New Twitter Categories To Increase Your Followers
As you know, Twitter can be a very powerful teaching tool and a good business resource. It also is in a constant state of innovation. The most recent changes involve creating categories as well as providing some additional tools.
Just remember that most vocal people on Twitter are there to promote themselves so you have to be selective and strategic to not waste your time. There are also a lot of fake accounts and bots (especially the ones with large followers).
Here are the new changes:
Interest categories
Twitter added a section that shows categories and popular accounts (corporate accounts and celebrities) that fit those categories. You’re not going to find any interesting people here who will rock your world but it does cut down time on finding the mainstream people. I do appreciate that as I check out diverse categories like humor.
The lists are pretty short and you may be able to only find a couple of accounts per category that is worthwhile to follow but that’s two accounts that I would never have taken time to track down. A future update should include a section for upcoming or maybe editor’s choice from reader’s suggestions. I didn’t think she would be on there but I checked out the entire humor list (all 2 pages of it) to search for Anjelah Johnson and nada. Would I make the time to track down her Twitter normally? No. I’m too busy but if it was convenient, I would have checked the tweet stream to figure out if I wanted to follow her.
I would love to see less popular people get profiled. That’s where the joy is in Twitter. The road less traveled and the quiet genius who occasionally share something brilliant.
This is my cynicism but I wondered how much Twitter got paid to feature some of those accounts on their categories.
Here’s Anjelah Johnson, very funny comic:
Suggestions for you
Twitter added a column of suggested users that I might want to follow. How do they figure this out? By using computer statistics on the types of accounts that you are currently following and scan for similar accounts. It’s like an online dating match for Twitter but without the questionnaire. I may get referrals to meet blond men just because I happened to notice a lot of blond men recently but my personal preference is dark haired men.
There’s two ways I can handle this.
1) Completely ignore the suggestions after checking it out a couple of times because the recommendations are off base.
2) Become even more selective in who I follow back from all the marketers (people with massive twitter followers and follows) who tagged me in the hopes that I will follow them back and add to their numbers. By the way, numbers aren’t everything. Don’t believe what you see on Twitter.
Twitter App for LinkedIn
Go to the find friends tab on Twitter. It gives you a choice to connect with Linkedin. From here you get into the Tweet page on Linkedin and it gives you a list of all your connections who have Twitter accounts. It also shows you whether you are already following them or not.
The nice thing is that Twitter gives you an option to export all these Twitter handles to a Twitter list and it will also keep it automatically updated for you whenever you add anyone new to your contact list. (Just make sure that you have less than 20 lists so Twitter can create a list.)
I find this service to be very useful. It would allow me to sample tweets before I follow someone and I didn’t have to build the list manually.
Many professionals follow the normal advice of hyping and marketing yourself on Twitter so they become horrific spammers. They’re fine if I talk to them one on one but I really don’t want their tweets in my stream. Being exposed to that much naked selling may poison my perception of them and ruin our relationship.
It’s rather like someone being told that being a nudist is necessary to get business so they expose themselves all the time at the beach. I prefer to see things on my own terms. If I am enjoying a stroll on the beach and accidentally see several of my contacts nude, it changes what I think of them and you can’t go back once that happens. I prefer to know, they’re nudists so I’ll just avoid that particular beach.
Recommendation pop up
Recently, Twitter added a feature that recommends other people to follow when you follow someone new. It automatically pops up without you having to do anything. I haven’t checked out those recommendations yet to see if they provide valid suggestions. I followed people today to review the popups, but true to Twitter fame, nothing is working and that feature is disabled. So you’ll just have to check it out for yourself when the addon works again.
Are there any new features on Twitter that I didn’t cover?
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Lol! I knew it was coming and I still got a kick out of the comparison of full time sales peeps on Twitter to a nudist!
Since I’m still pretty new to Twitter, I really appreciate being able to read what the various aspects of it are. As for the suggestions that come up, I just look at them in a simliar way that I look at Facebook suggestions…..as maybes – worth checking out, maybe interested. :>
Just went back and watched the Anjelah Johnson video….thanks for the share & the laugh! :>
Karen,
So glad you enjoyed it. I can’t help it. I think visually and I just put down what I saw in my head as I was writing. I had a blast writing the article though.
I love Anjelah because the Mexican culture is so similar to mine. I could hear my mom and dad when she joked about hers.
Came across from bloggerluv….what a great community bloggers are forming.
I am new to Blogging and new to Twitter. Even so, I decided early on that I would be particular about who I follow and I don’t really follow many who have huge lists. Means my list of followers has grown slowly but it has stopped a lot of spammers. If any who I do follow start spamming I just unfollow them and move on. Have found some great people who write interesting articles and so increased my knowledge base about blogging through their posts. Have notices I am even getting visitors to my blog via Twitter now which is encouraging.
Patricia Perth Australia
Patricia,
It’s so much better to build relationships than go for the numbers. After all, the marketers aren’t going to read or pay attention to anyone else except themselves anyway. I do follow some because I try to be open. You never know when you can learn something new. However, if their spam gets on my nerve, I unfollow.