Parnassus Group Blog

Sitting, as I do, in the middle section of a rather large power curve that is “Twitter users and their followers,” I spend a fair amount of time thinking about what particular actions generate those wonderful follower spikes—you know, that day and a half where you get a couple hundred new followers instead of two or three?

I asked people on Twitter what they remember causing their big follower spikes, hoping that maybe someone had done something replicable as a legitimate follower-building strategy.

Surprisingly, someone had.

The replies I got showed, essentially, two strategies for getting a follower spike.

First: get recommended –

# kingrat@jasonp107 Anytime I mention social media, I get around 5 “social media experts” who follow me. Other than that, no spikes ever.about 2 hours ago from TwitterFox in reply to jasonp107

# chrispetescia@jasonp107 yesterday, from @carrotcreative staff tweets about our work with DMBabout 2 hours ago from web in reply to jasonp107

# Snotty McSnotterson@jasonp107: 100 requests in 15 min following @moniguzman’s endorsement on #followfriday. Seriously, I need her to be my PR person. about 2 hours ago from DestroyTwitter

# Dylan Wilbanks@jasonp107 Biggest follower spike: ~50 in the 24h after I spoke at SXSW.about 17 hours ago from web

# Chuck Westbrook@jasonp107 About 150 in a day when I first launched the idea behind bloghiker. Mind you, at that point, I had 30 followers.

Second: Use hashtags!

# @JJTweets #nnbn & #thepitch were my biggest spikes.Having tweets on bigboard shown to whole room as well as streaming-video traffic sure gets eyeballs

I quite like that second strategy. Seems replicable!

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My local paper carried a story today about Twitter’s fast penetration of the US Federal Government. There’s a lot of praise from new media types and transparency junkies, but of course the cynics abound:

Some bloggers have mused that Twitter may not be an effective way of communicating with Congress. Ethan Zuckerman, co-founder of Global Voices Online, asked in a recent posting if Twitter had “just become another tool for spamming politicians and decision makers.”

Judging from my experience with public figures and Twitter, one of the things that is most exciting is the raw pipeline to the public. Until the internet made it possible for “anybody” to amass a following the size of a city, getting into the public eye meant putting an increasing number of filters between you and your…fans.

In the end, though, it’s important to remember that Twitter (like WordPress) is just a tool, and it’s not inherently a good tool or a bad tool. It’s perfectly possible for one politician to be using it honestly to connect with their constituents and another to bang out press releases.

And, incidentally, both of those approaches are totally OK. Those who want the press releases will follow the accounts that pump it out. Those who don’t, won’t.

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According to MSNBC, we’re all dopes.

I mean, who in their right mind would follow a fake celebrity (their logic):

Fakers can, after all, only steal an identity if the gaping audience at large is dull enough to believe that @cwalken, the guy who’s dropping absurd Zen koans like, “It’s partially my fault that the cat answers to ‘Martin.’ I believe his name is actually ‘Pookie’ but I won’t call a cat that,” really is Christopher Walken.

I think the split is pretty obvious, and we all just like us some good entertainment.

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We’ve just announced the Twitter Conference T-shirt Challenge, which is basically a contest to come up with the phrase that goes on the back of our Twitter conference T-shirts. And the winner gets a free pass to the event.

It’s pretty easy to enter the contest, and we’re taking submissions all the way up to April 17th, so if you’re reasonably clever, and you want to get in to 140 | The Twitter Conference for free, go ahead and give it a shot.

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There’s a cool little web app called TweetStats that lets you see some cool graphs on your Twitter usage (over time, your @replies, what interface used). And of course, when there’s data, we must play.

Since I’m assuming that most people don’t sleep-Tweet, one of the graphs that TweetStats pops up with seems like a rough visual guide to when people sleep. Right? For example, here’s my graph:

It looks like I’m plenty responsible on Monday, but then my bedtime just keeps creeping backwards until Saturday night, when I don’t stop tweeting until Sunday morning…

In contrast, here’s Jeremiah Owyang (who will be presenting at 140 | The Twitter Conference – do you have your tickets yet?), who seems to keep a nice regular 4am to 8pm tweet schedule.

Jeremiah: how do you do it???

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One of the things that I’ve always liked about Twitter is how it forces me to be concise when I write. I find that when I write blog posts, I’m often looking for ways to make things longer so I can justify it as a whole, you know, post. Which is ridiculous.

Today Copyblogger points out that for those of us who have—ah—loose prose, Twitter can be an excellent training tool:

Since you only have 140 characters to get your message across, you’re forced to dust off your dictionary and thesaurus and find new words to use—Words that are shorter, words that are more descriptive, and words that get the job done in 140 characters or less.

Crafting a message for Twitter requires you to “pump up” your verbs (replacing adverbs and adjectives with them), and discover a better, clearer and more concise way to say what you want to say.

I usually tweet using my college journalism professor’s SLBMBT (Something Like But Much Better Than) method. I drop in the message that I’m trying to say, in big long ugly phrase, and then I shave it down to the proper 140 character limit.

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Despite the rampant conversation about whether or not Twitter will ever be able to make money, my boss swears up and down that he can think of sixteen different ways for them to get richer than Google. It looks like John Battelle is taking the first step in bringing revenue to Twitter with a sponsored portal called ExecTweets.

It’s a Twitter-endorsed portal that collects the Tweets from top business executives. Because it’s Twitter endorsed, they get to take home a check.

From AllThingsD:

But there is something to be said for branding campaigns launched with Twitter’s approval and participation. Figuring out exactly how much that will be worth, and what it will eventually look like, will likely take Twitter and its ad partners a while to figure out. But now they’re starting. Finally.

I think the money here for Twitter is small potatoes. But we’ll find out.

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What’s that you say? You can affect the number of followers by changing your bio?

Well strictly speaking there’s probably not a bit causal relationship between the data, but Dan Zarrella over at the HubSpot Blog has certainly established that there’s a correlation between what you put in your bio and how many followers you have.

Here’s one of the more interesting charts I ganked from his post. Looks like people on Twitter are disproportionately interesting in marketing and starting companies, neh?

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I’m happy to announce that I’ve bludgeoned together a public Twitterbot for 140 | The Twitter Conference without touching a single line a code. This is particularly good news because the last time I touched a line of code there was a citywide blackout^*.

The Twitter bot is here: 140tc.

140tc is also the official hashtag for the event, so if you’re tweeting about it, go ahead and stick #140tc on the end of your tweet.

How does the Twitter bot work? Basically, it will regurgitate any public reply you send containting “@140tc.”

Awesome. Now we can all send group messages.

Building the Bot

The bot works by pulling together Yahoo! Pipes, TwitterFeed, Twitter Search, and SocialToo.

It’s all outlined very nicely by Martin Ruiz on his blog, and I’d suggest just going through that tutorial if you want to set up your own.

The only confusing part was the Yahoo! Pipes integration, but I just pulled a feed from a Twitter Search for “@140tc” and plugged it into the Fetch Feed module…worked OK as far as I can tell.

What’s missing?

OK, so what are the downsides to hacking the bot together, instead of building a real one?

There are two big ones that I can think of:

1. It only updates the 140 account every half-hour, because that’s as fast as twitterfeed goes.
2. It won’t automatically put in your username, so you get no credit! (There’s an easy fix…put @yourusername at the end of your tweet!)

All in all, I’m pretty proud of myself.

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* This isn’t actually true. I do know my way around CSS pretty well, but putting together a Twitter bot is certainly beyond my expertise. ( Return )

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