What matters the most in twitter when it comes to followers? Quality or quantity?

This question has been there for quite a long time. If you are a normal blogger like me who follows the School of Quality where bloggers like Gary Vaynerchuk, Chris Brogan etc preach that quality of followers is what matters the most, you won’t give a second thought about quantity. I also did not, until I read this thought provoking blog post by Justin Kownacki where he says “Sorry guys, when it comes to your audience, size DOES matter”.

After reading that post and doing a small research, I found that there are actually two types of successful twitter marketing methods people follow (I’ll tell about the third type after explaining these two). Well, I knew it even before but I never knew there were as many people following the second method of twitter marketing (a.k.a Mass following) and doing it “successfully” too. And this is what I call School of Quantity.

Side note: I don’t recommend the second method to anyone. It might get your twitter account suspended.

How do these two “Schools of Twitter Marketing” work?

1. School of Quality or School A:

This is the school which you are probably following now. Best examples of people who preach this method are, as I said above, Gary Vaynerchuk and Chris Brogan. They say quality is more important than quantity.

Here are some qualities of the students/people who belong to this school:

– They follow only those people who they already know or who interest them
- They don’t use twitter auto follow tools (although some people auto follow)
- RT their very close friends and popular marketers
- Occasionally send out links to their blogs
- Don’t post affiliate links
- Interact with a selective bunch of people

These are some of the qualities and I’m sure you can relate to it somewhat. I used to belong to this school.

2. School of Quantity or School B

There are many people who follow this method and some are very successful. As I said, I don’t recommend this method but this method does exist.

I know a lot of internet marketers who use this method. I don’t want to name names here. You might already know some of them. I’m sure at some point of time, people belonging to this school followed you and few days later unfollowed you because you did not follow them back.

Here are the qualities of people belonging to the school of quantity:

– They follow anyone and everyone they find
- Follow people based on keywords
- Use twitter auto follow tools
- Don’t RT that much
- They (most of them) automate the process
- Post lots of affiliate links
- Some people post only links
- Don’t interact much

You can tell a few more qualities but these are the main ones.

Do you belong to this school? If yes, I hope you will read the twitter terms and stay within limits.

Both these methods, as I said before, work while the first method is better one to choose. BUT…

I would like to explain about a third method of twitter marketing, which I would like to call “School of BOTH Quality and Quantity”.

Why do we need a third twitter marketing method?

Justin says in the post I mentioned that when more number of people see your message, the higher your success will be. I totally agree with this.

When you have very less people to notice your message, your amount of success will be limited. By following school A, you focus only on quality and by following school B, you focus only on quantity. But the third school requires you to concentrate on both. You should give equal importance to both quality and quantity.

According to the Dan Zarrella’s hierarchy of contagiousness, you need these three important things to succeed with your message:

1. Exposure
2. Awarness
3. Motivation

Now the above three helps us prove the flaw in both School A and School B.

Defect in Concentrating on Quality Alone (School A)

When you concentrate on quality alone, the number of followers you have is very less. The exposure your message gets is limited.

Now check the hierarchy of contagiousness. The first requirement is exposure. When less people are following you, you don’t get exposure to your message. As a result, your message has very less chance of being successful.

Defect in Concentrating on Quantity Alone:

By concentrating on quantity alone, you are not getting any quality. How does this affect your success?

What is the second requirement in Zarrella’s hierarchy? Awareness

Your followers will pay attention to your tweets only if they know you (or if they are bored). Well, let’s stick to the ‘knowing’ part. Most people are not bored when they tweet.

So how do you make them know you? Answer is: By doing what the third type of people in twitter does and that’s what brings us to the third school of twitter marketing.

3. Qualities of People Belonging to “School of BOTH Quality and Quantity”:

– They follow people who interact with their followers (unlike school A people who follow only those they know)
- Most of them don’t auto follow people
- Track keywords and answer questions people ask based on those keywords
- RT people who post interesting tweets (not just a close group of people)
- Tweet links to their followers’ interesting blog posts
- Interact with all their followers whenever possible
- Post interesting tips to show their expertise in the niche

This type of twitter marketing helps you get more quality followers who will actually listen to what you say and act on it.

Now let us go back to Zarrella’s contagiousness hierarchy and see how our third school of twitter marketing performs.

1. Exposure? Check
2. Awareness? Check
3. Motivation (call-to-actions)? Check. Every successful marketer will know this irrespective of which group they belong to. If not, check out posts on call-to-actions and also read Copyblogger’s post on writing magnetic headlines.

Which school of twitter marketing do you belong to? In my opinion, it is no more a question. If you want to succeed big time, you should try to be in the third school of marketing. Gary Vaynerchuk, Chris Brogan and the likes have both quality and quantity even though they preach school A type of twitter marketing.

So, it is not quantity or quality. It is BOTH. Please share your views in the comments.

P.S.: I use to belong to school of quality. But now, I’m working on joining the third school of twitter marketing (a.k.a school of both quality and quantity).

Image Source: Crowd (Colour) by Wayne Large

First, what is live tweeting? (scroll to the next sub-heading if you know this)

It is tweeting something that is going on live. You normally have a #hashtag for every live event. For example, the Izea event which took place few days back used #Izeafest as hashtag. People use hashtag to make it easy for others to follow the tweets about a particular event.

I love Copyblogger and I’m a big fan of Brian Clark.

Benefits Of Live Tweeting

What? Can you get extra benefits by posting live tweet? Yes, you can.

1. New And Strong Twitter Relationships

Twitter is all about relationship, conversation and did I mention promotion? Now, the last one should be done carefully and within limits. Anyway, you’d be knowing that by now.

Normally you tweet about conferences live. When you do that you will be following other tweets about the conference using the hashtag assigned for that particular event. So you have a chance to find new people and form a good relationship with them.

If you are in the conference, you can talk to them directly. But if you are not in the conference and watching it in a live stream, you cannot do it. What you can do is, tweet those who are tweeting about the conference and talk to them about it first. Second , take the conversation to the next step. Don’t flood your twitter timeline with many @ messages. Send them in DM or chat in skype or whatever you like.

People who attend conferences are often those who are serious about business and willing to invest time and money to improve themselves and take their business to the next level. Forming relationship with these people is the best thing you can do in twitter.

Image Source: Trust by ?o??ƒx™

2. Learn

Every event has some of the industry’s experts in their list of speakers. These experts know what they do and clearly know what works. When they say it out for you in a conference, listen to them and learn. I hear you. You go to conference only to learn and form new relationship. But wait, according to a Edgar Dale:

10% of what we read
20% of what we hear
30% of what we see
50% of what we see and hear
70% of what we discuss with others
80% of what we personally experience
95% or what we teach others

So why not hear it in conference, write it down as a tweet, favorite the ones that are really good and read it, discuss with others and teach them? It takes 21 days according to a research to save anything to your subconscious mind. Is it not easy to read the best tips that you have saved in your favorites everyday for 21 days till it gets installed in your subconscious mind?

Image Source: Learning to Walk by Tela Chhe

3. Help Your Followers

There will be many people in your followers list who want to take their blog/business to next level. How about helping your followers with what you learn from the conference?

People might have missed the conference due to some reason. Some would have missed it because they are in a different part of a world. Some of them cannot watch it in livestream because of slow internet connection/dialup. They all have one thing in common? The eagerness to learn.

By tweeting the important points of a event, you are helping your followers. Believe me on this. I have trusted few people in twitter who I follow because they teach me something new. It is a fact. You trust people who help you.

Let me remind you that you can even tweet about live games. I have live tweeted about football (Soccer if you are from USA). You don’t educate your followers in this case but you keep them up-to-date with live scores.

Note: It is better to keep your tweets within limits. Don’t tweet a lot about anything within a short period.

So when you live tweet, you not only learn and move your business forward, you also help your followers. Is there a much better way of using twitter? I’ll let you decide.

Please share your views on live tweeting, be it positive or negative. I’d like to hear your opinion on this. I’ll write a follow up post and include the best comments. You can add me on twitter here- @Ramkarthik.

I assume you are on twitter (after all who is not in twitter these days?). Though many people prefer tweeting through the web, using a twitter client will increase your productivity.

Though there are many twitter clients, I have always preferred to use Tweetdeck. But for the last few days tweetdeck was not working for me and I had to switch to twhirl.

Twhirl is simple and makes tweeting fun. But if you are new to twhirl or thinking of giving twhirl a try, these are 5 basic settings that you should change in twhirl for better tweeting.

1. API limit

Go to settings and you will see an option called network. In this you can set the API limit. You cannot set twhirl (or any application for that matter) to update once every few seconds. If you do, you will reach the API limits and you won’t be able to tweet using the client for sometime. The API normally resets every one hour.

In this API, set how many requests you need per hour. I have set it to 30 requests per hour as you can see in the image. Once you do this, twhirl will automatically adjust the options that are following based on the requests you have set per hour.

I have disabled it for direct messages because I get DM notifications to my mail. I want to reply quickly to people who @ me and that is the reason why I have set my replies to update faster than tweets.

You can do this based on your requirements but don’t forget to set this.

2. Retweet Format

You can see the retweet format under ‘general’ in settings. The retweet format is by default like the below image.

You need to replace ‘retweeting’ with ‘RT’.

The reason why you should do this is because when you retweet by saying ”retweeting”, more characters are utilized. So change it to RT.

3. Notification with Sound

In twhirl, you have the option of getting notified of new tweets with sound. When you select this, you will be notified for all the tweets. But I feel that I get more distracted when I set this. At the same time, when I’m in some other room, I don’t want to miss my replies.

So what I do is I set sound for only the replies. Check the box which says ‘only play sound on replies/directs’.

4. Do Not Hide When Minimized

Twhirl gives you the option of automatically hiding the client when you minimize. I normally do not prefer this. I don’t want twhirl to hide whenever I minimize. I don’t have the habit of having too many applications running at the same time. So having twhirl running without hiding will not be a problem for me.

Go to settings and select general tab. Here you have to uncheck the box that says ‘hide when minimized’.

5. Lookup Profiles in Browser

Most of the twitter clients have this function where if you click on a user’s profile, it will be loaded in the client itself. I hate this since I cannot get a proper view of the user profile in the client. It shows in a small column. Even if it did show in a big space, I would never prefer to see the profiles in the client.

Go to the general tab under settings and click on the drop down list box which says ‘By default, lookup profiles’. Select ‘in browser’.

After you do all this, don’t forget to save. If you don’t save, the changes won’t have any effect.

Try twhirl for a change and see how it works for you. Let me know in the comments what other settings need to be changed in twhirl when someone has just installed twhirl or started using twhirl.

You can follow me on twitter here.

Most of the bloggers, internet marketers and even celebrities have started tweeting and you need no other reason to join twitter. If you are not there in twitter, you are missing something. Join twitter right now. And don’t forget to add me.

Twitter backgrounds are to decorate your profile and make it look good. It will sometimes convince people to follow you. If you are using a default twitter background, it is time to change.

Before letting you know the service that allows you to have your latest flickr image as twitter background, I’ll point out some reasons why you should have a good flickr background (but you can always scroll down to see the service).

1. Convinces the twitter users, who have decided not to follow you, to follow you (at times)

2. Gives an exciting, scintillating, dazzling, brilliant, and amusing plus “enter all the synonyms here” twitter background. (Of course, only if you have that kind of a picture in flickr)

3. Attract designers and photographers

4. Fresh background everyday (if you upload a picture everyday)

And a lot more…

What is the service I am talking about?

It is Flickr my background. It is a service started by sawhorse whose other projects include the famous shorty awards.

1. Go to Flickr my background page

2. Fill the details they ask you

3. Validate your flickr account

4. Go to your twitter homepage and see the latest flickr image being shown as your twitter background

It is as simple as that.

If you want to stop using flickr my background, go their website and see at the bottom where they say “click here to stop updating your twitter background”.

Now you have a constantly changing twitter background.

Follow me on twitter here.

Instant Tweets is the twitter firefox addon that makes tweeting fun. It is developed by Ben Clemons and Josh Fulfer. I installed the firefox extension yesterday and it seems like a lot of fun.

So what’s good about Instant Tweets?

Instant tweet uses your firefox address bar to type and send tweets. You can type anything you want in the address bar and send it as a tweet. It also shows how many characters are left in the tweet.

You can also tweet the current page links in two ways:

1. Simply click the bird icon in your address bar
2. Right click your mouse and choose “Tweet Current Page”

You can also tweet images using Instant Tweets. Simply right click the image you want to tweet and choose “Tweet this pic”.

One another feature that I like about Instant tweets is that you can know whether a person is following you or not. The Blue bird icon in the address bar turns RED when you are on the Twitter Profile of someone who is NOT following you. If it is BLUE, then the person is following you.

Instant Tweets is compatible with Firefox 2 and 3.

Grab the twitter addon for firefox here or download it directly from here. Visit the instant tweets home page to see a video tutorial of how this extension works

Add me on twitter here.

Twitter is becoming famous everyday with so many people joining. You can find me in twitter here – Ramkarthik. All the new users need twitter followers to make sure their words are noticed by some people. Every twitter user likes to have many followers. Sometimes people don’t spend time to learn about twitter and spam the place. In this post you’ll find why you shouldn’t use twitter auto follow.

People, who join twitter, add the ones they know. Later they start to add new people. There is nothing wrong with this. But when people get over excited about twitter, they start following too many people in a single day or spam the community with tons of links.

Coming to talk about twitter auto follow, it is a service that let’s you follow twitter users automatically, once they follow you. Any person, who follows you, will be followed back automatically. You do not have the option of selecting whom to follow.

Image Soure: Twitter Influence by mil8

Here are 3 reasons why should not

1. All Links And No Real Update
There are twitter users who post every link of their blog post and do nothing much other than that. They add people in bulk; say 2000 twitter users at once. When you use twitter auto follow, you will be automatically following them. Why would you want to read tweets with links to blog posts all the time? If the profile created is on the name of a blog, you can expect them to tweet only blog post links. But some twitter users have their own names and do only blog promotion in twitter. I’m not saying that these people are bad. It is just that they haven’t understood twitter properly and will take time for them to learn about it.

2. Irrelevant Tweets
When you follow everyone who follows you, you are not using twitter efficiently. Let me give you an example. You have a blog probably (If you are new to blogging, I recommend you to read this free ebook). Even if you don’t have, assume that you own one. You write good blog posts and people are reading it. They subscribe to your blog. Will you subscribe to all of your subscribers’ blog? Of course not. If it was that way, Darren Rowse would have to subscribe to 7000 blogs, even if one tenth of his subscribers have a blog. So to make your twitter page relevant, follow only people who talk about things that interest you.

3. Follow And Unfollow
Twitter users who want to have many followers, add many twitter users. Once you follow them back, after a couple of days, they unfollow you. What’s the disadvantage here? Well, you followed a user because he/she followed you and now they have unfollowed you. When you are using auto follow, you automatically follow these people who unfollow users once they have added them. To avoid this, you should stop using auto follow, wait till the twitter user tweets you or tweets something interesting and then add him/her. Sometimes, you cannot avoid people by doing this too. You should start using Qwitter which will help you to know, who the users that are unfollowing you are.
Do you use auto follow? Why do you use auto follow? If you have valid points, I’ll include it in the next post. We could write a post on the advantages of using twitter auto follow. Please share your views in the comments.

P.S: Don’t forget to add me in twitter. My user name is Ramkarthik.

P.P.S: The link to the free report is an affiliate link.

Do you log into twitter, update your status the whole day and do less or nothing related to your online work? Are you trying to limit your twitter usage but cannot? If your answer is yes to the questions, continue reading the post as I show you the 5 ways that I use to limit the time I spend in twitter.

Twitter is addictive. I used to spend a lot of time refreshing my twitter page and sending updates many times a day. I found myself to be less productive when I spent a lot of time in twitter. I don’t say you shouldn’t use twitter but I’m telling you to limit the time spent in twitter. In the past 20 days, I have sent only around 5 tweets. But I have become more productive. You can use a little more than that but not too much.

1. Install A Twitter Client
By installing a twitter client, you don’t need to refresh your twitter page now and then to check if you have got any tweets. You will be updated with the latest tweets automatically. You will also be alerted when you receive a direct message. Sometimes using a twitter client will make you to use twitter more. But if you use the twitter clients properly, you should save a lot of time. Here are two resources with a list of twitter clients:
# How We Tweet: The Definitive List of the Top Twitter Clients
# A List From Twitter

2. Keep Your Busy With Other Works
This is simple. How to stop doing something? Keep yourself busy doing something else which is more important. For instance, you can keep yourself busy writing articles or reading books to limit your twitter usage. The more you keep yourself busy, the lesser time you will spend in twitter.

3. Twitter Is Down
Create a mindset that twitter is down. Twitter has had lot of downtimes. A month ago, twitter had continuous downtimes. I used to log into twitter only to find that it is down. It happened for a few days. Later twitter started to get back to normal. I created a mindset that twitter is down and stopped visiting twitter many times day.

4. What’s In It For Me
Ask yourself “What’s in it for me?” every time you log into twitter. Use twitter when you want to get something from it. If you feel the need for getting new friends, log into twitter. If you have something extremely important to share with twitter users, sign into twitter. There is nothing that you can gain by spending hours in twitter.

5. A Plan
Create a plan. Allocate a specific amount of time for using twitter. If you are a person who uses twitter 5+ hours a day, you must consider limiting it to 2 hours. Once you are at 2 hours a day, reduce it to 1 hour a day. This is surely possible. With a little effort, you can considerably reduce the time you spend on twitter.

Do you spend a lot of time in twitter? Were these points useful? What do you do to limit your twitter usage? Please share it in the comments.