Pre Challenge Twitter Video

[Ken Montville]

I liked the pre-Challenge Twitter video.

I was thinking Ed might want to talk about blocking people or what to do when people "follow" you that you may not want to have as a "follower". A lot of them are not, er, family friendly.

I was also wondering about the concept of only keeping a small group of "follows" and "followers". I see so many people with tens of thousands of of follows and followers and I wonder what the concept is. Wouldn't it be better to have a gazillion people to tweet a message out to?

I wonder if I should set up a different (second) Twitter account specifically to start from scratch for the Challenge and Ed's instructions on how to use Twitter for maximum advantage??

Just some "top of mind" thoughts after I watched the video.

[Kim Terry Haynes]

I decided to set up a brand new, uncluttered Twitter for the challenge. I like to have things fresh and clean when I start a project!

[Rheinard Korf]

The benefit of starting fresh is that you can start sorting people you follow early on and make real connections.

I personally love twitter lists. I have several private lists on which I list people with different kinds of purposes (on some of the lists I don't even follow the people on the list).

The real magic of twitter starts when your using twitter clients (like the official twitter mobile, twittelator, tweetdeck or seesmic). And as someone mentioned in another thread, you can also follow people using RSS.

Twitter also gets even more powerful when your tweets become useful (and not just titles and links to traffic spinning articles).

I'm happy with my 300 followers. I don't need 10 000 for my twitter goal (other accounts may fulfill those goals).

[lisahartwell]

I was thinking Ed might want to talk about blocking people or what to do when people "follow" you that you may not want to have as a "follower". A lot of them are not, er, family friendly.

I was also wondering about the concept of only keeping a small group of "follows" and "followers". I see so many people with tens of thousands of of follows and followers and I wonder what the concept is. Wouldn't it be better to have a gazillion people to tweet a message out to?

Re: blocking..I've rarely ever blocked anyone (only a weird guy who started making trouble for my business and had a number of Twitter personas so I didn't want him to be able to see me or sent @ comments). If you're not following them back then you never have to deal with what they are saying unless they are directing it at you. If you have followed them then unfollow or they could fill your DM (direct messages) box with all kinds of spam.

It's easy to fall into the trap of following everyone who follows you and trying to get as many followers as possible. But, many of those followers will only be there because they got a reciprocal follow (to boost their numbers). How many of those people who are only interested in the numbers do you think are actually reading a single thing you tweet?

If you only follow the people you are interested in then (a) you will be able to keep up with the conversation (and not get lost in a sea of irrelevant, uninteresting tweets) and (b) you are more likely to make a connection with your followers. It's better to have 50 followers who hang on your every word than 50,000 who don't even know who you are.

Lisa

[Beth Unlimited]

...It's better to have 50 followers who hang on your every word than 50,000 who don't even know who you are. -- Lisa

Agree! The other aspect to that is what you are tweeting. I've seen so many who only tweet #quotes or links just to keep their traffic up. The emphasis on social media means that we are to make connections with people -- so ask yourself, what am I tweeting that helps me improve the connection I have with whoever reads it? If you offer something of value (and maybe yes, occasionally that's a quote, a link, or a comment) then you're on the right track!

[Pam Firestone Brechlin]

I also think its important to mention that when creating your twitter account, make sure to fill in your profile. It will help people know what you are interested in so they can follow you.

[Sol Smiddy]

I also set up a completely new account for this years challenge, as far as I know it is not against their terms of service. Definitely recommend using a twitter client. Going to purchase twitterlator pro later today, but for the desktop I love seesmic, you can keep track of multiple accounts and only have what you really want to see on the home page.

[Ken Montville]

Good stuff. So, I'll set up another Twitter account and then start with a few people from the Challenge and roll from there.

It was interesting to find out that if I didn't follow back their stuff wouldn't end up in my stream. (thanks, Lisa) I guess I'm not as attuned to the nuances of Twitter as I could be.

I've been using Tweetdeck as a desktop client and Twitter for iPhone (formerly Tweetie).

[DaveMarkel]

I agree with what has been said above and would also like to add something. I only follow people back who use a profile picture. There are 1000's of bot accounts out there simply set up to spam people. They follow anyone and everyone and the typical feature that identifies this type of account (at least to me) is not setting up the profile WITH a custom picture.

I purged my list of people I follow about 6 months ago. I was following everyone who followed me and it got to the point where there was so much clutter in my account it was hard to do anything meaningful. Since, I have cut my people I follow to just over a 100 and now I actually enjoy using Twitter.

[Tiffanyg80]

DaveMarkel,

How did you purge your account? Did you go through and delete one by one. I have thousands and did get in the habit of following as many people as possible. Trying to get lots of people following me for traffic reasons. And I have learned and as many have said here, it beats the purpose of twitter. I don't want to create a new account as I have my account on everything and would like to keep it but I would like to clean it up.

What is the easiest way to do that and delete a lot at one time?