May 10th, 2009 |

Thanks for revisiting my Blog. Please feel free to comment. In fact, I insist you take the time to leave me a positive comment, or even a constructive comment. -- Your Friend Dave Perry

House Keeping:

I’m sure we all know Aesop’s fable “The Goose that Laid the Golden Egg”. The moral of the story is “Don’t’ get greedy when you have a good thing going”. So it is in the Twitterverse, Twitter will allow us to advertise and to build a list aggressively, unless we get greedy. So here are the housekeeping details that will keep us on the profitable side of Twitter.

Always keep in mind that Twitter is a social media site. It will not tolerate abuse. If we abuse it Twitter will suspend our account and we will have to start over again. So here are the basic rules for maintaining a balanced Twitter account. I would suggest that you check each day if you are within these limits, if not you will need to remove people from your following list.

In reality, if these people have not followed you back after 1 or2 days, they won’t be responsive to your messages anyway, so you should remove them from your account and follow some new people.

Twitter’s following rules:

New accounts can’t follow more than 2000 people until your follower count gets over 1850.
Once your over 2000 followers, you can follow 10% more than are following you.
For example, if you have 2000 followers, you can follow 2200 people.

You will need to remove people you are following that have not followed you.

Use the free Twitter Karma tool.
Sign in and select the “Whack” button – don’t worry it won’t do anything until you allow it to.
The interface to Twitter Karma is not that intuitive so here are the instructions:

In the SHOW drop down box select “only following”
Check that only twitterers with a GREEN arrow are shown
Go to the bottom select “Check All” then “Bulk Unfollow”

You should do this once every other day or when you are getting too close to your limits.
If you are using an automated following tool like Twollo.com, you should make sure you have sufficient room to add new followers so the automated tool does not exceed the limits.

This series has only scratched the surface. We have covered the basics for setting up a Twitter account, producing content, finding targeted followers and managing the list. If you have followed these instructions and are building a Twitter following at 100-200 persons a day, you will be interested in the Part 6 of this series. In Part 6, I will give you a list of some interesting utilities that will help you further automate your Twitter account, and also allow you to start sending out marketing messages to your followers.

I would caution you to take this slowly. There are so many interesting Twitter utilities out there, that you could spend days trying them. I have evaluated many of these tools and have found a few that are worthwhile considering. Take care, not to spend all your time tinkering, or to attach so many tools to your Twitter account that it becomes unmanageable. The list of tools I will be sharing with you in Part 6, have been tested and are worth trying and will bring value to your marketing activities.

[If you would like to see specific video instructions for setting up a Twitter account and automating it, purchase Twitter Traffic Machine. It will be the best $27 you will spend this week.]

I would appreciate any feedback you can give me regarding the usefulness of this blog post. If there are any omissions or errors, or if you are left with a burning question, please reply below. I am also interested to hear about your experiences on Twitter - good or bad. Please leave a comment below. If you have found it useful, then please bookmark it on Digg or your favourite bookmark site.

Dave Perry

Follow Me on Twitter: @DBPerry

Technorati Tags: automate twitter, social media marketing, Twitter