By Alan Skorkin of Skorks. Follow him @skorks.

I recently got myself a brand new twitter account! Yeah I can hear the gasps already, ‘How could I abandon my followers like that’? Well before we get judgmental and call me a Twitter traitor, let me tell you about my old account and what prompted my move.

The Twitter Trap

I joined twitter for the first time about a year ago, at the time I was just getting into social media - a relative newbie. I was however savvy enough to know that the info was out there for me to find, so I set out to learn how to use twitter properly. I started learning how to get followers as well as who to follow myself, I read about how to tweet, when to tweet and what to tweet. I joined all the ‘popular’ twitter services, Twollow, Twitter Grader (and many others), I tried out TweetDeck and Twhirl. I was steeped in Twitter culture and my account was growing by leaps and bounds. Before I knew it I had 5000+ followers and was following over 4500 people. My twitter client was always on and I was tweeting 20, 30 or more times a day, I was talking to all sorts of people about all sorts of stuff. And despite all of this I was finding that I was not really satisfied with the whole twitter experience. Where were the deep connections that all the ‘experts’ were talking about where was the ‘value’, why was I doing this anyway? Sound familiar?

I didn’t really understand what the problems were until I decided to engage in a retrospective of my Twitter experience. For those who don’t know this is a software development concept where you look back and try to identify problems to see what can be improved (as well as identifying things that went well so that you can keep doing them). I identified several problems and I believe these don’t just apply to me but to many people who join twitter and get caught-up in the excitement before they really know what’s what.

The Issues (Almost Everyone Faces)

• Mass following people. I don’t mean mass following spammer-style, but following dozens of people a day is still mass following. You don’t really know who you’re following, there is no time to find out, and you don’t know why you’re following them, you just know you need to follow people, all the experts say so.
• Following people for no other reason than to get a follow-back.
• Following everyone that anyone recommends.
• Not filtering your own list of followers. Who else is being followed by several hundred bots and spammers (don’t be shy raise your hand, you know it’s pretty much all of you)?
• Spamming your followers twitter stream with anything and everything you can find. What you’re doing, what you’re reading, what other people are doing and reading, all day long…
• Retweeting not because you like the content, but because you need something to tweet and if someone else retweeted it, then it must be great.
• Relying completely on a twitter client (TweetDeck) because there is no other way to keep a handle on your account
• Making at best superficial connections with your followers, and at worst no connection at all.

This is where I was and this is where I think many people are. Your twitter account is bloated with thousands of useless followers, people you never engage with, people who you don’t really care about and who don’t really care about you. You never see 99% percent of your stream since you get hundreds of tweets per hour despite the fact you’re on twitter all the time.

What Others Were Doing

Then I heard about a new trend where some people would try to ‘restart’ their account by un-following everyone they were following. I found that I had an ethical problem with that, it seemed somewhat duplicitous to un-follow people like that, after all you were both playing the game (follow me and I’ll follow you), but you decide to change the rules without telling everyone else. And what’s the point anyway, all you get is hours of effort wasted un-following everyone, but the people following you care about you just as little as they did before. This is where I had a revelation. Rather than ‘restarting’ your current account, why not phase it out and get yourself a new one. You give all your followers the opportunity to keep following you on your new account as you slowly abandon your old account over the course of a few weeks. You get to keep the followers who actually care about you and you get the benefit of a clean new account.

The Brand New Account

So we’re back at the start of this post, I’ve got myself a brand new twitter account. These days, I am not a social media newbie any more, in fact I am pretty savvy. I’ve read all the experts and have drawn my own conclusions I know how to handle a Twitter account (or any social media account for that matter). Does THAT sound like you? Well, here is what you get from a brand new twitter account:

• An opportunity to rebrand any way you like. Choose an account with a handle you actually want to be known by.
• You no longer need to mass follow anyone, you know exactly where that leads. Only follow people you you’re actually interested in following. You can’t make a connection with someone you don’t care about.
• Talking about connections, you finally have the opportunity to make some genuine ones, because you only follow people you actually want to connect with and there is few enough of them that you have the time.
• You can tweet what you feel like and what you think is worth tweeting as you no longer need to ‘satisfy’ your ‘fans’. If you tweet great content – fine. If you tweet inane bon mots – also fine. Oh and only retweet content you actually like, you even have time to read it now.
• You can follow your twitter stream on the web! Throw away your twitter client (if you want).
• You can filter your account mercilessly. No more bots or ‘money experts’ following you, give the Twitter ‘block’ feature a real workout.
• Spend 15 minutes in total on twitter per day and still get more value from it than you used to.

At the end of the day what you really want is for people to follow you because they care about what you have to say, not because they expect a follow-back. Sure you won’t get a massive account with 1000s of followers (who knows though, you just might, you may be that interesting). What you will get is an account which is almost a community, an account where you can engage 90% of your followers when you tweet as opposed to 1%. That’s powerful, considering that to engage 90 people you would need to have 100 people following you, whereas with your old account you would have needed to have 9000. I’ll leave it to you to decide which you would rather have.

In the meantime I am enjoying my brand new twitter experience. Feels a little like a breath of fresh air, refreshing, fun and liberating. Send me a tweet if you like and I’ll reply, because I care about what you have to say, and I can keep track of my whole stream, from the web, with no trouble and minimal time investment. Can you?

[image credit: tomsaint]

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.

Kevin Gibbons is the Director of Search at SEOptimise, a UK search engine marketing agency. Follow him at @kevgibbo or visit the SEOptimise blog.

A popular topic at the moment is the increasing importance of Twitter as a marketing and traffic generation tool. In the UK Twitter has been growing rapidly during the last 12 months and many people are now realising that micro-blogging is quickly becoming a very useful social media marketing tactic.

The Power of a Retweet

The following diagram helps to show the potential increase in reach when a message is retweeted:

So when I post a tweet it’s sent out to my 722 followers, if this contains a link it may send a handful of clicks, but this really is just the start of promoting a message. The real value is in the power of a retweet, this can potentially reach a far wider audience if retweeted, then maybe retweeted again and hopefully again.

If a tweet was picked up and retweeted by @problogger, for example, this would reach out to an additional 43,000+ followers, many of which are likely to retweet this themselves and hopefully create a snowball effect of RT messages across Twitter. It may also reach additional highly-followed users, such as Stephen Fry (as shown in the image above), helping to spread your message further. There will almost certainly be an overlap in users receiving tweets/retweets, but this also increases the chances of these users seeing your message as it could have been easily missed first time around.

How to find retweeting followers?

So how do you find new followers to RT your tweet? Firstly you should be tweeting the type of messages which your followers will take notice of. But you can take action to seek out new followers who potentially can help to retweet your messages too.

Bio Search - Find users in your industry by performing a query on Twitter bios on website’s such as Twellow. Also make sure you complete your bio using industry specific keywords to help ensure you get found by people searching for similar users to follow. Plus if you are trying to promote your own content try using the bio search to find bloggers and journalists who may be interested in writing about your latest posts.

Find users who like to RT - For example, if you’re looking to find users who will retweet your messages about SEO why not try searching for “RT SEO”? This will instantly show you users who have recently retweeted messages related to the topics you like to tweet about. These users may become very valuable in order to help spread your tweets to a wider audience.

Location Search - Find local users via an advanced search to help build relationships with Twitter users within your region. Try using top locational ranking tools to find the most powerful users with a specific location.

Analyse your traffic stats - View the full referral URL’s for traffic from Twitter, this way you can find the traffic sent from a user profile page and find the users who send you the most traffic. Make sure you are following these users and interact with them frequently.

Don’t use all 140 characters - Keep your messages as concise as possible, leaving more room for reweets and multiple RT’s without forcing people to edit your original message.

Retweet for others - Once you’ve identified the top users you want to connect with; you need to give them a reason to follow and retweet you. Quality content is key, but it may not be enough to get you noticed in the first place. Make sure you communicate with your targeted users and start retweeting some of their interesting tweets, this will help to improve the chances of getting them to follow you back and start to take notice of your tweets.

So those are my tips, what ideas do you have for increasing the visibility of your Twitter account and tweets?

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.

In this post Louise Doherty (@louisedoherty) shares a formula to help you increase the chances of being ReTweeted.

Being ‘retweeted’, the word to describe when one of your followers re-post one of your tweets, is a useful way of reaching a greater portion of the Twittersphere than you might otherwise be capable of reaching on your own.

Retweeted posts are generally indicated by adding ‘RT @username’ in front of the original tweet.

You might want to reach a wider audience for a number of reasons:

• To ask a question, perhaps for help or opinion (crowdsourcing)
• To share something prolific, amusing or newsworthy
• To promote something (an event, blog post or product)
• To interact with new people on Twitter (many of my new followers are as a result of being retweeted)

Unfortunately, without explicitly asking to be retweeted (which in my opinion always looks a bit desperate) you can’t physically make people retweet you. But I’ve discovered it is possible to increase your chances of being retweeted.

As part of my job as an in house PR at Fubra, who own HousePriceCrash.co.uk, OurProperty.co.uk and PetrolPrices.com, I created @housepricecrash, @ourproperty and @ukpetrolprices, and in running three Twitter accounts I noticed a common theme in retweeted tweets.

I’ve condensed my observations into a formula:

<140 - (username + 5) x interestingness = probability of RT

Ok, so it’s not totally mathematical - I do words not numbers - but it basically means that to increase your chances of being retweeted you only need to do two things:

1. Keep your tweet short - All tweets must be less than 140 characters, but to be retweeted you need to allow space for an ‘@’ symbol, your username, the letters ‘RT’, and 2 spaces (one after RT and one after your username).
2. Say something interesting - No one will retweet you just because they can, you also need to have something interesting to say! People should actively want to pass it on, because they’ve found it funny, informative or useful.

Pete Cashmore, CEO of Mashable, is the best example of this in action. The majority of his tweets are under 127 characters (the maximum length he can tweet to enable people to retweet him, given the length of his username) and he tweets about ‘all that’s new on the web’ - a subject the technologically enlightened Twittersphere clearly finds interesting. He’s retweeted several hundred times a day, as you can see from Retweetist.com - a site which ranks Twitter users based on the number of times they are retweeted.

There are of course other factors at play (the time you tweet, the number of followers you have, how much your followers respect or like you, to name a few) but by sticking to the formula above you will almost certainly increase your chances of being retweeted.

Try it out - and if you find this post useful feel free to retweet it!

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.