but I also posted to their wall that I would be more than happy to have them as a friend, but I am not interested in being a fan of their page. I only fan pages that I feel are relevant to me and unless I completely love the business and am willing to shout it from the roof tops, I do not want to be their fan just for the sake of making their fan count ego feel good. Since that post, I have not received a fan request since.
3. Automated Responses
My policy is that if I can not respond personally, I will not respond at all. My Mother used to tell me that if I didn’t have something nice to say that I should not say it at all. To me, a automated response is nothing nice. When someone accepts your friend request or even adds you as a friend they deserve a personal response. If you do not have time to give personal responses then don’t respond at all. The only people who can get away with this are celebrities, if they even care to give you any time of day at all. However, the large majority of us are not celebrities and should not send automatic responses. I have 100’s of examples from Twitter that I could post images of but I don’t feel like throwing anyone under the bus for just being ignorant.
Many of us turn off email notifications from the social networks because of the amount of emails that end up coming in. My suggestion is that you head over to Gmail.Com, set up a free email account such as [email protected] (not an actual email) that you can set as your email address for notifications on these social networks. Let the new friend notifications pile up and go through them one at a time sending a short personal message. You can even pick and choose who you email. If you are a realestate agent and another realestate agent adds you as a friend, they probably are not going to enjoy the canned response you came up with thinking that the all of your new friends are potential home buyers.
Painful Example of poor Social Networking Etiquette: Quote from a recent Twitter direct message: “Thanks for the follow. I’ll look forward to connecting with you! You might also enjoy http://blogname.wordpress.com.” The truth is that this person could care less about connecting with me. I have yet to communicate with her and she has not made an effort to communicate with me either. To me it feels just like going to a Chamber of Commerce event where people are running around like zombies with business cards trying to eat you alive.
In Closing:
If you get one thing out of this I hope that you walk away with a desire to treat people in social networks like you would treat your neighbor. Truth is that we are more in contact with people online than we are our own neighbors living right outside our walls. Respecting people is just as important online as it is offline. Give people your respect and they will respond with theirs.
With all of the self proclaimed “social networking experts” out there it is hard to decide who to believe and trust. Most of them want money from you in trade for what they call their “experience”. However what makes me smile is that almost none of these people have any business experience at all. If they do, it’s not any experience that has yielded something they could brag about. How does one decide who to trust to direct your business in the most public display of communication that your company has ever engaged in? Which social media sites do you participate in and why? To be an expert in something you must have experience. I have never found that one person has had all of the right answers.
For years now I have been using these sites to build SEO for my websites and expand my personal brand. I have been posting articles to StumbleUpon and Digg for years and have seen great results, posting images to Flickr and communicating through Twitter and Facebook. These sites have been huge contributors to the traffic many of my websites receive. There are many different social media websites, each of them with a different purpose.
While browsing around online I came across a single PDF Roadmap that explains everything in plain english. You can download a large PDF here (right click, save target/file as). Drew McLellan put this beautiful breakdown together and it’s content is very sound. As I explained before, different social media sites help with different functions of your purpose and brand. Use it to figure out where to post which types of media for the best results.
It is not rocket science, it just takes someone to put it all together in plain english. If you do not have accounts on these websites, get them. If your website is not set up with buttons such as the buttons you see below for sharing content, then contact your website designer and have them added. Encourage your readers to share your content if they enjoyed it. And please for the love of all that is sacred, stop encouraging the talking heads out there, take initiative and do it yourself.
Finding tools like the CMO Social Landscape help me continue to get better at promoting myself, my business and the content I create.
I know that most of you have had it up to hear with people telling you how you can find business in the social networks but hear me out. If you listen for the right cues you will notice that people are asking for your help, they just don’t know it. We naturally want to help people. In real life it is awkward to interject our thoughts into a conversation we were not invited into. Online we have the opportunity to make suggestions through private emails or direct messages. Watch my latest video where I share thoughts and ideas on how to find referrals for yourself and other people in your contacts list through online social networks.
Jerad Hill is a personal brand strategist helping people get referrals online. For more videos from Jerad subscribe to the RSS feed or the iTunes Podcast!
If you are a Realtor and you have heard of Twitter then you need to check out DemandSpot.Com. DemandSpot allows you to easily find people on Twitter who are talking about purchasing a home with in your area. Simply type in your location, set the radius and DemandSpot gives you a way to contact these people talking about homes. The great thing about Twitter is that it allows us to listen for opportunities in a way we never could before. DemandSpot aggregates all of the Real Estate related tweets into one place and allows you to search by location.
It provides nothing other then leads but at least you know the person was actually interested in searching for a home, I mean they tweeted it right? DemandSpot is a free service as of the time I am posting this. Their service is in Alpha so I am sure it will improve greatly over time.
I know exactly what you are thinking, you are rolling your eyes at the idea of a Twitter bot. You may even remember how annoying they were when used incorrectly on Myspace. I want to share my experiences with Tweetadder and explain to you why it is a must have tool for anyone who takes their persona on Twitter serious.
Tweetadder is a tool that allows you to perform all of the normal functions of Twitter from one app but also allows you to target followers based on search terms and follow them with the click of a mouse.
Warning: People will use this to create accounts and mass follow people with the sole purpose of advertising to them. People already do this as it is, this app will make it easier for them to do so but it’s happening anyway.
Tweetadder is perfect for those of us who promote ourselves and our businesses online and wish to target people with specific interests to follow. It simply makes it easy to do that so you do not have to use the Twitter website and manually follow people. Tweetadder saves you a ton of time.
Twitter has limits set up in place to prevent spammers from creating huge accounts and spamming a lot of people. Those limits are easy to hit manually so I don’t see this tool making Twitter a spam filled place such as Myspace has became.
I am going to walk you through the many features of Tweetadder and explain why they will save you time and better your Twitter experience.
First things first… Tweetadder is not free. There are many levels of licensing for you to choose from to fit your needs. Currently the prices range from $7.95 for a one week one account license to $499 for a 100 account, outright unlimited usage license. To try it out, I purchased the one account week long license. As of the first day using it I followed 200 new people who have the word iPhone in their about section and 160 of those people have followed me back. Is that not worth $7.95 alone? Other services that place your Twitter account in ads on their partners websites will cost much more then that and perform no where near as well.
Support my efforts: As an early adopter of the Tweetadder software I signed up as an affiliate so when you purchase Tweetadder, please follow my link to do so. http://www.tweetadder.com/idevaffiliate/idevaffiliate.php?id=118 What is great is that you can be an affiliate also and earn income from the people you refer to Tweetadder. After you create an account and have your license of Tweetadder, simply revisit the link I just provided you and create an affiliate account.
When you first launch Tweetadder you will register your license and enter the Twitter account(s) you wish to manage. You can always add more accounts later or upgrade your license to allow for more account usage in the future. Once logged in you will see the following screen.
Who To Follow: In this section you will tell Tweetadder who you want to find and follow. There are different search fields that will search different aspects of Twitter to return the results you desire. You can follow users with in a zip code and radius, follow the followers of another user or search for terms people have tweeted or have entered into their about section of their profile. As you can see, you have a lot of options. This will allow you to find the people who have interests in which you can service in a hurry. Long gone are the days of searching Twitter manually and adding people one by one. Have fun finding people to follow.
Add Followers: This tab allows you to add the followers you just searched for, add followers that you have not yet followed back and set parameters to assure that the use of Tweetadder does not flag your account. I will note as a warning to you: Do not get greedy. You will be tempted to try and follow 2000 people in the first day of having your new Twitter account. I do not recommend this. Nothing looks more fishy to me than someone who follows a ton of people and has nobody following them back. I never follow those people back because chances are they are fake or will just advertise to me. I recommend you check the box that keeps your follower to following ratio at 1.5:1.
Unfollow: Use the Unfollow tab to remove people whom you are following that are not following you in return. If you have chosen to follow to many people you may want to use this option to remove the people that chose not to follow you. If you got to carried away with the last tab then you may hit a Twitter limit which means your followers to following ratio is to far apart. I like the option that allows you to unfollow people who were followed using Tweetadder. This will make sure that none of the higher end people or companies you follow because you respect and desire to hear what they have to say get removed.
Messages: Now we are getting into the tools that can potentially be used to spam. I suggest that you think of sending direct messages in the same context that you think of sending text messages from your cell phone to your close friends. Only send them when you need to and always make sure they are relevant. Sending unwarranted direct messages to users at random is a big No No in my book. However if you are administering a Twitter account for an event or conference you can use this tool to send out updates. Direct messages do have a higher chance of reaching the person you send it to because most people have their direct messages go to their email or via. SMS to their cell phone. The messages section will allow you to set custom messages to be broadcasted out to your followers. You can set the time and date that those messages will be dispatched, which makes Tweetadder a really useful tool. You can load messages from a file or enter them directly into Tweetadder.
Tweets: Tweetadder can be used to send out tweets at any time or date you set. This could be a great tool for events, conferences, speakers, sports teams and more. Use it as a tool to thank attendees of your event or to set up custom #followfriday tweets you don’t want to forget to send out. You can also use it to custom reply to messages that were tweeted back to you in response to the message Tweetadder sent out, how cool is that!
Automation: Each tab described above has features with daily limits that can be used to assure that your Twitter account does not get flagged as a spammer. Continuing on with my example, my search for people with the word iPhone in their profile returned many more twitter profiles then I would feel comfortable adding in one day. Using the automation tab I can set Tweetadder to follow the maximum amount of users I had set in the Add Followers tab, remove users who did not follow me back, send out twitter messages and tweets as specified on their respective tabs. This allows you to focus on conversing with those new followers and cultivate those new relationships.
Let Tweetadder worry about following new people and unfollowing the old. You can now focus on your followers and creating more value for them. Though there will be many who will abuse this software I suggest that you use it to grow your business or friend base so that you have a larger contact base to share your passions, products or services with.
I hope that my article on the new software Tweetadder helped you decide to download it and give it a try. Remember, it’s only $7.95 to try it out on one account for a week. The amount of targeted followers that you could get in that one week is well worth the $7.95. If you are serious about your Twitter persona then I am not sure why you are still reading this article. Go give it a try now. Click the banner below.
Last Wednesday about 50 Modesto locals collectively showed up at Hero’s Pizza to socialize and network. Those in attendance ranged from homemaker Moms to Presidents of large companies in our area. All of us had one thing in common, we all used the social network called Twitter. If you are unsure as to what this thing called Twitter is, watch the video titled “Twitter in Plain English“. The event was called The Modesto Tweetup (@modestotweetup) and was only advertised by word of mouth through Twitter itself. Less than a week before the event Lloyd Gomez (@lloydgomez) did some graphics for posters and a quick tee shirt design. Income generated from the shirt sales went to support the March of Dimes. I witnessed quite a few people including myself purchasing shirts. In fact I am wearing mine as I write this!
Using PeopleBrowsr.com we linked up 2 laptops to big screens which displayed tweets live on the screen so we could experience the reach a group of local twitter’ers have all at the same time. My laptop (pretty mac) and Daniel’s laptop (meh Dell) (@danielversola) ran the screens. Naturally, I brought a camera and took pictures which are available on my Flickr account.
This Tweetup was the 3rd in succession for Modesto, the first two were impromptu dinner gatherings. The success of the 3rd Modesto Tweetup spurred @lloydgomez, @danielversola, @BDUBweitl and @jeradhill (me) to start planning right away for the 4th Modesto Tweetup which is scheduled for May 20th at Hero’s Pizza in Modesto. The purpose of the Tweetups are to get together for networking and socializing. Our goal is to always have a philanthropic connection to each gathering such as our support of the March of Dimes at the Tweetup last week.
It will be exciting to see what happens at the next Tweetup. If you are a Twitter user, please make sure to follow @modestotweetup so you know what is happening. If you would like to get involved, feel free to contact me, we would love to hear your ideas.
