I did an experiment on Twitter. It was not deliberate; it was just the result of approaching Twitter two different ways at two different times. I learned some things which are finally helping me to finally see what all the enthusiasm is about. I have been on Twitter for about six weeks this time and only have 320+ followers, so that’s not a multitude and I can’t tell you how to get a multitude. But I have learned to use Twitter for something that’s of value to me.
Last fall when I had my pets blog, I signed up for Twitter in order to automatically tweet links to new posts. I very deliberately followed people from BlogCatalog who had indicated their interest in pets. I also followed anyone who followed me. I tweeted some stuff besides posts, of course, and one day I tweeted that I wished I had some doggy pictures for my blog. Almost immediately I had a reply from @6bdesign asking what kind of doggy pictures did I need? She sent me the wonderful story and pictures I shared with you a while back. By the time I deleted that Twitter account, I had less than 100 followers. But they were followers I shared laughs with and really talked to – really what Twitter is supposed to be about. And I made one real friend that time, even though we live hundreds of miles apart.
I wish I hadn’t deleted that account. I didn’t realize I could just rename an account, so I started a new one for this broader blog. I immediately followed @6bdesign, of course, but I also followed @problogger, @johnchow, and a few more A-list bloggers. Suddenly I had 100 followers appearing quickly over the course of that first day. I thought I probably should automate following – I mean how many people can I properly vet and follow back and still not spend the day fooling around with Twitter? I signed up for Tweetlater and set up autofollowing and the auto-DM. After that I didn’t even want to log into Twitter at all. It was a raging river of people offering me the secrets of making thousands of dollars a day while just sitting in my own home or getting thousands of Twitter followers just as quickly. And if I did venture to ask a question to the river, no one answered. My voice was lost in the roar. I did set up Tweetdeck so I could just see my favorite people, but still it just wasn’t much fun. I finally signed into Tweetlater again and canceled all the auto-crap.
Lessons learned:
You don’t have to follow everyone who follows you. A lot of the people who will follow you are not interested in talking to you or listening to you. At all. They just want to “offer” quick riches or thousands of Twitter followers – multiple times a day.
I’ll no longer send an automatic DM to new followers. When I first started doing that, I thought it was a nice idea! I just made a simple message along the lines of, “Thanks for following me!” I did not add a link to click if you want to be rich within 30 days, but still the DM itself just adds to the information overload that everyone is experiencing. In fact, I have a feeling that we are all starting to block or ignore our DMs!
Look at the people who are following you before you follow back. I don’t have to open their profile and see how many followers they have. If they have something written about themselves in their bio saying they are all about kids or pets or politics or anything else real, I will follow them. If they have nothing in their bio and if they then turn out to be following over 1000 people yet only have 100 followers, I do not follow them. I mean, what value will these people add to the experience? Instead, they just make the river wider and deeper.
Go ahead and Tweet when you want to. Sometimes someone will answer you. Sometimes someone will RT what you said. And often, someone is searching for the very keywords you tweet and then they’ll follow you.
Follow me on Twitter!