Kim Sherrell tweeted about a great list today. Virl have posted a list of the ‘Top 250 People that are the Coolest, Most Influential or Neatest on Twitter that are also are very-very likely to Follow you back!’.
If you are looking to increase your follower count with some influential people, it’s worth checking this list out.
Link : The Best 250
read full article →The Direct Message (DM) option on Twitter is useful as it allows you to send someone a private message, which is handy occasionally if you want to quickly send something in private that you don’t want the world to say.
With only 140 characters to write your direct message, it’s not going to replace email but it is still useful. Well, that’s what I used to think. I’m not so sure anymore as it seems like every other person is using an ‘Auto Reply’ to thank you for following them. I’m getting about a dozen direct messages everyday now thanking me for following them.
I know that Twitter is an extremely powerful marketing tool and this kind of thing will probably bring you more traffic but this new Auto Follow trend annoys me for a few reasons.
First of all, getting so many direct messages makes the DM system less useful. Twitter doesn’t distinguish between which messages were auto replies from following someone and which messages are legitimate messages i.e. messages I want to read. At the moment I still have notifications turned on so that I get an email everytime I get a new DM because I don’t want to miss anything important.
However, I can see me having no choice in the future but to have to switch email notifications off because 95% of messages are spam.
Auto Reply Spam Problem
That’s not the only reason these auto replies are annoying me. The second is self promotion. People seem to be promoting one of two things : either their website or some product.
Again, I recognise that Twitter is about self promotion but as someone who checks the bio of everyone I follow, I don’t need a direct message telling me to visit your website because I have already visited it and factored it whether I followed you in the first place. Kristen Nicole touched upon this subject yesterday in her post Selling on Twitter without Being Hated and suggested linking to a personal page :
Admittedly auto-following users that follow me, along with sending auto-DMs helps me save a lot of time when it comes to Twitter maintenance. But abusing these features can ruin your reputation before you’ve gotten your foot in the door. Don’t use either of these features to pitch. Just keep the auto-DMs personal and perhaps redirect them to a link where they can learn more info about you, such as the welcome video I created for my Twitter followers.
I wouldn’t mind being messaged by someone to a personal page where they tell you about who they are. What do you think?
Whilst self promoting your own website is something I don’t have a major issue with, spamming me with some affiliate link to some software or service is a different story. So far I have automatically unfollowed several users because they sent a spam link to me.
Overview
Twitter isn’t perfect but the direct messaging system is one of the most useful features. Though in my opinion, it’s in danger of being unuseable. At the moment I am following about 15-20 people per day so I can only imagine how many messages others are getting, particularly those who are following hundreds of new people a day.
What do you think of Auto Replies?
read full article →
TwitPic is probably the most popular site which Twitter users use to share pictures with their followers. It’s an incredibly useful site however there is no facility to search photos quickly.
Which is where TwiPick comes in. TwiPick is a real time search engine which displays the latest photos added to TwitPic. It refreshes every few seconds with new images and when you click on the photo it shows you who posted the picture. It also tells you if the image has been retweeted by other users.
It’s a good way of finding other Twitter users and fun way of finding new people. I found myself following some interesting people I probably would have never found otherwise.
Link : TwiPick
read full article →If you’re well known on the internet then getting people to follow you on Twitter is easy. You just need to link to your account and watch your follower count go up and up every day. However, if you’re not a famous actor, musician, writer or don’t run a popular website then getting followers is a little more difficult as you don’t have people waiting to hear what you have to say. Which is the position which most Twitter users are in.
So how do you get more followers? Well there is a variety of ways to get more people to follow your updates. Amongst other things you can promote yourself in Twitter directories, to friends and associates on forums and blogs and organically by simply being active on Twitter (and other people seeing your replies on other users accounts).
However one of the most popular ways of getting new followers is also the most effective : Following others. As I mentioned last week, this is a technique that many people use and was the reason why I saw my follower count drop a little one day.
Here’s a brief explanation of how you can get more followers by following others :
There are other good ways you can grow your follower count but this technique is definately one of the most effective. What do you think : Is following the best way to get followers?
* Just to clarify : I dont think you should just blindly follow anyone. Quality is better than quantity so It’s important to choose who you are following and not just autofollowing anyone 
Retweetist is a cool site which tracks the latest retweets. It’s a great way to see what the latest news is because that’s what people generally retweet (that and good articles).
As well as showing the latest retweets, it also shows who the biggest retweeters are. It’s worth checking Retweetist out
Link : Retweetist
read full article →Mike Wesely from TwitTalk.tv tweeted about a good video he done which explains retweeting so I thought I would share it with you all. Enjoy
James
Hakim is a webmaster, blogger and self confessed gadget geek!
He owns numerous websites on the net including the popular
Twitter Scripts.