Who should you follow back on Twitter?

[reblogged from 2012]

If your Twitter activity is up where it should be, you’ll likely get some Followers before too long, sometimes in droves. If you wonder who to follow back, I have a few suggestions based on my own experiences. I actually should have named this one “who should you NOT follow back on Twitter”

Twitter Egg Avatar – several colors available – the default

First of all, never follow anyone back that you do not physically know until you go to their profile and skim their posts and mentions. Their profile image or avatar can tell you a few things about them. If they have the default Egg Avatar, it could be a warning, especially if they already have a lot of Tweets and Followers. If they only have a few of each, then it’s possible it’s a new account, but overall, with Social being what it is, they should have an avatar, hopefully a face.

Quote after quote – maybe a bot?

Another thing to consider is their Tweet quality. If it’s a few thousand quotes that might not be a good sign. As well, if it’s one after the other talking about getting more followers, that might not be good either.

3rd World Followers always make you look “genuine”

If you decide to follow someone relatively “benign” – those with 3000 quotes, or 3 Tweets and 6 Followers – expect to get an auto-generated DM (Direct Message) within seconds of Following them, often with something “To reward you for following me, here’s a link to something you will really like”.

Twitter DM for an amazing opportunity to reward me for following

These are probably not all that bad, and so long as you never click the link you’ll probably be okay and never hear from them again. Bots tend not to unfollow you, so it will add to your stats (if that’s important to you).

I highly recommend you do not follow back the 5,000 follower bots. For one thing Twitter really is all about authenticity, and if you are hooked up with these people, you’ll probably hate yourself for it later.

The quotes are pretty benign too, and if you want to fluff up your Tweet count and your activity stats, retweeting the occasional quote is pretty harmless, so long as it is meaningful to you and your followers.

Be careful – it’s a jungle out there 

Is Google Exact Match Domain Penalty Illogical?

[from October 2012]

Recently Google Spam Master Matt Cutts hinted that low-quality exact match domains could be penalized. This is aside from either Penguin or Panda, and as far as I know doesn’t yet have a cutesy animal name that starts with P, like Platypus.

An “exact match domain” is one in which the keyword is used as the domain name. A simple and almost meaningless example is for a company that sells yellow golf balls, and uses the domain “yellowgolfballs.com”. Supposedly, this is a suspect domain name, since it matches keywords that are logical for searching, and until now, was actually encouraged for your SEO marketing efforts. Some algorithm from Panda or Penguin would test the quality of the content on the site, and if it’s deemed low, would essentially ban it from search results.

A Real World Exact Match Domain Example

How does this apply to a realistic situation? Let’s go for the simplest example I can imagine. Ed the Plumber. Ed is a hypothetical local plumber who has been in the same town for twenty years. You’ve seen him driving around town in his big white van, labeled “Ed’s Plumbing”. You know who he is and what he is, and your family has been using him for two generations. One day at the dawn of the 21st Century Ed decides to get a website, and in the interest of simplicity, buys “edsplumbing.com” and has it painted on his truck. Like any other service industry professional, he lists what he does, what his service area is, what his hours are, and his general pricing structure, about ten pages on his website.

So is this a “Exact Match Domain”? What do you think people who are trying to find Ed’s phone number will type into the search box at Google? “Ed’s Plumbing” and that then becomes the keywords you are searching for, and blam, it’s an Exact Match Domain. So now let’s review the quality of the content. The list of a plumber’s services is probably fairly generic, and is probably almost word-for-word duplicated on thousands of sites, as are the hours, and probably a hundred businesses list the same geographic locations. Ed is probably pretty busy fixing pipes and stuff, so he’s not generating a dozen fresh, exciting articles each month on relevant exciting plumbing topics, like “advances in wax ring technology since 1952”. Not only that, but in all honesty, most everything in your house plumbing-wise hasn’t changed a lot in the last fifty years. The odds of constantly generating exciting fresh content are slim to none.

Inbound links? How is poor Ed supposed to get quality organic inbound links? Spamming blogs would probably work, if he could find some relevant home repair blogs, since relevance seems to now be important for inbound links, but then Ed is pretty busy doing pipe stuff. It’s not like a lot of people outside his town would stumble across Ed’s ten page site and put up links on their own – even with the wax ring articles. It’s especially not like the portal sites are doing all that well right now, which could give Ed a share of links with other plumbers for relevance mixed in with their spun articles.

So poor Ed, getting banned from Google, just because he has a valid site, with a valid URL, and a valid business, being searched for by valid customers using valid keywords. Illogical, don’t you think?

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Dumb Down the Product

A quick thought on “Dumbing Down” …

Rainbow Dash knows all about the best possible result

If you dumb something down to the level of the stupidest person in the room, can you simultaneously hope for the best possible result?

That would be nuts. I think this might apply equally to several types of endeavors. Education, science, business. Catch yourself dumbing down your product, and you’ll save yourself the hardship of putting out a less than desirable result.

Social Mistakes Make You Look Bad

Social Mistakes can ruin your day. Or your life. Or your business. You can make a total fool of yourself in a one second post that will haunt you forever. You can also sit in your cozy little basement room at Grandma’s ignorant of the tittering laughter that accompanies your every post or comment.

Classic Social Mistakes that you’ve probably heard of include using trending tweet tags to slip your advertising message into the million or so baby or death announcements associated with it. Scheduling automatic tweets that reference outside people places or events you have no control over. Pinning your entire product catalog in Pinterest, and a slew of others I’m sure you’ve probably already read about and heeded well.

Be very cautious when you’re obviously promoting a product

I’d like to point out a few of the really subtle dumbnesses, er, social mistakes I see all the time on Facebook.

Top Social Mistakes on Facebook:

Me-Me-Me: all your posts, all day, every day, are about you. Yeah, you’re cool enough to have figured out how to make a Facebook page. We got it, and were you aware how easy it is to unsubscribe?

You need to engage your audience. Make them think you know something about something besides your own glorious visage in the mirror. You need to post stuff that might be remotely affiliated with you, but doesn’t directly involve you. Guide services can post photos of other climbers climbing, weather reports, pretty cloud pictures, news stories from other countries – just interesting stuff for your fans to kill time and figure you have a broad perspective on things.

Just uncheck the boxes to see nothing at all in your timeline – they’ll never know

Sniper: every time someone posts anything about anything, comment as though you own them. This is like the Chinese Fortune Cookie ” .. in bed” gag. I should also call this the “that’s not what she said” social mistake.

This is a great away to annoy a lot of people in a hurry. In case you don’t understand, here’s a purely hypothetical example of one of these social mistakes and the type of doo it can result in.

Bob: I just got my first hole in one today!
BadCompany: That’s probably because you were wearing your BadCompany Velcro Metatarsal Sling.
Bob: Um, no, I practiced a lot.
BadCompany: There’s nothing like a BadCompany Velcro Metatarsal Sling on the green.
Bob: I don’t even have that POS sling, I only followed you to win a freaking t-shirt
BadCompany: if you wear the BadCompany Velcro Metatarsal Sling, you’ll stop being so cranky

Oblivious. Yeah. Please, let people just have fun and don’t troll their posts. Like stuff, compliment people, grieve when they do, celebrate when they do, and don’t try to manipulate it into a shining marketing moment. It’s their moment, let them have it.

Don’t set anything on autopilot – makes you look not only dumb, but lazy

Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell: yeah, you’re a big important company, or rock star celebrity. You can ignore all your messages, emails, comments, and other attempts at close and personal contact. You earned your right to be above the riff-raff, right?

Sadly, ignoring everyone while posting links to your stuff to buy, and pics of your stuff or your entourage, is not engagement. Really, look it up – engagement is not one-way. This is one of the social mistakes that can actually be most costly in the long run. You can’t check your messages once a year. You can’t ignore people who may be trying to give you money. It’s not profitable. You don’t have to agree with everyone, and even a simple “Thank you for your comments and support” will do wonders for your image.

If you can’t deal with these simple little suggestions, consider outsourcing your social marketing. Hiring a community manager is a viable option, allowing you to focus on what you do best to make
money and doing the best you can to support your fan base. If you’d like to learn more about social etiquette – one of the best books I can recommend to avoid social mistakes would be “UnMarketing: Stop Marketing. Start Engaging” a total classic in the art of engagement, though it’s Twitter specific. Another recommended book, though only available for pre-order is Gary Vaynerchuck’s “The Thank You Economy” which has been the topic of talks at several high-visibility social media conferences.

Fun with the Sochi Mascots at SVO in Moscow

Do yourself, your company, and your social network a huge favor, and learn how to be responsible in your communities. I’ve written a very simple guide to Pinterest: Do-it-yourself Social Marketing: Pinterest with a simple plan to promote your business subtly without triggering anyone’s anti-marketing filters.

Drop me a line or comment if you have any thoughts you’d like to share. Thanks 

Steal an iPad tagged image on Facebook

See the photo on Facebook about how to steal an iPad? I mean get a free iPad because of a broken shopping cart? The pic is usually tagged with a few hundred “friends” so it will show up in a lot of feeds. It explains that the online store has a broken shopping cart and forgets to ask for money. The door to the store is wide open.

Steal an iPad and get ripped off

This is a lot like your neighbor going out for errands and forgetting to lock their door. Well, the door is open, so it’s okay to steal an iPad from your neighbors. Right? This is social engineering for scamming. People who want to steal are easy to steal from. It’s easy to con a con man, as the saying goes. I won’t be testing it out, but it’s likely that the site runs you through a bunch of rounds of 20 questions, and sure enough, doesn’t ask for money. They have installed spyware, keylogging software, or have enough of your info to sell your identity. Of course your iPad will never show up. They just wanted to know if you would like to steal an iPad.

Hannum brought a lawsuit against Barnum for calling his giant a fake. When it came to trial, Hull stepped forward and confessed that the Cardiff Giant was a hoax and the entire story. The judge ruled that Barnum could not be sued for calling Hannum’s giant a fake since it was a fake after all. Thereafter, Hannum’s name was lost to history while Barnum was left with the misplaced stigma of being the one to say “There’s a sucker born every minute.” History Buff

How to not steal an iPad

Untag yourself from these images, and unfriend or block the person who tagged you. Don’t believe nonsense like this. If you were to purposefully go to a broken shopping cart, knowing it was broken, and “purchase” anything, you could be prosecuted for your attempt to steal an iPad.