DoshDosh
Doesn’t add any value for me because it simply repeats what has been already mentioned before. It’s just noise IMO.
So others won’t suffer the same fate of being rickrolled. Still love ya, Shady. :)
Dude. I’m tired. Not interested in another long fight. Twitter is not a marriage. It’s not till death do us apart. Just because I said I’ll follow you doesn’t mean I can’t change my mind afterwards. To say that I’m ’misleading’ my Twitter followers is absurd. You’re really suggesting that once you say you’ll follow someone, you can’t ever drop them from your follow list?People unfollow each other everyday on Twitter. People unfollow me everyday. It’s nothing personal and it doesn’t have to be. It’s not devious, manipulative or deceptive. In any case, on the day before I unfollowed everyone, I spent the entire day tweeting about what I was about to do... personally apologizing because I could not read so many updates anymore. Many people replied saying that they understood and I debated the issue with some other users. It was a wholesome experience. And there was no grudges or whatever.Although there are some people like you who think that I’m cunning or dishonest for doing so, but hey.. I can’t control what people think. I can only offer explanations, apologies and do what I think is best for me. There’s certainly nothing deceptive about what I did. I even followed people for more than a year before I decided that I really couldn’t manage. If someone followed me for a while, found that he/she lost interest in me or would prefer to have a less cluttered timeline... and he/she made tweets explaining/apologizing for what he/she is going to do... I would totally understand. Heck, an apology is not even needed for me. It’s just Twitter. Why make this a big issue? Sheesh.
>>>All I did was quote Twittercounter’s estimate. If you have a problem with their math/trending (which shows you losing 60 followers a day), you might want to chat with them.I actually don’t have a problem with Twittercounter at all. I know I’m losing followers. So you’re right there.The point I made about the articles and my blog is to show that I’m accumulating Twitter follows organically as opposed to manually inflating it by following other users (as you believed). I think the problem partially lies in terminology.. since you do know how the mass-following strategy works, its pretty clear that what I’m doing doesn’t fall in that category. Just following people who tweets you is not mass-following, after all I’m just following the people who already follow me. That’s what I did. I followed people who already followed me. That’s not what I call mass-following. As you should know, the mass-following we seem to be talking about is the act of following users who don’t follow you in order to get them to follow back. I didn’t do anything of that sort so I just wanted to clarify that. >>>>I never said, or implied, either of those comments so please let’s not go playing defense when no one was on offense. Fair enough. My bad for being defensive. >>>I didn’t. I asked a question because I vividly remembered you tweeting something along the lines of "if you’re following me and I’m not following you, tweet me and I’ll follow you"I said you implied that I faked my follower count because of this sentence of yours: "after gaining a lot of followers with the follow everyone technique, which the article seems to advise against."My article did advise against mass-following.. and I did say that people who do it are faking their follower count. So when you say that sentence above, I took it to mean that you believed I was faking my follower count by mass following. Anyway its no biggie. Maybe I’m just over sensitive.I did ask for people to tweet so I could follow because I wanted to know who was out there actually reading, so I could follow and check that out. This was a spur of the moment thing just for interaction. And completely nothing like the follow-everybody tactic I mentioned in the article... that’s why I felt as if I was misrepresented. You should know very well then just following people who already follow you doesn’t increase your follow count, it is maintains it because of mutuality. I mean, these people are already following me ANYWAY. It shouldn’t really be called a mass-following tactic, which as stated in my article, has slightly negative connotations because it would imply that I followed people simply to get a return follow.That’s not what I did at all. >>>>I didn’t ask that. I follow under 100 people and always have because of that very reason. You didn’t ask but the reasons I offered an answer was because you said that "he unfollowed en mass after gaining a lot of followers.." .... so I just wanted to clarify that my unfollowing en mass didn’t happen because I achieved my goal of getting ’a lot of followers’. I would have done it anyway. >>>Actually, I used to follow you. Back when you were mass following in return (but in the earlier days of it). I unfollowed because I follow very few people who follow an amount of people I’d gather is impossible to keep up with (therefore the follow back is more token then interest). I guess you must have missed that.I know you followed me. But didn’t know why you unfollowed. Thanks for letting me know. Anyway, just for the record... it was always more interest than token (even though yes, I admit I didn’t read every tweet)...I mainly followed you because I’ve been reading your blog for a while and enjoy the way you think/write/tweet. Very candid.I hope there’s no bad feelings over this. Apologies if I seemed rude but I just hate to seen as a person who earned his audience by fake-following everybody on masse. I’m proud of the people who follow me and grateful for them so had to offer a clarification. Thanks for taking the time to reply, Rae.
@SugarraeI respect you a lot and I’m actually following you on Twitter because I find you very interesting but...you should probably do a more thorough investigation if you’re trying to accuse me doing something I didn’t do. Here are the facts: 1. I never followed everyone who followed me. Go to Twitterholic and look at my history, I always followed less than I followed. The way I follow is not mass-following, it’s just turning on auto-follow to reciprocate people who followed me. There is a big difference there. A mass follower follows more than the no. of followers he/she has and always has a ratio that is similar. Go check out the folks in the Top 200 list on Twitterholic, you’ll see a bunch of ordinary people (non-celebs) with upwards of 70K+ followers. Go see their follow ratio history, that’s what a mass-follower looks like. I have a blog with over 24K subscribers.In the past I did turn auto-follow on because I wanted to reciprocate people who follow me.. because a big number of them were readers of the blog. I’m also ranking in the top 3 for multiple heavy traffic twitter keywords like ’get twitter followers’, ’ways to use twitter’, ’how to use twitter’ etc... and I’m getting new followers everyday from those articles, which accounts for the constant growth. This is on top of the fact that I’m not a noob (despite what you think) and actually have a decent reputation in my field. To imply that I faked my follower count by manipulating it with mass-follows is quite honestly, insulting. 2. Trust me, if I really were into mass-following in order to get followers, I would have been doing it since April 2007... and I would have upwards of 200,000+ followers now instead of the 13K I have. I’m not joking.Why stop at 13K when I can get more? Right now if I start an account and use some automated tools to do mass-following, I could get 10K in 15 days. Easy. And the graph will look as if I’m following 1K a day and then dropping and following again to accumulate followers. THAT’s what mass following looks like. So yeah, I didn’t ’learn from my experience’ because I didn’t play that game on @doshdosh. I have had multiple twitter accounts and I have experimented with this strategy prior to writing about it but never on @doshdosh. So why did I unfollow people? Because I couldn’t keep up with the updates and was sick of all the clutter in the timeline. Believe it or not, when you follow a few thousand people... things get messy, even when you can use groups or filters. And I just didn’t see the point of giving people fake attention. I wanted to reboot and start again from the bottom up, slowly adding people that I find interesting or people who I have a relationship with.Mass-following was never my focus from day one and since you haven’t been following me at all or keeping a close eye on my profile, I’m sure you must have missed that.
Story: My Week Away from Twitter
I think one downside of using Twitter everyday is ’mind clutter’. It’s not really about productivity, but maybe about sub-consciously losing focus or drive due to the insertion of too much irrelevant information. I’m concerned with that happening. I used to do Twitter pretty much everyday but have recently stopped twittering on the weekends, as a form of detox.
Authority bloggers like Darren won’t get a permaban on most social networks because of their massive clout. Its no surprise that StumbleUpon retracted it because he has the ability to kick up a stink. And nobody really likes the bad PR. What I’m more concerned with is their possible policies of blanket bans on small-time bloggers who don’t have influence or have smaller friend networks.
I forgot to post this earlier, but here’s the link to the digg thread for this article. It’s good to hear what the digg user base thinks of this potential deal. Some like it, some don’t.
FTA: "For micro-blogging the power is in the conversation and right now Twitter wins hands-down. During Twitters technical issues, where it seemed like it was down more than it was up, many people tried out other services, however the majority of users have always come back to Twitter in some capacity"I actually think Plurk handles conversation in a better way and during the outtages, many switched over to Plurk and never looked back. Twitter will always have its front-runner advantages and their position (from a macro-perspective) does look unshakeable (much like Digg for social news) but they’ll always only be ’King’ to some and not all users, which itself suggests that there’s not just room for other services but certain notable flaws with Twitter itself. That itself is worth noting, apart from the usual look at userbase size + traffic.
I’ve actually seen this eccentric behavior before. Last year on Sphinn, I saw someone submitting a propeller story to Sphinn, and the propeller story linked to a digg story which linked to the source. I guess he hoped that sphinn users will go to propeller to vote it up and then propeller users will go to digg to vote it up and then he’ll get a frontpage. Noobs crack me up sometimes.
Kinda similar to my post on ways to use Twitter. We had some almost identical points. I guess there aren’t many different/unique ways to use it.
I got a pop-up layer pushing an opt-in newsletter/course when I clicked over to the site. That’s a tad annoying for some social media audiences.
Pursuing sites that interest you the most doesn’t mean you can’t diversify, unless you only have one interest in your life. And seriously...what has PR got to do with influence or profit? Unless your site is not getting any search traffic at all (cuz of the ’PR slap’), its irrelevant. PR doesn’t negate the fact that passion drives and motivates web publishers to excel or strive towards profit or influence.Perhaps you misread my article.
There are many reasons you do not want to have someone in your friend list who doesn’t friend you back. It’s not a quesiton of "sweating" it, if it serves no purpose having them as a friend what’s the point?And these reasons are? It is ’sweating’ it when you’re meticulously checking/rechecking to see if all your friends are mutual on SU. There is a point to being friends (getting served up their stumbled pages) but there is no real solid advantage for mutual friending. And I’m talking purely in the context of online marketing through SU (which is the point of this post)Of course if you are interested in their posts friend them, but you want to be getting into the position of people friending you, being a follower all the time means you are not that influential.Not entirely true. Influence does not increase or decrease if you are following many users or not. If that were the case, we would all have a influence ceiling of 200 for SU.We all know stumble visibility is the fanbase, I’ve mentioned that in a previous comment. I guess I’m trying to say you don’t need mutual friending to build a fanbase or influence.It depends on how well you market your brand through the social service. I’ve never conscientously practiced mutual friending (in fact I don’t even have 200 friends right now, never did.) but I have over 1,200 fans on SU. It’s all about evangelism, active usage and driving targeted traffic to the profile.People judge you on how many friends and fans you have, if out of 200 of the people you friend a low percentage friend you back, to me that says you don’t know what you are talking about and that effects your brand. I disagree with that. How would that reflect on a person to say that they don’t know what they are talking about? Perhaps this is how you use SU but I don’t think many people even bother to click on all 200 profiles in your friends list to see if others have friended you back. I know you’re talking about the fan/friend ratio but since SU has a low limit of 200 friends, it’s not a big deal. This is more apparent on services like Twitter, where user can be following tens of thousands with only hundreds following them back. In fact, I could unfriend every mutual friend on SU right now and I doubt it’ll reflect anything bad about my brand or if it’ll mean that I don’t know what I’m talking about. This article is about being a ’superstar’ or a popular profile on SU for marketing purposes and I still maintain that mutual friending is not important at all. Personally, I have done quite well without that focus.
However, there might be an argument that "fans" are more likely to remain fans if you are mutual friends. And these are probably not the friends worth having. With the size of StumbleUpon’s userbase, you don’t need this focus on exclusively having mutual friends. It’s such a limited way of looking at things. Friend those whose stumbles you like to make sure you get served up the best information. It’s like subscribing to a blog: Would you only subscribe to someone who subscribes to your blog?Friend network strategies are a little different on other social websites. But honestly, if you want to be a social media superstar on a service like Stumbleupon, the no. of mutual friends is the last thing you want to sweat about. Evangelizing the service and driving interested traffic to your profile is far more important.
"Having more friends and fans means your stumbles will be seen by more people. Stumbleupon allows you to friend only 200 people, so make sure each one you friend, friends you back."I don’t really see the reasoning behind this tip. I think there’s too much of a marketing emphasis on mutual friends, this is not necessary at all if you’re looking to use SU to build a brand or market your site/s. If you’re talking about dialog, most of the active SU users I know hardly use the send-to feature (the only feature-based benefit of being mutual friends) and communication lines are still open via SU’s internal mailbox. If you’re talking about having your stumbles seen by more people, its really about increasing your fanbase, irregardless of mutual friendship. Stumble visibility is fans not friends. You befriend users with shared interests because you want to be recommended their stumbles when you click on the toolbar: to remove them because they don’t friend you back does not make sense.
Many ways to use Twitter and I do agree that too many see it only as a broadcast platform, after all... there is no faster way to send a link/request/message out to hundreds or thousands of people. It beats IM, email and any other tool out there for call-to-action response and immediacy.But if you only use Twitter for close friends and people you know, it’s intimate and awesome.
Nice lil ramble by Mark but the title is a tad misleading, I didn’t really learn about how to really make friends and influence people online.
Story: Rebuilding Your Blog Groove
Cutting back on Digg is an excellent idea... she can be a real vampire sometimes...
Story: YABL Trusted Google sites
These sites might have been on Feedburner pre-Google acquisition.. I do recall seeing such a page when I was researching Feedburner for my feedflares article last year...
Thanks for volunteering, Brent and Jeff! We all appreciate your efforts.
Story: The Mighty Desphinn Arrives - Power to the People