Does mass un-follow all your twitter friends make sense?

It looks like a trend that all of sudden a lot of big players on Twitter started unfollowing all their friends and rebuilt a list that is much smaller and meaningful. Does that make sense at all?

I first saw Scobleizer done that. He even blogged two posts that explained “how can anyone follow 10,000 or more?” and claimed “you are SO unfollowed”. Unfortunately, I couldn’t locate both posts on his blog anymore. But I can tell you that the tone in these two posts sounds so arrogant that I personally can’t take it at all. But that’s not the only reason why I don’t agree with him and his action that unfollowed everyone on his following list.

Then, my role model on Internet Marketing John Chow have done the same lately and explained number of reasons why he did that on his blog. While I agree most of the point he made in this blog, I still don’t see the strong needs that make him to take this extreme action.

I am not going to comment on those reasons one by one to against them but what I really want to say in this post is that don’t do it, especially when you are an ordinary user like me.

Those who did mass unfollow are the big guys who usually have more than half million followers. With that large user base, they basically can do and experiment whatever they want without worrying about too much losing the followers. They have the enough influence that can still make people to follow them no matter what. Besides, having the much smaller ratio of the number of following and the number of follower actually makes them look much better.

We, as the ordinary user in other hand, can’t really do that. If we did the same we would never be able to grow and gain larger followers. We still need to take the routine path and follow the make-sense steps to build our list. This mass unfollow thing just doesn’t make any sense and not belong to a regular user, like you and me.

By the time I am writing this post, I took the action in my twitter account and unfollowed all users who didn’t follow me. Hence, bye bye big guys, I am not following you anymore. What I want more is a two-way communication that not only makes me to hear what you say but also makes you to hear what I say.

Working on getting more twitter followers

We all like Twitter and know how powerful it is. And the game really gets started when you have tons of followers following you. So working on getting more followers on twitter is something that is worth doing. The effort putting into it will finally pays off one day.

There are tons of tips, tricks, guides how to do it all over the place. For example, you can soar your follow number in a short period of time by joining TwitterFollower.com, founded by John Chow.  It’s a free program that only targets two very specific things, mass unfollow and join to the list by committing that you will follow whoever follows you.

The program does actually work, largely because of John’s huge influence that attracted tons of people to join the program, me included. However, it doesn’t sound that the followers are very targeted and related users so the number may not mean anything to you if you are not in an Internet market niche. And for that reason, the method "Get More Twitter Followers Today” Chris Brogan posted today may work a lot better but that takes time and require a lot of consistent work and effort.

1. Find great stories from other people and share them with a link (and/or attribution). Do this 3 times or more a day!
2. Share useful information that others can use, too! example: “I’ve discovered that Blip.fm is very useful for sharing my musical interests.” (Bonus points if you provide the URL).
3. Participate in online events that use #hashtags, because others in the event will find you and appreciate you, too!
4. Respond to OTHER PEOPLE using the @reply method. This is advanced, so here’s an example: “@glendawh – Is it true you were out all night last night singing karaoke?”
5. Use Twitter Search (http://search.twitter.com) to find people talking about the things YOU talk about, and follow them!
6. Add your Twitter URL to your signature line in your email! (Easy to do!)
7. Don’t overtweet (more than 20 a day is a bit spooky to most people).
8. Don’t talk about your food (unless you’re me!)
9. Don’t use Twitter like IM (use direct messages for that)
10. Don’t tweet all about you: tweet all about them.
11. And never, ever, ever invite your friends to be part of your Ninja dojo (unless you’re @cspenn), your mafia family (unless you’re @jgottinotdead), or to participate in a “what type of piercing am I?” quiz.

I have been thinking of building a web app myself for a while to simplify some of the work I do regularly on Twitter, mainly simplify the process finding and following the target users, but haven’t really found enough time to really get into it. Jonathan kindly offered his time to help me out so we will work together to get something out real soon. However, we won’t release it sooner until we have proved that the theory of the app actually does work.

Potential way of making money on twitter via sponsored tweets

Both ShoeMoney and JohnChow shared a same way of making money on twitter, with the sponsored tweet. Just another potential way of monetizing your twitter account with hard earned followers.

One thing quite obvious is that it’s just another game that only the celebrities will benefit the most. Generally, the more followers and influential you have, the more you can charge. Hence, the more money you can make. If you want to get into the game, increase the number of your followers on your twitter account first. You won’t be able to make any decent money with only several hundred followers or even a couple of thousand.

I have only got suggested $1.5 per tweet when I signed up last week but both John and ShoeMoney got $125 and/or $250. While the charge looks quite reasonable comparing how many followers I have with they have, I increased to $3 anyway, still no offer though.

And here it is, if you are interested in trying, you can sign up here.

Auto-Twittering through Friendfeed

Friendfeed is very feed friendly because it can be a central place that integrates all the feeds you subscribe together. Not only that, it can also automate things like sending tweets to twitter whenever you have new feeds coming in, which is very nice for both time-saving and marketing.

Friendfeed offers 57 services you can subscribe so far, pretty much covers all popular social network websites, blogs, twitter, flickr, delicious, Google Reader, YouTube, etc. etc. you name it. However, wandering around there is usually quite time consuming. I won’t suggest you go there too often unless you are a social media expert or enthusiasm. It’s a nice place for marketing but only merely ok for learning. I currently have 5 services added in my friendfeed account, including my blogs, bookmarks, feed readers, and twitter. I also set it up so new posts posted on my blogs and items shared through my Google Reader will be tweeted automatically to twitter. So far, it works great!

Setting up auto-twitter is a little tricky though. There is no obvious option in user setting for that. You will have to go a little route to get friendfeed authorized in your twitter account first in order to get the option shown up in user settings page.

First, in your friendfeed main page, click Post button near at the top, which turns on the cc Twitter option next to it.

Then, click Twitter link, which opens Twitter authorize page in a new window. Put your twitter username and password in, and click the bit Allow button.

Once it’s done, you will find the Twitter publishing preferences becomes available in your friendfeed settings. Clicking the Settings link next to your avatar will get you the page similar to the one below.

And once you see that, it’s all set. You can now enjoy the time saved from this automated process.

Happy friendfeeding, and twittering!

Why my site ranked 3 already in such a short time?

This site, overscaled.com, is only 3-week-old, even the domain is not older than 2 months either as I am writing this post today, but why the site’s page rank on Google already hit 3? What special thing I did on this site that made this happen so quick in such a short time?

There are many sites over on the web talk about Page Rank and how it works and how to get a higher rank. But none of them makes any sense to me why it gets 3 on a site that is only 2-week-old and never done any SEO on it.

One possible logical thinking top in my head is that it may be something to do my overscaled page on twitter which is ranked even higher at 4 on Google right now. Twitter recently changed its title tags that may in result get ranks higher for your twitter name. And searching for the keyword “Overscaled” has both this site and my twitter page listed on the first page. So that got me to believe that having the keyword “Overscaled” as part of my domain somehow makes Google to think the relationship between this site and my higher ranked twitter page, which helped getting higher rank in result.

That makes to believe that keywords in URL weight much more in ranking than in page self. And it doesn’t seem to matter whether the keywords are part of the domain name or the URL, as long as they show up in the address bar, which is also why I recommended choosing the “Month and Name” as the permalinks setting for your blog in my last post, a checklist of preparing a working WorkPress blog.

And that also proves that social media websites do help in some way when it comes to SEO. Time I spent on twitter for the last couple of month somehow got paid off in some way, if my possible logical thinking is right.