Twitter has exploded in popularity over the last year. I know I was a little late to the game and considering I’ve sent out 2,145 updates since joining, it pales in comparison to some of the heavy twitterites (i just made up that word) out there.
I created my twitter account to communicate ideas that don’t warrant their own full post. I work full time for a bank and don’t always have time to write a full blown post about some of my ideas, especially stock trades which happen frequently.
To that end, I have a couple hundred followers as you can see by my widget in the sidebar. However, I don’t follow every single one of my followers. There are several reasons for this.
- I believe there is a limit to the amount of information you can digest from a single source in any given day.
- Not everyone has something interesting to say, or their tweets are so infrequent it wouldn’t matter if you followed them or not.
- I don’t believe in automatic reciprocal following. See my first point as to why.
Taking these points into consideration, I still find it difficult to follow the 100 or so tweeps that I follow now. My basic criteria for following someone is this:
- Do they have something interesting to say that meshes with my own interests
- Are they business/career oriented in my same profession
- Are they friend/family/Coworker
- Do they regularly tweet links I find interesting/useful
With these basic guidelines, you can see why I can’t/won’t follow everyone that follows me. Don’t take it personally, I always try to check out who the new followers are and if you meet my criteria above you’ll get a new follow from me, otherwise just realize that it’s nearly impossible to keep up with a half dozen conversations let alone hundreds or thousands.
Also realize that my tweets primarily revolve around stocks, investments and bussinesses that I am involved with. I truly think it is a great way to get word out about something new to as many people as possible that you might otherwise not reach. This is because of the power of hashtags and the twitter search engine. In fact, Twitter has gone a step above and beyond and put on your home page, topics that are most being talked about so you can get in on the conversation from right there.
So next time you are feeling bad about unfollowing someone, just remember they are probably using their own criteria for following just as you do.
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As you may know, one of the social networking tools I use quite often is Twitter. Twitter is a microblogging platform that lets you share ideas, links, blog posts and converse with other twitter users in real time.
Twitter stores posts chronologically from all the people you follow so you can keep up with what they are doing throughout the day or night.
If I am online, you can bet I have twitter open in a separate window and refresh my stream often. It’s one of the ways I get news and information from like minded people and it’s an exellent way to socialize and meet new people. A couple weeks ago I listed my twitter feed on a forum post at Entrecard and since then my followers have increased 50% to nearly 200 followers.
Today I discovered another way to get more exposure through twitter and again through social networking. If you run your blog using Wordpress you can add a simple line of code that will alert your readers they can tweet your post. Adding this functionality can increase your overall traffic which in turn has the potential to drive more earnings your way.
How is this accomplished? I have to give credit to JohnChow for the original code (to which he gives credit elsewhere) and it should be noted that I had to modify John’s original code to make it work for my blog. Thanks for the tip John! One of the reasons is that my installation of wordpress prefers dynamic linkage wherever possible and doesn’t always render HTML links properly. The following code works for this blog:
<a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://twitter.com/home/?status=Reading @Flagusco – <?php the_title(); ?> <?php bloginfo(‘url’); ?>?p=<?php the_ID(); ?>”><img src=”/blog/images/tweet-this-small.png” border=”0″ alt=”Tweet This!” align=”absmiddle” />Tweet This Post!</a>
Notice the php code I have used compared to what John posted. The reason why is because I can copy and paste this code to any blog using Wordpress and the only things I have to change are the URL to the images folder for the little bird and the @name for the proper twitter account I want to reference (of course I only have the one).
Now when you read an article you find interesting you can let your Twitter followers know about it. You can say a little bird told you. There are plugins that do this but then you have to constantly update the plugin when something changes. This code is optimized for any wordpress blog.
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