At last … the information you’ve always wanted: how to get un-followed on Twitter.
If you use Twitter, you’re familiar with the following scenario: someone follows you, and you find out via email, or some other software you’re using for the purpose (unless you’re automating Twitter, which is usually a bad thing in itself, but we’ll deal with that another day).
You take a look at the user’s stats, and if he or she has a decent number of tweets in relation to following and following numbers, you consider following back. You also check to see if the user is following way more people than are following him or her … because that’s usually a sign of someone trying to game Twitter to develop a big megaphone without putting any significant energy into earning that megaphone.
Sometimes when you’ve done this step, and even noticed that the user’s tweets are potentially of interest to you, you notice something else. Like this, for example:
I followed this user, then read a few more of his tweets. Lo and behold … multiple repeat Tweets.
This is a sign of a user with one or more problems:
- Boring
This person does not have a lot to say … but like the boring person at the party that you can’t detach yourself from, insists on saying it over and over.
- Lazy
This person probably actually has a lot to say, but is too busy or otherwise occupied to put appropriate attention on Twitter. So she is putting her account on autopilot and just repeating the same thing over and over again without the bother of having to think up (or experience) new things to communicate. This is the broken record (remember those round spinning black things) that keeps on keeps on keeps on keeps on …
- Forgetful
This person just says the same thing over and over again … like the old sales guy who has chatted up (sorry, networked) so promiscuously and with so little emotional investment that he forgets who he has told his stories to, and keeps repeating the sames ones to you every time you meet.
- Rude
This person doesn’t care about the signal to noise ratio, and doesn’t care what any one individual might think of his or her behavior. It’s all about the mass to this person, and to get to mass attention, they’re repeating everything twice or a hundred times, like old-fashioned advertising spewing out mindlessly and repetitively to an essentially unknown audience.
As soon as I saw all the repeat tweets, I un-followed this user. The funny thing here is that I’m actually interested in some of the topics he’s covering. But his behavior smells like spam.
Moral of the story? Old methods may not work in new media.
What is up with FriendFeed?
After perhaps a year of having a FriendFeed account but doing very little with it, I’m suddenly seeing a huge jump in activity. For the past 12 months I’ve pretty much put FriendFeed on autopilot, receiving data from my other social networks and media activities, but not paying too much attention to it or getting much attention from other FriendFeed users.
But in the past month or so I’ve been receiving subscription requests from FriendFeed users almost daily.
I’m wondering what’s going on – is FriendFeed growth exploding? Checking Alexa shows steady growth of 134% over the past 3 months … good, but nothing compared to the stratospheric take-off of Twitter, which has been growing at well over 1000% annually.
Maybe the growth in numbers is not the story. Perhaps more and more occasional users of FriendFeed have – like me – started to use it more and more over the past few months.
Either way, FriendFeed is a social network/aggregator to watch … perhaps it will not be limited to a geeky, connected audience after all.
Well in the wake of the Ashton Kutcher 1 million followers on Twitter event, BusinessWeek is making a big deal about celebrities powering social networks.
Social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr win big when celebrities participate; no wonder they’re wooing famous users.
While it’s self-evident that fans follow stars … it’s also obvious that many joiners are also quitters. I was wondering if the masses of extra users that flood on to an online service are major contributors to social network drop-out.
As Nielsen reports, in Twitter’s case that drop-out is as high as 60%:
Currently, more than 60 percent of U.S. Twitter users fail to return the following month, or in other words, Twitter’s audience retention rate, or the percentage of a given month’s users who come back the following month, is currently about 40 percent.
Turns out the Ashton Kutcher effect is NOT related to the poor Twitter retention numbers. As Nielsen discovered by tracking users during and after the Oprah experiment,
For most of the past 12 months, pre-Oprah, Twitter has languished below 30 percent retention.
In fact, Ashton Kutcher and Oprah are contributing to social media stickiness and enhancing retention.
So much for the democratization of the internet!
Dear reader (if I may call you that in an avuncular 18th century novelist manner) … This is one of those posts in which I use my blog as both a personal and public record of something I want to remember … using blogging as more of a personal database than a public communique.
Brian Clark at CopyBlogger recently posted The Art of Writing Great Twitter Headlines.
While I’m not sure he uses Twitter the way I do – a tool for communication and community, for seeing what’s buzzing and for connecting to like-minded people – it’s an interesting read. If you, like me, don’t post to Twitter solely for the purpose of catching people’s attention and calling them to action (and even if you don’t use Twitter at all) this is useful advice for writing headlines and content that makes a difference.
It’s the UUUS rule. Is your content/headline/post/tweat:
- Useful
- Urgent
- Unique
- Specific
That’s a tall order. Millions of blog posts would never be written if all bloggers followed it. And while many don’t – and shouldn’t, as they write specifically about themselves and their families for the benefit of a small group of relatives and friends – many should. It’s something I’ll consider each and every time as I think about posting to Sparkplug 9.
Of course, every rule is proved by its exception!
I worked with Thomas Clifford (AKA Director Tom) recently on a corporate film that I was executive producing.
He was absolutely amazing. And he’s done hundreds of films over a 25-year career. And he’s one of the most connected social media individuals you will ever find. But 3 days ago he just got laid off.
Which only goes to show that in this current economic climate of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt … many good people are losing their jobs as companies are slowing down.
Tom, however, being Tom, is a proactive guy. So he put together the Hire Tom website and kicked his network into high gear. As WorkLifeNation reports, here’s his 4-step strategy:
- Making the Hire Tom site
- Alerting his network
- Multiple LinkedIn updates
- Twitter, Twitter, Twitter
Read the article for the full details – it’s great. And the results are coming too. I connected with Tom today, and he says that the opportunities are rolling in – only 3 days after being laid off!
Of course, not everyone has over 500 connections on LinkedIn or 2000+ followers on Twitter. Still, there’s a lot to be learned from Tom’s actions … especially that the time to work on your network is before you need it!
Facebook continues to grow at a torrid rate. Reunion.com is growing almost as fast. Ning, Tagged, and Multiply are also all growing at over 100% annually.
However, Twitter is the runaway winner in unbelievable growth rates. While it’s growing from a smaller base, and therefore it’s easier to get a higher multiple, a growth rate of almost 1400% annually is just astounding.
twitter-february – Free Legal Forms
Those are some scintillating numbers. Wow.
Just like launching your website or start-up too early, being too eager to be a big swinging you-know-what on Twitter can be a fatal flaw.
Check out this Twitter account that I was invited to follow yesterday:
In brief:
Following: 584
Updates: 2
There’s an obvious discrepancy here. When you follow someone on Twitter, they are likely going to take a look at your past tweets to see if you might be someone they want to follow. If you have no history, people have no data. And what happens in the absence of data? You guessed it – not much at all.
So in other words, by “launching” too early … drawing attention to yourself by following people … you’ve done yourself a disservice.
Do yourself a favor instead. Learn Twitter (or any other social application you’re testing), develop some history, put out some data … and then start following people.
The unfortunate part is that this looks like a legit person or organization (unlike the vast proliferation of spam get-rich-quick accounts on Twitter lately) but they will not get the consideration they might deserve, simply because of a bit of over-eagerness.
Walk, then run.
. . .
. . .
On Twitter? So am I.
It’s amazing who’s an expert SEO on Twitter. They’re popping up by the day – I guess you just add water and stir!
But sometimes things don’t seem to actually add up … as in this case:
Is it really likely that a true SEO expert – and a true PR expert – would have 16 followers on Twitter? Not very! Here’s how a true expert would do it …
First, take the time to build a decent network – a couple of hundred followers at least. Have the credentials to back it up … like the website, the work, the results.
Then announce yourself.
The problem is, of course, all these things take time. Community isn’t instant, and success seldom is too. The harsh reality is that a “quick fix” is usually only half accurate.
The quick half, that is.
Robert Scoble knows who I am! He cares about what I do! He wants to know when I’m in the office, and when I go to Starbucks, and when I have an ingrown toenail! He’s following me on Twitter! I matter!
Or not.
This is obviously a fake Robert Scoble on Twitter … with about 50,000 fewer followers, and 20,000 fewer following than the very similar-looking real deal.
Here’s the real Robert Scoble on Twitter. I think he’s following me too.
But if anybody thinks that actually matters, I’ve got some beachfront property in Alaska for you. It’ll be great in 300 years, when global warming finally kicks in.
I’ve been using Twitter for probably over a year. But I’ve really only being using Twitter for perhaps 3 months.
In that time, there’s a few things that I think would add huge value to Twitter:
- Context
Yeah I know it’s a river. But some rivers have tributaries, channels, and eddies. Some of them are even dammed. And it’d be nice to have some context for your latest tweet: “Need help with my current project.”
- Categories
Look, there are some people we follow because we know them. Some we follow because we think they’re interesting and make us smarter. Some we follow because they’re famous, and everyone else is doing it anyways. And some we follow just because they followed us.
I’d like to be able to categorize followers – and people I’m following. Better yet, do it for me: geographically, by industry … and let me tag them.
- Space for URLs
Every single web address on every single profile is cut off. When it’s ubiquitous, you know you’re doing something wrong.
- Quoted messages for DMs
I know I already have context down, but it’s a particular problem for direct messaging. When someone says “I have a new red door,” and I DM 2 hours later “Interesting, how big is it?” … how on earth do they know what I’m talking about?
- Searchable following/followers
Right now, I want to send a message to a Twitter feed I’m following for a conference. I know it starts with W … but I don’t remember the exact name. How can I find it today? Only by tediously paging through lists of result pages. And they’re not even alphabetical! So I have to do a search of ALL Twitter users to find the one I want … and it’s only even possible because I happen to know most of the username.
I think I’d even settle for sortable following/follower lists …
I’m not in the make-Twitter-do-everything camp. It’s simple, and that’s great. But would just a few more features to improve the signal-to-noise ratio be so bad?
BTW, here I am on Twitter. Follow me!
I wonder what the best bio on Twitter is. I think it might just possibly be Ken Newman’s:
Film and Stage Actor, Trade Show Presenter, Corporate Entertainer, Writer, Magician, Photographer, and anything else that people will pay me to do – w/in reason
Love it! “Anything else that people will pay me to do, w/i reason.” Great.
FYI …
Here’s Ken’s Twitter … and here’s his blog.
I’m seeing Twitter’s fail whale more and more lately:
Twitter has been MUCH better the past few months, but I guess the relentless growth – up about a million users in the last 3 months – is starting to take its toll again.
Planning for incessant growth is not easy … I recently met a Google engineer who works on Gmail on a flight who had some interesting thoughts. “Up and to the right,” he called it, referring to increasing traffic graphed over time.
Hopefully Twitter’s technical gurus can start to manage the growth curve better. Meanwhile we can all join the Fail Whale club.
A truly wonderful part of any user-generated social community is the Jupiter-sized amount of spam that kamikazes towards the site like John Daly to the pro club bar.
Twitter, a social messaging site, is not immune. That won’t shock anyone in the social media know, but I gained a new appreciation for the spam-friendliness of Twitter when nerkaszs followed me.
This is a person with 27 updates, each of which follows the exact same format: “I just updated my Squidoo page: [ link to page ].”
This is obviously a borderline spam account, with no real personal info or valuable knowledge transfer on any particularly discernible topic. This is purely and simply an SEO play on Squidoo lenses that nerkaszs has built and presumably collects some PPC income on.
So why would anyone follow this account? Anyone who takes 5 seconds to actually look at it will drop it faster than a bar of soap on a string in a prison shower.
The answer is the secret to Twitter’s Spamability Quotient: 39%. Many Twitter users automatically follow anyone who follows them. There are a variety of ways, including this one that Dave Taylor explains.
I’m guessing the TSQ is about 39% … based simply on nerkaszs’s stats. Whoever Nerk is, she/he/it follows (yeah right) 918 people and has suckered 360 people into following (repeat yeah right) him/her/it. Do the math and you’ve got 39% of all people who are followed who will automatically reciprocate.
And that number says interesting things about spammers’ ability to use Twitter as a reproducible loudspeaker.
[ update: Wordpress downloads are working again ]
This is where Twitter comes in handy … proof that it’s not just me.
Wordpress downloads are not working right now – when you click on the download link, you simply get an empty page. I first thought it must be a problem on my end, but when I quickly tried Safari as well as Firefox, I was fairly sure there was a real problem.
Then, checking Twitter search confirmed it. Here are the 10 most recent tweets about downloading Wordpress:
That’s a live feed … and, thankfully, evidence that I am not finally leaving the twisted shreds of my sanity behind, or suddently growing stupid.
Twistori is a very interesting way to waste time and yet feel like you’re doing something significant.
It follows the twitters of thousands of people whose messages start include the words
- I love
- I hate
- I think
- I believe
- I feel
- I wish
Pure genius … and hard to keep your eyes off.
What do you love, hate, think, believe, feel, or wish? Tell the world!
Welcome to Sparkplug 9, John Koetsier's blog on technology and social media.
