Author Archive

This is a reprint of an original post that comes from Mark Dykeman’s blog, Broadcasting Brain.

There are benefits to getting more Twitter followers, so with that thought in mind, I’m going to tell you about the things that will help you build your own Twitter following. I’ll tell you about some things that seem to work and some that don’t work: short term or long term.

Let me be perfectly clear: I am not writing this article for you to use Twitter to help you feed a fragile ego, expand your mailing list, build a fan club, sell products, become a top Digger, or sway political opinion to the exclusion of everything else. However, if you are trying to do this then you might see some reasons here why you are failing to attract followers.

On the other hand, if you want to expand your contacts, get access to a constantly stream of interesting information, give and receive advice, and to learn how to be a better human being, then I hope this article will help you to show other Twitter users that you’re an interesting, helpful, or at the very least entertaining person who’s worthy of being followed.

I’m particularly hopeful that this might help some honest-to-goodness lesser known creatives, artists, and talented folks who do want a chance to promote themselves and their works in a creative way (as long as they understand that it’s not a one-way promotion deal; you need to give, too.) The world needs more good content.

You will also find that these concepts will apply to many social media websites.

Twitter in 140 words or less

Let’s (re)examine Twitter. It’s a running stream of Tweets: messages, comments, links, and other communication that you can see on the Web or by a mobile computing device. You can view the general stream of information (the public timeline) that everyone contributes to. Most people see a personalized stream created by the people they have chosen to follow.

Being followed can be a compliment because it means that someone chose to listen to you out millions of other Twitter users. This is important because several months ago Twitter put limits on the number of people that you can follow. Some people have amassed a grandfathered follower list of tens of thousands of people. Now, you can’t follow more than 2000 people, so being followed is a bigger deal than it used to be.

Metaphors used to describe Twitter

Some people compare Twitter to a coffee shop or cocktail party, but I think that Twitter is more like a state or city fair where there tends to be a lot of friendly people who like to talk. The coffee shop metaphor, even the cocktail party image, fails for me because there are simply no coffee shops big enough to hold this many people. It’s more like the chatrooms that people still use these days, but slightly slower.

Like any community, Twitter’s composition has changed over time. Twitter probably felt smaller and chummier in its earliest days, like a single cohesive community, because it likely was a cozy group of a few hundred or so friends and colleagues.

The reality is that Twitter is a federation of communities that happen to use the same facilities. In a sense, every Twitter follower creates their own unique community composed of the people that they follow, since it’s unlikely that any two users follow all of the same people. There can be a lot of overlaps between these customized communities, but each has some unique composition.

Just as you build your own network of offline friends, family and contacts, you get to pick and choose who you follow as you build your own custom network of Twitter users that you follow. However, most of the time you’re going to want those same people to follow you back. Just like in your offline reality, if you make a gesture of friendship or contact towards someone, you’re going to appreciate it if your overture is reciprocated.

Following a stranger on Twitter is like leaving a calling card

One simple way to start up a Twitter network is to hook up with people that you already know offline or through online social networks. In fact, this is probably the best way to start using Twitter. You have already earned credibility and built up a reputation with those people so you’ll already have their attention.

Otherwise, your best bet will be to start joining other social networks or looking harder in your own world in order to get started with other people that you know. Maybe you can even talk a few friends into joining Twitter simultaneously so that you have a common starting point.

At some point you’re going to start following other people that you don’t know yet. By following them in Twitter, you are leaving them a digital calling card that’s similar to the real-world equivalent used in previous decades.

The outside of the digital calling card is your avatar and your username, which appear on the Follower page of the person that you’ve started to follow. These two things make up the “envelope” which contains your calling card. A friendly or interesting envelope gets more attention to a plain white, yellow, or brown envelope. If you don’t have a personalized avatar or a name, then you’re a plain envelope. People tend to ignore plain, non-descriptive envelopes when they are pressed for time or when they’re not interested in exploring a mystery.

People open this envelope by clicking on your username or avatar.

Your Twitter bio, including any links to your blog, social network page, or other websites, is the “calling card” itself. The bio gives people a quick overview of who you are and what you do. It, like your avatar, is a chance to show people that you have wit, compassion, and are otherwise not a stuffed shirt. Or a robot. Or a faceless organization.

If you’re already using Twitter and struggling with building up your follower list, you could look at the bios of people that you follow, decide what you like about those bios, and attempt to incorporate those ideas in your own terms. Do not blindly copy; just use this information to get some ideas. This is not a sure-fire guarantee of success, but it’s one of several good ideas to consider.

One thing to note, though: many people are picky about who they follow. Some people won’t follow strangers. Some of them won’t follow you because they don’t see any common interests OR they see material in your Twitter stream that they don’t like. Some people just don’t want to follow more people because they’re at their emotional or mental state of saturation and they can’t take anymore. And, unfortunately, some people on Twitter just want to take more than they give.

Why people will follow you on Twitter

From personal experience, I can tell you that people will follow you because:

• They know and/or like you
• They think you are interesting, informative, helpful or funny
• You’ve piqued their curiosity enough for them to take a chance on a stranger like you
• They just like adding people to their networks, regardless of how strong or weak the connections are

Why people probably won’t follow you on Twitter

• Your account is the mouth and ears of an organization, not an individual. An account that represents a company name without reference to a human being looks and smells like a machine.
• Your Follower/Following ratio is unbalanced in either direction. If you have a huge number of followers while you follow a much smaller number, then it will seem like you’re not receptive to new followers (or you can’t because you’ve hit the 2000 Following limit). If you follow a huge number of people compared to the number of people that currently follow you, then you look like you’re trying to the old “follow a bunch of people in the hopes that some of them will follow me back” tactic. Some of us are very wary about this, because that tactic is often done in order for selfish reasons (and I say that as having tried it several times in the past: it doesn’t work very well over the long term unless you happen to connect with a lot of these people in some meaningful way.)
• You create a lot of automated Tweets instead of cranking them out by hand. It becomes pretty easy to tell what’s been automatically generated (and this is true for both regular Tweets, replies, and DMs (Direct Messages)). People are far more interested in the writings of a real human being than anything generated by a computer program. Sorry, but automated DMs really annoy me.
• You don’t have many (or any) Replies in your Twitter stream. A reply appears in the public timeline and your own personal timelines, but it’s directed at a specific Twitter user. It’s a way of making conversation and it helps to build an online relationship between two people. In other words, it’s an indication that there’s a human being behind the Twitter account.
• You Tweet a lot of content (including links) that are related to yourself, your organization, or your business. Unless that content is extremely relevant to me, I won’t bother signing up.
• You produce offensive material (offensive is in the eye of the beholder).
• You’re clearly talking to yourself about things that are relevant to you and you alone.
• You don’t share useful, helpful, funny or interesting content.

Why people will stop following you on Twitter

• You don’t respond to Reply Tweets – people don’t like to be ignored
• You don’t respond to DMs – see previous
• You don’t appear to respond to anything – see previous!
• You start to produce offensive material on a regular basis (again, offensive is in the eye of the beholder) – no one wants to see stuff that they don’t want to see
• You Tweet more about yourself and the things that you are selling than about other stuff.
• You cease to share useful, helpful, funny or interesting content – therefore, why would they follow you?
• You Tweet too much and it overwhelms a user’s Twitter stream so that it’s hard for them to see what anyone else is Tweeting.
• You Tweet too little to be interesting or you stop Tweeting for a long period of time.

Conclusion: how to get followers if you’re not a star, captain of industry, or just plain famous

• You need to be committed to a long term processing of sharing, helping, exchanging information, and building relationships gradually.
• Share a lot of high quality content via links that other people have created.
• You need to be a considerate human being.
• You need to reach out to people but not bother them or overwhelm them.
• Accept the fact that this involves a lot of work.

To close, I’m going to leave you with great advice from Ari Herzog that he wrote on (you guessed it) Twitter:

ariherzog @nooozeguy Greg: Be yourself on Twitter. Be as authentic as you can be. Be @Greg. Don’t be @noooozeguy. WTF is a noooze?

P.S. If you have any observations, suggestions, corrections, or remarks of any kind about this, why not lead a comment below? We’d all benefit from your feedback!

Other references about Twitter and social media for your consideration:

The Ultimate Social Media Etiquette Handbook (Tamar Weinberg’s excellent guide)

Facebook and Twitter (includes thoughts by Steve Pavlina about following vs. not following)

My Twitter for Dummies Tip: Be Yourself (Laura @Pistachio Fitton writes this post at the Touchbase Blog at Pistachio Consulting)

25 Ways to Build Your Community (check out Chris Brogan’s point 9 about promoting other people 12 times more than you promote yourself)

7 Ingredients in the Perfect Twitter Profile

Disasters have an unsettling way of bringing chaos through, among other things, loss of communication. Many smart businesses and governments have contingency plans in place in order to maintain some form of control and order when Mother Nature decides it’s time to shake things up. We’re starting to see more examples of microblogging applications filling holes in communication architecture during times of need, so let’s take a look at a couple of examples.

Washington State provides us with an example of how governments are exploring the use of microblogging during times of emergency. Interestingly enough, the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) recently turned to Twitter when their own servers were overwhelmed during recent emergencies and is considering more elaborate plans for the future:

Because the Web site is a popular source of traffic updates, sometimes it can’t handle a sudden spike in page hits… During an emergency, WSDOT is considering the option of posting a “neutered,” bare-bones version of its Web site that contains a Web link to the Twitter feed. Increasing use of Twitter during emergencies led to Twitter follower growth from 20 to 160.

If you check out the Twitter accounts that WSDOT follows, you’ll also find:

• SeattleTraffic – traffic information specific to Seattle
• WSFerries – an “unofficial” Twitter stream about the Washington State Ferry system

If you live in these areas, it makes good sense to subscribe these accounts and have their updates go to your mobile device.

This is just one example of how government departments are making good use of Twitter. It’s worth pointing out, however, that the use of Twitter is just one part of the state’s continuity plan, which also includes the aforementioned website. Microblogging becomes another tool in your communication toolbox when you need to get the word out during emergencies or even for planned service disruptions.

If you know of other government departments in other parts of the world that are doing similar things with microblogging applications, why not leave a comment and share the information?

Svetlana Gladkova of Profy.com uncovered an interesting way to help promote a business on Twitter. She discovered that one of the top Trending Topics appearing on Twitter Search (aka Summize) was Career Builder, a US based job board website. She further learned that several Twitter accounts from Career Builder were Tweeting links to each new job posting hitting their site, generating many Tweets. The Twitter Search application detected that activity and displayed the term “Career Builder” as a Trending Topic, or one of the most talked about topics on Twitter.

We don’t know for certain whether or not Career Builder intentionally “spammed” Twitter to gain Trending Topic status. However, it’s worth considering the pros and cons of attempting to artificially force a keyword or term into the Trending Topic section of Twitter Search.

Pros

• Creating a Trending Topic costs nothing but time and effort.
• An automated solution can take the labor out of generating the volume to achieve Trending Topic status.
• A number of Twitter users use Twitter Search – thousands of users per day. Therefore, getting your keyword into Trending Topic status could bring a significant number of eyeballs to your website.

Cons

• Artificially or mass-producing Tweets smacks of trying to “game” the system. Instead of appearing in Trending Topics through the natural course of Tweet activity, you’d be exploiting the Twitter Search functionality to achieve an artificial result.
• You need to spam Twitter to force these results. It’s unlikely that anyone will want to follow a Twitter account with that much activity.
• How many people really click through the Trend Topic link all the way to the final destination: from Twitter Search, then Twitter, then the desired link (plus one extra click if the link is in the Twitter profile, not the Tweet.)

After this review of the pros and cons of this practice, it’s ultimately up to you to decide whether or not this tactic really makes sense. As with any marketing tactic, you must weigh the costs and the benefits to determine whether it makes sense to try manipulate Twitter Search like this. However, this isn’t a practice that we would recommend to friends or clients because it looks like gaming, it smells like gaming, and that’s too close for our tastes.

Yammer, the 2008 Techcrunch50 competition winner, is the newest entry in a growing pool of internal (or “enterprise”) microblogging applications. We’re working on a side-by-side comparison of the many entrants to that realm of microblogging and hope to share it soon.

But what about the many “public” microblogging tools? Which tool is best in which situation? Here’s a brief comparison of five established applications and the situations where they perform at their best.

The applications that we’re examining in this article are (with unique monthly users from August 2008 by Compete):

Twitter – 2.6 million
Pownce -160,000
Jaiku – 100,000
Identi.ca – 60,000
Plurk – 250,000

TWITTER

Twitter is the most famous microblogging tool. It has gotten mainstream press coverage in newspapers, BusinessWeek, and other mass media outlets. Recently CNN’s Rick Sanchez started using Twitter. Many of the US Presidential candidates have had a Twitter presence for months. Creative types like Wil Wheaton, Warren Ellis, John Tesh, John Cleese, and Henry Rollins also have a Twitter presence.

Twitter’s strengths are its large user base and massive collection of third-party applications that extend the basic Web interface with more powerful functionality for searching, automating microblogging entries, and organizing the user interface. Twitter is designed to work with instant messaging (IM), E-Mail, and mobile phones using SMS messaging. Twitter’s DM (Direct Messaging) capabilities, which you use to send private messages, are also popular.

Twitter’s reliability, once a sore point, has improved greatly. The 140 character limitation can be frustrating, as is the lack of threaded conversations. There’s also the impact of the “river of noise” phenomenon that builds as you follow more Twitter users. If you follow hundreds or thousands of Twitter users it becomes easier to miss interesting or important posts as they drown in a raging torrent of posts.

Twitter is effectively the benchmark for other microblogging services due to the size of its userbase, the large number of supportive third-party applications, and its simple but effective functionality. It is capable of handling many microblogging needs. You can’t go wrong by having a Twitter presence, even if you intend to use other microblogging services.

POWNCE

For months Twitter’s main competitor was Pownce. Pownce launched on June 27, 2007, but only emerged from invitation-only beta on January 22, 2008. On the surface, Pownce has many features in common with Twitter and its competitors, but it has a few strengths of its own.

Sample Pownce screen

Pownce allows you to build lists of friends and followers and send both public and private messages, just like Twitter. One of Pownce’s biggest strengths is its ability to transfer large files between users. The pro version of Pownce can send files up to 250 MB; the free version has a limit of 100MB. In addition, Pownce uses integrated event scheduling that’s similar to Facebook’s event functionality. Links are very easy to publish using Pownce. Its private message system is very similar to Twitter’s Direct Messages. Pownce also allows threaded replies and the ability to rate the quality of other people’s posts. In fact, in many ways Pownce is more powerful than Twitter.

Pownce never caught on the way that Twitter did, possibly due to a later exit from invitation-only beta. It only added mobile messaging functionality in December 2007. However, its additional features give it an advantage over other competitors.

JAIKU

Then there’s Jaiku, acquired by Google in 2007. Jaiku has more in common with services like Snurl and FriendFeed than Twitter, as Jaiku has lifestreaming capability. It allows you to import and display virtually all of your activity that publishes an RSS feed. It does not support private messaging, but it does have channels, which allow you to create places where a limited number of people can read messages.

Jaiku only switched to unlimited public invitations in late August 2008, which effectively kept user growth at a very slow pace. The acquisition of Jaiku by Google and recent reengineering to use the Google App Engine may be the key to a promising future if the search engine giant continues to make improvements.

IDENTI.CA

Identi.ca, on the other hand, is possibly the most basic application of the five reviewed in this article. The most remarkable thing about Identi.ca is that it’s created using Laconica, an open source application. Anyone can download and install their own instance of Laconica for internal microblogging. Now that the popular Twitter desktop client Twhirl can interface with private installations of Laconica, this becomes a more attractive “enterprise” or internal collaboration tool.

This also means that people can take the Laconica source, create their own copies of it, and add to it. This makes Identi.ca feel like a prototype: a hint of things to come. An Identi.ca end user might not see the potential of this platform unless people start coding some really amazing things with the Laconica source.

Identi.ca has the smallest userbase of these five public tools. It lacks a direct or private messaging feature like Jaiku does and it is bound by the 140 character limit. Identi.ca does have a clean and simple interface, and it’s popular with several influencers who are pushing for more interoperability and standards in microblogging. If you’re looking to use a simple microblogging solution in a quieter part of the Web, or if you want to extend it on your own, Identi.ca might appeal to you.

PLURK

Our final service, Plurk, is different than the other services and so it deserves some special consideration. The other four offer streams of updates in reverse chronological order like blogs do. Plurk uses a unique timeline feature which lists the newest entries to the left and the oldest entries off to the right. You can choose views that show only your “plurks” (Plurk microblog entries which work within the 140 character limit restriction); those of you and your friends; and all plurks in the system. The web page looks like a series of swim lanes full of colored bars that represent plurks.

Sample Plurk screen

Plurk has a somewhat playful, fun feel. You can arrange your friends and followers into cliques, similar to mailing lists. You accumulate Karma points through being active on the website. Karma gives you access to different kinds of emoticons; consequently, you lose Karma through inactivity. There’s a few different views of the Plurk webpage that you can toggle between but they all have a bit of a cartoonish feel.

One thing that Plurk does VERY well is the ability to cluster comments around each plurk. This definitely works better than Identi.ca, Twitter, Jaiku, or Pownce because it allows you to track a conversation similar to the way that FriendFeed works. Plurk users are very loyal to the service; they include both casual and professional users.

Will all of these applications eventually become interoperable via standards, the way email did, or by aggregation in applications like Twhirl, the way Adium and Trillian pull IM accounts together? We expect so. Laura has been talking about this for a while - that you will be able to follow your Pownce friends in Twitter and subscribe to a Jaiku user without leaving your own tool of choice.

For now, each microblogging application has its own strengths, weaknesses and capabilities. Knowing them helps companies and individuals can use these applications to their best advantage. Currently, Twitter has the most substantial audience, set of user data and opinions and “off-platform” benefits for commercial use, but companies should be aware of the other applications for specific uses. In the comments, tell us what you think of the various tools and what each is best for.

The TouchBase Blog will feature case studies of companies using these tools to their advantage, to give you ideas on what you should try. Stay tuned! Contact us to submit your company’s story.

Related articles by Zemanta

• What’s New with Jaiku?
• Fidj.it Could Make Twitter and Pownce Feel Fidgety (The Startup Review)
• Google finally ready to take Jaiku seriously?