But in the process of cleaning up older files, I decided to revisit my workflow which could use improvement. I try to keep my footage and photos organized by date. But if I do this manually, then sometimes I don't do it right away and then I have to rush to clear my SD cards so I can reuse them. This leads to random folders with titles like "review later" or "up to august 8 2019.

I decided to write a script to help me sort out the files automatically so I could eliminate the human element. But then I thought, someone, must have done this already. There's no way that I am the only one that needs this type of solution

And I was right. After scouring forums and blog posts talking about how to automatically sort files and folders, I found the winning solution.

TL;DR

If you are a little technical, the script is below. It's short and simple. Just adjust the date format, the destination and the source directories and it should just work. But if you are not technical or familiar with running terminal commands, I explain it in detail below.

I found a promising blog post here, by Mike Beach and that in turn sent me to Github to get his script, but at the very end of the Github page, Mike mentioned a tool named ExifTool by Phil Harvey.

He was also gracious enough to add a 1 line, quick script to make ExifTool do exactly what I wanted. Here's the script, I'll break it down in a moment:

exiftool "-Directory<DateTimeOriginal" -d "%Y/%Y-%m-%d" $DIR

Getting the script

If you want to get this working on OSX, I think the easiest way to get it installed is to use Homebrew.

If you don't already have Homebrew, get it installed and then you'll have access to ExifTool and tons of other tools and utilities that come in handy as well, like the amazing youtube-dl script; more on that later.

Once you have Homebrew installed, just run this command on your Terminal to get ExifTool installed:

brew install exiftool

After a few moments, ExifTool will be installed and available in your system.

How to use the script

Now let's break down the script so you know how to use it.

exiftool "-Directory<DateTimeOriginal" -d "%Y/%Y-%m-%d" $DIR

The first word, exiftool simply calls the utility. You can just type that into your terminal, hit return and it will show you instructions on how to use it.

Next is the "-Directory<DateTimeOriginal" part this tells it to create a directory using the date and time based on the EXIF data of the photo or video.

The next part is the flag -d. This tells the script that we want to specify the date format we want to use to create the directory. Next, we define what structure of the folders should be by defining the date format: "%Y/%Y-%m-%d". If you notice, there are two instances of the year variable, separated by a slash.

This means that a folder with the year will be created, and inside of that, a folder with the year, month and day will be created. Then the files that match will be moved into that folder.

If you wanted to modify this, you just re-arrange the variables any way it suits your needs. I prefer to use this format YYYY-MM-DD so the script is already set to do that.

The very last part, the $DIR is just a placeholder to tell exiftool where the photos and videos you want to sort exist currently. This is my actual script:

exiftool "-Directory<DateTimeOriginal" -d "/Volumes/ScreenFTB/footage/%Y/%Y-%m-%d" ./

The last part that I changed from $DIR to ./ means I need to be in the same folder as the files I want to sort out. It's also worth noting that I added /Volumes/ScreenFTB/footage/ to the date formatting part, that specifies that I want the folder structure to be created on the drive called "ScreenFTB" under the folder footage.

One caveat

This one line script is amazing. The only issue I found so far is that videos taken with my Samsung Note 9 don't seem to have any EXIF data so it won't work with those files. For those instances where I use my phone to collect footage, I guess I'll have to sort them by hand or will have to find or write a script that uses the file naming structure of the files.

In conclusion

This script will save tons of time in sorting out files and making your workflow a little faster. I'm grateful for open source and Phil Harvey. It seems he's been maintaining this since 2003!

The post How To Sort Your Pictures and Videos Quickly appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

Today, I'll be lucky if I go out for a single event and come back home with less than 30GB of video footage for my next video.

To give you an idea, My Taste of Huntington Beach footage came out to about 50GB, if I recall correctly, the video I shot for Andrei's during their July promotion was about 35GB. A lunch review, like the American Grub one, may take up 8-20GB.

It's undeniable that this is a trend that will not stop anytime soon. For the most part, when I create a new video for Youtube, I archive the raw footage and after a few months, I just delete it.

Unfortunately, video files are notoriously difficult to compress without loss of quality.

I know some people keep all the footage, indefinitely. If I did that, I'd have over 50 terabytes of data just hanging around.

Imagine those people that are shooting daily vlogs at 4K. WOW, they are probably in the hundreds of terabytes range per year. I don't envy them at all.

So I think deleting the raw stuff is fine for now.

However, there are cases where I think the raw video should be kept around for a while. For example this video I published recently: Beth Jacob Congregation of Irvine Vandalized - City of Irvine Press Conference.

I think it has more value than just publishing it for Youtube. A company may want to license it, or I may want to do a follow-up and re-use some of the footage. Who knows.

I decided to explore compressing all the files and archiving them. But unfortunately, this doesn't do much. I thought you may be in a similar situation and this will help you decide if you should even explore it.

Good ol' gz and tar.

I thought I would use a tar.gz file to get the most compression. I did a little research and came up with this command as the one that would achieve the highest level of compression:

$ env GZIP=-9 tar -cvzf /file-directory/

This makes tar, compress the files using the -9 level which is the highest available.

I also know there are some other programs that can do slightly better compression, but they aren't reliable and require special software installations.

I wanted to make my method be long-lasting and somewhat universal. It just requires that your computer can run basic tar and gz commands.

Universal and long term access.

OSX can do this easily, you can also use Windows for this by setting it up with Cygwin or some of the newer methods, and of course, Linux does this natively.

But in the end results were disappointing.

Here's what happened. I had a directory with 12.78 GB of data in it. At the end of the compression, the result was 12.33 GB hardly any space savings.

The only benefit I see to doing this now is to maintain a clean archive of the files I have used to make vlogs. I might do it just for that reason, the 3-5% space savings is almost irrelevant.

Storage is cheap so maybe that's the real way to keep files around for a while.

In Conclusion and TL;DR

The takeaway I think is that unless a new, universal, and long-lasting method to compress video comes around, the only real benefit to doing this is to wrap up everything into one single file and then archive it; there are no real space savings with this method.

The post Compressing and Archiving Video Files. Is It Worth the Trouble for Vloggers? appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

This time we're talking about maintenance for your WordPress website. If you've had your site for a little while, you may have old themes installed. I know most sites I work on have at least a couple of unused themes installed.

Often these are leftover from past experiments or from the last time your website got a makeover.

Deleting themes that aren't being used is good for your site, it reduces the space your site uses and it removes old (maybe insecure) pieces of software.

You just don't need these lingering around on your site. If you're on Twitter, please hit that share button on the tweet below:

Go To Your Themes Dashboard

Go to your Appearance section on your main dashboard, then click on Themes. This will show your Themes control panel.

How many themes do you see there?

If you only have one, then Congratulations! you're done and don't have to do anything else.

If you only have two, you may be able to delete one theme.

But First, Let's Identify Your Current Theme

If you have three or more themes, then you can follow the rest of this tutorial.

Your current and active theme is the top left corner one, or you can see that it indicates it is the active theme. This is what my dashboard looks like:

Notice that I highlighted the active theme. It also says: "Active: News Pro." My theme name is "News Pro."

As a side note, I love News Pro from StudioPress. It's versatile and powerful. If you want to take a look at News Pro, you can see a demo of it on this link: News Pro Demo.

Since my theme is News Pro, I can delete all the other themes right? Nope.

No, sometimes a theme may have dependencies on another theme, if that's the case for you, you need to keep both themes. Only one will be active, but the other one needs to stay in place.

But do you check if you can delete a theme?

It is safe to delete a theme if

• You're not using it and,

• It's not necessary for another theme to function, we call this theme a "parent theme." You can read more about that here if you want the gory details.

To check to see if you have a parent and child theme situation going on, you need to click on the Theme Details button for your active theme. This button appears when you hover your cursor over your theme as shown in this screenshot.

If your theme depends on another theme, it will say this in the details.

Along with the name of the theme, the version and some additional details you'll see a notice like the one shown below where it indicates if there is a parent theme.

In my case, News Pro is a child theme of Genesis.

This means I can't delete News Pro OR Genesis. If I delete Genesis, my site will break even though I'm not using Genesis directly.

You Can Delete All Other Themes

Once you check to make sure there are no dependent themes, you can delete all but your active theme.

The benefits of this maintenance tip

Themes usually don't take a lot of space, usually between 3 to 50 mb. That's not a lot in today's "unlimited" hosting plans. But every little bit ads up. If you have eight, 10, 20 extra themes installed from past versions of your site, it makes a difference.

This also slows down your back-up procedure and could open up your site for security issues.

Just get rid of them.

The post Bite-Sized WordPress Maintenance Tips: Delete Old Themes. appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

Every email list service I have used behaves this way. If someone unsubscribes, they are just marked as unsubscribed or inactive, but they remain in the account.

These "dead" subscribers can affect your cost.

Aweber charges you per subscriber, not per active subscriber so if I have a few people over the threshold, I may be paying for people even though they would never get my emails.

It makes sense for Aweber to keep them around. First, because it benefits them to increase your total subscriber count, but also because if the person decides to re-subscribe, you may have a special rule or autoresponder sequence that applies to that person.

By the way, I use and recommend Aweber for your email marketing needs. Give it a try for free today, get started here.

For most people, it doesn't make sense to pay for someone just in case they decide to re-subscribe. So the best thing is to remove those subscribers.

Aweber doesn't do any clean-up for you automatically, so you have to take a couple of steps to clean up your list periodically and remove unsubscribed accounts.

How often should you delete subscribers from your email list?

It depends on your list size and how frequently you email all of your subscribers. Most people unsubscribe after they receive an email they didn't like.

If you send emails daily, then you might want to do this email cleanup procedure every month, but if you only send a few emails each month, you may only need to do this every two or three months.

Also, keep in mind, this is not the same as scrubbing your email list. We'll cover that in a different blog post.

Don't sweat it. People unsubscribe all the time.

As I mentioned in a previous post, How to get traffic to your blog part 2, email is important, but people unsubscribe. It's part of life, there are taxes, death, and unsubscribers. All are unavoidable.

It's easy to take unsubscribes personally or to feel like you did something wrong. But don't. It happens and it's just a part of business, don't even think about it twice. As long as you're getting more subscribers than unsubscribes then you're doing fine.

But you don't have to keep those accounts around in your email list. Remove them, because they count against you. Here's a quick and simple tutorial showing you how you delete them so they don't count against your account limits.

If you want to send them one last personal email, you could download the list to your computer before you delete them then send them a personal message. But, I would say, let it go. In fact I have a video about emailing your subscribers after they have unsubscribed here if you want to take a look.

To delete users or subscribers from your account follow the instructions below. And if you don't mind, share this on Twitter with the button below so others can see it as well, thank you in advance!

How To Delete Inactive Subscribers

1. Login to your Aweber account and select the correct list.

2. Click on the Subscribers tab

3. Click on the filter called "unsubscribed."

This will give you a list of the people that are still part of your list but have opted-out. Now it's time to get rid of them. Like Mr. Wonderful would say, they're dead to you.

4. Select the accounts that have unsubscribed and delete them, as shown next:

That's it!

And this is how you delete the accounts that have unsubscribed. There's no need to carry those accounts around and in some cases, they could cost you extra money so keep it clean and remove those.

Most other email services out there have a similar procedure, the whole goal here is to remove those people that have unsubscribed. It's just dead weight, get rid of it.

The post Get Rid of Dead Weight from Your Email List appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

Yes, really. Look here, and here.

And what is the number 1 search engine? Google, of course.

Google owns Youtube so you can say that Google really owns the #1 and #2 spots where people are searching.

One could argue that YouTube is not a search engine at all because it doesn't serve any documents outside of its own site, technically making the search function exclusively internal.

But going by the sheer number of searches going on in YouTube, and for this blog post, I'll consider Youtube a search engine.

This is why it makes sense for you to be on Youtube. Your business should be on Youtube and if you have a brand or a product, or even if you are your own brand, Youtube is something you should make part of your strategy.

There's Talent and There's Hustle.

Sometimes it seems that our efforts to create new engaging videos don't really pay off.

We find that despite all the effort planning, shooting, and editing a video, they turn out very low views and even lower engagement.

Well, here's what I have found. There are two things when it comes to any type of work, including being a content creator. One is talent, and the other is hustle.

This whole list is about hustle. It's about all the stuff you can do to beat the competition even if they are more talented than you.

When I've done all the heavy lifting part of a video, and I think I'm done. Just before my video is about to be published, I go through this list of stuff.

The work you put into this list can seem overwhelming, but take one step at a time and just check off each item as you go. After a few times, the process will become second nature.

This list is not comprehensive, but it's a collection of 11 best practices to follow just before and immediately after you publish a video.

Without further ado, here is the list I follow:

1 Add to a Playlist

Increase watch time by adding your video to a playlist of yours. Adding videos to related playlists gives you a chance of getting more views when people find one of your videos through a playlist.

Playlists show up in search results and sometimes videos in the playlist come up as results so when people play such a video, they're likely to see other videos in that playlist.

Bonus - make sure it's added to a "series playlist." Series playlists are special playlists, you can read more about them here.

Bonus 2 - make sure you create a good description for the playlist so that it helps with search results. You can even add short descriptions for each video which will help with search results as well.

2 Add an End Screen

When your video is over, help direct the viewer where you want to by linking to other videos or adding a subscribe button. You can add up to 4 items on your end screen, including any video, a recommended video for the viewer, a playlist, and the lastest upload.

End screens can be up to 20 seconds long. You can see how I do my end-screens on any of my videos.

Some YouTubers add a small video segment at the end of their video to talk about the end screens and actively direct the user to click on them, others like me, just ad a static slide for 10 - 20 seconds.

You can decide how to do it, or you can start with a static slide like me, and then later on make end video segments, up to you. But just use the end screens, they help.

This is an explanation of end screens, straight from the horse's mouth. And below is a good video by Youtube expert Darrel Eves, I recommend you check those two things out.

Darrel talks a little bit about annotations, the precursor to end screens. Then quickly gets into a tutorial on how to add end screens. Worth a few minutes of your time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4dYiyCg6q8

3 Add Tags to Your Title

It's generally important to have at least 1 or 2 of your tags appear in your title to help with search optimization on those terms.

This sounds confusing, but it basically means that you should have 2 tags from your tag collection (found under your description) match with part of the title of your video.

I have a feeling that tags will eventually go away as artificial intelligence engines get better at recognizing visual and spoken content, but for the time being, tags help you organize and categorize your video so that more people can find it.

Tags can be added in their own section, use at least 2 of these tags as part of your title to reinforce the topics and type of searches your video will appear in.

4 Add More Tags

YouTube allows up to 500 characters when adding tags. Use as many as possible and keep tags relevant to your video.

#3 above and this can go in any order, but when it comes to tags, you can add up to 500 characters worth of tags. Use them wisely and if possible, use up all your characters to maximize the chance of your video being discovered.

TubeBuddy helps you keep track of how many characters you've used and also helps you pick the right tags to use in your video. Learn more about TubeBuddy here.

5 Add Info Cards

Add Info Cards in order to provide relevant external information to your video - a related video of yours or your website, etc.

Info cards are those little pop-up icons that come up during some Youtube videos, they create a clickable call to action for your viewers to get more information about a video.

Info cards can link out to other videos, playlists, or even your website. You can add up to 5 cards to any video, and they are time-stamped so they can come up at the exact time you pick.

Sunny Lenarduzzi has a great video tutorial geared towards influencers and entrepreneurs, I highly recommend you take a look, it's only 3 minutes.

6 Add Captions

Adding captions will not only help visually impaired users consume your content, but it can also boost your search rank!

There is some evidence to suggest that videos with accurate captions tend to do better in search results and may attract more engagement compared to their counterparts without captions.

I recently made a video about this where I explain that I've seen around 5-15% increase in average on videos with close captions versus those that don't have it or have the automatic Youtube generated close captions.

I recommend you add your own and don't rely just on the ones that Youtube creates.

Here's that video if you want to see how to create subtitles from scratch with Youtube.

7 Upload High-Resolution Thumbnail

Ensure that your thumbnail shows up crisp and clear on all devices by publishing a high-resolution version. It's important to make sure your thumbnail is eye-catching but also make sure it's high-resolution.

Sometimes you can make a thumbnail on a mobile device and it looks great in that screen, but when you make it larger it turns out it's blurry or looks like it's low quality.

Thumbnails are the first impression when people see your video in search results or in your page so put some effort into it and make sure it's of high quality.

You can use Canva, Photoshop, or other apps to help you create crisp and eye-catching thumbnails. TubeBuddy even has a built-in thumbnail generator you can use on the fly.

One thing to note is that you must have a verified Youtube account to be able to upload custom thumbnails. Here are more details about video thumbnails.

8 Turn on Monetization

This video doesn't have monetization turned on which means you're not earning any ad revenue from it.

If you are a Youtube partner, you should turn monetization on for your video before you publishit. This will help you generate revenue from your video and it should encourage Youtube to show your video more frequently since they will also make money from it.

In order to have monetization available for your channel, you must meet certain requirements. You can learn more about those requirements here.

9 Make Your Title Between 20 and 70 Characters

You generally want your video title to be long enough to be descriptive but not too long to where it becomes hard to read.

Just like tags, you have a limit on the number of characters you can use in your title, but the ideal size for a title is between 20 to 70 characters. This is long enough to be descriptive and eye-catching but not so long that it becomes a burden to read the title.

Technically, you can go longer than 70 characters, but this is the cutoff mark for the title when it shows up on search results so in most cases, the viewer doesn't see anything beyond the 70 characters until they click on the video to watch it.

10 Get a like on Facebook

YouTube isn't the only place you should be sharing your video - make sure you tell your connections on Facebook about it.

This one is easy, and it also serves as a reminder to share your video on Facebook.

Whether you share it on your Facebook business page, fan page or your personal profile, share it so that other people can see it and hopefully at least a few people will like the post on Facebook.

You can also share your video in a group, but the likes from groups may or may not be tracked. Always share the video to your personal profile AND a business page if you have one.

This helps with your visibility, SEO and social signals.

11 Pin a Comment

Take control of your comment section by "pinning" a comment that you choose to the top of the list (usually your own comment).

This is a recent trend and while I can't say exactly how important it is, it is very clear that you should do this for all your videos as a way to start up the conversation and encourage others to leave their own comments.

It used to be that you would put a lot of information in the description, but in most cases, people will not click on the "see more" link to reveal your entire description.

A comment, on the other hand, is visible right away and if it's the pinned comment, it will show at the top so you can add more information about the video, ask a question or provide additional links.

Many people will feel inclined to reply to a comment by the creator instead of leaving their own comment.

In conclusion

So this is a good list for you to follow, keep it on a spreadsheet, print it and stick it next to your desk. Whatever you need to do to keep this list handy, do it. If you follow these, you should see an increase in views and hopefully engagement as well.

You still have to strive to create informational, educational and entertaining content, but when you've done your best in that regard, follow this list and I think you'll see results.

The Tubebuddy extension I mentioned helps you accomplish and track all of these items for you, like item #3, with TubeBuddy, is a breeze.

If you want to look at that, it's free and available for all major browsers. Learn more about it here: https://tubebuddy.com/youtubehelp. And yes, if you were curious, I'm an affiliate for them. But I also use them for every single video I publish and I'm slowly working my way back through all my previous videos.

The post 11 Best Practices to Get More Views on Youtube Videos appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

I'm guessing because there really is no indication of the status, but I haven't received an email or anything, and if I go back to the developers' area, I can't create a new app.

I say "new" because I still have my old one in there, I had already set up the app settings before I started writing these blog posts, so I can see my API keys and secret keys, but I don't have a way to create a new one.

It is only recently that Twitter locked down their developer program and asked some or all developers to re-apply.

I'm not sure exactly what happened, but anywhere I had a Twitter "app" I had to re-apply for that account. For my main account, there was no problem, but for this one, it's taking time so currently, I don't have my automated content machine going for this. However, it is still growing.

Other Updates

Quick updates on a few other things. I have a few irons in several fires and I've talked about some of them to you in my VIP Email list or in social media so I thought I'd give you a quick update.

WordPress 5.0 Update, Gutenberg

I've been thinking about the Gutenberg update coming to WordPress users. As soon as WordPress 5.0 is released, the Gutenberg update will come with WordPress by default. If you do not want to use this new editor, you'll need to install the "classic editor" and use that until you're ready to move to Gutenberg.

If you have a WordPress blog, I would start testing right away. Make a copy of your website or blog and test out how Gutenberg is going to affect you and be prepared. Unless you don't care if something breaks, don't install it on your main public site right away.

If you need help with this, get in touch with me and let me know.

Eye see you random thought

This is a totally random thought, but in helping a friend, I recently started learning about eyebrows.

Yeah, I know, such a random topic but my wife got her eyebrows "done" a while ago and that could mean something different to different people. But what I'm learning about, I thought was interesting enough to share on here.

My wife had her eyebrows done with microshading, which pratically looks as if she had applied make up. But there is more to this.

As I kept reading about it, I learned that you can have your eyebrows done in a few different ways, one is tattooed, another is microbladed, or another way is microshaded.

Tattoos are permanent, while microblading and microshading are semi-permanent. They're considered a semi-permanent tatoo.

So I thought it is a fascinating topic and there's a good FAQ about microblading here. I'm going to be helping her improve that so any feedback about the content itself is welcome as well.

During a microblading procedure, they literally take a tiny blade and cut eyebrow-hair-shape cuts into their eyebrow area then fill it up with pigment (ink basically) and after it has entered the tiny cuts, the pigment is removed the customer is left with new "eyebrows."

Of course, my head goes off into the online monetization for this business, so I may be talking about this again soon, not sure. Remember, the most monetizable niches are self-care, self-image, self-development, making money, finding love…

But there's a lot of money being made in this business. The things girls do to look good never ceases to amaze me!

And while most people that "get their eyebrows done" do it for convenience or seemingly vanity reasons, sometimes this helps people with scars, or people going through cancer treatment or other reconstructive process.

Sometimes they look so realistic that they are also known as 3d Microblading eyebrows. Look here for pictures of before and after.

About the Twitter growth case update

Let's do a quick recap.

I'm trying to grow an account to help drive traffic to a niche website. It is also a passion project and I haven't talked about it much publicly but I think in another blog post I'll share a link to it.

The case study includes the methods, and tools used to achieve the goal. Check out the first post about this, then part two here and this one you're reading is technically part 3.

• Goal is 1000 (about 1/2 there)

Currently

• Following: 905
• Followers: 483
• Tweets: 325

So if you don't know, the following/followers ratio is important. You don't want to have more following than followers.

It looks weak and needy, It is always advisable to have a slightly positive ratio in favor of the number of followers. In simple terms, have more people follow you than you follow.

More followers than following

As you start, this is tricky. You have no credibility, and you don't want to buy followers either through shady companies or directly from Twitter with advertisements.

My main problem right now is that I can't follow a lot of people too quickly because if they don't follow me back, that followers/following ratio will get worse and fewer people will want to follow me back.

This part is always a little slow, it feels like when the wheels of the train are spinning and grabbing a little bit as the train leaves the station.

But we keep on keeping on and try to keep up with these 3 strategies.

1. Provide quality content.
2. Provide engaging activity.
3. Changing that ratio to a positive number.

Let's talk about the ratio part first

As you can see, I'm following a little more than 2x the number of people following me. To fix this, Rewst has a feature to help you unfollow people that didn't follow you back after a period of time (customizable) or that are no longer following you.

A good ratio is anything higher than 1.1. The higher the number the better but it's also relative so don't get too hung up about it when you develop your long-term marketing approach. For our immediate purposes to grow this one channel, this metric is important because of appearances.

It's important for the follow/unfollow method I said I would use. The way we're going to get the attention of a potential new follower is by following them first. And so it becomes a little strategy game.

There's a method to this madness.

A new potential follower is more likely to follow you if they see that more people follow you than you follow back.

There's a slight dash of intrigue there when they see your account and they wonder "why did this account follow me?" "I must have said something interesting or shared a good article" and they'll be more inclined to follow you back.

Love it or hate it, this is how people work. Especially in social media. Everybody's looking for that next little fix.

A little bit of chat, a little bit of praise, maybe even a little friction over a slight disagreement, but the follow/unfollow method works because it reaches out to people while helping you maintain that perception to the outsiders looking in. 

What's the right follow ratio then?

So you see, this is why it's important to bring that ratio to a greater than 1.0 ratio. Currently, for this account I'm working on, the twitter follow ratio is 0.43, just divide the number of followers by the number of following to find your own.

The bigger the number the better --generally, but at least 1.1 is necessary for this case study to work. My main account has a ratio of 3, while a celebrity or personality, like Elon Musk has a ratio of about 360,000!

I would recommend that a business maintains their ratio between 2 and 10.

It's hard to determine that more accurately since so many factors are contextual.

Rewst has a time period set to let those accounts mature before it marks them as "non-followers" and lets you unfollow them.

While that period of time is going on, I think I have it set to 3 days, I spent a few minutes each day looking at my feed and liking, retweeting and commenting on stuff I see from the people I want to follow me back.

This is also something I do to interact with them and really get into them. If you follow just for the sake of following, then there's no point.

Consider the follow and follow back process as an introduction at a networking event. You now know each other exist, now talk, get to know each other, etc. Without this part, this technique will fail!

One other tool I didn't mention before is Twittercounter. This is good just to keep an eye on the historical growth of your account.

You should go to TwitterCounter as soon as you can and ask for your stats. This will put you into their database and they'll update regularly so you can see how your efforts are working out over months and years. 

To provide engaging activity

This is where the people that just like to be haters miss out. They don't ever get to this part of the whole process, where I advocate that this method only works with good quality content and engaging activity.

I have a list of tweets I'm putting together, they'll be 100 of them. These are icebreakers and questions and greetings. These go into my Textexpander app which then allows me to reply to everybody that follows me with a quick quote, greeting, question, or something else. It's kinda like when people @ you and say "thanks for the follow" but my method works way better because I'm actually making the response to them unique and interesting.

Takes me about 2 minutes to do this for 15 - 30 people. This helps me lock down those people as followers for a long time and also increases my engagement numbers which will hopefully start adding me to recommended lists and get more retweets and likes which should increase traffic to the site eventually.

I also proactively unfollow junk accounts. The follow/unfollow method I'm working with has that as a side effect. Sometimes I'll just follow a ton of accounts and by the sheer number, some are bound to be bad accounts, bots, junk sellers, spammers, or in a language I don't want, so I'll unfollow at least a few accounts just by looking at my timeline.

The major unfollow process happens with Rewst every week or so and that handles a few hundred unfollows in just a minute or less.

It should be worth noting that Rewst is beautiful because it lets you manage those actions quickly, but it actually spreads them out over time when it executes them so that Twitter doesn't get overloaded and your account doesn't get flagged for using too many resources. Everybody wins.

Changing the Twitter ratio

As I continue with this, the ratio is going to get worse before it gets better. I'm probably going to get to a poor ratio for a while maybe around 0.375 which will be negative for growth.

But when I get to that point, the first big batch of people I followed should have matured in Rewst and I can unfollow them and close that gap a little to make things better. Right now I think I'm around 0.53

On the next update about this, I'll try to do an update about Tweet Wheel and getting that Twitter developer license. Hopefully, I'll have it by then.

The post Twitter Growth Case Study Gutenberg and Random Eyebrows. appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

But how do you know the person behind that profile is real? If you don't have any connections with mutual friends, or if you don't recognize the person from a previous place of employment, education or even a recent event, chances are the profile trying to befriend you is a scammer.

If you're not very active on Facebook or social media then this may not be obvious, but let me tell you that there are tons of people out there looking to scam you. Maybe they want your money, or your connections or they are simply using you as a pawn to a larger more nefarious goal. Stay alert, and be cautious when new people approach you and don't seem to have a clear purpose or intention.

Don't get me wrong, everybody is looking for something. Most people just like to add you as a friend to truly connect with you. But some of them want to use you, some want to abuse you. I'm here to help you spot the ones that want to abuse you, to take advantage of your good nature.

Video: How to spot a fake profile scammer on facebook

NEVER click on a link you didn't ask for or were not expecting until you are absolutely certain that the link is harmless. Better yet, just don't click on it.

Some Telltale Signs They Are A Fake Account

• The user tries to make chit-chat conversation, often repeats it all over every time they make contact. There is no purpose to the conversation.
• The user has only a small amount of personal pictures or none at all. They may have a profile photo, but since they aren't real, they don't have other photos with friends, family, etc.
• They have very few posts. They just put a few things up to appear legitimate.
• They claim to work for high-visibility trustworthy school or work at a very prominent company or institution, i.e. Harvard, Yale, Oxford, or they work at a governmental institution. It's almost impossible to verify this unless you run an employment background check.

This is a video I made to show you how to spot a scammer on Facebook. It works about 75% to 80% of the time based on my personal experience.

In conclusion

Spotting fake profiles on Facebook can be pretty easy and with time, you'll be able to guess which ones are real and which ones are fake even without doing the steps I outlined in the video. It just takes practice. The method I describe just confirms your suspicions, and it takes just a couple minutes to complete and it's totally free, just use the Google image search.

A tip I didn't mention in the video if the image you search for doesn't turn up any results, you may also want to "reverse" it. You can do this with almost any photo editing software, just flip the image horizontally. Sometimes scammers will do this to throw off the image search in Google.

You should also know that it's perfectly possible for a scammer to have a legitimate profile. These type of scammers are a totally different kind and this video will probably not help you with that. When I said that this works 75 to 80 percent of the time, that's because sometimes scammers don't use photos from other people so the image search will not work in those cases.

The post How to Spot Fake Profiles and Scammers on Facebook appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.