Commodore Black

Strategies for building followers on Twitter

Roberto Mazzoni — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 12:44:58 +0000

You can’t be active on social networks without having an account on Twitter and budiling a following, which means having people who connect with you and follow your updates. Twitter, along with Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and Skype is a must have for every professional who wishes to promote himself on the Web as weel as for anybody who wants to develops friends and share some key moments of his life (for personal information only you don’t need to be on LinkedIn).

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Twellow.com is a directory that lists all top Twitter user under their category of specialization

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Gaining followers is the name of the game: the more you have the more you will be able to stand out and make yourself visible out there. And even if you wish to have just a few selected ones, you still need to have a system that allows you to pick the right ones.

The starting point for your building strategy is going to be Twellow.com, also known as Twitter “Yellow Pages”. It is a free site where you can find the most prominent people on Twitter in any given category. The selection is done based on the information that each person writes in her profile’s bio. So it is just as accurate as the information originally provided. Yet it is an excellent starting point for locating the opinion leaders in your area of interest and start growing your followers by piggy backing on their own followers list.

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Under every category you have people listed based on the number of followers, with their bion info in plain view.

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As a matter of fact Twitter is the best way for building a list by using the names collected by somebody else. Let’s say you are interested in marketing you go to Twellow.com and chose the “Marketing” link and get to a page which list all of the top marketers on Twitter, listed based on the number of followers.

You can browse the list and reach the bio of each of the people and chose the one that you feel is closer to you. I would not pick the most followed ones, those ranging in the 100K+ followers and more because you will find a lot of untargeted followers in their list. Initially pick somebody who has 40K or less followers and you will get a very good response: they are prominent enough for attracting the best followers and at the same time they will still have a fairly targeted audience.

Then go to their page and start following their followers and you will have 1/3 to ½ of them following you back. I would actually pick 4 or 5 names out of Twellow and cycle through them every day picking followers from a different person. In this way you will have more variety and more response, as you will be picking up fresh followers all the time: people who have been active recently and are more likely to follow you back.

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Twellow sub-categories

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You can also pick sub-categories like “Internet Marketing” , “Sale” or “Network Marketing” and narrow down your selection even more. In just a couple of weeks, by working on this just half an hour a day, you will start growing an sizable list to drive traffic to your blog or to any site or landing page.

Be sure you have your own bio updated and with a picture of you on your Twitter account before you start this process and also publish some updates on your profile (ten or twenty) before you begin following people. If you don’t know what to say, simply repeat (that is “retweet”) what other people say that you find interesting.

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Roberto Mazzoni

Please read more of my blog posts on my new blog that has been created to host all of my content and that will be kept updated regularly from now on. Commodoreblack.com was my first blog ever and I owe it my beginning in this beautiful blogging world, but with experience I learned that it was better for me ton create a blog that carried my own name. And I advise you to do the same if you ever plan to start a blog.

http://robertomazzoni.com

Choosing you name on Twitter and Web 2.0

Roberto Mazzoni — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 12:37:05 +0000

The selection of the user name to be displayed on Twitter and other Web 2.0 properties is often ill advised and reduces your real visibility and is detrimental to your recognition. The first key element to keep in mind is that Web 2.0 is about the people and not businesses.

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The more you insist on yourself and your personality the easier it will be for you to also be recognized for what you do. Businesses are made of people therefore there is nothing wrong in talking about what you do an promoting your activities on Web 2.0 sites, but people will first and foremost connect with you as an individual and then they will become maybe interested in what you do.

Therefore the first safe bet for promoting yourself on Twitter, Facebook and all the other Web 2.0 sites is to secure the possession of your first and last name just as they are in normal life. If you have a common name and somebody else already took it up, then you can change it just a little by adding to your name some short word that better describes your personality. There is one exception to this. If you are well known with some other name pseudonym then you might prefer to use that one as your universal screen name. But be honest with yourself, if the pseudonym is not already well known then you should still set up your main account using your real name.

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Inside the Twitter biography information always use your full name (first and last) separated by a space, no matter what is the “screen name” you have chosen. In this way Google will find you when people are looking for you. Some people, even experienced Internet marketers, place something else in there or write firstnamelastname with no separation (just as it is in the screen name). Don’t do that! Google won’t find you!

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Last word of caution: Twitter fights against the practice of developing an account and then selling it to somebody else. Therefore if you chose a screen name like “cocacola” you are very likely to be shut down. Your account can also be suspended down if you suddenly change your screen name after you have developed a sizable list of followers. Usually you can get it back within a day or so, but it isn’t pleasant. Therefore chose the right name from the start!

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Roberto Mazzoni

http://robertomazzoni.com

Living in the Twitter jungle

Roberto Mazzoni — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 13:19:24 +0000

Twitter is becoming one of the most popular Web 2.0 sites and a very effective way to keep in touch with other people and finding new friends, but it also become one of the main targets for spammers and hackers in general. For this reason the Twitter staff is becoming tighter in enforcing anti-spam rules and suspending accounts. Sometimes these rules change day by day, so you might end up having your account suspended because of somebody else’s actions.

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It is very easy to impersonate anybody while generating a tweet. Let’s say I want to create a spam message but I want to attribute it to you. I simply build a tweet that looks like this: “RT @yourtwittername spam text spam link” and send it from my account. People who read it will believe that the message was originally created by you and that I am simply re-tweeting it because I find it interesting. If anybody were to come to your account and look for the original message, they wouldn’t be able to find. But goes to all the work of checking it?

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Additionally the spammer will cover up his tracks by canceling the re-tweet message from his own account history after having sent it so nobody will be able to trace it back to him and Google won’t have the time to index it. Yet he will have obtained his result of spamming all the people who are following him, and using your Twitter name in doing so.

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I have personally observed this on my own Twitter account and the only remedy is to be on the watch. The danger here is of looking like a spammer while you are not and the fake Tweet could also contain a link to a site that has some kind of malicious software into it (like a virus). If this happens, Google picks you up as source of contagion, they report you to Twitter and Twitter suspends your account until the link with the virus is removed. So keep an eye on the @reply section of your account and change regularly the password to you account.

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Roberto Mazzoni

http://robertomazzoni.com

The dangers of follower churn

Roberto Mazzoni — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 13:20:16 +0000

How would you feel by discovering that your account on Twitter has been suspended and all the followers you have now find a unfriendly owl picture telling them to move along there is nothing there to see anymore. How much a hit would that be for your pride knowing that all people searching for your name on Google and finding your Twitter account (which is ranking pretty high) would find out that you have been suspended due to strange activity?

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Twitter policy about spamming is becoming more and more stringent also because the abuses are spreading with the growth in popularity of this environment. The policy on how to prevent spam are always evolving and so you’d better check them out regularly if you are serious about creating a presence on Twitter. Yet one of the most stressed one in recent times is about “follower churning”. What is it? Let’s take the definition given on the Twitter official site: “If you have followed and unfollowed people in a short time period, particularly by automated means (aggressive follower churn)”.

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Following new people and then unfollowing those that don’t follow you back has been one of the key methods for increasing the follower count and one of the most controversial. Recently more attention is being put by Twitter developers to this practice and Doug Williams, one of the Twitter platform developers, has stated recently that using automatic software to add a large number of social connections daily and then breaking the connection with those who don’t reciprocate can result in account suspension.

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It is again a matter of size and numbers. You can still follow and unfollow, but when big numbers and too fast a churn come into play your account can be suspended. Following many people all at once and un-following many of them the same day is almost sure cause of suspension.

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Roberto Mazzoni

http://robertomazzoni.com

The 10 capital mistakes in Twitter profiles

Roberto Mazzoni — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 11:30:21 +0000

What would be your first impression in meeting with someone who conceals his face or wears a mask and tries to sell something to you from the get go without even introducing himself? Disgust, rejection, annoyance and maybe also a bit of fear.

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So how do you believe people react to you when they first meet you on Twitter and try to find out who you are? The information you put in your biography, the picture you publish in your profile and the name you record in your settings can make all the difference in the world and can prevent you from being banned! Read carefully the following instructions!

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Your Twitter profile is very important for your success in social media and there are some major mistakes that can prevent you from gaining credibility or followers:

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A suspect username
Your Twitter username will always be present in any contact or communication you will do. Some people use their own first and last name, some use a “brand” name that communicates what activity they want to perform, others use the name of their company or site, and finally some chose just a fantasy name. These are all fine choices, but make sure you don’t get mistaken for a spammer: they usually use a girl name followed by numbers or a gibberish combination of letters and numbers, like “jhyudh265”. These are all fake accounts that get shut down and that people avoid.
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Omitted or altered real name
Whatever the username you chose, make sure you also add your real first and last name in the profile, and that they are SEPARATED from one another (there is a space between the first and last name). People will search for you on Google and will find your Twitter profile(s) only if they contain your real name, spelled as in real life.

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No image
People will decide whether to connect with you in a few seconds. If you have no photo of yourself or no image whatsoever, the vast majority will stay away from you. This is true of every social network, not only Twitter.
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Missing site
You will lost most of the benefit of connecting with people if you don’t have a site, blog or simple page where they can find more about you and if it doesn’t come up in the profile.
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Photo of an object
You are on Twitter in order to connect with other people, true people. They don’t want to talk to an object and you’ll appear as somebody trying to spam them about a product. Exceptions: it is fine to use objects when you are providing some kind of service which is best described by the object, like the many “bird” picture that coemn up on Twitter related services. Again, be careful as you will be more easily tagged as spammer.
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False location or identity
The fastest way to get banned from Twitter and lose your followers and credibility is to pretend to be somebody else and to live somewhere else than where you actually live.
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Pretty girls
Spammers know very well that people respond better when they see a picture of a nice girl, even better if she is half naked. So they use this trick continually and people have come to recognize it. If you do happen to be a beautiful lady or girl, make sure you have a picture that looks personal and natural.
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Somebody else’s photo
It is usually a bad idea to show somebody else’s picture, like a very well known character or popular figure. If you really don’t want to show your face, you can use a picture that of you at a distance or you can use the picture of a kid, pet or family. Kids and pet create strong relationships and can be also used for the background of your Twitter page.
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Sad and bad quality pictures
Would you put a low quality photo on your resume? So why use it on your Twitter profile? A smile can go a long way. Get a professionally done photo.
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Crowded or bad picture
You have a very limited space, so avoid using pictures that contain too many elements that make it impossible to recognize you. This includes group photos, holding your face in your hands, objects that are in the background and so on.

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Avoid these mistakes and you will have much better results and, most importantly, you’ll avoid being banned from Twitter.

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Roberto Mazzoni

http://robertomazzoni.com

How to get people to your blog with Twitter

Roberto Mazzoni — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 11:55:15 +0000

Twitter is a microblogging platform: it allows you to publish short messages called tweets. The tweets are 140 characters long at the outside, only text. They can contain information, a call to action and possibly a link (URL). The tweeples, which is the name by which you designate the people who are on Twitter, are used to click on the link when they find an interesting tweet. Here are 3 rules you can follow in using this powerful tool to direct people to your blog.

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Take short meaningful sentences from your blog post and format them into tweets that people can digest and understand immediately and add a link to that specific post.
Use an URL shortener to keep the link size to a minimum so that you leave as many of 140 characters available for your message. I personally use budurl because it is free, it does an excellent job at shortening any kind og URL and, if you register on the site, you can keep track of any link, looking at how many people clicked on it.
Avoid putting more than one link in a single tweet. You could do it, but it is somewhat confusing and you might look like a spammer.

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Twitter is a very powerful environment and it can bring lots of traffic to your blog throughout the day if you manage to engage the people who are online and who are following you.

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I suggest to make at least 5 tweets during the day pointing to your blog post, using different words and concepts, although some repetition is allowed. Scatter the tweets evenly during the working hours and you’ll get the best results.

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Roberto Mazzoni

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P.S. Go to www.budurl.com and create an account, you can use it to shorten any type of link and it is very convenient also for e-mails and newsletters.

http://robertomazzoni.com

Is Twitter like a radio or more like a plaza?

Roberto Mazzoni — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 11:25:51 +0000

Recently I have been reading the idea from an online marketer, Peter Drew, that Twitter works like a radio station: you have your own audience, your followers, that listen to your “talk” and that can switch from one “channel” to the next with ease while tracking their favorite music (by the use of keywords). I have expanded on that concept by doing some testing myself and I have noticed seven key elements.

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You have only a portion of your followers actually listening to you in any given moment and most of the “listening” happens between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m from Monday through Friday. Ou also have a night crowd but it seems to be different from the people that are listening during the working hours.
When you post a tweet (short message) on your Twitter account, your followers have about 10 to 15 minutes to catch it before it fades out of view. Those who will catch it, because they are tuned on your “channel” will respond to it within a few minutes.
You can successfully repeat the same tweet at different times of the day, finding a different public every time. I would suggest not repeating the same tweet more than 4 or 5 times, well staggered during the day.
The same message can be repeated with different words, so catching a different audience withing a shorter time span (15 minutes, half an hour to one hour).
People will respond much better when you “are on the line” giving some personal and unique content, even if it is somebody else’s content that you are simply retweeting.
If you are saying something interesting they will retweet your content right away giving it more exposure and sometimes marketers invite directly people to retweet their short messages.
You will also have somebody occasionally commenting on what you say few minutes later, joining the conversation with some original content.

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So Twitter does have some similarities with radio in that you have different audiences during the day and they tune in on different streams of conversation, depending on the content. Like radio, they shift very fast from one stream to next and respond better to the subjects that entertain them the most.

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But overall I find it more similar to a town plaza, where people like to hang together and you have occasional new comers joining in spontaneously. It is like when you go to an Italian small city and sit in front of the cafe in the main plaza, or close to some public garden: you will always find people hanging out together who know each other and spend some time chatting about information of common interest, telling jokes and plainly enjoying each other’s company.

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You can join or leave the group when you want and you can follow their conversations making your comments and your stories. And if you are just a stranger passing by and looking for help, you will feel more comfortable turning to this small crowd group rather than just anybody else. And they will always be more willing to help and open to you as compared to the regular guy that is simply walking down the street, minding his own business.

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Roberto Mazzoni

http://robertomazzoni.com

Hummingbird is the best tool for getting more followers

Roberto Mazzoni — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 12:30:21 +0000

“Growing followers day by day” seems to be the major concern of people on Twitter right now: a survey I have just done indicates that 41% of people are looking for ways to increase their followers daily and this interest is even bigger than “How to monetize Twitter” that has drifted to 36% while being the foremost interest up to a couple of weeks ago. Still 39.5% ofm people indicate that they are looking to “Being able to attract more followers”.

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The best tool I have found so far for managing your followers is Hummingbird by Twitaddict. This is NOT a product for spammers that will create a whole bunch fake accounts and will use them to blast people with commercial messages (tweets). It is NOT even a system that will grow your followers on autopilot or that will make you money overnight. I have been using it for over 3 months now and compared it to other software and systems and I still find it the best.

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It is simply a way for automatizing those tasks that you would perform on your own, particularly following and unfollowing tweeple (people on Twitter) and finding targeted followers.

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The program is amazingly simple: you create a profiles for each Twitter account you want to manage and then you go to your Twitter home page where you do everything you could do within your browser but with some automatic function.

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You can first of all define your VIP’s, the people you will keep following no matter what, wether they follow you back or not. Then you can go on the home page fo any other interesting person on Twitter and follow all the people that he is following or that follow him/her. Hummingbird will automatically follow one person at a time until it reaches the last page or uintil you hit your following limit.

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It will then color code people according to their status in relation to you: green for those that you follow and have followed back, light blue for VIP’s, white for those that you follow but haven’t followed you back, and more.

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You can also do searches for keywords and follow those people that are connected with those keywords.

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Twitter limits the number of people you can follow in proportion to how many follow you therefore you need to un-follow those that do not reciprocate if you want to grow your follower’s list initially. Hummingbird can unfollow automatically all those that don’t follow you back and it puts them into a database (marking them red) so that you don’t follow them again in the future.

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A very effective tool that can save you many hours and build you a strong following. You need to pay for it, but it’s worth it.

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Roberto Mazzoni

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http://robertomazzoni.com

Use Tweet Later effectively

Roberto Mazzoni — Sat, 30 May 2009 12:45:12 +0000

How can you be actively present on Twitter without losing your life into a constant stream of communication? What is the most efficient way to keep your friends and customers informed without being in front of your computer all the time? How can you welcome and take care of your followers automatically? The answer is www.tweetlater.com, a site which offers a service for organizing and scheduling your tweets, for managing multiple Twitter accounts and for following and unfollowing people automatically.

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This is the first site you should register into after you have created your Twitter account. In this way you will be ready to tackle your expansion on Twitter from day one and you won’t have to think about it any further.

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Registering is easy: you need to provide a user name, which IS NOT your Twitter username but any other identity of your choice, and a password. The basic service is free and it is all you need to get started.

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Once you have registered you need simply to login in and configure your accounts. Here is where you input your Twitter username and password. You can have multiple accounts configured at the same, if you need to. You manage your accounts by clicking on “Accounts” on the navigation bar to your right.

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Your account will be listed in a page that shows also its key features. You can edit its features by clicking on the “Edit” link.

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You will go to a page that contains and describes all the key automation features. In the first half of this page you have the user name and password for the Twitter account, plus a check box that allows you to send automatically a welcome message to anyone who Follows you. Just below the check box you also have a window for entering the text of your welcome message that has to be 120 characters long, max. It is very advisable to have a welcome message and you can also include an URL pointing to your blog or site.

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Later in the same page you also find a checkbox for enabling your automatic follow of anyone following you and the automatic unfollow of anybody unfollowing you. You can also enable the “Vetting” function for manually approving the automatic follow back.

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Now you are done with configuring the automated tasks for your account. You can now schedule tweets in advance. You do this by going to “New Tweet” and then entering the text of the message you want to publish inclusive of any link (URL). Tweet Later will shorten your long links so that they don’t take away space from you message. You can then decide at which time and date to publish your scheduled tweet and hit the “Save” button.

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You can review the list of your scheduled messages and you can also edit, copy and cancel them or add a new scheduled tweet.

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You can also search for messages containing specific keywords, including your user name. You get the results on your e-mail box.

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Used well, this tool can save you a lot of time in your Twitter experience while leaving you free to jump in at any time and join the ongoing conversations at your will.

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Roberto Mazzoni

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P.S. If you want to get regular updates of my new articles and download a full free Twitter ebook, sign up for my newsletter.

http://robertomazzoni.com

What people are looking for on Twitter

Roberto Mazzoni — Sun, 24 May 2009 13:27:42 +0000

Just completed a survey on Twitter users and the first question asked was “What would make you a perfect Twitter user?” There were three possible questions and anyway left the door open to comments and the result shows that people are mostly concerned in “Understanding how Twitter really works” (40% of answers).

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The peculiar relationships that are built between Tweeples (Twitter users) is missed by some. It is pretty evident also that a fair amount of people have come on Twitter because somebody else advised them to do so, either for finding friends or for marketing something, yet they still don’t fully get it and need help to envision the difference between Twitter and the many other Internet Marketing tools.

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The survey shows as a the second most common answer: “Being able to attract followers” (33% of answers) which indicates indeed that many people are out there with promotional purposes or simply want to make themselves better known or find new ways to make money on line.

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The third answer is: “Ideas to tweet about” (27% of answers) which is something common also in the blogging field, but is less present here because with 140 characters available it’s easier to find something to say even though it is just “I am going to take a coffee” (not advisable though). Probably the answers shows a desire to find something to say that other people will also find interesting and which will attract them as followers, friends or buyers.

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Time for answers

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Twitter is a place where you can exchange short messages, as if they were text messages, with other people who can “tune in” to you by following you. It is a bit like listening to different radio channels and skipping from one to the next at every single tweet (message).

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You can also filter the stream of messages so that you tune in only to those coming from few selected people or that cover some specific subject (keyword). It is a wonderful way to get in contact with people because they feel more protected that other places, since they don’t have to use their personal e-mail or even they real name for that matter. Look at it as an evolution of chat, but on a much wider scale and in a much more organizes fashion.

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The best way to attract followers is to have something to say that they find interesting. Many will also follow you because they want you to follow them. If you are looking just to increase the number of followers moderately and build a group of close knit friends you won’t have to worry, it will happen by itself provided you put yourself out there and communicate. If you are looking to reach a high number of followers, this is a whole subject in itself and it will require separate articles.

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What to Tweet about? Just like blogging, chose a subject you are passionate about and just go ahead. If you really don’t know what to say, then you should ask yourself why you got on Twitter in the first place and reorganize your goals or just listen to others.

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Roberto Mazzoni

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P.S. Thanks to all the people who have used some of their time to participate in my survey.

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P.SS The three subjects above and many more will be covered in much more detalil as I move along and will result in a Twitter survival guide, so why don’t you subscribe to this blog and keep abreast of all the cool new stuff coming out?

http://robertomazzoni.com