Will Your Twitter Account Survive? – TweetSpinner
February 1st, 2010 by bus2
So you joined the twittersphere? Congratulations you now are among the millions that enjoy this social media frenzy.
You follow me I follow you, twitter is not very hard and can raise a very simple question. What are you doing? It seems people are doing a lot on the twitisphere these days.
Spam is becoming a big concern for the folks that run twitter. I’m not sure if you have read their recent focus? Twitter will soon filter out as many spam accounts as they can.
Now if you are using one of the many twitter friend finders or the Cram Your Twitter Account type affiliate programs. You very well could be in jeopardy of losing your twitter account permanently.
You have to be very careful of your twitisphere. You don’t want to spend months building a social network and then have it all thrown out the window for over aggressive tactics.
I have used several twitter management type tools. Some for free and some I had to pay for. Let’s face it once you get a few hundred people in your tribe, things can get over whelming. DM messages, followers tweeting, filling up your page like bee in a bee hive.
I needed to do something to reduce the time I spent managing this great new social event. The tools I had tried only worked partially for what I needed. I found myself actually using two tools to get the management I wanted and even then there were things I needed and wanted that are left out.
Then I found TweetSpiner. I was a bit skeptical at first thinking it to be another limited tool that was being spammed on my twitisphere. But, I checked it out and this is what I discovered.
TweetSpinner cares, they want to make sure your account doesn’t get banned from twitter. Be sure to Read the Rules of the road below very carefully. Now let’s Check out TweetSpinner.
Rules of the Road: Follows and Unfollows Do not engage in follower churn!
Twitter considers aggressive, repeated following and unfollowing to be “follower churn” (read Twitter’s rules) and they suspend accounts engaged in this. The definition of
“follower churn” is a difficult one. Twitter is rather vague about it, largely because if they specifically define it, people will use this as a signpost for how far they can push the limits. Our goal is to enhance the Twitter experience for all users. We will not tolerate continued abuse of our application to somehow “game” Twitter. With this in mind, we recommend: Following
” Follow people who you want to engage with. Don’t follow for the sole purpose of gaining more followers.
” Quality over quantity. Build a good, stable follower list slowly, steadily, and CONSERVATIVELY. If you are aggressively maxing all follow and unfollow actions, and using multiple applications like ours, you will almost certainly run into problems.
” Avoid spammers. One common spamming tactic is to create hundreds of fake accounts and have all of them follow each other. If you ALSO follow some of these accounts, then, when Twitter suspends the spammers, you may get caught in their dragnet. You can use our follow filters to help. For example, follow users whose accounts are >60 days old, whose tweets do not consist largely of URLs, who have a good number of followers, who regularly @reply to others, and so on.
” Are you sure you want to followback ALL people who follow you first? Oftentimes, these people are spammers, and following them will put you in a “bad neighborhood” and push you closer to your follow limit. Configure filters to avoid spammers in followbacks.
” Never, never, never follow someone who you have previously unfollowed. Following, unfollowing, and refollowing the same user is a sure sign of Twitter abuse.
” Never hit a “follow limit”. A follow limit occurs when you follow too many people in one day. This limit varies for each Twitter user. If you hit it over and over, you are likely to run into problem. In our application, conservatively set a follow filter (“Stop all following if my friend-to-follower ratio is more than X”) to ensure that you never approach a follow limit. And if you DO hit a follow limit, use another filter to pause all follow actions for at least 1 day.
” Refine your follows. Carefully examine reciprocity scores for each keyword and mimic follow. If any of them are resulting in less than 50% return follows, then you need to adjust them (and your filters), or you should really consider removing them. The goal is to find people who are interested in your tweets, and reciprocity scores below 50% indicate that you’re not finding the right audience.
” Make sure you “mimic follow” someone who truly matches your particular interests (e.g., a family member, a competitor, and so on). With “keyword following”, make sure that you enter very targeted keywords, using the full complement of advanced search terms. For example, if you are interested in scuba diving, you might enter “scuba -snorkeling” (that’s a minus sign in front of “snorkeling”) to find only people tweeting about scuba (and NOT also snorkeling).
” Further refine the scope of your follows by using our advanced filters to target only those people who regularly and recently tweet; whose Twitter accounts are older than, say, 60 days; who you have never purged before; and who have a decent number of friends and followers. Carefully go over each filter and set each of them conservatively. Unfollowing
” Try to unfollow spam, stale, or boring accounts. Try not to unfollow people solely because they don’t follow you back.
” We will soon be complementing purge with a “prune” feature (which will look through your entire follower list, not just people who don’t follow you back). When this feature is available, we recommend transitioning from purge to prune.
” Many top Twitterers speculate that it is the act of unfollowing that is the real “danger point” when it comes to follower churn. Indeed, following is great; but unfollowing those same people just a few days later is obviously problematic. You should carefully consider whether or not you really need to schedule purges. And, if you do, you should absolutely unfollow no more than a handful at a time.
” Generally, you should not unfollow more than 100-200 per day (and even this may be too many!). And you should unfollow those who you deem to not be worthy of your follow (because they spam, tweet to in/frequently, and so on). It simply isn’t sufficient to unfollow someone just because they aren’t following you back.
” Instead of following 100 people, and then later purging 50 of them… instead, examine those 50 that you may purge, and try to configure your follow filters to avoid similar people in the future. Perhaps those 50, for example, haven’t been on Twitter in weeks (in which case you can configure a filter to not follow people who haven’t tweeted in, say, 5 days). Reduce your need to purge by targeted following.
” Give people you follow ample time before you unfollow them; a week or more is a good idea.
” It takes two to tango, and “churn” requires two components: following and unfollowing. As such, it is advisable to focus on each at different times. Or, at the very least, you should give your account a breather now and again, and pause all scheduled follows.
” Please also read our Rules of the Road in regards to sending tweets and DMs through Tweet Spinner. The combination of spammy tweets/DMs in conjunction with aggressive following will lead to problems.
Now what this tells me is TweetSpinner has a longevity approach and I use it every day.
Some very powerful features I enjoy are. Keyword following option. Type in as many keywords as you can think of and TweetSpinner will find those individuals and start following them. This is very valuable for obvious reasons. One other feature is being able to regionally target your twitisphere. For example if I want to find people that live in Oregon. TweetSpinner does that with ease.
One you try this Twitter Tool it will be the one you use most.
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