Common Twitter Situation: Handful of Followers, Little Used Account, or About to Delete

You've heard about Twitter and thought it would be a great way to connect to the world, old friends, make new friends, promote a business, or build a fan base that would want to read your book. But for the majority, after a few weeks or months interest is lost and the account forgotten or deleted. Statistically, Twitter has 75 million users, but only about 20% or 15 million are active on a regular basis. Facebook, on the other hand, has 350 million active users and has grown 40% in the last six months.

Yes, Facebook is certainly more user friendly. But what of this Twitter? Is it a total write off? Let's take a closer look.

First of all, Twitter is really an old-school application. It's kind of like the old DOS based computers that were quite command driven, meaning, not really user friendly or easy to use.

 

For example, if you just want to do a simple Tweet, sometimes it can get quite involved, especially if you want to respond to someone or something said. 

If you want to respond or re-tweet (RT), you have to type in the @ symbol, theTwitter account name, RT, and then the message you're referring to or a portion of it, then your comment. Remember, all of this has to be done in 140 characters or less. Once again, good luck. More user-friendly social media like MySpace and Facebook just require you to type your response or post into the text box, hit enter, you're done. And if you want to add a picture, link, or video, doing so on Facebook is a snap. Twitter, not so easy. Very high maintenance.

 

So let's get into more of the issues and why some have said "I HATE TWITTER!!!!" (That's exactyl how it was written on the blog I read.)

 

One of the issues people have with Tweeting, as I alluded to above, is trying to say something in 140 characters or less. Actually, not so bad at first. It's even kind of an enjoyable challange. But after you've been Tweeting awhile it can become annoying. So what's to be done?

There are Twitter applications you can use like TwitLonger that allow you to post a longer than 140 character message. But once again, it takes time away from your Tweeting to do so.

 

First you have to log into TwitLonger using your Twitter user name and password, type your entry and then submit. Then you go to your Twitter account and you can see the Tweet. It will show up on Twitter 140 characters with a (cont.) and then the link back to TwitLonger for the entire tweet. But once again, not user friendly. Kind of reminds me of the old days, of the non-GUI (graphic user interface) days with all those DOS commands. Lots of typing to get things done, one of the reasons PC's were basically for geeks only at that time.

 

Another way to make a long Tweet short is to shrink long URLs. If you have a relatively long URL in your message, you'll have to use Tinyurl or Budurl to shrink it. You go to one of the applications, type in your long URL, shrink it, copy and past to Twitter, and then post your Tweet. Complicated? No. Easy? No, especially as you do it over and over again.

My point being here that unless you're serious about using Twitter, forget it. It's way too much work for the casual user. Even those seriously promoting a business or career often have few followers or an under-utilized account. Why are they there? Well, they were told or heard that in today's world you need a presence on social media (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Goodreads, Talitopia, are some that I use-there's dozens) if you're looking to promote and market your wares. Well, it appears many weren't told how involved and time consuming Twitter is, or they haven't had the time or money to outsource the work yet.

Still want to use Twitter?

Well, if you think you're going to sit around all day Tweeting, think again. Most "experts" say you shouldn't spend more than 30 to 40 minutes a day on Twitter. Those using it right, don't. Because if you've got something to promote, then you better be spending the majority of time doing that. Dan Kennedy, one of today's top marketing gurus, tells his clients that they must market consistently, day in and day out, the majority of time spent there. And even though Twitter is a marketing tool, it's difficult to accurately determine your ROI, or return on the dollar, so it is only to support your marketing efforts. It shouldn't be your sole marketing tool.

So now you're thinking "Wow, with Facebook's 350 million users, I'll jump on there and promote my stuff." Think again. Currently, Facebook has a limitation of 5,000 friends or, as Twitter would say, followers. You can reach all 350 million users but it will cost you, meaning, you'll have to advertise. So now Twitter is looking better because there is no limit on followers, and everyone who follows you has their own followers who will see your Tweets. So if you work at it, you can literally get tens of thousands of people following you. But then there's the question of how many are actually seeing your Tweets. And this is where the lack of certainty of social media comes into play.

But after doing your homework and you decide Twitter is worth the time and energy investment, you need to learn how to automate your Tweets, Tweets that are product or service specific and fresh or new. By automatically posting stories, news items and such related to your product or service, you maintain an "active" presense. You need to be active to be considered a gamer or someone one would desire to follow (see some of the related tools below in regards to this issue). There are programs out there to automate your Tweets, but it takes time to not only learn how to set everything up but to get your Tweets focused. The method I use involves several steps and applications, a process that is complex and requires an entire article. I'm still working out the kinks to get focused Tweets that will promote my coaching business. 

 

So now when you spend your forty-minutes or so a day actually being on Twitter live and in person, you can check what Tweets people are responding to, post some important updates about your company, or address an issue or problem that may have come up regarding a product or service.

So, are you still with me? Want to be more than just another Twitter account that's ignored by the masses? And don't think that by simply being outrageous or controversial you'll get lots of followers. Sure, it happens, but the majority have to take a more serious approach, so how's that done?

Back to Twitter.

Here's a bunch of good tools you can use for various reasons. There are literally hundreds of them out there--tools that is--but these are a good start if you're serious about Tweeting.

1. Twitter Grader -- Using a detailed 5 piece algorithm Twitter Grader assigns every user you run through its system a grade from 1-100. Using this tool you can investigate how engaged the people you're following are and that can help you decide if you want to keep following them.

This comes in handy if you want a more refined list of followers with greater potential to respond to your offer.

2. Twinfluence Twinfluence is a scientific approach to measuring the influence of Twitter users. It's another set of metrics you can use to help you figure out who you want to follow.

3. Tweetcloud One of the most important factors when deciding whether you want to follow a Twitter user is what sort of content they tweet about. If someone tweets mostly about topics you don't care about, they might not be the best person for you to follow. Tweetcloud creates a tag cloud of a person's tweets to give you a bird's eye view of the type of things they tweet about.

Good for refining your followers.

4. Twitter Karma Twitter Karma is a great app that lets you sort through all of your follows and see who's not following you in return, who you have a mutual follow/follow-back relationship with, and who is following you that you're not following back.

This is good if you've got a few thousand followers, but as you get more and more the usefulness of this tool is downgraded. If you've got ten-thousand or more then the time it takes to not only run the application, but find those you want to remove becomes tiresome. My suggestion? Outsource, especially if you're serious about using Twitter.

5. Friend or Follow Friend or Follow does essentially the same thing as Twitter Karma, helping you figure out who your friends, follows, and fans are on Twitter. The difference is in the presentation, and it might be a little easier to use for those with a large number of follows or followers.

Yes, see above.

6. Qwitter Once you've done your initial cleaning, Qwitter is a nice app that will update you via email whenever someone stops following you. It will even let you know what you tweeted that caused them to stop following you, which could be useful (if you lose five followers every time you tweet about your cat, for example, that might be a hint to stop talking so much about your cat if you want to retain followers).

7. Nest Unclutterer Nest Unclutterer will automatically block Twitter users who are following more than a certain number of people or who have been inactive for a certain number of days. You can specify those thresholds and white list certain tweeps so that they are exempt from the cleaning. Nest.Unclutterer is actually less about who you're following, and more about making sure people following you are actually friends you want to be associated with.

8. Twitoria Twitoria scans through your Twitter account and finds anyone who has been inactive for the past week, two weeks, month, two months, six months, or year.

9. TweetSum TweetSum digests all your new followers, rates them using what they call the DBI ("Douche Bag Index"), a number that supposedly weeds out Twitter users likely to be annoying, and then lets you easily follow them back or categorize them as tweeps you don't want to follow. You can see a list of recent tweets for each new follower as well, which is helpful.

10. Tweepler Tweepler is a new follower management application that lets you make quick, one click decisions about whether to follow people back or drop them into an ignore pile (out of sight, out of mind). In addition to being able to view recent tweets, Tweepler gives helpful stats about new followers, such as average tweets per day.

Now the point here is that if you're going to maximize your use of Twitter, you'll have to use several applications to do so; however, you have to ask yourself, do you have the time to learn them all and to maintain your Twitter account on a regular basis? Here's where you have to decide whether or not it's cost effective or time effective to have a Twitter account.

Twitter is not like other social media accounts in that, as stated above, it's not so user friendly and it's high maintenance. So, if you've just gotten an account, or are thinking of getting one, and know you need to use Twitter, here's a few things to think about. Dig in and go at it.

 

However, if you're just looking to connect to old friends and family or to make new friends, best to stick with more user-friendly apps like Facebook or MySpace

Happy Twittering! Or not.