Twitter Numbers; What The Hey?
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Feb 16, 2011
I’ve been on Twitter almost 3 years now. When I first joined, if a person had a lot of followers they had just under 20,000 people. Now if you don’t have followers into the hundreds of thousands, you’re pretty much considered a loser.
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I guess I’m a loser. I have around 2,700 followers, and I’m following just over 1,000 people at the same time. In general, I’m thinking that’s not a bad ratio, and for the most part I’m okay with those figures.
For the most part, that is. I get a lot of requests each day from people I’ve never heard of saying they’re following me and giving me the option of following them. Actually, I guess it’s more accurate to say Twitter sends me these messages. What I do is look through almost every one of them to see what these people are all about, and how they communicate with others.
You know what? For the most part they’re junk. I mean, sometimes you have a profile that had lots of messages with fewer than 10 words. Sometimes they’re only quotes; often they’re just sales messages. Most of the time they’re links or retweets. That’s certainly a lot of Twitter blather.
Nothing really wrong with that, I guess, but is it, well, social? Actually, let me go back and say there is something wrong with it. Something I don’t like is that I know that most of these people are automatically signing up with each other and not looking at anyone who’s following them. They may not ever even go to Twitter and read any messages; they may not ever respond to anyone who sends them a message. Instead, they just hook up with everyone else and end up with some fantastic numbers.
What kind of numbers? I regularly am being contacted by people with at least 5,000 people following them. Often I have people with more than 20,000 others following them. And you know what? Some of those have never even posted a single message; what the hey?
I’d be jealous if I really thought these people were popular. One of those interesting things is that these people end up with very high Klout scores, and maybe that’s one reason I’m not trusting Klout at all. I wish I could remember who did it, but one guy actually set up a false account with software and did an experiment where it automatically not only went out searching for people to follow but automatically followed anyone who followed the account. Within a week his new account had over 5,000 followers, and it hadn’t send out a single tweet. And that account’s Klout score was over 65; it was amazing.
He then set up the account to automatically start posting messages, which were all links, and within 3 days the follower count increased to 7,000, and at the end of the week the Klout score was around 75.
Frankly, if it’s that easy to game the system, I’m not sure I want to deal with it. Sure, I want more influence, but at what cost? Is one being influential if they’re actually talking to no one? And if one’s posts are being retweeted but none of those people are ever stopping to check out the links, then are you really influential or just feeling a false sense of the word?
By the way, this isn’t a Twitter bash. I have lots of fun on Twitter, and I know that by posting my blog links to it from time to time that I’ve encouraged people to stop by my blogs for a quick visit here and there. I will say, though, that I lament much of the technology that’s made it kind of a mess here and there by people who could care less.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell
Klout
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Mar 27, 2010
There’s another neat little web service that will tell you what they’ve perceived is your clout on Twitter. Of course, it’s called Klout.
What you do is put in your Twitter account name, it does some calculations, and then it comes out and gives you what it calls a Kscore. My score is 56, and strangely enough, out of everyone I personally know, I have the highest score of all of them; pays to have been around awhile, I figure. Then I checked some other names, and the only person I could find who was higher than me, that I kind of know (since I wasn’t interested in looking up Oprah or Ashton Kutcher, or any other celebrities for that matter), is Guy Kawasaki, who has an 82; ouch!
Klout tells you a bit more than that. Without signing up, it also gives you the names of people who are following you that you’re influencing in more than just a totally casual manner, and how you’re influencing them, as well as who’s possibly influencing you and how they’re doing it. One oddity about that is that one of the categories of influence is “casual”, and Sire happens to be the one person in that area for me. And it will also tell you the Kscore of those people. There’s one guy who supposedly influences me a lot, yet I don’t know who he is, and I’m not even sure I’ve ever seen any of his Twitter posts.
If you register you can get other information as well, such as statistics and content and some type of influence tracker. I’m not sure what any of those things are because I didn’t register yet, and I’m not sure if I will or not. Sometimes when you register for those things, they automatically go onto Twitter and tell everyone, and if I can’t control that I’m not going to be a happy camper. There’s also the possibility that I wouldn’t be able to cancel if I signed up, which has happened to one other thing that I just can’t figure out how to get out of.
Anyway, it’s just another bit of fun people can have with Twitter; give it a shot.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
Are You Missing The “Social” Part Of Social Media?
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Mar 1, 2010
Okay, I get it. Twitter and Facebook can be used for business purposes. I know; I use them for business as well. Not that often, but obviously I do. Every blog post I write shows up on Twitter. One of my blogs shows up on Facebook every time I post. When I’m holding office hours I announce it on Twitter; never done it on Facebook, but I guess I should.
Yes, money can potentially be made from both Twitter and Facebook. But is that the only thing people can think of to do with it?
Remember when I wrote about Twit Cleaner a week ago? Man, that thing took off by storm. Not from my post, but from a lot of people who discovered it and decided to check things out. There were a lot of Twitter folks who suddenly saw their numbers drop drastically. I’m betting some of them have no idea why it happened, and think Twitter penalized them for something. Truthfully, all any of those people had to do was to look at their Twitter account every once in awhile and they’d have seen that many of their followers were talking about it, and looking through their accounts to see who was talking to them and who wasn’t.
Is it too much to ask for people to try to be social at least some of the time while they’re either on Twitter or Facebook? Do I have to keep repeating myself often enough on Twitter about not being selfish? Do I have to write my posts here and there about why Facebook seems to be lame as a social media entity?
I was reading another blog earlier today where a commenter wrote that people have no right to tell others how to use social media, and that if all he wants to do is use it to market his services and products that it’s his right. I don’t dispute that, though I hate it. What’s also people’s right is to be able to find a balance between being able to just talk to people and occasionally seeing something that they might be interested in that might also be an ad.
For instance, I’d have to say that I’ve gotten stricter in determining who I’m following when it comes to internet marketing or SEO topics. I don’t want to have to visit a site, then put my name and email address in to find out what something is about. Nope, not falling for that anymore; been on the internet way too long. These people are irksome enough to begin with, but on Twitter, since everything changes to a tiny URL, you never know where you’re going to end up.
Maybe I’m just being curmudgeonly; what are your thoughts on the social aspects of social media? Am I asking for too much?
Twit Cleaner
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Feb 21, 2010
What, another Twitter related thing? Yes indeed, but man, this is another great one.
The Twit Cleaner is an online program that will analyze every person you’re following and tell you things about them that you may not have been paying attention to. For instance, when it ran through mine, it told me who sends out only links and never engages with anyone, who sends mainly spam messages, who hasn’t been around for awhile, who’s not following you, and a couple other things.
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Once you’re done, you have the chance to go through the list, determine who you want to keep following, and then, if you’re following fewer than 2,000 people, you can click the button and it will start unfollowing people. It’s careful not to unfollow everyone at once, as I guess it worries about triggering a Twitter reaction of some kind, but eventually it will eliminate all the folks you tell it to.
In my case, it highlighted 378 people I was following as actionable, and I decided to save fewer than 10 of those folks. So, at some point my follow number will be reduced by 368 folks, people who won’t even know I’ve dropped them since Twit Cleaner basically said they don’t interact with me anyway.
This is crucial, and it’s great. A major lament has been that social media hasn’t proven to be all that social, and you’ve seen me gripe about it often enough. The way Twitter had it set up, it would have taken me hours to go through my list and weed out many of these people. This is great, and I’m happy to share it with y’all.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
Clearing Away Irritations In 2010
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Jan 2, 2010
Back in September on my business blog, titled Mitch’s Blog, I wrote a second post on the topic of tolerations. The original post on that topic was only about a paragraph long, so I wanted to boost it up some more. On that post there’s a link to a pdf file called 1001 Tolerations, which pretty much means things we put up with instead of getting them out of our lives and making us feel better about things.
Well, this is a new year, and I think it’s time for me to clear some things out of my life that have been irritating me in some fashion. Actually, most of us should think about doing that from time to time because we all tend to allow certain things to drag us down, even if it’s only occasionally. For instance, you have someone who you call a friend, yet you avoid them because they bring you down whenever you talk to them. All they talk about is themselves and their problems; they never ask you how you feel or even listen when you try to talk; it’s all about them.
I don’t have anything like that in my life, but I do have some things that I will be eliminating. One is going through my email address books and eliminating anyone who hasn’t responded to anything I’ve sent in at least a year. I think that’s not a bad place to start, but I might even go back further than that; I’m not sure yet. I go through my email all the time, and I see these email addresses of people I send stuff to that never write back. I tolerate that, but no more; they’re gone. Well, kind of gone; I’ll save the email addresses in a file, but at least I won’t be seeing them anymore.
Two, remember my post against Disqus? Well, I’m now resolving that any blogs I’m following that has Disqus on them, or any other blogs I go to that send me a message saying I have to subscribe to find out if someone has commented back to something I’ve commented on, I’m deleting from my blog reader and moving on. Any new blogs I come to that has Disqus I’m not even reading. Now, I know some of you have it on your blogs, and if I like you, I may not delete the blog, like our friend Peter; we go back a long way after all. But Peter, sorry, I’m not commenting anymore because I hate getting that email every time asking me to subscribe.
Three, I’m going through all the blogs in my reader and I’m going to make sure I’m following people who are talking about stuff I really care about. Also, I’m going to drop anyone who hasn’t written a post in 3 months. And, while I’m doing that, I’m going to find the time to get to Twitter and release people who I started following a long time ago, who either aren’t talking anymore or aren’t talking about anything I care about. I follow nearly 1,400 people, and I’m not going to say that’s too many, but I am going to say that I do listen to a lot of folks, rather follow a lot of folks, who aren’t really talking to anyone, but instead are always selling. Twitter isn’t supposed to be a one way conversation, just like blogging isn’t supposed to be a one way conversation either.
You know what? At a certain point, we all deserve to have more positivity in our lives. And sometimes, heck, all the time, it’s up to us to make our own happiness and get rid of those things that help to make us unhappy. It’s time for me to do that; what about you?
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