Social Media Consultant: May 2009

How To Know Who To Follow On Twitter?

This is just another quick tip for all you twitter users who are ether new to twitter or are still getting your head around how it works. I just wanted to tell you a couple of findings about what to look for in a twitter profile when searching for good followers and good people to follow.

1. Do they have a Bio on their profile? The bio is your chance to give all the people of twitter a quick and easy viewpoint of you, what you are interested in and what you will be Twittering about. So having a Bio is the first step when looking for people to follow, if they don’t have anything to write about them self then why follow them? Would you hire someone who gave you a CV with nothing but their name on it?

2. Do they have a picture? If you get an icon like this on their profile –

If so the person doesn’t have a picture. Now this doesn’t really seem to be a very important aspect but it’s like a brand without a recognisable visual brand name to go along with it so that you can recognise it. It makes the person more personable and by all accounts puts the face to the name.

3. How many followers do they have? Now this from the offset would be a good basis to evaluate a person on, but as I mentioned in the previous blog ‘how to follow the right people’ post someone may have lots of followers but they don’t really interact with them or have anything in common with them. So looking through them to see if they do have attributes and interested in common would be a good indication. If you cant be bothered to do this, put this together with 4 & 5 and you can evaluate things better.

4. How many updates do they have? If the person has hundreds or thousands of followers and people they are following but less than 10 updates then there is a high chance that they have just added as many people as possible to obtain followers with the specific intention of getting followers, not the quality of good followers; OR they have used one of those DREDDED ‘increase your followers’ programs which will spam people to obtain as many irrelevant and random followers as possible! If this person has said nothing then you have to think, ‘why would 500 people follow them?’

5. When is the last time they tweeted an update? If its months ago and they haven’t said anything recently then they have most probably given up on twitter! This is sad because its such a great tool to connect with people and find links to things you are interested in. There is not much point in following someone who dosent use twitter anymore, because they wont follow you back and they wont contribute anything to you that you will find interesting, so my viewpoint is don’t bother following them!

Even though this may seem a long and drawn out process its more of a key to look at twitter in a light that you will get out of it what you put in. If you want a list of followers that will tweet interesting stuff that you actually want to read then these are good guidelines to know who to follow. Otherwise you will probably just give up on using it and loose out on the great connections and information that you can obtain.

Need help with your Twitter Marketing Campaigns?

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Twitter, How To Follow The Right People...

This is a subject, which by all effects, people ether don’t know or don’t follow. People get so caught up with getting as many followers as possible, and for the most part this isn’t what twitter is about. You may start following 500 random people (and get the majority of people will follow you back because it is good Twitter etiquette to do so) and think to yourself, ‘yeah, I got 500 followers!’ but the rule you really need to adhere too is ‘Quality not quantity’.

By this I mean that you may be feeling quite good about yourself for having lodes and lodes of followers but if they are not actually interested in what you are writing and posting in your tweets is there any point? The goal is to obtain a list of followers that are actually interested in what you Tweet and will not only share (RT = Re Tweet) it but comment (@youre-username) and start conversations with you. This is the whole point of twitter. It’s to share things with people who are interested in what you are saying and sharing, and will then share it with the people who follow them and are interested in similar subjects or genre’s or Tweets.
So now that you start out and want to find people who are interested in the same things as you, this is how...

KEY:

1. Do a Twitter Search (view Key) for keywords that you are interested in. So if you are a mum who wants to meet and tweet with other mums you would search for subject keywords of things you are interested in e.g. babies, baby, mother, motherhood, parent, children, etc

2. When you have found a list of tweets around the subjects (keywords) which you have searched for, have a look through them, is there any that stand out and interest you? Click them and have a look at the persons Twitter page, (its not like Facebook where you have to be the persons friend before you can view their content – and if their content is locked there usually isn’t a point in looking at it! You’re not missing much! Lol) if you like what you read and think you have the same interests and would like to read more from this person, follow them!

3. Once you have found some of these people, followed them and found a common ground on a subject matter that you are interested in (it doesn’t have to be just one, variety is the spice of life!!) you can look through these people’s followers and people that they follow and you can find similar people who they chat too. Same principal as before, if you like what they say, follow them!

4. Now you should have a good list of people who you follow who will be interested in the same things as you, as I mentioned before it is good Twitter Etiquette to follow people back, so most of them will follow you back, if they don’t, don’t be too disheartened, try starting conversations with them by adding their username with an @ before it in your tweets and they will get this message in their replies list (see Key) and most people will follow you back if you interest them, reply things to them that will interest them, or if you have a friendly comment about a twitter tweet that they post @ them to start conversing!

5. #Followfriday – (See Key) Now this is a very useful tool for finding people of interest to follow and referring people who interest you to your followers. How it works is that every Friday you can post a tweet which has #Followfriday and the names of the people you want to tell your followers about, (remembering that whenever you put anyone’s names in a tweet, you should always put an @ before their name) and then your followers will see this and they can look at these people and see if they want to follow them too. On a Friday you may see a big increase in your followers, this could be because of someone #Followfriday you to their followers, so to look to see if this is the case click on the @youre-username icon (see key – Reply’s list) in your home section on twitter to see.

There are a couple of things to spot about people on twitter to see if they are worth following , find out about these in the ‘How to know who to follow on twitter’ post.

Need help with your Twitter Marketing Campaign?

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Is Celebrity Journalism Coming To An End Because Of Twitter?

With Twitter fast becoming a staple in many people’s lives around the world (much like facebook has become over the last couple of years) its meteoric rise has come with many unprecedented attributes!

One such attribute is the access to conversing with your favorite celeb! Gone are the days when fan clubs and websites give you access to someone in an office who would have some link to the celeb, who would send out generic ‘thanks for your support’ etc letters to all fan mail. Now all you have to do is get yourself on Twitter and ask them a question or comment on something that they have Tweeted. This could get you conversion directly with the Celeb in Question.

I was thinking the other day, now that you can so easily see what celebs are doing day to day and read and write to them in 140 characters or less, how long is celeb journalism going to last? With the speed that updates to Twitter can happen and the opportunities to get to hundreds of thousands of people in seconds with their twitter followers, who’s going to wait weeks for a magazine or newspaper article which is going to ask the same questions that you could find out in any case by reading their twitter or even by asking them yourself! With celeb journalists reporting on what’s going on with celebs on twitter, days (and in some cases weeks) after the said event, is this going to be obsolete soon? I know in my point of view when I reading the newspaper that Lilly Allen had a pop at Scottish sensation Susan Boyle on twitter days after I saw the actual event on Twitter I’m thinking to myself, ‘Old News Much?’ I’m sure I’m not the only one who thinks this!