When combined with the already existing limit based on follow ratios, this means that it will be more difficult for marketers or self-promoters to rapidly increase their Twitter follower count by following many people. The old days of following thousands of users a day to get thousands of followers back are gone.

That’s not to say the strategy of mass following users to increase your Twitter followers doesn’t work anymore. It does. Why? Because many people use tools to auto-follow anyone who follows them. And there are new users who think its only polite to reciprocate. So you can easily get tens of thousands of followers from this strategy over time.

I see quite a few people still practicing this method. Some are social media enthusiasts or consultants, some are internet marketers or bloggers. All of them are people who want to get something in return. They want to:

1. Make money. The goal is to monetize Twitter users by linking and recommending products or services, either their own or others if they are an affiliate. They do this by tweeting out links and sending automated direct messages with the same offers when someone follows them back.




2. Improve their reputation. They amass followers with the aim of improving their reputation in a specific field like marketing or social media. They also use their followers to boost their prominence on other social arenas like Digg or Facebook.




3. Get more visitor traffic. More followers means more visitors to their websites so they can get more subscribers, readers and members. They also want the ability to make specific content go ‘viral’ and become popular by sharing it with their followers.

Many people think that to achieve all of the above, they need to build a large list of Twitter followers and broadcast links to get free traffic. It’s a simple strategy. The more followers you have, the more people listen to you, and the easier it is to spread your messages.

But do you really need a large number of followers to promote yourself successfully on Twitter? The answer is no. Not at all. But many people still persist in mass following users. Let’s look at some of the reasons why you don’t need to use this marketing tactic.

Low-Value Followers: Automatons, Spammers and Self-Promoters

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Many products on Twitter marketing have been released by internet marketers looking to profit from the growing interest in Twitter. These products give you the same blueprint: just get more twitter followers. All you need to do is to follow many users everyday, drop non-mutuals and then follow more. Repeat until you get a ton of followers and look like a social media rockstar. If people follow you, you must be awesome, right?

The only problem is that these are low-value followers. Not because they are dumb or socially inferior but because a good amount of these followers are not ultra-targeted, active or responsive. Many of them are self-promoters, spammers or automated feed accounts. These people aren’t interested in you. They don’t care about you. They didn’t REALLY opt-in. They even followed you automatically, didn’t they?

If we were to draw comparisons to a email list or newsletter, these types of people are the ones who would use a temporary email address to sign up so they can get your freebie and disappear. Most of them aren’t going to end up retweeting your stuff, most of them don’t even read your tweets. Most of them don’t give a damn about your ideas.

It’s not about the follower count, its about conversions. A carefully cultivated list of 1000 followers can beat a list of 10,000 twitter followers anytime when it comes to spreading content or getting traffic/sales. A social media strategy that only involves mass following all sorts of people and shooting out links in order to hook buyers or readers is quite inadequate.

Low-value followers are incredibly easy to get and the only positive thing about them is that they’ll make you look good. Judging influence by the follower count is something that people do. It’s social proof. So you have 80,000 followers. You can probably start a social media consulting business and tell everyone that you’re an expert. Or write that ebook and flaunt your follower count on the sales page. You can fool a lot of people and you’ll make money too.

So play the Twitter game of mass adding and dropping users for a few months. You may even meet some cool people but don’t assume that you have 50,000 users who actually read your tweets or are interested in you. They aren’t. And you’re irrelevant to them.

Remember, you’re not getting natural opt-in follows preempted by interest. All you have is an inflated number. Maybe you think that’s something to be proud of but if a 7 year old kid can press a auto-follow button and get 500 followers in 24 hrs, you’re not that impressive.

Twitter Marketing is More Than Just Getting Followers

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Unless you are a celebrity or a famous brand, you will never get hundreds of thousands of natural follows from people who are interested in what you have to say. If you want to look like a VIP, you can fake it by manipulating follower counts like most self-promoters.

But do you really think that’s effective Twitter marketing? Sometimes I feel that marketers should stop this obsession with volume and carefully think about cultivating a better follower list as well as other more effective ways of using Twitter for marketing.

I don’t want to blindly label all mass-following users as spammers. Some are not malicious nor are they aggressive self-promoters. I’m just questioning the overwhelming focus on this tactic, as if its the only way to accumulate influence or market yourself on Twitter. It’s not.

This isn’t an attack on anyone. If you think that mass following many users to boost your follower count is great, keep doing it. I’ve got no problems with that. I’m just offering my opinion on why I think its flawed. This comes from having actually experimented with this strategy, so it’s not just theoretical postulations.

In my opinion, while having a large number of Twitter followers is not a bad thing, there are some other key factors you should consider if you’re want to use Twitter to market yourself or your website/brand. These are points which I think are quite important even if your ONLY reason for using Twitter is to make money or get traffic.

The most important thing you should remember: It’s not about the number of Twitter followers you have, its about who follows you and the responsiveness of your audience.

Who Follows You: The People Who Give You Their Attention

It matters who reads your tweets. Are these people interested in you or your business? An interested follower is naturally more engaged with whatever you put out on Twitter. People who automatically follow you do not count as interested followers.

Are your followers active? Active users share your links, they give you feedback, they talk to you. Automated or semi-automated users are not active users that will interact with you.

And do the people who follow you have influence? Would you rather get 50 retweets from users with 10 to 100 random followers? Or you rather get 10 retweets from influencers  in same niche, with all of them having 1000 to 10,000 very relevant followers?

How about tweeting out a link or idea and having someone with a blog in the same niche write about it and link to you? Can your army of auto-followers offer the same? Not every Twitter user has the same audience size. Some users can reach more people much faster and these are the ones that can help you.

This is not to suggest that the average twitterer is useless but to highlight the unequal influence of each user. Who follows you matters a great deal because powerful Twitter marketing involves not just link-blasting but networking and relationship development.

Responsiveness of Your Audience: Are They Engaged?

Image Credit: seizetheday

Responsiveness is the degree to which your Twitter audience is engaged with whatever messages you put out on Twitter. A responsive audience connects with you, retweeting your links and answering your questions. They interact with your Twitter stream.

When we talk about a responsive email list, we’re talking about subscribers who are willing to buy or take action on your offers. Responsive Twitter followers are similar: they take action on your tweets by spreading them or talking back to you.

An easy way to measure responsiveness is to ask a question and see how many people respond. The no. of link clicks and retweets are other factors as well but anyone can click on a random link: it just shows that they’re interested in the link title or story. But are they interested in you? Actual responses to your queries are a good measure of that.

A responsive Twitter audience naturally develops when people are interested in you, what you do and who you are. Celebrities have the most responsive followers, many of their subscribers even sign up for a Twitter account just to interact with their tweets. They’re actively looking forward to reading new tweets from their favorite personality. This anticipation and interest makes them a perfect audience for conversions and call-to-actions.

If you’re not already famous, you will have a tougher time building a responsive audience because you don’t get natural interest in you from the start. One way to generate this interest is to develop a reputation in your field so that your name or brand is known.

This means you shouldn’t just spend your whole day following/unfollowing, tweeting links and chit-chatting. You have to work at your brand away from Twitter. If you put out an interesting tool or piece of content, you’ll get interest. If you’re selling a product that solves a problem, you’ll get interest. As you become more known online, you will get people following you.

When on Twitter itself, you can develop responsiveness through reciprocation. By actively interacting with other users, you will induce them to pay more attention to your updates. But don’t just send out updates and only talk to people who reply to your tweets. Actively monitor and engage users. Over time they will warm up to you and responsiveness will increase.

Remember, you don’t just want a large follower count. You want a responsive group of followers. People who are genuinely interested in you and people who will click on your links, retweet you or respond to your queries. Ultimately this group of Twitter followers can help you popularize your website or grow your business.

My Follow Strategy for Twitter Marketing

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Instead of autofollowing a ton of people and rinsing them out to get mutual followers who are either not interested or very poorly interested in you, go for ultra-relevant Twitter users.

There are two types of twitter users you can target: people who have the power to help your business grow and the average user who is a potential customer. Whichever type you choose depends on your goals and what you want to get from Twitter.

Generally I’m more in favor in targeting twitter users who can best promote my business interests so you can get customers/buyers/readers through their efforts instead of your own. Potential end-users/customers are equally important although you’ll have a tougher time trying to determine their level of interest in your website/product.

Yes, you can use keywords to track tweets and find prospects on Twitter directories but interacting with each and every prospect (there are thousands out there) takes a lot of time and energy. I would prefer networking with influencers who can promote my site/brand in and outside of Twitter because they have a built-in audience and a platform.

Mass following can get you followers. But it doesn’t drastically improve your reputation, no matter how attractive a high follower count looks. A mass follower tweeting out a link is very different from an authority in the field endorsing a link by putting it in a tweet. The influencer is followed by a targeted list of other taste-makers.

The core of influence will spiral outwards based on the initial endorsement. This is more powerful than a link sent out to an auto-follow audience. Sure, you can easily get traffic but your tweets are not as effective as a voice that is respected by your target market.

So who should you network with? Not just end-users with your keyword in their bio. But bloggers, webmasters, publishers, journalists and business owners. People who work in your field and own web sites that can send you links and traffic. You can focus on networking with the superstars in your field but don’t ever forget about less famous people. This article by Brett Borders offers a good explanation of why you shouldn’t ignore the average Twitter user.

So in essence, you should use Twitter as a relationship building tool to extract benefits from a core group of influencers who are relevant to your business/website. Network actively with the right Twitter users, talk to them, spread their links, give them feedback, support their content. Be a participant in their Twitter experience.

If you do this long enough, you will eventually make them comfortable with helping you or promoting your stuff either on Twitter or away from it.

If someone talks to me very often on Twitter, shares my content or points me to good resources, I’m more than willing to retweet their stuff. Especially if its great content. I wouldn’t think twice about it. The desire to reciprocate is a very powerful instinct.

Image Credit: Erica_Marshall

And if you want to talk about ‘going viral’, just a few retweets from several users with responsive audiences and your link will get all the momentum it needs. You don’t need to build up an account with tens of thousands of users only to send your message out to people who aren’t even half-interested in your content.

You will gradually grow your business or website by getting more readers, clients or buyers through the help of that core group. And after you’ve achieved some success, people will naturally start to follow you on Twitter. And these are the best kinds of Twitter followers to have, people who opt-in because they are interested in you or your work.

Then you can concentrate on these new batch of followers and by interacting with them, turn them into people who will actively support your content or initiatives. Many of them might be site owners or bloggers as well so this is a great way to network and learn if you’re looking for some help to improve your core business offerings.

In terms of making money indirectly or directly through Twitter, I’ve realized that the no. of Twitter followers you have is not always proportional to the income you’ll make.

It’s not necessary to inflate your Twitter follow count through an automated game of mass following. But I understand why people do it. It’s the same old strategy used on Myspace, Facebook and pretty much any social site where people can ‘friend’ each other and capture attention. The mentality is go for maximum volume and hook the few that will listen.

You can go down that route if you want but I think you can easily achieve the same results and more by cultivating a high quality list of followers and networking smartly with the right people. Marketing on Twitter does not just involve getting as many followers as you can.

Think beyond that. If you want followers, you should get them to come to you. You don’t have to chase after them. It’s devastatingly easy once you learn how to leverage other users with established audiences and create bait that entices people to opt-in because of interest.

What do you think? Feel free to leave a comment below or talk to me on Twitter!

Twitter Marketing: Why You Don’t Need to Mass Follow Users

In terms of online marketing, social media channels offer many opportunities. Some webmasters focus on setting up profiles with self-serving user generated content only for backlinks and traffic. Other savvy brands or individuals actively interact with online communities while moderating the impulse to ’spam’, in order to build legitimacy, authority and a better reputation in the specific field.

And then there are a few that adopt a particularly powerful social media marketing strategy that consistently extracts attention with ease. A way that reaches out to every new and future member of a social community automatically with minimal effort. A tactic that markets continuously as long as the social channel exists and grows, without end or interruption.

Introducing the Method

Image Credit: Mick Ø

You might have heard about Dell earning $1 million in revenue from posting product offers on their Twitter account. So they’re using Twitter like email, as a sales alert system. Not a big deal really. But they’ve also recently started posting exclusive ‘Twitter-only’ discount offers on their Twitter profile (Over 100K followers!). Exclusive to Twitter. Those are the magic words. Exclusive to Myspace users. Exclusive to Bebo users. Exclusives, exclusives.

When a social media channel (like Twitter) becomes large enough, it’s time to think about devoting serious attention to leveraging the size and reach of the userbase. Marketing doesn’t need to only target the lucky demographic you manage to data-mine and filter out from the online crowd. Sure, its more ‘targeted’ but why limit yourself to just that? Why not reach everyone and let the interested few fall through the net themselves? Move the masses. Not just the few. No market segmentation needed. No need to selectively pitch and sell.

Exclusive product or service offers for users of a specific social website are only the beginning. There are a lot more ways to deeply tap into and gain the favor of large social communities. But first of all you’ll need to understand the mentality of social media users. People will consciously or subconsciously self-identify as members of a particular online social tribe. “I’m a Digg user. I’m a Facebook junkie. I love being a Youtuber.”

Put aside your demographic notions of gender, age and location for a moment. People are more than all that when they are online. They create identities, behavioral patterns and personas based on the community they most frequently use. This constructed online identity is a proxy that can be used to not only engage these users but develop a favorable impression of your brand. Tap into their love or hate for the service and reach from there.

Image Credit: myspace is for losers

A powerful social media marketing strategy is to create a service, tool, system which perfectly complements, faciliates and improves each individual users experience of the specific social website. Think of the features that unite them and the problems that frustrate them. This creation must be almost indispensable and extremely useful to a very broad audience. They must be able to pick it up easily and integrate it into their daily routine.

It must be highly customizable and relevant to the different ways one can participate in the social community. A powerful long-term strategy would be to invest time and money on creating free complementary services for large and growing online social communities. Each new or future user is drawn towards to your tools naturally because they help them to better enjoy the social channel. They will gravitate towards you and pull other users along.

The Twitter Example

I’ll use Twitter to illustrate my point again but note that what is said here applies to most social media communities. Twitter is not exceptional in this regard. All large social media communities online operate in a similar manner: they all have devoted users who love ways to improve their experience of the community or service.

Many popular blogs (like Mashable) and other websites have a huge Twitter fetish. Whenever a new and interesting app/service is released, they’ll write about it immediately. Twitter users will often tweet and retweet a new app because its relevant or interesting to them. So what’s the end result when you create an exceptional tool for Twitter users?

A large influx of traffic and links that’ll flow towards your service’s webpage, which can easily to funneled to your Twitter profile, other websites and business. The large influx of new users is continually exposed to your brand (indirectly via the service). You’re essentially appealing to a guaranteed audience that’ll always be there.

If your tool/service appeals to a broad enough market, it’ll develop a userbase. Work at it and soon enough it’ll grow itself. People will recommend it to friends, new users and the general public even withou any direct incentives from your end. Why? Because it is genuinely helpful. There is minimal trace of self-serving marketing and little effort or cost at your end to continually leverage a community that is all too willing to promote you.

Reaching the Peak of this Marketing Strategy

When someone asks for a good non-mobile way of using Twitter, the names of popular desktop clients like Tweetdeck and Twhirl often come up. They are considered essential tools for a better user experience. They are near the peak of our social media marketing strategy.

The pinnacle is reached when your service achieves great recognition and mindshare within the community. At this point you can easily expect an endless flow of user recommendations, backlinks, referral traffic and support from a community interested in evangelizing their favorite social media channel and inadvertently, the value of your brand.

This may even lead to the specific social media channel directly recommending your service as a worthy addon to what they offer. For instance, Twitter is very explicit about what third-party tools it endorses: the Apps page feature Twhirl/Tweetdeck amongst other tools and its one of the first few pages that is pushed to a new user when he/she signs up.

Even if you do not reach this level of achievement for a single service, you can create many diverse services to fulfill different needs. Don’t release them all at once. Spread them out and launch over a certain timespan so links and traffic can stream in consistently from blogs that monitor news about the social website. Be sure to interlink and promote your previous tools/services. This is another way of gaining attention and building influence over time.

Alternatively, you can sponsor and fund creative web developers who have a knack for creating addons for the specific social community. You don’t always have to build them yourself, you just need to strongly associate them with your brand.

Publicity is Giving Someone a Reason to Talk about You

Image Credit: speech bubble

Why would a popular tech industry blog like Techcrunch write about an unknown web designer in Toronto? Or a freelance writer in Tokyo? Because these two people did something interesting. Something relevant to Techcrunch’s blog and topic focus. Publicity is easy to get when your target is content-hungry publishers in a news cycle that loves novelty.

Many people encounter problems marketing online. You can’t get mentioned in a popular blog that sends a lot of visitors. Because you’re not relevant. So the solution is simple: make yourself compatible via an action, association or proxy. Build/do something that people in a specific field will talk about. The social media marketing strategy we are talking about is a publicity funnel. It gives you attention you can redirect to grow your core business or brand.

In the long run, you always should aim to build excellent authority services that grab a big chunk of user mindshare but should you fail in that aspect, there are short term advantages to using this marketing strategy. It can be a cyclical tactic to leverage news publishers for free traffic. Build a system, launch and promote. Grow users. Update with new features, send out news alerts. Build another service, launch and promote. Interlink systems, cross-promote. Grow users. Update features. It’s a way to get free traffic and links over and over again.

It’s kinda like linkbait on a mullet page but this is a lot more effective. You don’t just become a flavor of the day on Digg but an actual service with registered users. Attention isn’t given to you for the duration of a funny article but everyday when someone returns to re-use your service. Over time, user loyalty can develop into hardcore evangelism.

Monetization Won’t Be a Problem When You Command Attention

In general, monetization comes easy if you’re willing to work hard to develop your service’s reputation and value amongst the community of social media users. Remember Ashley Qualls? She’s a 18 year old high school dropout who created a website for Myspace layouts early on.

Most new Myspace users want to customize their layouts so layout providers were in hot demand. Her popular website was widely embraced by the community and it made $70K and more in revenue every month (back in 2007). While Facebook’s popularity has eclipsed MySpace, there’s still a guaranteed user audience for established providers like Ashley.

There’s always a way to make money when you have people flowing into your site on a daily basis via the proxy that you’ve set up for a particular social media channel. In the end, what you’ve created is another notch in your resume and can be used in many ways to demonstrate competence or expertise. Apart from monetizing via display ads or premium service plans, you can heavily promote your core business or offer B2B consultancy programs.

But don’t spend all your money and time only creating hit-or-miss services. When it comes down to it, a strategy like this must only be an add-on to your core business model or income system. Until it becomes a massive success, never mistake the means for the end.

What Social Media Sites Should You Target?

This particular method works best with very large and well known social media communities because you’re relying on their popularity and the size of the userbase to get attention. If you’re unfamiliar with what’s hot nowadays, the Alexa Top 500 gives a rough listing of the heavily trafficked social media sites both globally and in each country.

Focus on them but always keep an eye on other growing social communities. Read sites that report on new startups and be in the loop for news about specific social sites, especially the ones that appear to be growing fast. The key is to look out for problems faced by users, while enhancing features which are the main draw of the specific social service.

Keep trust-worthy programmers/coders and designers close by so you can materialize ideas as fast as possible. It also helps to be an active user in the specific social media community so you can develop an instinctive understanding of its architecture, usability and possibilities.

Sounds like a Lot of Effort Doesn’t it? But it Works.

If you’re feeling tired just by reading this article, this tactic is probably not for you. If you’re really excited (with wheels turning in your head), you’re on the right track to success. There has to be some enthusiasm for you to see this method through. And one last important tip: always build relationships with key influencers, way before you begin to pitch. Trust me, it helps a lot.

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Building Complementary Services: A Powerful Long-Term Social Media Marketing Strategy

The answer is simple. I’ve mentioned it before. First of all, you need to start by gathering tactical knowledge on the specific website. Know your audience’s fetishes. Know what they love/hate and know what they talk about. Know what cliques exist within the community. Know what totems,  symbols, personalities and ideas are embraced by the general populace.

After knowing that, you can start to create content that is angled towards the specific audience. The mistake that most people make is not having broad appeal. A large general community has many members, each with different interests but a microscopic and overly technical focus on a small topic area may rob your content of the chance of truly going viral.

So what do you do? One method that works is just to use references to heighten content relevance and styling your articles in a catchy format that is easily accessible. What this template looks like will of course, depend on the specific website you are targeting.

Let’s use Digg as an example.

I’m not going to go into all the details on creating digg-friendly content (all that jazz about writing good headlines, using attractive pictures blah blah), instead I’m going to point you to Cracked.com, an example of a website that has perfected the art of writing original content that is attractive to not only Digg but many other channels like forums, blogs and social sites.

A general humor site, Cracked has gradually learned to create a template that works perfectly for a broad range of topics. Their content style does not vary from article to article: they use a more or less fixed template while inserting their topic-of-the-day into it.

What does this mean? That content producers in every conceivable niche/field can create content that will be appealing to a broad audience, just by learning how to use an attention grabbing frame. No more complaints about your site topic being inherently boring or obscure.

Cracked.com publishes a few articles everyday of the week and without fail, almost all of them will get to the frontpage of digg and sometimes, sites like Reddit. It’s a given that they’ll get frontpage glory, the only question is how many hours it’ll take for them to get there.

Like many other popular sites on digg, their success is accumulative: digg users see their content on the frontpage, read it and subscribe to their site via RSS or bookmark. They then visit it when new articles are published and end up digging them. And it goes on and on, untill a sizable number of digg users have become regular readers of their publication.

A lot of their initial success in the beginning was due to the fact that they wrote interesting content which was supported by a few power users who started submitting their stories. Over time, their integration with digg grew deeper and now every morning you’ll see users refreshing the Cracked.com homepage repeatedly just to be the first to submit the new article.

So apart from having supporters early on, how did Cracked.com take off? Mainly through good writing/ideas and the use of a sensationalistic, list-based content template. Instead of analyzing their website myself, I’ll refer you to two key articles they’ve written on the very topic of creating digg-friendly content and getting it to the frontpage.

The first one talks about writing a cracked-style list post and this quote here is most useful:

There are incredibly important questions in the world that need to be answered, which is why people read the The New York Times. Often when writing a list, your goal is to come up with a question that nobody on the face of the earth would ever actually need the answer to–a question that may in fact have never been asked before in the history of the human race.

This might sound easy but think of it like this: Real newspapers give people answers to the questions they’re already asking. What’s going on in Iraq? What’s up with this Bin Laden guy? It’s easy to know what questions to answer when they’re being asked of you.

But nobody’s asking Cracked and me “Who ARE the Top 10 Greatest Character Actors Who Ever Played Ninjas?” or “What DOES Science Have to Say About the Likelihood of a Zombie Apocalypse?” Journalists have it easy.

They even developed a tongue-in-cheek popularity equation for their list posts:

The” + (Number) + “Most” + (Over the top adjective) + (Subject) + Of All Time (Synonyms like “in History” or “Ever” will also be accepted) = Popularity

The second article (published today) talks about the 7 cheats for hitting the digg frontpage. This is more of a satirical piece and has only two points which are useful. The first is to use to talk about and reference Digg. I’ve talked about this before. The other point is to play to the crowd’s interests. Here’s an exaggerated mockup of a story that does that:

Note how the title crams in some of the big issues that Digg users care about.

Many people have written about content creation for social media, site optimization and ways to leverage digg. The hundreds of guides or tutorials out there are great but you’ll learn the fastest by observing the best. Apart from regularly watching what goes popular on various social channels, sites like Cracked.com can help you learn how to make even a small topical focus attractive to a general audience. And that’s what you need to reach more people online.


By the way, you might want to add me as a friend on Digg.

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How to Create Digg-Friendly Content: Cracked.com’s Template

According to a recent study of 2 million people and 8 million phone calls over one year, researchers discovered that the cause of persistent relationships is reciprocity – returning a friend’s call. The more often you call each other, the longer your relationship.

The results showed that the strongest factor determining persistence values was when individuals returned calls to each other. When links were reciprocated, those links had a greater chance of persisting for longer time periods. Also, when an individual´s connections had connections among themselves (when a person´s friends knew each other), his or her own connections lasted longer.

The results also revealed insight into individuals with a high number of social connections:

It has been known for a long time that some people are much more connected than others, yet it was not known whether these highly connected individuals also had a larger number of strong connections. While time constraints may force people with more ties to be less persistent on average, the data also showed that, in absolute terms, people with more ties also have a greater number of persistent ties than those less connected.

Highly connected individuals are not trading quality for quantity; rather, they appear to be more socially expressed in both the numbers of links and the persistence or strength of them.”

Let’s transplant these findings into social media. Having a large online network of friends doesn’t mean you naturally have weaker ties with everyone. As we’ve seen, the depth and lifespan of a relationship is the result of making effort to connect repeatedly over time.

In our current age, communication itself can be divided into different degrees of intimacy or impact. For instance, meeting someone in person offers the greatest depth of connection, since you’re essentially having an un-mediated experience of the other. Phones and video technology with visual representation also enable people to engage one other in real-time.

And of course, there are lifestreaming/microblogging sites like Plurk (my profile) or Twitter which allow you to meet and communicate with large groups of people from all over the world. This method of communication is less personal but its no less legitimate. In my opinion, its a form of ultra-casual, ‘light-touch’, non-invasive communication.

The strength of lifestreaming services lies in their ability to help you develop persistence in relationships, which itself will enable you to gradually build a network of people around you. These are individuals who’ll provide you with feedback, information, conversation, empathy as well as support for your present or future initiatives/goals.

Lifestreaming makes it easy for a group of people to be informed of your opinions and events in your personal life. It’s like taking up a phone and calling a few hundred people at once. It’s effortless to talk to many people through Twitter/Plurk as well and using these services not only strengthens your existing relationships but broadens the range of people you can know.

When it comes to ROI, we often instinctively know what is most important and hence worth pursuing. We are interested in developing strong relationships with others that share similar interests/goals. Hence, some of us return to these sites again and again.

You can keep on thinking of ways to leverage a new social channel like Plurk, but don’t forget: In the end, people market people. If these lifestreaming/microblogging sites help you to develop persistence in beneficial relationships, isn’t that a good enough reason to use them?

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Relationships and Online Social Networks: The Value of Sites Like Twitter and Plurk

Start by understanding that social media marketing is more than just putting up links whereever you can with the hope that they’ll send visitors to your site. One should endeavor to think beyond the hit-or-miss game of boosting pageviews.

It’s important to have a long-term strategy which works to improve your site’s reputation and audience reach. This means that you should go for big and repeatable benefits by carefully planning your actions, not tediously searching for ways to manipulate the system.

Take Digg for example. I’ve seen many bloggers repeatedly submitting their articles and wondering why they only received a handful of votes. They all want to get their story on the frontpage but often fail because they are unfamiliar with its unwritten protocols or practices.

These people believe that good content will naturally be noticed and rewarded. After all, that’s the premise of a democratic user-driven news site. But it’s not often the case in reality, especially when massive amounts of content are competing for attention.

The truth is, careful optimization of content and diligent promotional efforts are factors which greatly contribute to social media popularity. While that doesn’t mean that all successful content must be conscientiously manufactured from the start, it does suggest that you need to understand the social channel well in order to strategically support your initiatives.

Determining the best way to leverage a social media channel is difficult. I thought it’ll be helpful if I share my own personal strategy, the one I use whenever I come across a promising social media channel and want to use it for something more than just leisurely fun.

Three Part Strategy for Developing Tactical Social Media Knowledge

Image Credit: iWarfare by mbym

This article will not give you detailed marketing tactics to use because that would be an impossibility. Every social website is different and they each evolve over time. There is no blanket strategy that can and will work consistently. However, you can learn how to develop a comprehensive understanding of the social media channel and its community preferences.

I am a strong believer in having tactical knowledge. Before you embark on any campaign, its is important to know what you are dealing with, in order to best develop a course of action. Knowing the social media channel inside-out is paramount to leveraging it for benefits.

The three steps mentioned below will give you the necessary foundation, from which you can start to devise future strategies with a strong likelihood of success:

1. Use and track the social channel: Apart from personally using the website, one should constantly monitor the social channel itself to keep track of popular content/discussions. This includes keeping tabs on what its users are doing within the channel, which is a good way to discover workable tactics.
2. Monitor commentary: Apart from monitoring the social channel, one should seek to accumulate knowledge on it by reading and learning from articles/tutorials written by others. It’s always beneficial to learn from the different experiences of others, which will give you a good range of perspectives on the topic.
3. Interact With Power Users: One of the most powerful ways to get an idea of what works or not for a social channel is to interact with its seasoned users. These users are often deeply involved with the community and they can give you ‘in-crowd’ insight that is not easily attainable (not without much time investment). Learning how to talk to these users is a good way to get feedback for your plans.

Before You Begin… Creating and Managing an Information HQ

The first thing I do before I embark on the 3 steps above is to create an information HQ, a place where I collect all the notes I have on the social media channel. This HQ can be in the form of a notebook, word processing software, to-do list and RSS feed reader. The point is to make sure that you have a centralized location from which to retrieve information on the site.

I use Google documents to record notes on the site, del.icio.us as a bookmarking tool, a to-do list and a separate folder in my RSS feed reader. You can use any info-recording tool you want, as long it works for you. Just make sure to keep it organized and well maintained.

An information HQ helps you to accumulate and effectively dissect information on the social media channel. Instead of keeping all the juicy details in your head, writing them down helps you to be more strategic. It’s much easier to work when you can assess multiple sets of data at once on a screen, instead of just playing around with random thoughts and assumptions.

You’ll understand the importance of this as we go through the 3-part strategy.

Part One: Using/Tracking the Social Channel (On-The-Ground Info)

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Popularity of content or ideas on a social media channel are usually demonstrated by certain indicators. On Digg.com, the more diggs a story has, the more it has resonated with the crowd. On other social sites, popularity can be tracked by no. of views, comments or the depth of community participation. Your goal is to monitor this content on a daily basis.

Subscribe to the RSS feed for the website so you can get an overview of popular items or discussions. In the case of Digg, I’ll subscribe to the feed for frontpage and popular stories in relevant categories. Your feed reader can also serve as an archive when you need to search for specific keywords. Alternatively, bookmark the website and visit it daily to stay in the loop.

Secondly, learn to participate. Using the social website gives you a good orientation of its infrastructure and features. Click around on the site whenever you have time to get a feel of how it works. If its a site featuring user-generated content, try uploading/submitting content to get a feel of how it works. Consistent usage of the site will give you an instinctive understanding of what appeals to the community.

Part Two: Monitoring Commentary (Macro-Perspectives)

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By now you should have set up a separate feed folder in your RSS reader for the specific social site. Now your objective here is to subscribe to specific keyword watchlists. For example, you should subscribe to the keyword ‘Twitter’ if you’re looking for commentary on that site. Tools you can use include Google Alerts, Google Blogsearch, aggregators and other social news communities. I’ve covered this in greater detail in my post on information sources.

But don’t just stop at monitoring commentary. What I do is that I usually read a specific article and extract key points by pasting it in my documents file. I also jot down specific ideas that might come to me while I’m evaluating the specific article. If I don’t have time, I’ll bookmark and tag the post for future reading.

I find that keeping on top of external commentary gives me a macro-perspective. While using and tracking the social channel itself gives you an appreciation of the site itself, commentary usually offers comparisons with other channels while situating it within a specific frame: be it marketing, personal productivity or big business goals.

All in all, its an excellent way to complement whatever on-the-ground info you have.

Part Three: Interacting With Power Users (Knowledge Evaluation)

Image Credit: Storm Front

The term ‘power users’ simply refers to experienced individuals who use the social website very frequently. Their expertise is derived from many hours of being on the site everyday and their avid interest in learning about new technologies/tools for the specific website.

These people are usually in the know when it comes to their favorite social website and their greatest skill is the ability to read the community. They know what kind of cliques exist on the site, they know what pushes the buttons of the masses. They know all the unwritten protocols which the community favors and practices.

After monitoring commentary and tracking the social site, power users are the people you want to talk to, not only because they can give you quality ‘insider info’ but because they can confirm or disprove your theories/assumptions. Interacting with these users is a great way to get feedback for your initiatives or content.

Start communicating with these users via the tools within the social media channel, such as a private inbox or a comment message. After which, try to engage them away from the limitations of the social site after you know them well enough. IM, email or Skype are probably the best methods, since these are tools commonly used by most users.

Tactical Knowledge Improves Your Ability to Leverage Social Media

After gathering and evaluating all the information you have, you’ll come to understand how you can use the specific social media channel in a way which will not harm but only benefit your brand in the long run. I can’t emphasize how much a little investment in knowledge goes a long way when it comes to effective social media marketing.

Fundamentals of Social Media Marketing is a tutorial series which teaches you how to utilize the power of social media channels to get more exposure, supporters and customers for your site and business. You’ve just read the 9th article in the series.

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Developing Tactical Knowledge on Social Media Websites: A Three-Part Strategy for DIY Marketers

Take Youtube for example, it’s well known that the use of sexy screenshots can help your videos get a lot more exposure. People are much more likely to click through on videos showing cleavage or the body of an attractive male/female.

This is something that video creators/uploaders exploit to their advantage. What they do is that they insert a suggestive clip or picture within their video so that it shows up as the thumbnail. Sometimes the content of the video has little or nothing to do with the screenshot.

For example, users will click through expecting to see an attractive girl and end up watching a man talking behind a webcam. This practice is widespread and it has become a common marketing tactic for many who want more views for their uploaded videos.

Having noticed this phenomenon, Wired reports that Youtube comedian LisaNova has taken this practice one step further by offering copyright-free video clips of her role-playing as different characters. Available for download at her website, these racy videos show her acting as a sexy nurse, emo college girl and bespectacled librarian, among others.

She calls these ‘collabcharacters’ or characters you can use in collaboration with your videos. Basically you download her video clips and insert them into your videos, with the aim of using these sexy images to increase your video views. See her video below for more details:

I like how this initiative benefits LisaNova. It increases the utilitarian value of her videos. Previously, her uploaded videos were simply entertainment. People watch them and left comments. That was all. But right now, her videos have become short, tasty brand bites, the ones you can contextualize and incorporate into your own content on Youtube.

It’s a smart way to spread her name even further. People will insert her ‘collabcharacters’ into their videos and the accompanying word-of-mouth will help her get some new fans. Right now, LisaNova has 98K+ channel subscribers (a strong launchpad) and as long as she keeps creating new clips, images of her will continue to infect more and more videos out there.

She’s also doing the smart thing by asking for feedback and suggestions from other users:

I am going to be uploading tons of character collab clips, so that we don’t have too many people using the same image/clips. But I would LOVE your suggestions so please if you are planning to make a video and need a great collab clip, let me know and i will try and make it. Whatthebuck was doing a video about Kim Kardashian so I was able to make him a personalized collab clip.

By offering free customized videos, she’s making sure that her brand is malleable enough to accommodate different contexts and audiences. Content producers will seek her out. It’s a wonderful pull-strategy, especially when a site like Youtube has such a varied userbase.

She also recommended that people who use her collab clips leave an attribution link in the description box, which points back to her profile and her download site/forum. Word of mouth online is strongest when its accompanied by links. There is great value in getting free links on relevant Youtube video pages, all driving interested traffic back to her.

In essence, LisaNova has done quite a few things right: First of all, she recognized the phenomenon or trend of using sex to promote Youtube videos and found a way to leverage it. Trends are often indications of demand and it’s important to know how to read the community you’re targeting in order to increase your viral potential.

She then created and released free content. Free, because it allows zero-risk consumption, something that aids initial mass adoption/participation. This is important when you want to build influence and buzz. She then set up a new community away from the site, to allow fans to mingle with each other. This is a good way to test new initiatives and receive feedback.

Along the way, she offered to collaborate with other content producers while making full use of the medium (videos) to make her brand spread easily among myriad audience types/contexts. To sum up, this is an excellent example how to market yourself effectively in the new media environment of blogs, social media communities and user-generated content.

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Viral Marketing on Youtube: A Look at LisaNova’s Sexy Videos

You’re interested in increasing your Twitter followers. You want more people reading your updates. It’s not difficult to build a prominent profile but I think it’s important to start with the right understanding. This is the first thing you need to know: It’s not really about how you tweet, what you say or who you talk to but who you are.

There have been several articles on the topic of growing your Twitter presence: many of them focus on teaching you how to use Twitter by providing value in order to increase your Twitter following. While good points were made, I want to offer my perspective on this topic.

Take a look at this list of Twitter users with the most followers and you’ll see that almost everyone on it is famous or well known for reasons other than Twitter. For example, you’ll notice that the top 10 users are mainly all people who own popular websites/businesses and brands or have established a reputation through their involvement in different activities.

Run your eyes down the list further and you’ll notice the same thing: these Twitter users built their large audience through their already established popularity. They didn’t start from the ground up: it’s likely that they started with a decent amount of followers and will continue accumulate them passively through the strength of their reputation or personal brand.

Many people have built their following because they are well known away from Twitter, not because they were inherently entertaining or helpful as a Twitter user. In other words, they grew large follower base because they cleverly integrated their brand or what it is they do, with their Twitter profile. They used their websites or platforms to promote their Twitter profile

This doesn’t mean that you can’t develop a strong Twitter following if you are not famous for something online or offline. It can be done but in my opinion, building a Twitter following has little to do with how you use Twitter. I don’t believe that in order to get a sizeable audience, you need obsesses about specific tweeting etiquette.

I’ve never written any articles on how to use Twitter because I don’t think there’s an ‘optimal’ or best way to use Twitter, nor am I interested in regulating another person’s lifestream. Even if you’re purely using Twitter as a broadcast tool to increase your online influence, how or what you tweet is not really the thing you should be focusing on.

So let’s talk about what I think will help you to get more Twitter followers.

Maximize Visibility: Treat Your Twitter Profile Like Any Other Website

Image Credit: Tweet via QuickSilver

The first step is to understand that your Twitter profile is like any other website. You should treat it no differently from your own blog or a free opt-in newsletter. This means that if you want to increase your Twitter subscriber base, you just need to do one thing again and again: Drive web traffic to your profile. The more targeted the traffic, the better.

This sounds obvious but many people overlook this fundamental principle and focus instead on less relevant details like Twitter usage times/frequency. I’m sure that causing controversy or learning to tweet a certain way might get some extra exposure to your profile but in my opinion, the benefits are minimal. How, when and what you tweet is not crucial.

When you want to catch as many fish as possible, use a large net and spread it as far as you can. The guideline to remember when building your profile is just one: keep working on sending visitors to your profile. People can only follow you when they know you exist.

With this in mind, you can play around with a myriad number of marketing strategies, just like how you would promote a website. Think in terms of incentives. Why would someone want to follow me on Twitter? How will he or she benefit from it? Assuming that someone doesn’t know who I am, what would motivate him or her to subscribe to my Twitter profile?

Here are just some examples of traffic-driving strategies (there are many more):

1. Create a tool/application and promote your profile alongside it.
2. Buy a banner ad to target tech-savvy audiences, link it to your profile.
3. Use Twitter as a tool for tech/customer support.
4. Organize a contest through your Twitter profile
5. Include links to your profile in email/forum signatures.
6. Evangelize Twitter on your blog/other blogs and include a link to your profile.
7. Connect your blog and other social media profiles to your Twitter page.
8. Learn to pitch Twitter influencers with articles relevant to their interest
9. Explicitly ask another user to recommend your profile or exchange recommendations.

Apart from these strategies, there’s also another sure-fire way to increase your Twitter followers and this simply involves the act of following other users. Lets look at this in detail.

Mass Following Twitter Users: The Favorite Methodology of ‘Spammers’

Twitter is similar to many other social networks in numerous aspects, particularly when it comes to friending behaviors. Like Myspace, its possible to befriend a massive amount of users, some of whom will add you back as a friend. Continually adding Twitter users as friends allows you to increase the amount of followers you have.

This is a strategy that has worked remarkably well for early adopters when the Twitter was still a relatively new phenomenon. For example, I know a marketer who followed over ten thousand users and got thousands of followers in return. He then cut down the amount of people he followed and changed his username to make the account look legitimate.

Nowadays, the Twitter community has grown more aware of these ’spammers’ and many tools like the Twitter Blacklist and Twerpscan have been developed to help Twitter users weed out people who try to follow many users in order to build an large audience. Still, a portion of Twitter users (perhaps the new ones) tend to add anyone who befriends them.

Take for instance, Osen Komura. A fake profile set up by another Twitter user in February 2008 as a social experiment. The Osen account followed 41,798 Twitter users in one month and 7,847 users added him as a friend, a 17%+ follow-back rate.

And Osen is not only the only profile out there with thousands of followers all derived through mass user following. The question is: Should you consider using the same strategy?

Apart from the risk of being labeled a Twitter spammer and increasing the noise on your Twitter stream, this method still works. However, know that following so many users inevitably reduces your ability to keep track of individual users since they are drowned out by other updates, unless you conscientiously keep track of your Twitter stream or use RSS. But keep in mind that this is not essential. Here are some good reasons why you really don’t need to mass follow twitter users.

Scoble has suggested that it’s beneficial to follow many Twitter users because you get more access to information and it shows that you’re listening and more open to communication or meeting people. Perhaps so, but I would recommend increasing the people you follow on Twitter gradually, while making sure that you’re maintaining conversational interactiveness.

Most Twitter users don’t like it if you’re simply following him/her to broadcast a message and if you don’t monitor them equally in return or engage them in conversation. Unless you’re a popular celebrity of some sort, one-way attention doesn’t work very well for Twitter.

In any case, only viewing Twitter as a broadcast platform to drive traffic to your websites is a limited perspective, especially when your Twitter followers offer a wealth of knowledge, connections and opinions you can use to improve your business and personal skills.

Personally, I prefer building up an online reputation and driving traffic to my Twitter profile. For me, the benefits of Twitter come from using it as a conversational/networking tool, so I’m more concerned with whose updates I’m receiving daily and hence, the people I follow.

All in all, it depends on your goals and how you use Twitter. Feel free to share this article with your Twitter friends. I’ll love to get more feedback on this topic.

And yes…please follow me on Twitter and say hi! I’m always looking to follow new people so don’t hesitate to introduce yourself. I’m pretty friendly and open to new experiences.

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How to Get More Twitter Followers: Some Methods That Work

For example, some Digg users set their message inbox as ‘friends only’, so you can only ’shout’ or communicate with other users through the site when they have added you as a friend. Only when someone on Twitter ‘follows’ or adds you, will you have the ability to send them private messages or view his/her updates, if they are protected.

In sites like Facebook, adding someone as a friend allows them to see more of your profile (depending on your settings). Befriending users on Youtube allows you to follow their rating and favoriting on videos, while also allowing you to more easily share content with one another.

In general, when someone adds you as a friend on a social media service, you gain some or all of the following benefits:

1. Access to more data. You get to view more data on the user, some of which may be intentionally obscured from the public or other non-friend users. This allows you to network with the specific user in a more intimate and personal setting.
2. Greater communication options. Depending on the social site, when someone adds you as a friend, they open up more avenues of communication. This adds a greater level of interactivity: you can connect with the person who added you through private/direct messages, instead of the highly visible public channel.
3. Recommended content. When someone adds you as a friend (and vice versa), your activity or actions on the site may be recommended or ‘pushed’ towards the other person in some part of their admin panel or profile. This means that you’ll get greater visibility automatically whenever you use the social website.
4. Greater Social Proof. An auxiliary advantage of having many fans on social media websites is social proof, especially when the social site itself ranks the users according to the no. of followers/subscribers they have. Popular and visible users tend to accumulate friends more easily than unknown users.

Basically, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain when someone adds you as a friend on any social media website. They are giving you permission to share messages with them while bestowing attention on your recommendations/actions within the social site.

If you’re trying to get maximum visibility for your message, develop a popular social profile that has a large amount of fans in order to take advantage of the innate advantage that comes from communicating with a large number of people at once through a specific action.

You can see this most easily in highly subscribed Youtube channels. A video can easily rack up over 10,000 views in one day if it is released by a highly subscribed channel owner. Similarly, marketers or web personalities enjoy increasing their Twitter fanbase because they benefit from the influence they derive from consistently wielding a large amount of attention.

Are There Benefits to Having Mutual Friends on Social Websites?

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Depending on their level of particpation, some of these users will become part of your inner circle: the people you interact with the most on the social site. You’ll notice that you’re often talking to the same people on Twitter, Friendfeed or Facebook. More erratic or non-regular users will connect with you less, only when they use the site.

This brings to mind something that is rarely discussed by social media marketers. Are there benefits to mutual friendship on social media websites? Should you only befriend people who befriend you and make sure that you only have mutual friends?

There’s no simple answer for this question because it depends on two things: The infrastructure of the social media site and your goals or how you want to use the site.

Let’s use StumbleUpon as an example. Some have suggested that it’s important to only have mutual friends on StumbleUpon since there’s a friend limit of 200 users. I think that’s just a really limited perspective on how to develop popularity on StumbleUpon.

I don’t recommend this strategy because the only feature-based benefit that you’ll get from a mutual SU friendship is the use of the send-to feature on the toolbar. This option is not used by most active users, does not help to increase traffic significantly and is liable to be abused by spammers who send you multiple pages of content irrelevant to your interests every day.

Who you befriend on Stumbleupon influences what pages you see when you click the stumble button: this means you should try to add users who often stumble content within your field of interest, in order to improve your user-experience, regardless if they are friends or not.

What one needs to understand is that friend networks serve different purposes on each social media site so the value of mutual friendships will differ. This is something you’ll instinctively realize when you spend a lot of time on using each specific social channel.

Next week, I may talk about some friend network building strategies you can use. Feel free to leave a comment and pose any questions you may have!

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Understanding the Value of ‘Friends’ in Social Media Websites

These aggregators enable lifestreaming, which is a simply the publication and sharing of your daily activities in continuous sessions. These social lifestreams allow you to keep track of what your friends or other people are doing online.

In other words, they are tools you can use to observe the activity of others on various social sites or allow others to follow what you’re doing all around the web.

One of the most popular social aggregators is called Friendfeed and it appears to be the most widely used service amongst many other lifestreaming services.

The goal of FriendFeed is to make content on the Web more relevant and useful for you by using your existing social network as a tool for discovering interesting information.

By using an automated, crawl-based approach to finding the content you find interesting, our hope is that your FriendFeed experience will be completely “maintenance free” — you can help your friends and family discover what you’re sharing without changing the way you already use your favorite web-based products.

Friendfeed is an additional way for you to connect with other people online through their interactions on various social websites. You can check out the videos they favorited on Youtube, read the stories they submitted to Digg or learn about what they recently added to their bookmarks in del.icio.us…. all in one webpage.

I’ve been wanting to write about Friendfeed for a while but didn’t because I wanted to let it develop a little more. Right now, there’s a good mixture of applications and commentary on Friendfeed so it’s a good time to talk about it on Dosh Dosh.

What are the Benefits in Using Lifestreaming Services Like Friendfeed?

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There’s been quite a lot of people blogging about Friendfeed and other lifestreaming services but some of them only talk about features and not really benefits i.e. what you stand to gain. I’m always interested in exploring new social media tools but the first thing I think about is how they’ll help me.

Translating lifestreaming and social aggregation into benefits is something I want to do. I don’t care if the service looks terrific or ugly. It doesn’t matter if they have a million features that nobody has. All I want to know is how it’ll benefit me, how it’ll improve myself, my web properties or my relationships with others.

Having played around it for a while, here are the three main benefits I see from using Friendfeed (and other social aggregators), apart from fun/pleasure:

1. Networking With Others. Social aggregators offer many entry points for people looking to connect with another person. There’s no lack of conversation fodder. You can talk to other Friendfeed users about the items they’ve shared by commenting on the site itself or the originating social site.

   Watching what the other party does gives you a better understanding of what he or she is like and allows you to acquire better knowledge on how to interact with another person. It’s basically a communication platform, a place where you can use to comment on shared links or topics.

   Lifestreaming services are also useful for relationship maintenance. If you like to keep up with close friends or people you know, Friendfeed is a good way to make sense of what’s going on in their online lives.




2. More Information Sources. This is in my opinion, the best feature of Friendfeed. Everyone is constantly performing social actions that are aggregated into their lifestream. This can be a useful source of information or news, especially if you use site filters or follow users that are particularly active. By filtering your friend stream according to individual social media websites, you can easily get very specific recommendations.

   For instance, monitoring the LastFM or Netflix stream gives me a list of new songs/movies to check out. If a particular user is a maven or industry leader, just subscribing to his/her stream alone will give you an inside look at important news, sometimes as soon as they break.




3. Expand Your Reach. Social aggregators like Friendfeed compile all your social activities in one place. When you give someone the URL to your Friendfeed profile, you’re granting them viewer ship of what you do online. This convenience for others allows them to give you their attention, thereby increasing your social media equity.

   Someone monitoring your lifestream might share or spread what you like or discover to others as well. When actively promoted, Friendfeed can be a useful way to sustain the attention of your audience away from your main channel, which might be a blog or online business.

Can you have all these benefits independent of Friendfeed? Definitely. There are many ways to interact with others online and you can certainly acquire enough information sources to re-use or consume. So why even consider using Friendfeed? This is a hard case to make, especially if you’re already experiencing information overload when working online. Do you need this additional distraction?

The value of Friendfeed (and social lifestreaming) is that it associates information online with your friends or people you know. Instead of subscribing to a blog with a fixed niche topic, you subscribe to an individual mind. To a person whose qualities or knowledge you trust, thereby letting that person show you around the web.

When you add someone on Friendfeed, you’re entrusting your time to a tour guide.

For example, if you trust me after reading the information here on dosh dosh and think that I’m interesting, you might want to know what I read, consume or do online. Subscribing to my friendfeed is the closest way to experience what I experience when I’m cruising the social web.

The benefits you get from social lifestreaming services like Friendfeed are mainly achieved when you subscribe to people you find genuinely interesting or people you know in order to obtain information or communicate.

Using Friendfeed: Some Recommended Applications and Tools

Image Credit: Metal Gear (NES)

I’m a big believer in actively using a social media service in order to truly ‘get’ it. After all, I didn’t understand the value of Twitter until I started using it regularly. Participation is the gateway towards value extraction.

And so, let me share some of the Friendfeed tools which I’ve found useful:

• MySocial 24 x 7: A Firefox sidebar extension which opens up Friendfeed in the sidebar so you can browse the web while keeping an eye on your friends. It allows you to comment on items that your friends post right in the sidebar and it also comes with filters to sort updates according to social media service or friend. This is pretty much my favorite Friendfeed application right now and I highly recommend using it if you run Firefox.




• Alert Thingy: A desktop application much like twhirl, a Twitter client. It automatically updates with desktop notifications and sound when new items from your friends are posted. It’s not so useful because you can’t filter your stream according to user or web service. But try it if you can: it might be just what you need.




• Greasemonkey Scripts: If you’re using Firefox/Flock, some greasemonkey scripts will really enhance your experience of the web interface. This script to filter friends by service is quite essential because Friendfeed doesn’t yet allow you to filter your friend streams according to the specific web service (for e.g. to view only Youtube activity)

So how do I use Friendfeed? Since I practically live inside my RSS feed reader, I initially subscribed to the entire stream of updates from my friends via RSS. I checked it twice a day, once in the morning and once in the late afternoon for content. This is the most non-interruptive way of using Friendfeed.

The other alternative is to visit the Friendfeed website and to check on what the people I follow are doing. This second method encourages you to participate a bit more because reading the RSS feeds is a lot more passive: you might feel lazy to click over and comment.

However, I eventually moved on from that and started using the MySocial Firefox extension. Since I’m using a widescreen monitor, this was perfect for me. I get to keep up to date with what’s happening and it’s not too distracting at all. One-click sends the sidebar away and I can occasionally zero in on a few users to see what they’ve been up to for the past 24 hours.

So take Friendfeed for a spin, play around with it and let me what you think. If you want to stalk me and spy on what I’m doing online, add me on Friendfeed here.

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The Benefits of Social Media Aggregators and Lifestreaming: A Look at Friendfeed

Apart from making sure your product/website is relevant to the social media channel, it is also useful to participate in social media communities as an end-user or brand representative.

My previous post on social networking ROI already talked about the benefits for building a strong social media presence so let’s move on to examine the characteristics which constitute successful social media profiles.

What are some qualities which contribute to the growth and eventual popularity of a social media profile? Assuming that you aren’t a niche celebrity and don’t have a well-established brand name, what characteristics of your profile should you develop for maximum social media presence?

To uncover these factors, let’s take a look at social news communities, sites which allow their users to have editorial control over the popularity/visibility of content. Although I’m using social news as an example, note that the points I make apply to other social media channels such as networks, forums, blogs as well.

This article is not just for end-users/webmasters but businesses who want to learn how to start using social media to develop a stronger online reputation.

When I started using social news sites like Sphinn and Digg, I was a nobody. My early story submissions to both sites received only a handful of votes and very few people knew who I was, let alone added me as a friend or actively followed the stories I submitted.

A few months later, I’ve submitted over 300 digg frontpage stories and became the No.1 user on Sphinn in terms of Sphinn stories gone hot. I’ve made new friends and other users are more likely to pay attention to what I contribute now.

The point here is not about me transforming from nobody into someone of social media importance. Anyone can do that with some concerted effort. The lesson I want to impart here is that there are some general characteristics which underlie a popular social media profile. I’m going to tell you what they are.

How to Build a Popular Social Media Profile: 7 Helpful Characteristics

These characteristics are no secret and they apply to both new social media users as well as already popular brands seeking to leverage the exposure that social media gives. Instead of explaining in an abstract manner, I’ll try to link these points with what I’ve done with existing social media profiles.

In my opinion, here are the 7 characteristics of a successful social media profile:

1. Strong Profile Visibility: Developing Brand Recognition

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A good social media profile is highly visible in multiple channels. The more people connect your social media profile to your existing brand or website the better. Start to increase your visibility by inter-connecting all your social media profiles and web properties (blog/podcast/forum etc.).

After which, take this one step further by evangelizing the social media service. When I first using StumbleUpon, I published detailed guides on dosh dosh and drove traffic to my profile. This increased the number of people who befriended me on SU.

Don’t rely on cheesy incentive-based contests to build an audience, just become a gateway for others into the social media channel and you’ll develop followers. Teach, guide and help others adopt and use the social media service. It’s not difficult to do and everyone benefits in the end.

Visibility is also reliant on your participation levels. When I first started using Sphinn, I submitted a good deal of stories everyday and always voted new stories religiously. I deliberated maintained the high submission volume because I wanted my avatar to become more familiar to the other Sphinn users.

When you think about visibility, think about it in terms of familiarity or brand recognition as well. You not only want people to see your profile, you want them to know and recognize it instantly. Broad visibility will give you a lot of opportunities for networking, which helps you along the way.


2. Active Participation: Maintaining a Continuous Presence

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The more active you are on a social media channel, the more likely you are to build a strong reputation. The amount of time you spend on the site is directly proportionate to the growth of your brand presence. To be highly active via a social media website, you need to strategically set aside time to use it everyday.

You must not only be active but regular. Don’t use the website for 2 weeks and then disappear for a month. I’ve seen this happen for Digg users and when they come back after a while, they’ll find that other users have un-friended them and may find it difficult to get people to notice their submissions.

This applies to all social media profiles. Attention or influence accumulates. Strive to build on what you’ve gained. Just sitting back and slacking off limits your potential for maximum visibility. When you are entering into social media, the best thing to do is to maintain a continous presence from the start.

I treat social websites like I treat email. I am most active two times a day, morning and night. In between, I use social media sporadically: only when I comes across interesting content to share with other users. I’ve done the same for many months and it has become a habit of some sort.

The initial stage of building a profile will always require an investment of your time. Take it from me: it gets easier over time. At the moment, I spend considerably less energy and time on all my social media profiles than when I first started. Why? Because established brands tend to spread themselves.


3. Practice Reciprocity: Seek Win-Win Outcomes

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In social news websites, users often vote because of the submitter and not the story. This is because they are reciprocating votes given to their own stories or sites. Psychologists like Robert Cialdini have mentioned that reciprocation is a natural component of human relationships. It’s not strange to find it in social media.

But instead of merely trading votes, trade attention and other assets. When someone shows interest in your social profile by linking to or promoting it, keep an eye out for the his/her profile or interests as well. Go beyond mere site-specific functions and think about how you and the other user can collaborate in mutually-beneficial ventures.

Reciprocation is not just a mechanical game of blind, circular suppport but a pro-active tactic. Instead of reacting, take the initiative doing someone a favor, and ask nothing in return. The unspoken rule of reciprocation will ensure that it’ll come back to you. Even if you don’t get anything in return, at least you’ve made a friend.

And friends matter a great deal in social media.


4. Effective Communication: Conversations are Important

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A good social media profile is always open to communication. Request and listen to feedback. Learn from the people around you. Make it easy for others to contact you away from the social media channels by providing your contact information.

Communication also involves some power networking: try to interact with other fellow social media users by talking about the community or other common interests.

When you’re communicating, you’re learning. When I talk to other social media users, I almost always learn something new. Even experts need the grapevine.

It’s impossible for anyone to know everything and anything to do with social media, let alone be perpetually updated with the latest happenings with each website. Let other social media users be your informants, let them be your teachers.

Communication is an integral part of building relationships and its a good way to make new friends or acquaintances that may benefit you in the future. Talking to other people is also fun and it enriches the social media experience. Conversations are a big part of social media: Keep this in mind.

Although I might not be available on IM every day, I do try to reach out to the people who are most active on the same social media channels. These are the people I like to talk to the most because they are actively engaged as I am. Make a point to connect whenever you have issues to discuss and not only when you need a favor.


5. Support the Community: Putting the Collective Before Oneself

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A good social media user supports the community in many ways. She reports bugs, shares feedback about the site and highlights issues concerning other users. When you see other social media users struggling to broadcast news about the community, help them to spread the word.

A successful social media profile is one that is well integrated with the collective. And that integration is naturally developed when one is passionate or supportive of other users in the community and the site itself. Offer constructive criticisms of these websites and help other users to get heard.

While using Digg, I’ve noticed a few users who consistently shout or promote the stories of other users. They have nothing to gain except that they believe the story deserves to be on the frontpage. These users are selfless and they care more about the community than their own digg submission/frontpage record.

While there aren’t many of these users, they demonstrate a mentality that I think should be adopted more often in social media. When you build a profile or enter into social media, think in terms of the collective first before you focus on your self.

This not only allows you to develop credibility but naturally leads me into the next point on providing value.


6. Provide Value Above All: Gaining Trust and Attention

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There is one reason why you should provide value before expecting profit when it comes to social media: value leads to the development of trust. To build a successful brand through social media, you should first earn trust by providing value through your participation.

For instance when I started using Digg/Sphinn, I mostly submitted stories from other websites instead of mine. I deliberately minimized the benefits I could get from each channel even though both of them welcome the submissions of your own articles.

Why? Because the impression of providing excellent value is one I want to associate with my profile. I ended up submitting tons of articles from other sites and directed millions of visitors to them. I didn’t ask for anything in return.

I’m sure you’ve seen Digg users who submit nothing but their own website all the time. There’s nothing wrong with it inherently but this gives one a bad reputation among other users. If you do it aggressively enough, you’ll may even be labeled a spammer and your site might be blacklisted/penalized by other users or site admins.

What’s the problem here? Simple. You’re not contributing value to the community, you’re only trying to extract benefits. This doesn’t work. If you look like you’re constantly trying to pitch your affiliate link or drive traffic to your site, you’re never going to build a popular social media profile.

The sad truth is that if you focus on providing value, other users will trust and follow you or your site more closely. You gain attention and your brand grows, which often leads to greater benefits in the future in terms of traffic, reputation or connections.

This is the way I built up profiles on every social site I’ve used. Provide value above all. Don’t overfocus on extracting benefits. You can’t go wrong with this strategy.


7. Demonstrate Integrity

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You want to make sure that you’re developing a legitimate social media profile because many people are keeping their eye on you. There’s no point in creating a strong social media presence only to do something stupid to mess up your reputation.

When I talk about ethics, I’m mainly referring to personal principles, unwritten community rules and each site’s Terms of Use. Don’t do anything that violates each social media website’s rules. Even if you really want to do something against the regulations, at least make sure you don’t get caught.

You can bend the rules a little and experiment with social media but make sure that what is visible to your audience is legitimate. A large part of the social media audience will not appreciate you breaking the rules if they discover it. It only takes a few people and a few words to damage your social media profile.

Unwritten rules may vary for each website and you’ll probably get a hang of what to do or what not do after you’ve participated and talked to other social media users. These rules are not set in stone and you can act outside of established norms, although you should do it in a way which frames yourself in a positive light.

Apart from self-preservation, ethics can also improve your reputation of your brand in social media. Integrity is a much respected characteristic by all, so tailor your behavior to demonstrate that. This is especially important for new brands entering social media, since they have no previous clout to leverage.

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For example, I know what I share on Twitter will be seen by all my followers I make sure to only share non-spammy and useful/interesting websites. When I submit a digg story, it has a 44% chance of hitting the digg frontpage, so I make sure the site I’m submitting is legitimate.

Precautions like this may seem minor but people notice what you do. Once I’ve had a user message me to tell me that a story I submitted to Digg was stolen from another website. I emailed digg support and had them remove the story immediately.

I don’t want my name to be associated with plagiarism of any form. You might think it’s not a big deal but reputation is built step by step from the ground up.

Your brand is simply a summation of many situations, all compounded into a coherent whole. Every public action matters. In short, take a stand on what you believe in, demonstrate integrity and use each social media website ethically to protect your established reputation.




And that concludes the characteristics of a popular social media profile. If you’ve got questions, feel free to leave them in the comments. I’ll be glad to answer them.

Fundamentals of Social Media Marketing is a tutorial series which teaches you how to utilize the power of social media channels to get more exposure for your brand, website and business. The post you’ve just read is the 8th article in the series.

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Building a Popular Social Media Profile: Seven Essential Characteristics