The old way of using twitter
The way I used to use twitter was to get as many followers as possible. I accomplished this in large part by following people and knowing that about half of them would follow me back.
Doing this allowed me to get a large number of followers in a very short amount of time. I actually wrote a post about how I did this.
The problem with this method is that I end up attracting a lot of people who also just want to get a lot of followers. The end result is that we all end up with many followers but no one is really reading what we tweet about.
I found out when I would tweet about some new blog post the amount of traffic I was getting was a very good.
The other problem I had was that I was following 3000 people and I was not interested in the vast majority of their tweets. And the few people that I was interested in the following have their tweets completely drowned in the zillions of tweets I did not care about.
You can view my twitter account here: http://twitter.com/nick1123
Another thing I did not like about this method is that I was inundated with direct messages from random people. over the last few months I have had 1500 direct messages. And of course every time you get a direct message twitter sends you an email. So this has resulted in 1500 emails flooding my inbox.
Looking back this strategy was a mistake. I thought it could be a way to get some superfast traffic and in the beginning it did yield some moderate results but as time has gone on it hasn’t been the great traffic source than I had hoped for.
My new way of using twitter
My new way of using twitter is going to be simple and straightforward. I am going to use it the way it was intended to be used. (What a concept!)
I am going to use as my main account this: http://twitter.com/NicksTraffic
I am only going to follow people that I care about following. And I am not going to follow anyone back just because they decided to follow me. Please don’t be offended if I don’t follow you.
The consequence of this of course is that I will how fewer followers on twitter. But that’s okay. At least I know that all of the followers I have actually care what I have to say.
As for getting followers, my strategy is to post great content on my blog and invite people to follow me. That’s it. If people don’t want to follow me that’s okay too.
How do you use twitter?
I would love to hear your thoughts so please leave a comment below.
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
I’ve got a personal account that I use “as intended” plus a couple of others that I’ve experimented with a bit. I initiallly did exactly the same as you, and while I managed to break the 2000 follower limit I found that not many of those followers were actually reading my tweets and visiting my sites. I’ve now changed tactic and now use Twitterfeed on my non-personal accounts to tweet notifications about new posts on my blogs and new links in my directory.
Yah following people for the sake of following people doesn’t seem a terrific strategy for getting traffic.
I’m not sure: I tested the massive approach with some thousand followers and every time I’ve send a tweet I got ~20-50 visitors. Not bad in my opinion cause I could send the same tweet 10 times a day and it worked.
But maybe I’ll try it with my new blog on the usual way how twitter intended it *g*.
Wow that’s cool. How many followers do you have?
I have been doing the same as you were originally doing Nick, now I have seen the error of my ways and must put a new strategy in place.
Thanks for all your tips
Glad to help.
Funny i did the same thing at first i would follow so many people i have like 10 twitter acounts i dont use what i was doing was stupid. I would use tweetlater but at the end of the day im doing what your doing. I have 5 follower but they care what i tweet so im happy.