I sent an email out to my newsletter before I went into launch mode for Membership Site Mastermind that was promoting the virtues of Twitter. I was hoping to introduce some new people to Twitter and increase my followers with the enticement of a behind the scenes look at the launch I was about to do.
Here is the first part of the message I sent out –
Twitter is a service that lets you communicate with other people using up to 140 character messages.
The best way I can describe it is like micro-blogging combined with instant messaging.
You’re not going to “get” it until you try it, so I’ll stop trying to describe how it works and you just go use it.
You can sign up and begin following me from my Twitter page here (it doesn’t cost anything) –
Go to that link, click the “Join today” button and then begin following my updates (or “tweets” as they are called).
You can then start sending messages and following other people too.
If you want more help, see the video from Gideon Shalwick on how to use Twitter –
Why Should You Care About Twitter?
Twitter is another contact point with your audience and as such can help you in all the ways that knowing other human beings is beneficial.
You can use it to…
- follow important people in your industry
- influence your tribe
- send traffic to your blog or website
- sell your products and services
- sell other people’s products and services
- keep up to date with friends and family
- participate in the conversation
- become famous
- and more…
Although hesitant initially, after Twittering for fun at first, I started to realize how incredible Twitter is for business too.
Simply put, you can’t afford not to use this tool if you want to stay current and be a participant in your market and not just a consumer or observer.
Participation leads to insights, which leads to you developing a more intimate knowledge of your industry, and more importantly, a more direct influence over the important people in your industry, namely –
- Other experts/mavens
- Your audience
To put this into practical perspective, I use Twitter to send traffic to my blog posts. I use Twitter to promote affiliate products (I’ve done thousands in sales already). I use Twitter to stay connected with other top Internet marketers and to connect with my people – my followers.
It’s a great tool, but like all things requires work to get going, so you should start now.
What was interesting was the feedback I received after I sent this email.
A few people replied saying that I should follow back everyone who follows me. I was warned from acting like a “celebrity” and not using Twitter how it should be used, as a social media tool that breaks down barriers.
My initial response, which I sent back to a few people who wrote to me, was that I don’t necessarily agree that you should automatically follow everyone who follows you. Choosing to follow someone should be because of the value they offer. I don’t read the blogs of every person who reads my blog, they choose to read mine because of the value I offer, and I think Twitter should be the same.
Because of my current status of not-autofollowing everyone who follows me, I have a much lower subscriber base of around 7,000 people, where many others are reaching 10, 20 and even 30,000 followers very quickly.
I’m Undecided
The title of this article is a genuine question that I don’t have the answer to.
The way I see it, people who build an auto-followed subscriber base might effectively be creating what we would call an “untargeted” list. Your followers are not there for any reason other than wanting you as a follower to fatten up their follow count, so they won’t be paying attention to you or responding to your calls to action (clicking your links in tweets).
If you take this even further, people are using software scripts to go around and automatically follow the followers of people they follow (phew!) and since lots of people autofollow back, all you effectively have to do is follow other people to increase your own followship.
Okay, so that sentence is totally whack, but it does make sense. At the heart of this issue is the reason why you have people follow you and I think my argument is sound: You want people to follow you because they are actually paying attention to what you tweet. It’s a value exchange.
However, and here’s where my dilemma really begins: Some people will not follow you – and even use software to remove you from their followship, if you don’t follow them back, on principle.
As one of the replies to my email stated – Twitter is like a party, you are there to interact socially with everyone and it’s not about status – it’s meant to be a level playing field.
I don’t agree with that claim because any social environment online mirrors our society, where it’s not a level playing field. Those who have more “value” based on societal conditions – like celebrities (how wrong we are to place value here) – have more attention.
For people like myself who have established themselves as a big fish in a small pond, we are rewarded with more followers, regardless of whether we follow back.
I’m not sure which way to go with this situation right now. I’d like to increase my follow count, but I want legitimate people who pay attention to what I tweet, plus I don’t want to lose those who would follow me with genuine interest, but won’t if I don’t follow them in return.
You can follow lots of people and use a client like Tweetdeck to filter people into the groups you want to pay attention to, thus using the auto-follow function and still keeping in touch with who you want to is possible, but it still doesn’t feel right to me.
For the moment I find new people to follow based on who sends me replies and who the people I currently follow send replies to and talk about. I use it as a sort of slow referral networking tool, taking human recommendations of other Twitter users to find good people who offer value.
Twitter is intended to be used as a communication tool for direct one-to-one communication and broadcast communication from one-to-many. As a marketer I want to broadcast to as many people as I can who are interested in what I offer. As a social media tool, just like having lots of Facebook friends who you don’t really know, you can dilute the true purpose of the tool if you simply go for numbers rather than relationships.
Then again, am I harming relationships by not following back everyone who follows me?
What do you think?
Yaro
Great info on Twitter……I like the 140 character limit and I am going to go set up an account and get started!
Thanks,
Sean
I was wondering about the importance of twitter but couldn’t find enough information anywhere. Thanks for a great post. I am in South Korea teaching English and I am writing and posting vids/pics about the experience but it seems like there is no audience.
I’m glad you did a topic about Twitter. Frankly, I get the concept but I am still unsure about the execution.
For now I follow only a few people. I’m sure that eventually I will figure this whole social media thing out but for now I am still wondering how to get MY market to follow me.
On Facebook I went out and asked to be friends with everyone. I don’t think that was such a good move on my part. Now my wall is filled with useless comments and people are sending me things that I just don’t have time to fool with.
I’m sure that I will figure it out at some point or someone else will and share the secret to using social media.
I’m not sure how this whole social media thing is supposed to work or if it is powerful as so many others make it out to be.
For now I only follow a few people. I’m still trying to figure out how to get people from MY target market to follow me. I get the concept but the execution is a little off.
I’m sure I will figure it out at some point or someone else will and give up the secret to social media.
good stuff. best advice i’ve heard about twitter is that 90% of the time you should be listening to your market, and only 10% of the time you should be communicating to it. so for me, it’s been a great tool for seeing what interests people enough to write 140 characters.
I am currently trying tweet deck and the auto following thing but am quickly getting turned off. My marketing and web site are all family friendly and I found that as soon as I turned on the auto follow feature I was getting porn followers and some with nasty avatar pictures. I have noticed that no other comments on this subject have mentioned a problem with this but it has really turned me off of the auto follow function.
Has anyone else had a problem in this area?
I’ve been following people through auto follow out of respect for following me. I try to follow other internet marketers, the main reason is to follow and connect with like minded people who I may learn from and possibly make a sale.
The fact that I now get a lot of followers that I normally would not follow doesn’t concern me. When I make contact with someone I will always see their message in the sent DM’s as I’m deleting the others.
I like your observation that any online social application mirrors our society, where the playing fields are not level. What i’m seeing with social media is that some people tend to go on a bit of a binge, where they equate quantity of followers / friends with perceived success, but pay scant regard to quality. Quality wins out over quantity in my book, every time…..
So many people on Twitter, FaceBook, MySpace, et al, are there just killing time and are not looking to buy anything or be marketed to. They are the ultimate “lookie-loos”. In my experience, the only Social Media thingy worth a hoot when you’re trying to build a following of people who have a reasonably high probability of buying something fom you is Blogging. [ That's why I joined your Blogging Mastermind program
]
I too totally agree that just because somebody follows you it doesn’t mean that you should automatically follow them back.
However, being pragmatic, if you want to attract as many followers as possible then it may be better just to grit your teeth and follow them all.
There are various Twitter clients around where you can group people, so you could put the majority of people in one group that you don’t actually read very often and the ones you are interested in in another group.
That way you’ll not get drowned out by everyone’s tweets.
As a long standing member of social sites from Friendster ( before went down for 6 months and everyone moved to myspace) myspace and facebook, I’ve seen the potential of Twitter but as a new member of Zero followers and following Zero, the general push to begin is a little staggering. As you mentioned.. i don’t want to just add people for the general sake of it.
However this being said for example : if i have 10,000 followers, 6,000 of those are auto-followed that probably have.. little to no interest in what i have to offer. those who are interested will still read you reguardless even if its at a glance. and those who aren’t.. well it changes nothing even if they weren’t following me they still wouldn’t read it.
Except. i have been to many websites that offer little to no value to me Personally… But do i know someone who might like it? someone who ..yeah they’d like that and then you IM the link? of course. we’ve all done it.
even if the refferal rate is 1%. thats still 1% more potentional clients. and as we know.. they’ll tell 2 people.. and they’ll tell 2 people.. and thats like a million people right there!
I’m planning on starting a fresh Twitter account for this exact reason; I’d rather have 1,000 people that follow me because they are genuinely interested in me rather than have 10,000 followers that only care about me following them back.
Do you subscribe to the RSS feeds of all the people that are subscribed to yours? No.
Once you follow more than about 1000 people you start to just get a rolling list of tweets that fill a new page in a few minutes. So once you are there whats the problem with following more people? It doesnt really cost you anything and you can still track @s and DMs? Thats why I decided to turn back on my Auto Follow Back.
And Rajaie, what’s wrong with having more followers? If 10,000 followers meant I had 1,500 “targeted” followers I would always choose it over having 1,000 purely targeted followers.
I have to agree with you on not following everyone who follows you. As you said, they are following you for the value you are offering them and if the only value they percieve from following you is to get you to follow them back then for you it is pointless. Great post!
I am still fairly new to Twitter but have to say I believe in the quality vs. quantity approach. I only want to follow people I am truly interested in and want to read what they say. Thanks for your view point Yaro!
In my experience, it’s much saner tack to follow people who give value by tweeting useful links, engaged you in meaningful conversations. Twitter can also be like a playground. A cool place to hangout and have fun with online blogging buddies. I try to joke or tease people I’m friends with. And for this, I’m using DM a lot. You just never know who will be offended even with a lame joke.
You’re right, we don’t need 20K followers if we have an engaged circle of friends and buddies. It’s a waste of time, resources. I’d rather have a few hundreds than thousands of people who don’t have the time to read my blog. Or even connect with me on a personal level.
Splendid idea, this.
Hi Yaro
I am doing your BAB and Membership Mastermind courses and am just beginning to delve into Twitter so have not really had the dilema of to follow or not to follow. I think it is best to follow people that I find interesting regardless of who followed who first.
Just like Facebook, there is a tendancy for people to get as many followers and ‘friends’ as possible for quodus. Then there is the spam element, I have just blocked two profiles with dubious content. However I am somewhat aware of of the appearance of having more people following you, the more prestigious it appears to be.
Lydia
I just saw that a lot of people were promoting these viral twitter following builders which I felt were just a waste of time. BTW, I’m following you on Twitter. Follow back is possible!
-Abdulrehman Agha
Yeah Yaro,
I totally agree with you. Recently, i just sacked..ups sorry, i just removed who i am following and just 8 remaining people who i am truly following, including you, Yaro. I dont mind if my followers do the sama thing like i did, because i just want to start all over again from zero who really want to be my follower. And so it goes with my Facebook, it doesnt bother if i only had few friends as long as i stay connected with them.
Thanks,
Daniel Likin
I think Twitter is great in principle but the problem is like everything else if people start to automate everything you then start to wonder if it’s real. Spammers made email so much harder and you can be sure that the same will happen with Twitter as it did Myspace and many others.
I too have been struggling with how should I be using Twitter. I don’t use autoresponder and I look at every person who follows me and if I’m not interested in who they are or what they do, I don’t follow. I like to see what people are doing but I can only take so many internet marketers. I stick with the one’s, like yourself, who I’ve been following for a while in other venues, such as blogs. I’d like people to follow me who want to know more about me and what I’m doing.
i am using for a over a year now. but i rarely focus on my twitter because i can follow only 2000 people but some people i know have like 4000 followers or more.
but good thing about twitter is that it helps my generate traffic for my site and also helpful for the products i promote. my friend recommend me a software to have 10000 followers but since ive read the twitter guidelines once you get caught your account will be disable
Normally if you follow someone, they will follow you. I think it’s able to follow 1000 people per week without much trouble with time – but the question I would ask myself is: Is the followers following me targeted? Will it do me any good as I doubt whether they relate to what I do.
I made the same mistake as a lot of people in that I followed anyone who followed me. I also signed up for a service that was to get me followers but most of them are my competitors for services I offer.
You definitely should not have to follow everyone who follows you. You might have people who are interested in your area of expertise but you have no interest in theirs.
I read that Seth Gordin of Squidoo fame doesn’t follow anyone. That, on the other hand is arrogant – I guess he thinks no one has anything to teach him! – Ellyn Deuink