The @girlkawasaki effect! How to get Hundreds of Twitter followers with little work on your part

What is the @girlkawasaki effect? How does this work, and how can it work for you?

Let me first off by telling you that @girlkawasaki is a very real person who has a very real blog.  They’re a very good friend of mine and are fortunate to have been an influence of the first draft of this (Originally it could have been the @cxi effect, but that’d be lame and the fruits of my labors resulted in the direct effect to apply to @girlkawasaki :))

So, WTF is this?!? – Alright, I’ll tell you!

While studying the way Twitter works, and more importantly how other people on Twitter work, I began to analyze some trends and patterns of likely events.  I personally love conversation on all topics, so I would follow people of all backgrounds on twitter.  When someone re-tweets someone else on something interesting, I follow them as well, continuously spreading the love of knowledge whether me sharing or simply learning from others experiences.

I noticed that when you add some people, you may get an immediate follow-back, and more often than not an Auto-DM (Direct Message).  A lot of people find these Auto-DM’s to be a bit annoying.  I simply find them to be rather insincere and only a little annoying. ;) I do like them because Auto-DM’s typically give rise to the fact that you’re using a 3rd party service like SocialToo or others which auto-sends that, and often Auto-follows on your behalf :)

So if you have a boatload of followers like I do (Hey I’m no @guykawasaki) But I do have a fair number of followers, many of which happen to reside in my own industrie(s) You’ll tend to find that by following a lot of people, a lot of people will often follow you back.

So in that first test, @girlkawasaki wanted followers for the same reasons I do (People to learn and share with) so she followed a bunch of the people I (@cxi) happen to have been following and a number of them ~half followed her back.  And this trend would carry on for some time, of people following her either directly (a response to being followed) or randomly based upon tweets, comments and interaction.

So the next phase of this, once @girlkawasaki was seen to have a comfortable following of stable tweets, I then tried to follow everyone (minus spammers and locked accounts) that happened to be *Following* her ~650 people were following @girlkawasaki which were then followed.

This is where it gets interesting.  You might think “I’ll get a mass of followers instantly!”  But that isn’t true and isn’t the case, because people use different services which have large databases with different scrubbing and updating routines.   The result turns out to be that after the first hour of following ~650 people,  ~130 twitter accounts followed back.

This is after the first hour ofcourse, and after several hours we’ll see how the numbers reflect.    I’m not saying you’re guaranteed to get hundreds of followers if you follow everyone who is following @girlkawasaki, however after one full day I’ll update this to include what the final number looks like.    The account I used in this test is indeed an actual real twitter account so these are real live and valid numbers to be working with. :)

This is not a test of a Denial of Service, more of an interest of parties out there (like me) who want to follow more people and want more followers so we can continue our conversation in life, in Tweetdom and most importantly with ourselves :)

This is no disrespect to anyone who follows @girlkawasaki and are interesting in what she tweets (both actual tweets and her wonderful blog posts :)) Just think how many followers you get by consequence when you don’t fall into that small criteria of auto-followers :)

Thanks, and don’t hesitate to ask any questions or leave any comments on your success! :)

Control Group: 373 followers in 17hrs, for 56% followback!

When that’s out of 650 that’s pretty amazing!

How do I fix the Tweetdeck API issue with Twitter?

First of all, this is not an issue with Tweetdeck, this is an issue with Twitter!

How I personally handle this issue (And I haven’t hit an API limitation using just Tweetdeck)

Is go in and modify the API values to look like this:

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As you can see, the major difference is the “All Friends” has been increased from 1min to 1min 12s.

That minor difference alone is easily enough to make up for the API limits on an hourly basis.

If you continue to run out of API calls in an hour, increase that number to 2 minutes or beyond.

 

 

 

While you’re at it, upgrade to Tweetdeck 0.21 Beta released: Christmas Eve!

Read More

Happiness is a warm tweet (Happytweets)

Are you a happy tweeter? How can you tell? HappyTweets is here to actually give you a ranking along with a color coded soothing feeling to the situation!

So, how does it work? It’s actually extremely simple!

Go to happytweets.com Type in your name and click “Get Happy!” It’s that easy!

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So lets see, just how happy am I today?

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Wow, would you look at that! I’m very Happy! Even with a nice pretty orange to show just how happy I am!

But not everyone is happy, and the colors certainly do change based upon the numeric ranking out there!

 

 

 

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So, whether you’re feeling orange with excitement, or blue or grey and down in the dumps, this certainly can be a good indicator “Hey, wait a minute, apparently I’m being a real downer in tweeterville! Maybe I should spin it up a bit!”

This is more than a social experiment as Tim creator of this tool has intended it to be.

This actually serves as a “Social Service” because if you’re down, and the software says you are – Do something about it! Tweet a little happiness into your life and I’m sure you’ll find your attitude towards the world shift!   Think about everything you have to take for granted, like food or civil rights! :)

So, thanks @u2elan for bringing us this! Have a Happy Holidays, and a Happy Tweetlandia! :)

How to mass unfollow or follow people on Twitter .. and more!

Here is a new update to this post –

Please read this latest version of the best tool for this, viable as of Friday, August 20th, 2010

How to mass follow and unfollow on twitter FOR FREE?!?!?

Here is an update to this post – Be sure to check out this updated version for the >10k club!

How to mass follow and unfollow on twitter: over 10k club!

So you’re sitting there wondering “I wonder who is following me that I’m not following back!” or the more realistic question “Which of these folks that I’m following are not following me!”

Here is our good friend Friend or Follow!

It’s actually very simple to use.  Simply browse to their site, enter your name hit submit and you’re off!

imagePet the bunny! :) image

Then suddenly you’re brought to this wonderful page!

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At that point, you can click on their names and decide if you want to continue following them or not.  It’s a useful way to see who it is that you are following who is not following you.   But the benefits don’t end there!

 

 

 

 

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Simply by clicking on Fans, you’ll get a list of people who are following you, but YOU are not following back!

This happens to the best of us, or they’re spammers which haven’t been removed yet, in either case you can click on them and choose to follow or not!

 

Here is where it gets tricky.   Let’s say you chose to follow ‘x’ number of folks and they’re not reciprocating, and you decide “Alright, I’ve had enough of this!” I hear it more often than not.

Well, with Friend or Follow here, you can open up every page, perform your 3-4 clicks and remove them as friends.  Oh I forgot, I don’t have that kind of time and carpal tunnel, do you have another option?

Introducing Twitter Karma!

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The security conscious folks abound will be concerned about using this as it does require you to enter your password (It will be performing calls on your behalf so that’s understandable that it needs credentials)

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You need to be cautious when using this, if your API limit is close to being maxed as it may “appear” as though it’s not working.   Just try again in an hour if it’s not working as expected.

(Infact, merely connecting the first time is often enough to exceed your rate limit – Be warned)

Then simply change the “Show” field to “Only Following:”

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Pop on down to the bottom and make your decision:

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If you’re looking to drop everyone, do a “check all” and “Bulk Unfollow” and it’ll go through and unfollow them.

A bit of warning, this may take some time, so please be patient.  I find the best way to keep up on whether it is working (Because it goes into work mode the instant you click it: Would be to go to your twitter homepage, and watch the numbers increase/decrease appropriately.

One of the hardest parts for me to unfollow people is, I enjoy reading their conversations and interacting with them, regardless of whether they’re following me.  But Twitter Limits and other restrictions force you into these situations! :)

One of the nicest parts is it will show you when they “Last Updated” so you can feel better removing people who haven’t updated “Ever” or “not in a year” or so.

So remember, if you’re looking to mass follow, mass unfollow, or take any kind of mass actions (Or even just get a feeling of how unbalanced things may be)  – The two tools mentioned above will help you achieve that!

Be sure to be running the latest version of TweetDeck and Adobe Air also, just in general :)

And be sure to add me @cxi on Twitter and @cxi on 12seconds!

On the 12 seconds of Tweetdeck my true love gave to me

Raise your hand if you use Tweetdeck! Yes I know you do, we all do.

You ever sit there and wonder what that little image  is up in the control section? A click on it will reveal much excitement to be had!

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Simply clicking that little 12 will bring up this prompt: Asking you for your 12seconds.tv creds!

Then, get ready for it, because all of a sudden you have access to Video in Tweetdeck!

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OMFG What is going on here? Why are there videos in Tweet Deck? This is actually kind of cool!

 

 

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Hovering over it will prompt you to Play the clip, or click the arrow and Whoa! Wait a minute you can RT from here as well?!

image RT cxi: 12seconds – http://12seconds.tv/channel/cxi/64782

#Playing in TweetDeck

imageIt’ll grey out your background while it displays video! 

Okay, this all seems a bit weird.  I thought we could only interact with each other in 140 character segments (Less in a reply) but now we can suddenly interact in 12 second segments?    Sure, you might think 12 seconds doesn’t seem like a lot, You say I want more, I want 12 times 12 seconds to get my point across! But seriously, that’s Gross But seriously, you can say a lot in 12 seconds and this gets to that point.  The first time you’ll realize just how long of a time 12 seconds indeed is :)

*I won’t even mention the iPhone Application they announced on the 18th! ;*

How cool can this possibly be? Think about it.  It’s been integrated into Tweetdeck for how long now? And we’ve never even noticed it?  I think it’s time we take notice (Especially with the TweetDeck Holiday update coming Dec 24th! hooray! :))

As always you can find me on twitter at @cxi but you can also find me on 12seconds @cxi!

So get out there, give it a try, add me in my shaven and unshaven form and lets celebrate the 12 seconds of christmas together!