Too Many Facebook Friends?
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Dec 22, 2011
Do you have too many Facebook friends? Rather, do you have so many that there are people you’re not sure why you’re following anymore, whether they’re updating or not?
 |
I ask this because I’m often reading where people have said that they’re about to start whittling down their Facebook connections because of whatever reason they decide to pick on. It got me to thinking that maybe I should take a look at some of the more than 550 people I’m connected to there to see if I should be paring my list.
First, why would one want to pare their list? Lots of reasons; I’ll name some here. One, just too many people, such that you miss the stream of people you really care about. Two, you might not like some of the updates you see from certain people. Three, you may never even talk to or hear from someone you’re connected to. Four, they might not even be active on Facebook anymore; what’s the point? Five, you have some folks still connected you that you have now decided you don’t want seeing any of your updates anymore. I think that’s enough for my purposes right now.
I decided I was going to pare my list down as well; I certainly know there’s a lot of people on there that I added for some reason or another that maybe I don’t need to be connected to anymore. I went looking for something like what Twitter has to help me out; you know, Friend or Follow or maybe Twit Cleaner, but I couldn’t find a single thing. This meant that I would have to do it manually, looking at names, looking at their accounts, and decide that way instead.
You know what? That turns out to be way harder than I could have imagined. I didn’t want to just drop someone whose name I didn’t recognize because they might be subscribed to my Facebook business page (by the way, why aren’t YOU subscribed to my Facebook business page?) and that would be insulting to them. That and they might have connected with me because they’re friends of someone else I know better, and I don’t want to insult them either.
I looked up some names I didn’t know and saw that they were current on the site, and they weren’t putting out anything that was irritating me. I decided to leave them, just in case. I saw people whose pictures I recognized for some reason, even if I couldn’t ever remember seeing them saying anything in my stream or to me. And I actually found a few people who fit my criteria for deleting; nothing new on the site, few friends, etc.
That was kind of the problem; after almost 45 minutes (I’m surprised I stayed that long) I’d found only 3 people that I decided I no longer needed to be connected to. I think I’d only looked at 15 accounts; at more than 550 people, throwing out the at least 100 people I know very well, I realized that would be 30 hours worth of time that I’d never get back; no thank you.
I’m a lot more judgmental these days in who I’ll add to my Facebook account, but that won’t help me for my past connections. Actually, I have to admit that I was surprised that I didn’t see the names of a few people I know I’d connected with; did they up and drop me first or leave Facebook without saying anything? One of those people was supposed to be my college roommate my junior year, then he ended up not coming back. He reached out to be first, then totally disappeared; his name no longer even appears on Facebook, which I’d thought people had said was hard to do.
No matter. I’m sticking with the people I’m connected to, whether they care or not. However, if anyone finds a program that works like the two I mentioned works with Twitter, please let me know and I might revisit it. Right now, too much work. 
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell
Social Media Marketing Is Just Marketing
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Nov 8, 2011
Last night I was at the top grocery store in my area and ran into someone that was at the conference I got to present at last week. We talked a little bit about some of the programs that were put on, and then we talked about his general opinion of the event.
 |
He mentioned that there was so much going on that he knew he’d be skipping some things here and there, like my presentation, because he wanted to take in as much as possible about things he didn’t know much about. He said that he talked to a lot of people who seemed confused at the end of the day, which I knew would happen because if you don’t know a lot about something going in and get inundated with lots of information there’s no way you can retain it all.
What he also said was that as he listened to a lot of the presentations he came to this conclusion; social media marketing shouldn’t be all that much different than traditional marketing, as it’s only a new platform and not a new way of marketing. His point was that the idea of marketing is to attract someone’s interest, get them to at least look at everything you have to offer, and then hopefully buy something before leaving. This takes research to figure out just what you have to offer a potential buyer and then figuring out how to make your message stand out to encourage that buyer to become a customer.
I couldn’t disagree with his general premise, yet I felt he was possibly missing the bigger picture. The reality is that social media marketing gives one the opportunity to branch out beyond their local area and reach a much larger audience in a lot shorter time. With the proper connections, I can talk about my latest project (which, by the way, is my editing a book of early newsletters from my primary business at the moment) and if I get the right audience to notice it the message can be seen by thousands is less than a day. Other than buying a commercial to show during a prime time TV event how many other ways are there to reach that many people? And the costs… forget about it!
Social media marketing also doesn’t have to be that direct to work. In the past I’ve mentioned that any major business not following their name or industry on Twitter is doing themselves a disservice because it’s not giving them the opportunity to either thank people that say nice things about them or correct something that a customer has complained about. These days it’s incumbent to address issues sooner than later because, though one can recover from bad press, it can be harder to do so. Just the other day I had someone comment on an old post of mine complaining about a particular affiliate that didn’t pay me; even when someone might think an issue is gone, online it’s never gone, especially if the company didn’t fix the issue (weasels; still never paid me).
Overall he’s correct; social media marketing is just marketing. But it’s also so much more, and anyone that doesn’t believe this will eventually run into the wall. On that day I hope they call me or someone else to help them get out of it, and then hope it’s not too late.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell
Taking Twitter Unfollows Too Personally
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Sep 12, 2011
Some of you know that I don’t often read blogs I won’t comment on because of their comment systems, most specifically things like Disqus. Still, every once in awhile I get intrigued by a topic, and like almost anyone else I just have to check it out to see what the hubbub is.
 |
It’s in this vein that I read a post by Chris Brogan titled The Great Twitter Unfollow Experiment of 2011. He talks about making the decision to stop following all the people on his list, which was around 131,000, and how people literally freaked when he first made the announcement, then did it. Some people thought he hated them; others thought he was mad at them. Many decided to tell him he they were dropping him because he was dropping them. Frankly, it was kind of pathetic.
Why he announced it to begin with is interesting. I don’t know that I’d have felt I had to announce that I was unfollowing everyone. Truth be told, if he had just done it without announcing it probably less than 2% of the people who he was following would have noticed immediately, as some people have notification systems that tell them when someone drops them, and others would have just thought Twitter was messing with them when he followed certain people back because it’s been known by some people that every once in a while there are random drops of people.
Also, did you see where I mentioned that he was following 131,000 people? Folks, I have problems following the around 970 people I’m connected with on that level, so what the heck was he supposed to be expected to do with 131,000 people? I mean, that’s pretty ridiculous when you think about it, and he probably did what I did for the first month I was on Twitter, just followed everyone, until he got smart. But by that time the dye was cast; wow, 131,000 people?
I unfollow people on Twitter all the time. I run both Twit Cleaner and Friend or Follow. One tells me who’s not following me, which is a short list at this juncture since I unfollow most people who aren’t following me because almost all of them reached out to me first. The other one tells me if people engage others and the types of tweets they send out. Y’all know me; if there’s no possibility that someone I’m connected to will ever talk to me I’m outta there.
See, I don’t take people unfollowing me personally. I expect some people to unfollow me for one reason or another. Unless someone announces it on their way out I could care less. That may sound cold and direct but I talk about so many different things, and I do have my own political bent, that I know some folks who follow me won’t stick with me if their positions are different than mine. I do the same thing after all.
I miss people more on my blogs than I ever would on Twitter. It’s why I was so frantic days ago when the comments wouldn’t work on my blog. I know people came and I also see how comments have slowed up; some folks may not have gotten the message that things had messed up here. Still, I’ll write for whomever decides to stop by and say hello, offer a comment, or watch a stupid video I might put up. And since I haven’t put up a stupid video in a long time, I’m wondering how many of you have heard of Keenan Cahill, this 16-year-old YouTube sensation with a disease called Maroteaux-Lamy Syndrome who not only lip syncs to the videos of famous people, but actually gets the famous people to appear in his videos as well. Don’t believe me? Check this one out with him & 50 Cent; now that’s props!
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell
Why I Don’t Over-Automate On Twitter
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Aug 24, 2011
“Just thought I’d mention that if you see a post from me at 2 or 3 in the morning, I actually wrote it.” – Mitch Mitchell
I tend to stay up pretty late; yeah, I’m nuts. I get my energy around 9:30 or 10PM and then I start working really well. At a certain point I finish a project and unless I’m totally exhausted it’s a great time to go back and look at Twitter to see what has gone on either during the day or for at least a few hours.
 |
Some people locally have commented on my late night tweets because they wake up and see a bunch of things from me. Actually, I never knew any of them paid much attention to anything I put out so that’s illuminating. However, like most people they tend to believe that everyone else is on the same time frame they’re on, and thus think that by the time I’m writing everyone else has gone to bed.
The world’s a big place, and as I’ve talked about on this blog, the majority of people that actually comment in my blogs don’t live in my area. So if I’m posting at 3 in the morning and someone’s still awake, they’re probably on the West Coast except for my friend that lives in Nebraska and works night, or they’re in Australia where it’s actually already well into their next day, or in Europe where it’s morning and they’re just getting started on their day.
One also sees a lot of other noise, if you will, when you stay up really late. There’s a ton of automation, the same messages over and over from people you know aren’t awake, messages I’ve seen many times during the day. Frankly it starts getting irritating, and one reason I actually write some of those folks early in the morning is to see if any of them respond. Of course I know that almost no one is going to respond, but I figure maybe they’ll respond in the morning when I’ve awakened.
Nope. Truth be told most people that do a lot of automation aren’t interested in what anyone else has to say for the most part. They haven’t quite learned the lesson that social media isn’t really only about “them”, but about everyone, communications, relationships, and networking.
I only do one little bit of automation. For almost every new blog post I publish I use Twitter Tools to put the notification out that I’ve written a new blog post. I do that because I tend to write a lot of posts all at once on all my blogs (remember I have 5 of my own and many that I write for others) in advance.
Often I’m actually sitting at the computer when a blog post goes out but I’m doing something else. However, I check to see if my blog posts are showing up usually within the hour if I’m not live on Twitter. Actually, every once in awhile I’m on Twitter when a post of mine shows up; that’s pretty neat.
If you see a blog post of mine in the afternoon or evening, you can be 99.8% sure that I’m posting it live. It’s either a repost of an earlier blog post or, if something’s hit me that I just have to talk about immediately, it’s brand new. Back in November I did an experiment testing 2-a-day blog posts with the second being advertisements for some of my products, and in that case those were written in advance. I haven’t done that since.
Here are my questions for you. How much automation are you doing on Twitter? How much actual engagement are you doing around the time messages are coming your way? Are you actually engaging people on Twitter at all? And how do you feel when you see messages from people that are almost all automation, since we know it when we see it?
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell
The Chase For Influence Via Klout
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Jul 31, 2011
What started out as one thing kind of turned into a little research project for myself, and now I’m ready to talk about it. It’s the chase for influence, and I used Klout to measure it because I wanted to get a better handle on just how it might work and not work. Here’s the tale.
 |
On June 24th I put out a post called 21 Of The Top Black Social Media Influencers. I wrote that for a specific reason which I talked about on the post, so I’m not going to bring it up here.
I did some things with that post that I don’t usually do. With our friend Ileane’s help I first looked through Klout scores as my criteria for who to select. Once the post was out I made sure to try to find some, not all, of the people I’d mentioned in the post. Actually only a couple because I wanted to see if those people would find it for themselves. I went to Facebook and selected certain people and asked for their help in promoting the post. I didn’t do it on Twitter because I thought if some people didn’t see their name in the list they might not be as happy with it.
That post got a lot of response. Most of the people mentioned in the post stopped by to thank me. It got retweeted all over the place for many days. It got mentioned in a couple of radio programs; Ileane was influential in getting that done. And it even got mentioned in passing on a few other blogs.
And something strange happened. By using social media, my influence, through Klout, suddenly jumped. It actually went up 3 points in 4 or 5 days; pretty amazing since Klout only used to move once a week. So I thought I’d see what I could do to keep it going high.
I now have a smartphone and I have an app I use called Tweetcaster to keep me connected with Twitter; works great for me. Anyway, I knew that Twitter was the biggest factor in Klout rankings so I undertook a new role. I started talking to a lot of people on Twitter via their messages, and I started retweeting many links as well, almost always adding some kind of comment. I often went and left a message on the post as well, but Klout doesn’t count blogs right now.
I did that for a couple of weeks, and I found that not only did many people talk back to me at least once or twice but my Klout score jumped up a bit more. In the next two weeks it jumped 2 more points; I was on the verge of 70. When you hear that the average is around 19 (I wonder how they get that since most people in my stream seem to be coming in closer to 30) that’s pretty good.
But you know what? That can be fun but it can also be tiring. It’s definitely time consuming, and when you’re not making any money doing it and it’s pulling you away from work, you start to ease off some. That’s what I did; I still go in here and there but nothing like that two week period. And what’s happened? My Klout score has decreased two spots, and will probably fall some more.
The experiment proves one thing; Klout really loves it when you play the game. And playing the game can be tough; after all, most of us have other things to do. Since I refuse to do a lot of automation I know that to keep my score up I’d have to continue at a pace that’s unreasonable. Actually, I’ve noticed that automation hasn’t really helped Karen’s blog all that much as far as her Klout score,and she’s all over the place. This tells me that Klout can discern automation from real engagement.
 |
Another experiment that’s yielded some answers that I probably already knew, but just had to test. Unless you’re making money with it all, this type of influence definitely isn’t the way to go; whew! I wonder if my influence would grow if I wore funny hats…
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell
I'm Just Sharing is where I share my thoughts on internet marketing, writing, blogging and many other things. You never know what I'll be posting on. So keep coming back, read, enjoy, and buy something! ;)
