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?

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

One of the most effective ways of growing your Twitter followers list is to follow other people. I myself follow most people who follow me as long as they are not bots, have nothing in common with me or do nothing but post links to their own sites. Other than that, I am happy to follow most people, and I’m sure many other Twitter users do the same.

A few days ago I noticed my followers count drop a little. I wasn’t too sure why but I checked FriendOrFollow and saw that many of the people who were not following me in return had only recently started following me. One name which I noticed was @ShoeMoney, a blogger in a similar niche as me who added me and then unfollowed me a week or so later.

Turns out that many people use this tactic i.e. they follow lots of people, wait a week or so and then secretly unfollow them. I signed up to Qwitter a long time ago, a service which lets you know when someone unfollows you, however recently it hasn’t been sending updates when someone unfollows so I didn’t notice this happening at first.

Getting unfollowed in this manner doesn’t really bother me as I regularly unfollow those who do this however it got me thinking about why people do this, why are they so obcessed with getting their follower count high but keeping their follow count low?

Is Twitter a One Way Street?

I read a few comments about this on some online forums and the general concensus is that some people are doing this to try and give the impression that they are an authority. The idea is that when the average user sees someone who is not following many people but has lots of followers then they must have something important to say. But is that the case?

When you see a user who has lots of followers but isn’t following many people themselves, do you follow them because they must have something important to say? Personally, I do the opposite. I don’t mind someone who doesn’t follow every single person back as there are a lot of people I don’t follow in return.

However, when I see someone with thousands of followers only following a hundred or so back, I see someone who isn’t worth following. I see someone who doesn’t care what anyone else has to say. Now I understand that the more people you follow, the more your Twitter home page becomes full of tweets and it makes following the people you want to follow harder (Clearly Twitter need to follow Tweetdecks example and add a group function on Twitter!) but surely Twitter isn’t just a one way street? Surely a big part of Twitter is interacting with new people?

Celebrities are notorious for not following many people back. Take Ashton Kutcher for example, he currently has over 1.35 million followers but follows less than one hundred people himself, nearly all of which are celebrities. Perhaps that’s why people are trying to keep their follow number down, perhaps a low follow count does demonstrate influence within the Twitter community and shows that you are too busy to follow anyone else.

Again, I’m perhaps being a little harsh with my view because as I stated, the more people you follow, the more updates you get and some people don’t want to clutter their Twitter home page up. What do you think, does Twitter become harder to manage when you add more followers?

The Flip Side

Up until now I have talked about Twitter users with low follow/follower ratios and whether it influences your decision to follow them. But there is a different group of people out there : Twitter users who follow more people than follows them back.

If a low follow/follower ratio implies that the user has something important to say then perhaps the opposite is true, perhaps it shows that the person is not worth following.

I must admit that when I see a person following 800 people but only has 100 followers themselves, I rarely follow them because I get the impression that nearly all of those who followed only did so because they were returning the favour. Is it wrong to think like this?

A few days ago Twitter introduced a few new restrictions on how many people users can follow on Twitter. I am pleased that these new rules have been introduced because it will make it harder for people to grow their list to silly levels using bots and spam tactics (but it won’t stop them!).

• First of all they have introduced a maximum following limit of 2,000 people or 110% of the number of followers you have. So someone who has 500 followers can follow 2,000 people but someone with 3,000 followers can follow a maximum of 3,300 people.
• Secondly, they have introduced a maximum daily follow limit of 1,000 people. So if someone like Ashton Kutcher does feel like following back some of the people that follows him, he will have to do it at a rate of 1,000 people per day.

With these new rules in place there will be less users with high follow/follower ratios though with a limit of 2,000 follows there will still be a lot of Twitter users out there who follow more people than follows them back.

What do you think : Do you actively follow Twitter users who follow more people than follows them back?

Overview

There are many factors which quickly influence my decision on whether I should follow someone or not but the follow to follow ratio is something I always pay attention to. I also look at the number of followers in total the user has, their background image, their avatar and their bio.

Does the follow to follower ratio influence your decision on following someone on Twitter?

I read an article tonight from frickenate entitled ‘Twitter Would Sell Database to Highest Bidder‘. He noticed a few alarming statements within Twitter’s Privacy Policy. Including :

Twitter may sell, transfer or otherwise share some or all of its assets, including your personally identifiable information, in connection with a merger, acquisition, reorganization or sale of assets or in the event of bankruptcy. You will have the opportunity to opt out of any such transfer if the new entity’s planned processing of your information differs materially from that set forth in this Privacy Policy.

and

Twitter may sell… all of its assets, including your personally identifiable information, in connection with a… sale of assets or in the event of bankruptcy.

As frickenate rightly points out, this information not only includes names and email addresses, it also includes mobile phone numbers. Twitter has still not been bought over by a large company like Google or Microsoft.

If a business model cannot be found, would the Twitter founders simply sell the site, and users information, to the highest bidder? It certainly is food for thought

Link : Twitter Would Sell Database to Highest Bidder via @frickenate

Without doubt, Twitter owes a huge amount of success to bloggers, webmasters and ‘tech friendly’ internet users who are quick to embrace new technologies (and to celebrities like Stephen Fry and Wil Wheaton). With Ashton Kutcher recently reaching 1 million followers and @Oprah approaching half a million quickly in less than a week, it’s fair to say that Twitter has arrived.

Twitter has been hitting the headlines a lot in the last 6 months but history has shown that once a service starts being embraced by superstars like Oprah, it is taken to a whole new level (We are talking about a lady with so much influence she can recommend a book and within a few weeks it will be on the top sellers list!).

I believe that Twitter is going to double it’s number of users in the next few months but I also believe a lot of the people who will be signing up are not very ‘internet literate’ i.e. people who use the internet frequently for email and web browsing but not much else. Will these people be using Twitter everday in 6 months time? Will they understand how to get the most out of it?

I am not suggesting that those who only use the internet for web browsing will not understand Twitter but perhaps they do not need to use it as much musicians, bloggers, gamers etc. So will they see it as a Fad?

Social Website Cycles

Social websites grow incredibly quick but they can also grow out of favour very quickly too. In the UK I witnessed Friends Reunited grow from nothing to a site which everyone from my high school class signed up to and it was referred to frequently when I was out at the pub at the weekend. Then, less than a year later, no ever used it. I guess everyone got bored of it i.e. the novelty wore off.

Whilst travelling America I saw MySpace grow in the same manner. Everyone I spoke to asked if I had a MySpace account and everyone seemed to be checking it daily. MySpace remains an incredibly popular site but it has certainly lost a lot of people to other social networking sites.

Around 2 years ago, Bebo was the site which everyone in the UK was using. All of a sudden people I only knew a little bit were telling me ‘they’d bebo me’ about something or other. However, in the last year that too has grown out of favour and no one seems to ever use it now.

The one everyone is currently using is FaceBook. For a few months I was checking it everyday because all of my friends (near and far) were leaving me messages and posting new pictures and tagging me. At the moment, I’ve not had to log in for a few weeks because very few of my friends seem to be using it anymore.

It’s not that FaceBook is any less useful. I just believe that is the nature of social networking sites. People catch up friends on it but after a whilte they become a little bored of it and the novelty wears off. I am sure that FaceBook will continue to get new members at a fast rate and I am sure that people will still use it a lot too, however I also believe that many of it’s current users will start to rely on it less and less.

So what has this got to do with Twitter? Well, I don’t believe Twitter can be compared directly to a social networking site because quite simply, it isn’t one, it’s a micro blogging service. However, social sites in general tend to grow quickly and decline just as quick. Will Twitter turn out to be a ‘fad’ in some peoples eyes?

Perhaps there’s a bigger chance of Twitter being replaced by a ‘Twitter Clone’ which is more reliable and has more features. There are many features that Twitter users want to see added to Twitter but so far they have not been added. If a company comes out with a good service with more functionality then it only takes a few key influential people to endorse it and it will grow rapidly.

What do you think : Do you think many people see Twitter as a fad?