Archive for Learning Twitter
Has Follow Friday Outlived its Usefulness?
Posted by: | CommentsMy good friend, @Dr_Cards ask me that question a couple of days ago.
The original purpose of FollowFriday (#FF) was to recommend great people to follow. It was a great way – and still is – to find interesting people to follow. With the advent of Twitter Lists and applications like Twellow, we now have many ways to find interesting people to follow. Maybe we no need FollowFriday.
I think that FollowFriday is just as useful today as ever – but its use has evolved.
I now use FollowFriday as a vehicle for publicly acknowledging and saying ‘Thank You’ to important people in my life – people who have helped me solve a problem or get to where I am in life (though all of my FollowFriday recommendations are certainly people worth following).
You can hear conversations only between people you know
Posted by: | CommentsImagine going to a party and being able to overhear a conversation only if you knew both people.
Recently Twitter made a change that I really really really dislike.
Once upon a time if Twitter users A and B where having a conversation and you were following only A (and not B) you could see A’s @replies to B.
I liked this. It allowed me to discover interesting people. If one of my friends was having what appeared to be an interesting conversation I would often begin to follow the other party as well.
The other day my friend @KarrollK and I were having fun. You see, Karroll loves almonds. We were having fun coming up with song titles containing the word ‘DIamond’ and substituting ‘Almond’. You know, like:
Almonds are a girls best friend
Almonds are forever
SIlly? Yes. But it was fun. Two intellectual minds having a little R&R. Karroll is a very bright guy and worth following. I would hope that anyone seeing half of our exchange was curious to learn what the fun was all about and proceed to follow both Karroll and I (and maybe join in). That’s the way our community grows. That’s the way we discover interesting people.
For a while, Twitter had an option in the Settings page to turn this behavior off. In other words, you could tell Twitter to show you @replies only if you were following both parties in the conversation. Unfortunately, Twitter just took that choice away from us and made it the standard behavior.
It’s actually more complicated than that. To use the example of A and B, and you follow only A:
- If A types “@B hello” you will see it.
- If A hits the ‘Reply’ icon to create his reply to B you will not see it.
- If A says “I’m going to visit @B” you will see it.
I liked the old way better.
What Is Twitter Spam?
Posted by: | CommentsYesterday I tweeted “I unfollow spammers”.
My friend Jason Dragon thoughtfully replied:
So what is considered a spammer. Where is that line exactly. It seems that different people have different ideas on this. I only post updates about my business yet people unfollow me. I like to see how other people are doing. To me spam is posting the same worthless information over and over again.
Maybe it’s kinda like that famous line about pornography: “I know it when I see it.”
In the case that prompted my tweet it was pretty clear:
- It was a DM from someone I’ve never exchanged tweets with before
- The user name was just a randome collestion of letters, not a real name
- The content of the DM was, “Test out the new Mac Mini and keep it for free at [url I won't repeat here].
If your only tool is a hammer then everything looks like a nail.
Which means, I suppose that if you are a spammer then everything looks like a spam delivery channel.
In general, I give people the benefit of the doubt, but in clear cases like this I just unfollow. This is after all, permission marketing:
- I choose to follow you.
- In return, your obligation is to provide me with content I think is worth my time.
”But Dave, you keep saying Twitter is the best prospecting tool on the planet!”
Yes, it is – when used properly.
Mine is not the final – or only – opinion regarding what is – and what is not – acceptable Twitter behavior but in general, I suggest that you approach the twittersphere in much the same way you would approach a Chamber of Commerce mixer: Don’t hit-and-run. Be there for the long haul. Get known; Get credible; Get trusted. When you observe someone articulating a problem you can solve, help them. When someone asks a question you can answer, answer it.
If someone articulates a need or desire for a product or service you offer, consider it an open invitation to make them aware of your offering but in a way that’s not hard-sell.
In general, you’ll get the most ROI for your efforts if you look for people expressing a problem you can solve and then reach out to them and help them in some way.
What is #FollowFriday?
Posted by: | CommentsFollowFriday is a great example of the altruistic nature of the Twitter community. #followfriday is a hashtag (Click here to learn about hashtags) that signifies that the twitter users mentioned in the tweet are interesting people and worth following.
Simply put, #followfriday is a mechanism for recommending people to follow. So if I create a tweet that says:
#followfriday @goodmansales
It means that I think Michael Goodman is an interesting person and I recommend that other people follow him.
What Are Hashtags?
Posted by: | CommentsA hashtag is a single word preceded by the pound or hash symbol (‘#’). Using hashtags adds some context to your tweets. The best way to illustrate this is with some examples:
- I recently attended a party that it’s host had named ‘Bling Nite’. Several of us talking about this party on Twitter included the hashtag #BlingNite in our tweets. ANyone could then search for ‘#BlingNite’ to find all the conversations about this party. (It was a great party – Thank you, Jennifer!
- Many people are using the hashtag #swineflu when publishing breaking news about swine flu. By searching for that hashtag you can keep up with breaking news about it.
Just as we tag blog posts; just as we tag photos on Flickr, we use hashtags to say, “This is what this tweet is about” or mark specific words has being significant.
The idea was originally put forth by Chris Messina in this post. They were used extensively during the San Diego fires in 2007.
One really novel use of hashtags is my attendees at conferences. While the speaker or panel is underway the audience uses a specific hashtag to discuss the topic.
Anyone can create and use a hashtag.
In addition to making it easy to search for and follow a specific topic, hashtags off another novel use. THere is a sight named hashtags.org that tracks hashtag usage. If you follow @hashtags then your hashtag usage will be tracked too. Hashtags allow you to guage the popularity of a topic. For example, here is a graph displayed by hashtags.org displaying the use of the #swineflu hashtag:
In other words, hashtags not only help us find conversations about specific topics, they help us understand what people are talking about. This is kind of ‘meta search’, where we are less interested in the search results themselves that the data about the search results. An interesting concept and one that has yet to be fully explored.
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