Janet’s “All Atwitter” Follow Up
I was almost embarrassed by my own raves about my new addiction to Twitter this week. On Wednesday I spoke at Innotech to the Nonprofit Summit attendees about leveraging social media to support their causes, and actually thought I might be crazy as I stood on stage in front of 85+ people and went on and on about Twitter…
But I’ve come to rely on it to do the following for me:
- Get a glimpse into the minds (and lives) of some very interesting people
- Understand immediately what’s happening in places I can’t be
- Get to know business colleagues and even friends on a more personal level
- This is the very best part - knowing what people are excited about, what they’re coping with, and how they’re reacting to their own lives…
Follow, Follow, Follow, Follow…
Following is way fun. That’s why I’ve largely given up on tools like HelloTXT that will post to Twitter without me going in. When I go into my Twitter feed, I learn something. The act of Twittering is much more about the subscribe than the publish to me…
So as I’ve been doing it more and getting personally more interested in it, I’ve run across some great Twitter Do’s and Don’ts - one from Kim Dushinsky - my mobile marketing guru in Denver; and one from Caroline Middlebrook, a software developer in the UK who gave up her 9-5 for the fun of online marketing.
One More Do, One More Don’t
I think I’ve said this before:
“Do” pick a short screen name. With only 140 characters, honor your fellow Twitterers who want to engage with you. I didn’t, and I’m sorry… but I truly didn’t know better at the time.
And this just in:
“Don’t” miss the tabs on your Twitter home page - it took me by surprise to see the Replies tab where I’ve missed timely replies to all sorts of conversations. Ugh.
Janet - have you tried twhirl yet for Twitter? Its a desktop Twitter client, based on the Adobe AIR platform, and can really make a difference to your twittering experience.
BTW You can download it here http://www.twhirl.org/
You’re the second person who’s suggested twhirl to me. I must go have a look. Thanks James!
Another good one is Twitterific: http://iconfactory.com/software/twitterrific. The free version is fine. And I go to iTweet.net on the iPhone for quick check of recent tweets, replies and easy posting.
Thanks Jean! I’ll definitely check out iTweet - I’ve been just going into Safari to tweet from my iPhone.
Hi Janet!
You and I have discussed twitter as a competitive advantage before but there is a dark side of twitter also, twitterspam. The practice is for someone to fire off a bot to follow anyone and everyone they can find on twitter. (Not hard, about 20 minutes of coding and you can write one in PHP)
The theory here is that about 10% of the people you follow will blindly follow you. This number jibes with the twitter spammers I’ve seen recently. BTW, there’s a simple tool you can use as a twitter black list. http://twitterblacklist.com Just use this url:
http://twitterblacklist.com/api?twittername
and it will return a simple yes or no as to whether that person is a twitterspammer based on their follower ratio.
So, when you get the “* is following you” email, go ahead and click the link. Make sure you know the person, know of the person, or at least find their comments interesting.
Non-spammer, “twitter as a communications vehicle companies” are also easy to spot. I’ll use one of my accounts as an example but mainly because I don’t expect any of your readers are that interested in it’s content.
One of my accounts is twitter.com/phpa. It’s an announcement channel for one of my podcasts. You’ll notice that I don’t follow *anyone* with it. When I post a new podcast, an announcement goes out to that account. No, I don’t have tens of thousands of followers but the 60 I have really are interested in what I have to say. IMHO, that is the right way to use twitter for marketing. (It’s a quality over quantity thing)
Great post, thanks for the insights, hope I’ve added to the conversation.
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