Twitter Experiment – Was it worth losing over 400 Followers?

I joined Twitter when it was fairly fresh to the market, long before it began spreading everywhere in the mainstream media. I enjoy Twitter as it is like an ICQ, mixed with a message board. It is a very useful social media tool to stay connected with people over long distances, meet new and interesting experts and friends as well as keep up to date with current events. Last week I decided to change my Twitter strategy and conduct a Twitter experiment, here are my findings.

Automating Twitter can grow your Followers quickly.

Like most Internet Marketers, I like things that are automated. Why spend unnecessary time on a task if there is a way to let a computer do it. The 80 – 20 Rule applies to everything, and at the beginning, Automating most of my Twitter account seemed to be a great way to make it easier. I found SocialOomph.com to be a very useful tool to automate your Twitter account and get the most out of Twitter by reducing the time you spend managing or finding the information you like. With features like Autofollow followers, Scheduled tweets, Track keywords and send DM’s to new followers SocialOomph.com offers you the ability to automate the administration of your Twitter account for Free. I started using it when it was called TweetLater. At this time the main functionality was the Scheduled tweets. I used SocialOomph.com to scheduled updates with useful information from my Twitter account and watched as my Followers grew to over 2000 in two weeks. I also used the Autofollow function and, you guessed it, I followed everybody who followed me.

My Twitter was Useless

Another great tool for Twitter is TweetDeck, it is of great help with the day-to-day use of Twitter. Being able to manage multiple accounts as well as create simple views to check on the people you are following. Learn how to use TweetDeck effectively and save time is a great article to get you stared on TweetDeck. However, even using such advanced tools didn’t stop my twitter from becoming rather useless and spammy. I often felt overwhelmed by the amount of tweets I was receiving in one day. Often it was almost impossible to follow updates from my friends and the experts I follow. Every 30 seconds, my TweetDeck would update with 20 to 50 new tweets. Many of them were not helpful at all for the things I am doing with Twitter. I love following people and learning something new from them, but if I get updates about Real Estate in Arizona or Solar techniques every 30 seconds it really doesn’t make Twitter very useful for me.

How I lost over 400 followers in less then 3 days

Twitter Followers of FalkoInc

Last week I decided to focus more on Twitter again and write more articles for my blog. Not an easy thing to do but I feel that the content publishing or affiliate business model will suite me better in the long run. Last week I changed the way I used Twitter. I stopped using the Autofollow function and decided to clean up the list of people I follow. I reduced it to people, I personally know, or experts I want to follow to try to make it useful again. In return I lost over 400 followers within 3 days.

Only 17.39% of Twitter users are automated

Twitter people I follow

Now I’m only following 126 experts, tools and friends. 6 days later I’m sure that will change, but still I have more then 2000 followers on Twitter. That means only about 5.75 in 100 Twitter users are actually using the automation function on there account. This applies to both autofollow and autounfollow, which allows you to unfollow people who stopped following you. Sure this is a perfect example of the 80-20 rule, but it is also an opportunity to gain large number of followers in a short period of time. I can only say I’m very happy about the out come of this experiment. I’m finally able to use my Twitter effective again and use it more often then before.

If you liked the post, feel free to connect with me on Twitter @FalkoInc and leave me a comment if you have any questions or a difference in opinion to this topic.

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