You go through the ritual once every couple of days. Unless you have auto-follow, that is.
How do you decide whether or not to follow someone back on Twitter? I fielded the question on Twitter and here are some of the responses I got.
@CWarfield:shared interests; no spam or useless “eating a ham sando” posts
@rtstrategy: re following back: educational/entertaining content & signs they are engaging.
@alewi854:They need a good bio and tweet regularly RT @andrewspoeth: what do you look for when considering to follow someone back?
@walkerjill:but not tweet TOO MUCH! RT @alewi854 good bio & tweet regularly RT @andrewspoeth what do you look for when considering to follow ppl back?
Take a look at your newest followers in Twitter and decide who to follow back. My process involves a CTRL+click on each profile name to open up a new tab for each person. Next, I scan profile information and tweet stream. Looking at these, I consider:
1. Interests of the Twitterer
How closely do they match mine. I tend to keep open to various interests, unless it’s something like sharing wealth or getting rich quickly.
2. Follower count
I don’t look for a large number of followers. More important is a balance between Following and Followers. If the person is following way more than being followed, it’s a red flag.
3. Tweet volume
Check number of tweets against number of followers. If this person’s tweet volume far exceeds the number of people who follow them, it’s likely an indication of boring tweets.
4. Quality of content
What would be described as quality on Twitter? I personally look for tweets that are:
thought provoking
funny
resourceful
current
generous
engaging
A twitterer should have a healthy balance between original content, retweets, and engagement with others. It’s also encouraging to see the occasional question – an indication this twitterer is interested in listenting.
Twitter is reaching a significant milestone. At nearly 50 million tweets per day, the average output of Twitter users has climbed dramatically over the past year.
@kevinweil in his post on Twitter’s blog puts this in perspective. 50 million tweets per day equals roughly 600 new tweets every second. A year ago, average output was 30 per second. Looking back further, we get closer to Twitter’s very beginnings.
It wasn’t long ago that Twitter allowed you to see a feed of all tweets on your Twitter home page. Anyone remember those days?
Looking at the graph above, one wonders what happened at the inflection point around April 2009. Was it the Ashton Kutsher/CNN race to 1,000,000 followers? Was it Oprah signing up for Twitter? Or was it a combination of elements creating the perfect storm?
I love bit.ly. As many of you, I use it to shorten URL’s in Twitter and measure the relative success of specific links that I put out there.
Here are my 5 top bit.ly links of the past week, based on click through performance.
Twitter’s New Headquarters As Shown Off By Employees (Pictures)
Twitter moved into a new, much larger office this week. Several Twitter employees went around snapping pictures for the rest of us to see. Some of my Twitter followers noted that it looks pretty empty and dark, dark perhaps because they are conserving electricity that is being used up through the new retweet function that they’re rolling this week.
100 Ways To Measure Social Media
A David Berkowitz article from the MediaPost Social Media Insider Column. With a title like that, how can you not look? Some of the points in David’s list are repetitive, but this compilation is nevertheless worth reading as it covers a lot of ground.
Google Chrome OS: 5 Ways It’s Completely Different
From Mashable, reporting live at the Google Chrome OS press conference last Thursday. Although this won’t change our lives immediately, the release of Chrome OS next year will have an impact, and is likely creating serious headaches for Microsoft.
The Definitive Guide to Lead Nurturing
As a B2B marketer, I’m always looking for ways to better drive the revenue funnel. This white paper from Marketo brings together best practices in email marketing, lead scoring and lead nurturing.
During the course of a week, I’ll scan hundreds of tweets, receive dozens of newsletters and flip through numerous blog posts. Here are a few which I think you’ll enjoy.
Not brand new, but nevertheless a good laugh and SEO 101 lesson for any search marketer! How would you apply SEO best practices to the Google home page? Here the author demonstrates cross linking, fresh content, social bookmarking, reinforcing with keyword content, and a keyword-rich URL for Google’s search page.
Brilliantly designed for their target market, Omniture scores big with this new ‘Pick the Winner’ campaign. Step up to the vintage arcade machine and try your hand at guessing the correct results to A/B tests. How high did you score?
A little over a month after Google Wave was released in limited numbers to the public, the first Google Wave guide book has come out. It’s long, detailed and thorough. And the online version is completely free.
With Twitter Lists being rolled out to a greater portion of users earlier today, there is a lot of buzz being created around the new feature. In a nod to my friend Manoj at Web Analytics World, who just posted a set of web analytics Twitter lists, here are a some marketing lists to follow on Twitter. This top 10 list is based on the number of followers each list has at the time of this posting.
Earlier today, Twitter rolled out its much anticipated Twitter Lists feature. Within a few hours, it has taken a large part of the Twittersphere by storm. Twitter lists allows users to assign custom keyword labels to any Twitterer, which can in turn be viewed on a separate list.
Listorious has created a directory of lists which is quickly becoming populated with a lot of data. To start, here is a list of the Top 100 Lists on Twitter.
It’s interesting to note that we can see Twitter lists already being indexed by Google. This ultimately means that marketers will want to have influence on the way they are labelled. Looking through the list names that are created for an individual, one can learn a great deal about the public’s perception. And there is also the occasional laugh as well. To demonstrate, here are a couple of famous Twitterers and the variety of Twitter lists they appear on.
Guy Kawasaki, @guykawasaki, who has been ‘listed’ 1,729 times as of right now, is labeled as:
marketing
power
news
very-friendly
high-tweequency
firehoses, and
titans of tech
Darren Rowse (@problogger), listed 664 times, is described as:
As I write this post, marketers are gearing up for what promises to be one of the year’s best conferences: MarketingProfs’ Digital Marketing Mixer. The event, being held in Chicago on October 21 and 22, brings together email, search and social media in an intimate setting. Industry experts will be presenting real-life examples of what’s worked and what hasn’t from top companies including Hoovers, Intel, SAS, Lehmans and Intuit.
I thought it would be fun to list a few things we’ll want to pack in our suitcases heading to the conference. It’s a checklist of things to have, figuratively speaking. It starts here but feel free to add more in the comments below or in the Twitter conversation: @andrewspoeth #mpdm.
5. Thinking about our own company’s Search Marketing, Email Marketing and Social Media
6. A glance at the content, nearly 30 different sessions being presented
And if you’re literally looking for a glance, here it is: all of the MarketingProfs Digital Marketing Mixer sessions packed into one piece of word art:
Google Wave has been the talk of the town over the past few days. Techies everywhere have been clamoring to the 100,000 invites which were sent out last week. It has been a trending topic on Twitter and the first reviews are coming in. As luck would have it, I`m not one of the fortunate 100,000 who received an invite, and can`t give my own opinion on it yet. But if you`re looking for a quick, simple explanation of how Wave may change the world as we know it, check out this video from EpipheoStudios.com.
Andrew Spoeth is Enquiro's director of marketing, with interests in B2B marketing, social media, the psychology of leadership, and just about everything else you can point a finger at.
