Working out the Twitter Mafia

There has been a big realisation: Twitter as a micro blog site, is a great communication and Marketing tool where professionals and brands have discovered its power to connect with the world to network and to engage with potential employers and clients. The aim is to get followers and to follow people who you share common interests, you would like to network or do business with, or you simply like what they have to say.

Although at first sight, Twitter might have appeared to be a very clever way to waste copious amounts of your time: You could buy into the idea of fame and what it would feel like to rub shoulders with your idols and favourite celebrities in general by getting to know their innermost secrets and thoughts by becoming their follower ‘friend’.  Also,  you may have wrongly believed everyone cared about everything you had to say and your followers were your ‘fans’ – all because you became, all of a sudden an important person or a new all time celebrity.

The truth is that the Twitter revolution is growing rapidly, more and more brands are beginning to realise the benefits the micro-blog site can offer, however they are quick to realise that maintaining a presence online is not as simple as it looks.  It is therefore important businesses have a strategy and plan in place to ensure regular tweets; updates are in order for you to successfully engage with the world.

Some businesses believe succeeding in Twitter it’s just a matter of the number of followers they have.  Therefore companies providing online applications that are trying to capitalise on the Twitter swift rise.  Some of them claim to gain you Twitter followers for you to appear more popular in exchange for money.  My advice would be – Don’t Buy Twitter Followers

Buying followers, means you would go against Twitter’s rules and may have your account terminated.  It’s also considered the worst way to promote yourself, as any followers sold to you are unlikely to be real or even interested in what you have to say. Some operators also use very unethical means to add them to your account (such as creating thousands of fake accounts with the only purpose to follow accounts in exchange of money). The key skill is to engage with followers and listen to what they have to say too.

There are other so far accepted, promotional methods to grow your Twitter presence, monitor your account, schedule and publish tweets.  Some could be considered of dubious value.

Have you ever come across Twiends for instance?  A promotional method to grow your Twitter presence, they propose seeds as the ideal way to grow your social network consistently each day. Those seeds can be employed to get more exposure and either be featured or encourage and reward accounts for following you.  They then can use those seeds to pay for other accounts to follow them. The result here could be they may only follow you to collect seeds and not because they have anything in common with you and they are likely to un-follow you afterwards.

What happens when you are following too many people?  Either by extreme enthusiasm or by using applications where you get rewarded the more people you follow.  Then you can use I Unfollow to get rid of those accounts you didn’t want to follow to start with any way or the ones that have become inactive for years.

By this time, you might have become suspicious of how many of your followers were either expecting you to follow them back and you haven’t, or had only followed you to get their reward seeds. What to do now? – Despair not. Another tool can be used, such as Who Unfollowed Me to find out who has un-followed you. Also, it can be used to find out who is following you but you are not following back and those you are following but they are not following you back.

href=”http://timely.is/”>Timely, an analytics and optimisation tool that adds your tweets to a scheduler and publishes them when they are likely to have higher impact.  When you run out of ideas they offer suggestions for tweets although they seem to always be the same ones. It can also be used to calculate the reach of your tweets.

Have you ever thought it may be interesting to see how many dead accounts you are following? Manage Flitter can do just that.  It is a popular monitoring tool to manage twitter followers and non followers. It shows if they follow you or not, if they are talkative or quiet, or even if they are inactive.