Plenty of food for thought.

What can and can’t you say on Twitter?

A student who made racially offensive comments about footballer Fabrice Muamba on Twitter has been jailed for 56 days – the latest case where a comment made on social media has landed someone in court.

Read the full article here…

So what is this retweeting malarkey all about then? Twitter users will be used to seeing and sending retweets but there are benefits to both the original poster and the retweeter.

So first of all, how do you retweet? Ok, this is easy. Firstly you can copy and paste the original tweet and place ‘RT’ at the beginning, not forgetting to put in the originators name to give them credit. Or, secondly, you can hover over the tweet and click on the ‘retweet’ link, and this will then forward the message to all of your followers.

Applications such as Tweetdeck also allow you to edit the message before retweeting it which can be very handy if you want to reduce the size back below 140 characters.

To find what you have retweeted and which of your posts have been retweeted by others click on the ‘Your Tweets, Retweeted’ tab and a pane will open to the right with all the details in it.
Right, I’m tired of writing ‘retweet’ and Ezine articles will accuse me of keyword stuffing, so I’ll move on and just refer to them as RTs from this moment forward.

Why should you RT? Well RT-ing provides value to your followers, so it is important to only RT tweets that you find genuinely interesting or informative. If you are providing quality content in your twitter feed then you are more likely to attract new followers and retain those that you already have. Also people are more likely then to RT your content, giving you further exposure.

Don’t however RT any old content in the hope that this will be reciprocated, as you are diluting the value of your Twitter account and diminishing your followers twitter experience.

If you are worried that you may be sending followers away from you then don’t be. For the reasons outlined above, quality RTs only add value to your account and will encourage people to follow you more and pay attention to what you have to say.

I should really add some images to this post as it looks a little dull, but just don’t have the time at the moment.

Speak soon

Mark

Twitter Following – How to Increase.

I have had a lot of emails recently regarding increasing your Twitter following so I have decided to post the details here, it is short and to the point, hope it helps.

The way Twitter works is that you follow people, and they follow you back, or vice versa. Unfortunately there are some strict limits applied. You can follow up to 2,000 people but after that you are limited to following only 1.1 times the number of people that are following you. So if you have 10,000 followers, you can follow up to 11,000 people and no more. There is also a daily limit to the number of people you can follow of 500.

The next issue is that a lot of people who you follow will not follow you back, so it is essential  to periodically unfollow everyone who has not followed you back, then you can start adding followers again.

So, to increase your following you will need to follow lots of people (up to 500 per day), then you will need to unfollow all those who do not follow you back (I would normally leave it 7 days before unfollowing).

Using these basic  rules your following will slowly, but surely, increase. This takes time and patience but as you get more followers the rate of increase will speed up.

Also if you haven’t already, get registered on Twellow.com

I do offer a service to do all of the above for you, but this comes at a cost of £50 ($75) per month. Email me at mark@webtrafficseo.co.uk if you are interested in this service

Hope the above helps and remember that you really have to be patient to grow your twitter following. If you follow the above rules then over time you will be able to build up a large following. There’s lots of ebooks and advice out there, and various tools, but the above is pretty much all I have used to get my 70,000+ followers.

Thanks

Mark

ps. If you have found this post useful please link to it or leave a comment. Thanks!

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ppps. If you have any of your own tips for increasing Twitter following please feel free to add them in the comments. Cheers!

Ok, so approximately 75% of my followers this morning were newly created spam accounts. How can you tell? Well it’s not easy, but there are 3 particular ones doing the rounds at the moment. These are indentifiable by the contents of their ‘Bio’. There are literally thousands of these accounts being created so whatch out. If an account has any of the following 3 Bio’s then give it a miss, it is automatically created, and spam.

1. Discuss Yoga, Discover life, tell you YOGA STORY,YOGA DIARY,YOGA KNOWLEDGE,WEIGHT LOSS,BEAUTY – These twitter accounts lead to a site yoga-diary.us AVOID

2. I’m an ordinary people who are using twitter. I’d like to collect useful twitter tips and categorise them properly .

3. This the land of trick,here you find some trick about wordpress,google adsens,twitter,joomly,seo firefox. – These accounts lead to a site called dailyonetrick.com AVOID

4. Look out for the name “Michelle Yeong”. This is another automatically created account name, with hundreds of different versions.

5. The name “John Google”. As above

6. The BIO: “Here you can Find all about Cooking Fans, pictures, photos, videos, fans, biography, reviews and everythings.”
This bio points through to a site ‘cooking-fans.info’ and is just a crappy blog with a bit of adsense on it. There must be so many twitter accounts now pointing to this site that I wonder why Twitter can’t keep control and block them all.

I think the new Twitter interface is great, gives you a better view of what someone is about.

7. If you see a post that says “I like make friend, please come with me,I love you!” it is a spam…there’s hundreds like it. I really don’t think I needed to tell you that!

8. Have seen another regular update from dozens of different profiles. Any updates that say “My mother was sick, in a bad mood the past few days!” AVOID.

Come on spammers, sort your grammar out!

There may be more, and if you know of any please add them to the comments on this page and we can warn people awayfrom these destructive, time-wasting spammers!

Thanks

Mark

I just wanted to list some of the great, and free, Twitter tools that are out there.

www.twellow.com – the Yellow Pages of the Twitter world. Great directory to find twitters of same or similar interest to you.

www.tweetlater.com – my personal favourite. You can organise several twitter accounts, set up and auto DM, auto follow and unfollow, plus you can set tweetlater to post to your twitter accounts while you are asleep, on holiday, walking the dog!

http://nearbytweets.com – Nearby tweets finds people on twitter who are in a similar geographical location to yourself. Especially useful if you are running a local small business, or just want to connect with people in your area.

www.tweetdeck.com is a downloadable twitter interface that allows you send and receive tweets and DM’s, while organising your twitter information into columns for easy reference. It also allows the user to split their followers into groups.

www.twitteranalyzer.com – This web based application is a great tool! Amongst its many features it shows you how many of your followers are online at any given time, giving you maximum exposure if you want to share a link or a post.

The other tool I want to measure is Twitter Smackdown which is a paid tool that I use, but which has enabled me to get a following of over 20,000 in just a few weeks. You don’t need this, but if you want to take your twitter marketing to a different level then this could be a good investment.

There are many, many twitter tools out there, far too many to mention, but as I trial more I will keep this page updated with what works for me!

Thanks

Mark