If you use Twitter, by now you have probably have a large number of people that you follow as well as a solid following for yourself. One of the quickest ways to build a following besides offering popular content is to follow other users in the hopes that they follow you back or influence other users to check out your content. Are the people that you follow offering useful and relevant information or are they just people you followed in order to increase your presence on the social network? Although this can be a great way to get started, once you have gained a good number of followers these users may no longer be relevant.
Twitter Logo from http://www.twitter.com, Nov 2011
Twitter tools and tips
Twitter Tools and Tips
Managing a professional or company Twitter account is a lot different than managing a personal one, mainly because you are not as lax with your company page as you are with your personal account. A business Twitter page should be all about offering industry, consumer, and company information while an individual page is more often used for social communications with friends and family. It becomes much easier to manage the two if you avoid mixing your personal and professional Tweets.
When to follow someone on Twitter:
- If they keep you informed.
- If they entertain you.
- If they make things easier on you.
- If they are already an active member of your network.
- If they are someone you’d like to get to know.
When Not to Follow Someone on Twitter:
- If the user is not industry related or only use their account for personal tweets.
- If the user still has the default Easter egg avatar or if they use a provocative female as their avatar when it is clearly a man or corporation tweeting.
- If the user doesn’t list anything in their bio. (No website, no location)
- If the user only uses this medium to try to sell something and doesn’t offer actual content.
- If the user follows a lot of people but has no one is following them.
- If the user has too many people following them without ever tweeting or updating anything.
- If the tweets consist of spam and lies. (Free iPad, here is how or Make $1000 from home in one day)
- If the user’s follow auto responder sounds spammy.
- If the user’s tweets are all capitalized and beg for you to follow them back.
- If their website doesn’t offer any relevant content or they appear to be uneducated in the type of business they own.
- If they claim to be an expert but fail to deliver expert information.
- If they do not engage their followers or barley use Twitter.
When and why it might be a good idea to clean up your Twitter account:
Your first sign to clean up your account is if you have an extremely large gap between the number of people that you follow and the number of users that follow you. You should also clean up the users that you follow if you notice that they match some of the descriptions that were listed earlier in this article.
Understandably not everyone is going to provide a follow back, for example major corporations, celebrities, and well know industry professionals will probably stick to following users that offer them useful content and avoid following people just for the sake of following them. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing because you don’t always need someone to follow you back as long as you are still able to gain value from their tweets and the content that they provide. As for the people following you, in most cases providing them with a follow back isn’t a big deal just as long as those people appear legitimate and offer good content.
Twitter Tools
Some tools to help manage your Twitter Follows and Following include: FreindorFollow, TwitterKarma, and TweetSum. These tools are great for editing your account and sorting through the users who you follow, the users that follow you, as well as mutual follows. These tools also provide recent activity reports that allow you to eliminate the users that haven’t used the social network in a long time.
For more twitter tools and tips visit 30 Twitter Tools to Help Manage Followers!
Thanks for Reading
Dustin
Tags: follow, follow back, followers, Social Media, social network, Twitter, twitter follow, twitter tools
