How to Lop Off the Heads of 1000 Twitter Marketers
At the time I’m writing this I’m sitting at a little over 5,000 followers on Twitter and AT LEAST 1,000 of them are either marketers, spammers or some other form of insane villain.
As much as I love to click links in each and every tweet promising to get me over One Million Followers in the Next 10 Minutes, the extreme volume of such tweets can sometimes obscure other, semi-important tweets such as my girlfriend tweeting from the front yard on her cell phone that all four bedrooms are on fire and I should get up out of my computer chair before the back of my head chars.
One way to sift out the spam is to start un-following these brave souls; however, by doing that you run the risk of a retaliatory de-following and reducing your impressive follower count.
Now, if that doesn’t bother you, go ahead and do it, but if you’re a blogger like me and like the “social proof” benefits of showing a big Twitter follower count on your blog, I’ve discovered a solution that will not only turn the sprinklers on these annoying pests, but will beef up the Feedburner feedcount on your blog at the same time.
The answer is FriendFeed.
FriendFeed allows you to tweet as normal to your friends through Twitter except you can categorize your Twitter followers into manageable containers.
For example, you can place your favorite Twitter friends into a container called, “Friendzies” and then just communicate with those particular tweeps rendering everyone else invisible.
If @MisterSpam shows up, go ahead and make him happy by subscribing to his FriendFeed, then throw him into the online equivalent of Solitary Confinement. I call mine, “The Pile.” [so evil]
Another cool thing is that you don’t have to keep refreshing the screen to see if one of your buddies tweeted; the screen will scroll as the tweets come in!
When you use FriendFeed for your tweets, the tweets are no longer limited to 140 characters; if you run long, FriendFeed will automatically put in a link that, when clicked, takes the reader to the full-version.
As an added bonus, bloggers will love that when they add their RSS feed to FriendFeed, their feedburner feedcount will rise with every FriendFeed subscriber.
I’ve only scratched the surface of what you can do using FriendFeed in relation with Twitter, but there’s so much more (such as attaching comments to tweets or automatically tweeting your new blog posts), so go ahead and play with it and discover all the great non-twitter related stuff as well.
Oh, and don’t forget to subscribe to my FriendFeed and I’ll return the favor (you might want to send a Direct Message to me through FriendFeed letting me know you’re a Dead Rooster reader and not a spammer so I’ll know not to throw you on “The Pile”).
See you there!
Photo credit: salvez
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Ah! I’m one of those Twitterers who doesn’t go for quantity as much as folks who I think are interesting. So I haven’t gone at it from that direction. As a result, my followers are around the not-quite-400 range.
But I tend to use Twitter more for hanging out and keeping up with folks than actual marketing.
Hope this works out for ya!
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William McCamment
reply on July 8th, 2009 10:40 am:
I didn’t start out for quantity either, but I made the promise that I’d follow anyone that followed me, so I feel obligated to keep my word.
Twitter SHOULD be for hanging out with friends. I think pretty soon the marketing, spammer types will learn that it’s getting increasingly worse for them.
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