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orion_joel
02-03-2009, 08:33 PM
I only just really started using Tweetburner about 10 days ago in favor of tinyURL, more so for the direct tweet from whatever page you are on. However, after just post a tweet 10 minutes ago, i had thought of checking the click through on the other tweets i made with links.

Well quick results or what i had 1/4 (yes just 10) people click that link of which i would assume they are mostly following me to have seen it.

I just need more people following me and i could do quite well traffic wise from twitter.

vangogh
02-04-2009, 12:47 AM
People do click links on Twitter. I know I do as long as it looks like something I'll be interested in.

rezzy
02-04-2009, 10:14 AM
How often do you see yourself reading a person's bio or following the links in their bio?

vangogh
02-04-2009, 10:33 AM
The bio on your Twitter profile? I do most of the time if I don't already know the person. I might not click it on your profile, because I already know you and I know your site, but pretending I didn't know who you were and something tool me to your profile I would almost always click to find out more about you.

rezzy
02-04-2009, 11:45 AM
Interesting. I never placed much stock in profiles. But I guess since this social media requires a up-to-date profile. I guess I should update my page with a new background and color scheme.

Using the default page isnt a good idea for designers.

orion_joel
02-04-2009, 11:07 PM
I think whether you expect people to click links in your profile or not it is very much worth keeping them up to date. Because you never know the one person that does click the link may be the one that is worth keeping it up to date for.

I find at this point with about 45 followers, i am getting on average 9-11 clicks when i post a link, according to tweetburner. I should hope that this may stay around this percentage wise as followers increase. I dont know how it will go though because i dont want to follow a massive amount of people, because my feed is already quite busy with just the people i am following now.

customtollfree
03-06-2009, 05:07 PM
Usually, if you find something or someone interesting, you check out their bio and hopefully they have a website that you can click on. I do this all the time and interestingly, these twitter bio's you have checked on also checks your bios.

Harold Mansfield
03-06-2009, 06:24 PM
How often do you see yourself reading a person's bio or following the links in their bio?

I do it all the time. Evey morning when I check the email account I use for Twitter, I check the profile of just about everybody that followed me from the day before and click the link to their website.
I actually like Twitter better than Stumble for discovering new people and sites.

In the 2 weeks that I have been using it, I have expanded my content resources tremendously for my music blog.

You definitely should create a custom background....I almost never click on peoples links with the default background unless they have a large number of followers.

vangogh
03-06-2009, 07:04 PM
I read them too. Whenever someone follows me the first thing I do is look at their profile. I'm partly checking to make sure it's not a bot or someone who's following thousands of people before creating a few tweets, but I'm also trying to get a sense of what the person is about.

orion_joel
03-07-2009, 06:22 AM
I find that i tend to click through a lot of links in the stream, when something catches my eye. Then often will click through and check out the person bio, and site.

Having over 1000 followers does make it difficult to get personal, with everyone, however i seem to have more conversations that last longer with the larger number of followers. Where on my original personal account, the conversations with different it was one tweet each way and kind of died off, dont know maybe something i need to test out more.

vangogh
03-07-2009, 11:44 AM
Joel what are you using to communicate on Twitter. If you use TweetDeck you can set up groups so you can view the tweets of all the people you're following in one window and then say maybe all the people you follow from here in another window. You could set one up for personal friends and you can set another up for a particular search term so anytime someone mentions the IT for example you could see the tweet.

Lots of ways to set it up. Makes it easier to follow more people.

Spider
03-07-2009, 01:55 PM
And to what purpose, all this tweeting and following and being followed? Sounds like an awful waste of time to me.

I guess I just don't understand social networking, yet!

Harold Mansfield
03-07-2009, 02:14 PM
And to what purpose, all this tweeting and following and being followed? Sounds like an awful waste of time to me.

I guess I just don't understand social networking, yet!

I'll tell you how it helps me. There are a lot of Dj's and music people on Twitter. I can get information a lot faster on Twitter, and I have been exposed to some people in the Industry that I didn't know existed which in turn gives me a more content for my blog that is a little more diverse than just the top or "main stream" Dj's and artists.

Good example, people post their promos, new releases and such...when I see someone "Tweet" something that interests me, I can simply message them back, "Looks good, send me the press pack" and Bam! I have the next days post for my blog.

It's also a new traffic source. Twitter is now right up there with my top referring URL's, an I have noticed a slight increase in traffic, so people have also found me, that didn't know I existed, and many have come back to read.

I try to streamline my followers to people specifically interested in Dance Music (Trance, House, Techno etc), and I frequently cut people that aren't, so that when I do get an alert it's probably related to the business and not SEO, or "Make Money form Home" spam.

vangogh
03-07-2009, 03:06 PM
Frederick it absolutely can be nothing more than a waste of time. In all honesty the majority of people using Twitter (really all social networks) are doing little more by design. However all these services can be used for marketing if done well.

I use Twitter for a few reasons. Mostly to connect with people, to network with them. It's really not different than getting to know people here or offline. It's just another avenue to connect with other people. Also I use it to understand what other people are talking about. It's a way to listen to trends or just get a handle about how people feel on a given subject.

For example I work with WordPress a lot and have an interest in knowing what people want in a WordPress theme. I use an application called TweetDeck to interact with Twitter. TweetDeck allows you to follow all the tweets about a specific search term. I set up a window within the application based on a search for WordPress. Now anytime someone in the Twitterverse says something about WordPress I can see it. I can learn what people are looking for, what is readily available and more important what's lacking in the market.

I'm not using Twitter at the moment to directly promote myself by linking back to my posts, but it's something I know I should look into more. Let's say you post a link to an article you've written. All the people following you might see the link. Some of them might then retweet the link and all the people following them might see it. Assuming it's a good article and people retweet it your article has a chance of going viral as each new group of followers is exposed to it.

The same basic principles apply that you can cross a line with the community and come across as being a spammer, but if you respect the community and contribute to it, you can benefit from it.

There's no reason you have to join Twitter or any social networking site. You can certainly do well without them. Just know they're there and potentially can be another way to connect with people. One business may decide to advertise on TV, another may prefer radio spots, another might think print works the best, and another may focus on social media. Smart business mix and match different marketing channels and find the balance that works for them.

KristineS
03-09-2009, 12:39 PM
I'll say this for Twitter. I was of the mindset that Twitter was mostly a waste of time and full of vapid people talking about what they had for lunch. A few people had been pushing me to try it and I had given it a half hearted try, but wasn't really behind it.

Recently I set up a Twitter feed for an organization I run, the Outdoor Bloggers Summit. The results have been fantastic. The reach of the organization has expanded dramatically and we're adding new bloggers to our blogroll daily. I can't say that Twitter is the only thing that has caused this change, since I know a lot of our members are recruiting too, but it certainly has raised the profile of the organization.

customtollfree
03-13-2009, 04:13 PM
Although twitter does not set limits as to the number of followers you have, one thing that stands in your way or my way as to how get past 2K following. I've seen some twitter users like having more than 20K followers (search for Barack Obama).

Anyway, let me share one nice trick when I'm promoting something on twitter.. I simple send direct message to random followers. A few hours later, check on google analytics and boom! great traffic!

vangogh
03-13-2009, 04:18 PM
When people I don't know are sending me directs with links I've been unfollowing them immediately. Tells me right away they aren't interested in interacting with me in any way other than to market to me.

You may be seeing traffic, but is that traffic doing anything useful. It could be a lot of people checking to see whether or not you're legit or spamming them.

orion_joel
03-14-2009, 12:01 AM
That 2,000 following limit is breakable, have done so myself in the past 3 or 4 days. However while they cap it at 2,000 it seems if you have less then that many followers, it seems you need less then a 10% difference between the number of following and followers. So if you are following 2000, people you will not be able to follow any more unless you have about 1828 followers.

Easiest way to work out how many the max you can follow is to take your followers count drop the last number and then add together for example 1818 + 182 = 2,000 or 2500 + 250 = 2750 (so if you have 2500 followers you can follow a max of 2750 people yourself.

I think i kind of discovered this one by accident, but it seems to be almost spot on everytime i find myself unable to follow any more people.

vangogh
03-14-2009, 11:17 AM
That makes sense. It must be spam protection since one of the obvious spam tactics is to follow thousands of people in the hopes that mist will follow back. When I see someone following me along with thousands and very few people are following them back or they have close to 0 tweets I tend not to follow them.

orion_joel
03-14-2009, 04:08 PM
Exactly i think that it is a measure to try and keep things to some extent closer to equal. Even though for people that do manage to get up to levels of 20,000+ followers/following, there still can be a variance of potentially over 2,000.

However it is better to have it capped in some form to alleviate the potential for someone to follow, 100,000 people have almost none follow back and have just one spam tweet.

bizcard
03-24-2009, 08:06 AM
I'm not really fond of auto-response in twitter, if I get them from people I follow, I automatically unfollow them but not all the time, sometimes I give exception to people who have more than a hundred updates.

vangogh
03-24-2009, 12:18 PM
I don't care for them either. Lately I've been getting a lot of direct messages that are clearly automated all saying thanks for following and then providing a link for me to visit. I don't visit and I often unsubscribe on the spot.

orion_joel
03-25-2009, 03:00 AM
I read most of my Direct Messages, however generally delete most, and respond to a few that may catch my eye as not automated.

vangogh
03-25-2009, 03:19 AM
I read the real ones. What bugs me about the automated directs is they pollute that stream. It's really meant to be a private form of communication within Twitter, but lately it's becoming the new place to send spam. I don't mind an automated thank you for following, but when people send me a link in their first DM I unfollow them right away. Shows they have no interest in anything other than selling to me.

customtollfree
03-27-2009, 04:45 PM
It seems to become a standard nowadays, I've always received auto-thank you responds from people I follow with their website on the message since I signed up on twitter. It can be annoying if you just blindly follow someone other than that its okay.

orion_joel
03-28-2009, 02:15 AM
I have an auto thank-you setup for people that follow. However i did change it to not include my link and just suggest to visit my site, which can be easily found on my profile. I think it will probably mean less clicks but the clicks will be from people that really want to visit my site.

vangogh
03-28-2009, 12:38 PM
Be careful with the auto response. There's a serious backlash against them now and with good reason. The idea behind a direct is to have a place for personal communication between friends that don't appear in the public Twitter stream. An auto response from a stranger violates what the direct is all about.

Even if people do click on the link or don't immediately unfollow you, you haven't made a real connection with anyone. Without the real connection you haven't really gained anything useful to your business.

Harold Mansfield
03-29-2009, 02:56 PM
You know reading this reminded me that I have an autosponder set up, and haven't even thought about it. I think I need to change that now.

vangogh
03-29-2009, 05:11 PM
The last week or so I've seen dozens of posts criticizing the auto responses. I think most people using them are honest and mean well. They probably don't realize how annoying it is to receive them and how they come across more as spam than genuine.

orion_joel
03-30-2009, 12:55 AM
Probably the biggest issue on using them or not, is that it is almost impossible to guage how it actually effects how many people choose to follow you or not based on it.

vangogh
03-30-2009, 01:47 AM
Well I would think no one is actually following you because of the auto response. Aren't you sending them after they've already chosen to follow you? I'm sure some don't realize it's an automated response and I'm sure some people don't mind them. Recently though, there have been a lot of complaints about them.

orion_joel
03-30-2009, 05:18 AM
Yeah but more so you would be hard pressed i would imagine, finding how many people unfollow you straight away because of an auto response. So while you may see a lot of people follow you, from the email notification. You would then not really know how many of them unfollow because of the auto message or some other reason

vangogh
03-30-2009, 11:20 AM
There are some tools that will email you when someone unsubscribes and it'll show your most recent tweet when they did unsubscribe. I'm not sure how accurate they are, but they probably help figure out if it's the auto response causing them to unfollow.

orion_joel
03-31-2009, 01:28 AM
I am really not to concerned with people unfollowing. Especially if it is just one at a time. If i see a big hit like lose hundreds, then hopefully i will be able to connect it back to what i did to cause it, or a known glitch in twitter.

Especially when you get above the few hundred followers, it is almost impossible to keep track of every follower an losing one or even gaining one makes little difference to what you would do i imagine.

vangogh
03-31-2009, 02:08 AM
I only mentioned the unfollow tools because of your post above. I don't really pay much attention either to people unfollowing me. The only reason I want to know is if it's people who followed me just to get me to follow them back and as soon as I do they unfollow.

janiels
04-11-2009, 12:39 AM
I don't actually check bios, I just click on random links that they twit, specially when it is mixed with interesting lines.