It’s always amusing for someone like me to make some points about a free service. People love to complain as a whole, even if its a free service which they aren’t loosing anything on and actually have everything to gain – but it’s human nature, so I wont let a little thing like guilt stop me! To start with, I’ll also say that I’m not the only one, I’m sure there are plenty of people complaining out there in blogs across the net.

Why am I using Twitter?

I like it, it’s a POPULAR (important reason) service, with thousands of users, and a lot of those users are you, my readers. So it seems a logical place for me to broadcast in between brilliant and interesting tutorials and blog posts like these (insert shameless self-promotion here). When I first started on twitter a couple of months ago, I found it hard to understand the point, and the mechanics of it – and the reason behind why so many people use this service. Many hardcore, and die-hard Twitter fans will also struggle to come up with a definitive reason why they use it – but the truth of the matter is its fun, addictive and allows us to connect with interesting people on another level.

OK, so what don’t you like about Twitter?

Well, as they say, ‘Build it and they will come’ – and that’s exactly what they did. Unfortunatley, or fortunatley maybe, this attracts a lot of attention. Probably more than the non-profit service may have anticipated, or planned for. Any high traffic website on th web also becomes a commodity or resource, a way for people to promote their brands, services or even just themselves – and ofcourse we all flock to do that. This is probably part of the problem. Everyone is doing it – and it’s hard to distinguish one person from another on twitter, making it hard to build up those relationships that most of us are seeking and desire. It’s really because there isn’t a way to narrow down actual users by categorey. The only real way to try and find users who may interest you is to search for keywords using their search, and hope to find people who have mentioned it. The trouble is with that, some of these people will only have maybe mentioned the term once, and if they never follow you back – it’s going to be a one way relationship. No their fault of course, if your a popular twitter user, how can you communicate with thousands of followers, would you want to? Realistically no.

Another draw back whilst I think of it is time zones, people all across the world use twitter, the trouble is its hard again to connect to someone who maybe has tweeted whilst your sleeping, also mean that I’ll often miss replies as they are pushed further down the list.

Spam is a huge issue for me, if there was no spam on twitter, there would be very few people with the many thousands of followers, because enormous numbers of followers are spam. Question on my mind is, should I remove all of them? Or just leave them to make it look like my numbers are higher? I have been undecided, and I have removed some. Perhaps when I hopefully reach a few more followers, I will cull them a small number at a time. But in the battle to get more followers its kinda counter-productive to remove some. It’s also difficult to spot some of the spam followers, and often easy to mistake a non-spam user as spam. This is because the age old and USP of Twitter ‘What are you doing?’ is often replaced by Twitter users miss-reading it as ‘What link shall I post?’.

Twitter for Marketing

I use Twitter for marketing, and anyone who says they don’t are generally lying. Twitter is about not only marketing websites or services, but also about marketing yourself. Those who want to hear what you have to say, are also likely to want to visit your website, and even often comment on your blog. Wuup is quite new to Twitter, but over our 3 accounts we have near on 300 followers. Also many sources tell me, and proven by stats we have seen on Wuup – 4% of followers will visit any link you post. Hence accounts with thousands of visitors have 4% of their followers they can direct to a website at any time. Hence the more you offer, or have to offer via Twitter, the more you’ll get in return.

Few tips to enhance your Twitter Experience

• Reply to as many people as you can, even use multiple replies.
• Joke, have a laugh, life isn’t boring, and neither should you be.
• Follow just the users which genuinely interest you. That way you can build relationships with people easier.
• Remove the worst of the spam by blocking, and don’t follow them back, worth not using any auto follow plugins.
• Don’t auto follower other people, take the time a few minutes a day to look and read other people’s accounts.
• Re-tweet tweets of your favourite friends, and those you want to connect with more.
• I’m not interested in getting thousands of followers overnight, so I’ll just wait for the long haul and get a quality bunch of followers.

If you don’t follow me, follow @wuup <- I always try to connect to as many people as I can and reply as often as I can, also feel free to ask me any questions.