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Shameless Twitter: Community Standards

As more and more people use Twitter for promotions the community begins to set standards for behavior. This comes about through a commonality of experience. Once of the concepts of social networks is that they are inherently self monitoring. People want to be in communities where they belong, where they are accepted. That community sets its own standard of conduct based off of community values and behavioral experience. Inside of Twitters micro-verses you will find very specific rules of engagement that you will become familiar with as you involve yourself with the community.  However, Twitter as a macro-community has some of its own rules of engagement.

Some things we hate:

  • Calling someone out on unfollowing you, not cool. Not to mention that they will not likely want to follow you after you announced to the world that you unfollowed them.
  • Forcing people to “validate” themselves by using a captcha before you will let them follow you.
  • Auto DMs. Seriously why are you still doing this? We know they are automated and we are definitely not going to click your link.
  • Eggs – not the nice farm eggs in your fridge, but the arm of eggs that are following you. If you are a real person on Twitter then have a real profile pic.
  • “Please RT” – stop begging for retweets. If your content is good people will retweet it.
  • Asking for more followers. No one cares that you are almost at 8000 followers. Stop asking for people to pander your Twitter account to their friends. That is what #FF is for.
  • Its Wednesday, why are you doing a #FF? It means “Follow Friday” ….so do it on Friday!
  • Uncredited tweets. If you are posting something that someone else wrote, don’t play it off as yours. Give the person a h/t (hat tip) or some kind of credit.
  • Altering trending hashtags to make them sound cool. Some people do this for #FollowFriday, or #FF. You will see alternatives like #FriendlyFriday or #FavFriday. Don’t do this. #FF is a trend for a reason, when you alter a trending hashtag, you are no longer searchable in the trend, and therefore are not participating in it.
  • Pretending to be the Twitter account of someone else. You will be called out on this. No one likes impersonators, unless they are actual comedians!

These are just a few, there are more. Tell me what are some that you know?

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Twitter Gallery Has No Boobies

When Twitter released their photo gallery it was a feast of boobies! All the photos from third party apps like twitgoo and yfrog were streaming in with naked bodies galore. Of course we wondered how long this was going to last. Posting naked photos is against the Twitter terms of service. But since Twitter was simply aggregating the pictures, we asked if they would put pressure on the apps to crack down on nudity.

On the down-low, I think they did. I ran a test photo on twitgoo of a blowjob and it was deleted in less than 30 seconds.

Officially I have not seen anything that says that, but there has been a change in the Twitter gallery. It is not longer a feast of boobies. It is more like a feast of clothed people in sexy poses. The only two photo apps that I have really seen being aggregated are yfrog and twitgoo. Both of these apps are notorious for deleting adult photos very quickly.  Moby, an app that was previously aggregating in the gallery, is not anymore. When running test photos for them, they remained active.

So we had a few glorious weeks of hundreds of boobie pictures to feast upon in the gallery, but it was just a matter of time before they figured out a way to make the gallery compliant with their terms of service. I guess we will have to go back to consuming boobies one tweeted link at a time.

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No One Cares How Many Twitter Followers You Have

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Twitter follower treeI see people posting all the time about how many followers they have.  They usually say something like “20 more followers and I will post a naked pic!” or “I am almost at 1000 followers, help me get the last 10!”. From a social media management point of view, the number of followers you have matters. You want to keep track of that. From a social media follower point of view, no one cares.

If you follow someone, you don’t care how many followers they have. You don’t care about getting them to the next thousand. The only reason people will encourage more people to follow you is because they want what you are promising. They want to see the sexy picture or video that you will post.

Though promising something your fans want is a good way to reach your goal, it is not a good social marketing strategy. You are not building relationships. You are not building quality. You are barely building interest.

Instead of going out and asking people to follow you, try going out and following other people. Follow some of the basic rules of engagement…start engaging. Go talk to people. If you start joining some conversations and start following people, they will follow you back. You will make your next milestone and you will be building your relationships. In the end you get it all!

So don’t be a soap box preacher. Don’t just ask from your followers and think that your big contribution is showing them more of you. Remember, social media is about being social.

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Track your Twitter Tracks: New Analytics Tool for Twitter

Sexy Twitter Bird Woman

Can you track your Twitter tracks?

The biggest questions people who are doing business on Twitter have is how much traffic are they getting from Twitter and what is the ROI? When it comes to marketing, tracking your ROI is always a challenge, unless you are following a simple chain like link – click- sale. But lets face it, most sales are not that simple, because most of us don’t just buy something the first time we see it. We all like to browse and look around, read reviews, and get to know the product or brand. So if you can’t always track link – click – sale then the next step of tracking ROI is tracking the amount of traffic you are pushing to your site.

The great thing about Twitter traffic is that it is qualified. This means that the traffic coming from your Twitter clicks are people who are interested in what you have to offer. They are clicking because they are interested and therefore far more likely to buy what you are selling. Great! So how much Twitter traffic are you generating?

That is an excellent question and until this week, that was not a question easily answered.

Twitter is coming out with their own web analytics. This will let you track your Twitter traffic, see how well your website Twitter integration is working, and see how your website links are being spread across Twitter. The new tool will help give you a much clearer picture of your true Twitter traffic and how well your marketing efforts are working.

Currently the tool is only available to a select few, but it is expected to start rolling out to the rest of us over the next few weeks.

Will this replace tools like bit.ly and google analytics? Not likely. But it will be another tool in the analytics arsenal that will help you get the most from your social marketing.

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Don’t tell me you unfollowed me – Twitter Etiquette

I am sure you have seen it, those posts that tweet out that mention you and they say “So and so unfollowed me”. How often do they make you say, OMG I better go follow that person back? How many times does it actually make you feel bad? Most likely you get annoyed, and then wonder who the person was to begin with.

Most of my Twitter accounts are set to auto-unfollow after a period of time, the people who aren’t following me.  Of course I have people who don’t follow me back that I don’t unfollow just because they don’t follow men.  But if you are actively networking, you need to be careful to keep a close following/follower ratio so that way you can continue to grow past the 2000 following mark. In case you are wondering what that is, if you follow 2000 people and don’t have many people following you, you will not be able to follow any more people. To grow past 2000 you have to have your ratio at about 1:1.2  …basically you need to have your followers and following pretty close together.

So when I see a tweet that says I just unfollowed someone, my first instinct is to tweet them and say I only unfollow those people who aren’t following me back. But that is just petty and without real purpose, so I ignore it and move on.  Now if you are wondering why the are doing it to begin with, there are apps that will automatically tweet out when someone unfollows you. The idea behind the app is that if you call them out publicly they will be guilted into following you back. But realistically, this will not happen and will likely secure the opposite.

So if someone has unfollowed you and you are really bothered, check to see if you are following them and send them a personal message. It is possible it was a mistake. But don’t bug people with the unfollow apps.

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Tracking Twitter Traffic

Twitter AnalyticsThe biggest question in adult is how can your measure your ROI from Twitter. Traffic is the main answer for that question. But how do you track twitter traffic? Well the short answer is you can’t, or at least not completely. The longer answer is, yes there are tools to use and Twitter just made it a lot easier.

Shortners

The easiest way to track traffic from your Twitter account is to use a shortner. Bit.ly, Goo.gl, Ow.ly are a few of the common link shortners that will also give you analytics. Personally I prefer bit.ly. I like the analytics they give. They let you know where you traffic is coming from and how many unique people are clicking your links. If you are fastidious, you can even check what time of day people were clicking if you look at the past 24 hours. Goo.gl has obvious benefits as far as SEO (though bit.ly is run through google analytics, and also receives SEO benefit), though I am not as fond of their reporting system. Ow.ly is great for those of you who use Hootsuite to manage your Twitter accounts.

When you use a shortened link in your tweets, and someone clicks that link, it is very easy to track it through the analytics of the shortner. However, this does not account for all twitter traffic. You will also get traffic from your profile, from other people tweeting your links and from brand recognition.

Direct Traffic

This is the traffic that is going directly to your website. This could be from the link on your profile, or if you are putting your direct link in your tweets. This could also be from people typing in your URL directly into their browser.

Making it Easier

The bigger problem with tracking twitter traffic is through your analytics. When you are looking at your analytics though a site like Google Analyitics or Statscounter the traffic from Twitter was not always being credited from Twitter depending on the the device being used. For instance if someone when to your site from twitter, but they were using a mobile device, your analytics would likely report that it was coming from a mobile device and not Twitter, even though it was coming from both. Or worse, you would not show a Twitter referal at all, it would show up as direct traffic.

Twitter is now shortening all links that are 20 characters or more with their t.co link shortner. This is meant to help with tracking traffic. It will also allow the analytics providers to properly attribute their traffic sources.

 

Though this newly integrated Twitter shortner is meant to help track twitter traffic, it is in part part of Twitters ongoing efforts to replace the need for third party apps. Though it is unlikely that t.co will replace bit.ly anytime soon. For one, the true analytics of t.co is only available to a small selection of developers and not available to the public. So the only way to view link analytics is through your website analytics provider. For many marketers that is simply not enough.

On the plus side, in your analytics you should be able to see what t.co is directing traffic to your site. This means that you can track your site traffic down to a specific tweet, and that is a huge plus for marketers.

So now we just have to wait for the release of the full t.co analytics to see if they will get rid of the need for third party shortners.

Since the release of the t.co analytics, many webmasters are already reporting sales and traffic coming from twitter from previously unassigned sources.

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Twitter Naked Image Gallery

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Twitter recently added that ability to load up images directly onto their mainframe. They have upped the ante again. Twitter has created photo galleries!

The photo galleries are your most recent photos that you have uploaded onto Twitter. But unlike Facebook where their photo strip is the most recent 5 photos, for Twitter it will be the most recent 100 images uploaded onto Twitter. It will be aggregating photos as far back as January of 2010 to compile your individual image gallery.

Twitter will be using photos uploaded from third party apps like Twitgoo and Moby.

This poses an interesting issue for their terms of service. A lot of people us third party apps to post their #TittyTuesday pics or just random nude pics. Of course this is a feature we love about Twitter, and who doesn’t look forward to #TittyTuesday, but currently the image galleries are displaying nude photos.  Obviously Twitter has either not figured this out, or not figured out what to do about it.

Because the images are being loaded on a third party app, it is up to the third party to monitor. It is possible that Twitter will insist that their third party apps be more stringent in their photo monitoring.

From a marketing perspective this is giving a great leg up for adult stars and websites. You can now pepper your profile with images from your website, or of you! It is a great way to do a little extra promotion in your tweets. So make sure that you images are good, in focus and highres!

You can view the most recent four images on your profile. But if you click an image it will take you to the complete gallery where you can see all the photos. If you click an image you can even see the tweet that posted the image.

This could possibly boost image retweets and give people much more interesting content to browse on Twitter.

In the mean time, enjoy your naked photo gallery!

Twitter Nude Photo Gallery

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Why Your Twitter Post is Not Being Seen on Facebook

Are you wondering why you should not syndicate your Twitter on Facebook? Isn’t it easier to have your Tweets automatically post an update to your Facebook page? Isn’t it easier to not have to go onto Facebook and post yourself? Of course it is. However, if it is important to you that people see your posts, then you will say no to syndication.

I can give you lots of technical jargon that will tell you why you should not syndicate. Things having to do with News Feed Optimization and the algorithm that will prevent your content from making it onto the news feed. But there is really no better way to understand why you shouldn’t do this than to see it with your own eyes.

This post was taken directly from the newsfeed. You will notice that right underneath the post it says “See 10 more posts from Twitter”. You might think that this is 10 more posts from that same person. You would be wrong. These are 10 more stories from 10 different people, they just all happen to be syndicating through Twitter.

Syndication is an easy way to make one post and have it appear on all your relevant social networks. Where this is fine for LinkedIn, it does not work for Facebook. Outside of the fact that Facebook and Twitter are usually two different audiences, and that what is allowed on Twitter (ie. nudity) is not allowed on Facebook, your posts have a significantly lower chance of being seen because of getting lumped together with other Twitter posts.

It is not your content they are discriminating against. Facebook discriminates against syndication in any form. So if you are syndicating then you will be lumped into posts such as the one featured above. So if you want people to see your posts, you have to get on Facebook and actually post it yourself.

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Twitter Photo Upload: No Nude

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Twitter Bird with CameraTwitter has finally launched the new API that will allow you to upload pictures directly onto twitter from the mainframe. This new service is being powered by Photobucket. If it has been a while since you heard that site name, you are not the only one. But this new pairing will likely make Photobucket competitive again. Along with the launch, it looks like Photobucket.com  gave itself a nice little redesign to make themselves more fresh and relevant.

But despite the website facelift, Photobucket is still not adult friendly. This is from their terms of service:

  • 8.4  contains nudity, excessive violence, or offensive subject matter or contains a link to an adult website;

Though it is not like most of the photo sharing third party apps are adult friendly and plenty of adult stars and sites use them for posting. Sure yFrog or TwitPic will occasionally delete a photo, but that doesn’t seem to stop anyone. I am sure that Photobuckets attitude towards adult will likely be ignored as well. Of course, how diligent will they be with deleting the pics and because of their association with Twitter, will it affect your account standing if you violate their TOS?

The big deal with the Twitter integration of photo uploading is that they are now directly competing with yFrog, Twitpic, Twitgoo, Lockerz and other third party apps.  Since the purchase of Tweetdeck in May, and now the integration of photo uploading, Twitter seems to be trying to corner the market on Twitter based applications. But no worries to the adult market here, SexyPeek and MyPornProfile are not even on the Twitter Birds radar.

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