How To Remove A Virus From Your Twitter Account And Stop Twitter Spam!
Here is a video I made to show you how to quickly remove Twitter spam if your account is compromised. If you get Direct Message spam just shoot a link back to this video to help your follower remove the virus from their account.
How To Unfollow People On Twitter and Why
In an effort to make Twitter’s timeline useful again I’m trying a 500 person follow limit. I’ve been thinking about doing this for a long time and finally did it. Does anyone else find there is just too much gibberish on Twitter? It was looking like a self promoting link farm when I looked at it yesterday afternoon…… I may have unfollowed some friends by accident, if I did don’t take offense just lmk, I still love you.
Why I unfollowed 1200 people
- Twitter’s timeline wasn’t useful to me anymore. When I first started Twitter I loved checking the timeline because I would learn something new every time. These days it’s just a bunch of links, hashtags and pointless paper.li updates.
- There was too much noise on the timeline so I avoided looking at it. I found my use of Twitter has changed over the past year from engaging people to waiting for people to engage me. I want to do more of the engaging and learning about the people I follow.
- I want to build meaningful relationships (business or personal) with more people. Following 1700 people really wasn’t helping to build quality relationships.
How I chose who to unfollow
I was interested by my self observation with the decision making process. I had a hard time deciding who to follow and who to unfollow. My overall mission was to get the highest quality Twitter timeline with only 500 follows.
- Does the user have a clear picture of themselves? I unfollowed almost every logo, dogs and cartoon drawing. If I didn’t recognize the avatar I knew it was because that person has never caught my attention or engaged me anyways… Lesson here, your avatar is important. Make sure it’s a clear picture of your face and don’t change it often or you will be hard to remember.
- Does the bio say something interesting about who they are and what they do? I once had Owen Clark ask me why I deleted my Twitter bio (this was about 6 months ago). I told him I was checking to see if curiosity would generate more clicks to my website (eg, if people want to know more about me they have to click my web url). Turned out traffic to my blog via Twitter stayed the same, which was interesting. However I’d say it’s better to have the bio and the traffic. I read a lot of bio’s while deciding who to follow/unfollow.
- Follower ration. If a user was following 2000 or more people I knew it was unlikely they would see much of me… However I was more interested in what they were tweeting about. After all, the goal here is to get the optimal timeline. I found most people who followed 2000 people and had half as many followers tended to be the ones sharing a bunch of self promotional tweets. Coincidence, I dunno.
How I unfollowed 1200 peeps
First thing I did was created a Twitter List of all the people I wanted to make sure I didn’t accidentally unfollow. Sometimes when using unfollow tools you may accidentally unfollow friends, so I recommend creating a list of your favorite peeps first. Later, you can come back to check it and make sure you didn’t unfollow any friends.
The first tool I used was TheTwitCleaner.com this tool was able to give me recommendations of who to unfollow based on their activity. You get categories such as: do they only share links, do they post identical tweets, are they victims of app spam ect. This was a good first start but only eliminated about 100 users.
The main tool I used for unfollowing was ManageTwitter.com with this tool you can unfollow all those who are not following you, those who talk too much and those who talk too little. I’ve created this video below to show you how to use it more effectively.
[coming soon]
I was able to use TheTwitCleaner and ManageTwitter to clean up more then half my timeline. Once I was down to about 700 I went on to Twitter.com and started manually unfollowing. What I found really handy was the Klout browser plugin (for Chrome and Firefox) which allowed me to view users Klout scores from Twitter.com. I looked for those with low -20 and high 50+ Klout scores.
What Klout scores tell me
- The user has a good follower ration
- The user is a regular Twitter user
- The user is engaged and engages
- The user is probably retweeted often (shares good content)
- 50+ the user engages with influential people
- -20 the user is new to Twitter but doing a good job
- -10 they aren’t really using Twitter
(these are all guesstimates)
I won’t get too much into Klout but I do recommend using the plugin and looking at scores with a grain of salt. It’s not everything but it’s helpful to see.
Who am I following and why
You can view the list of 500 people I followed
I kept these people for a number of reasons
- I know them personally and like them
- They share unique content on Twitter which is not on their blog or Facebook
- They share links I’m interested in (eg, tech/marketing/business related)
- They tweet about topics I’m interested in
- They don’t promote themselves all day long
- They are not Paper.li, #FF and Foursquare addicts
- We have had recent conversations together
In conclusion.
I know a lot of people are wondering why I don’t just use a dashboard like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck and manage Twitter Lists. I never got used to using a dashboard and prefer using Twitter.com
Abby from @ArtsVancouver suggest bookmarking a Twitter List page on my browser. I think this is a brilliant idea and will probably do this next.
I have a feeling the 500 follow limit will make Twitters timeline interesting again. I have lost about 25 followers so far, I am sure I will lose more as I continue tweeting and people notice I’m not following them. However I consider this and decided if people are only following me because I’m following them they probably don’t care much about me anyways ;)
This may very well be one of the best social media campaigns I’ve seen come out of a large corporation. What makes it great is the tiny personalized interactions (which I talk a lot about in my presentation “Secrets Of A Social Media Campaign”).
When you make ONE person a huge fan of your company they forever help spread the word about every other great thing you do. Take advice from this video then next time you plan a social media campaign.
The Original Dropbox Homepage Video
Now valued at over a billion dollars, Dropbox is another lean tech startup success story. However the company didn’t have an easy start. If you use the product you know it’s not easy explaining the product to someone, or get them to download it to their computer.
The video above was made by Dropbox founder and CEO Drew Houston. The video is simple, however what made the video so successful was the tiny humorous details. Pay close attention to the file names, IM chat, pictures and email addresses for a good laugh.
This is the video knows as the MVP, “Minimum Viable Product” that helps Dropbox get to where it is today. Simple, yet effective.
Angry Birds Stats = Crazy
Alright here we go, I hope you’re ready for this.
Angry Bird Stats (Nov 2011)
- More than 500 million people have download Angry birds.
- Worldwide people have played 200,000 years of Angry Birds?
- 300,000 million minutes each day is spent playing Angry Birds.
- People have played over 266 BILLION levels.
- 400 billion birds have been launched.
- and 44 billion Stars have been collected.
That’s crazy! And here is what Rovio CEO Niklas Hed has to say about the game:
(this interview is a few months old, but it gives you a great insight into the success of Angry Birds)
And… here are my stats haha
So what does all this mean? Haha I have no idea. Only that Nintendo better watch out ;)
