Twitter was innovative, it was cool, you could talk to people and it was interesting.

Unfortunately, all the things that made Twitter cool aren't part of the smallest of the tech giants. Where once they were bastions for freedom of speech promoting revolutions and allowing those without a voice to have a platform. They are now censors of expression and arbiters of "truth" more like the ministry of truth from 1984.

For a year or two, I've been trying to delete all my tweets. For purposes of branding and business, I can't just delete my Twitter account. I want to retain the name, so I didn't want to just delete the twitter account. I simply wanted to stop using it and delete everything I've posted on it.

I tried free services, but these couldn't really delete all tweets. I also tried this tutorial from Quincy Larson, but the problem with that article is that a crucial step required to implement it can't be done anymore. Twitter used to give you a "tweets.csv" file that contained all your tweets. Now they give you all your tweets in a javascript file, but the script in Quincy's tutorial doesn't work with that.

How to Delete All Your Tweets for $7.50

I finally decided to pay up and get it done. This is how I did deleted all my tweets. I tried deleting all my tweets for free, but that resulted in a lot of tail-chasing and procrastination. If you really want to delete all your tweets, for whatever reason, this is the best way to do it.

The app I used is Tweetdeleter.com

Step 1 - Request Your Data

Request your data archive from Twitter. This is under your settings, account, Twitter data.

Twitter should produce your archive in two to 48 hours and will notify you via email, this is a zip file that contains all your twitter data.

Step 2 - Sign up with Tweetdeleter

Is to sign up with Tweetdeleter. I used the monthly option and paid $7.50 for one month since I was only going to use it one time to delete all tweets, then I would cancel the service. If you are interested in deleting tweets regularly, then paying for a year in advance might make sense.

You can set Tweetdeleter to delete tweets older than certain days, or just to keep the last few, you can also delete tweets that fit some criteria if you want.

Step 3 - Download your Twitter Data

Download your Twitter archive and upload it to your Tweetdeeleter account. Depending on the size of your archive, this might take a few minutes. My archive was a little bit over 350mb and it took about 10 minutes to upload.

Step 4 - Upload Your Archive to Tweetdeleter

Tweetdeleter will then process the file and give you some options to select what tweets you want to delete. If you're like me, and you are going to delete all tweets, then options are pretty much irrelevant.

Step 5 - Delete All Tweets

Pick the "Delete All Tweets" option at the top of the dashboard, Tweetdeleter will confirm and after you click "Delete" your tweets will begin deleting. Wait 30 seconds up to a few minutes.

The entire 37160 tweets I had posted since 2007 were deleted in about 2 minutes. I then visited my Twitter profile and I had 0 tweets.

Step 6 - Cancel Membership

Optionally, if you just wanted to do this one time and don't want to get billed again, make sure you cancel your recurring membership to Tweetdeleter. I paid with Paypal so I had to go into my Paypal account to cancel the service.

Conclusion

Deleting your tweet history isn't very straight forward. Twitter doesn't want you to delete your tweets and doesn't really let you do it easily. You can delete 3200 recent tweets relatively easily, but if you want to delete your entire collection, you need to find a paid service to do it for you.

It was time to close the chapter on Twitter for my Notagrouch account, and this was the best step I could take towards that, I kept my account open, but now there is only a tweet notifying followers and visitors that I've left and where they can find me.

If you want to follow me, follow me on Instagram, TikTok or even Youtube.

The post How to Delete all your Tweets in 5 Easy Steps. Adios Twitter. appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

I haven't dug into why Twittercounter shut down but I'm guessing they weren't making enough money with their paid placements and other enhancements to their stats.

Their announcement was simple and straightforward but didn't offer much of an explanation:

Sorry to hear this. Your data was very helpful to my org over the years.

— Magnetic Dynamo (@magneticdynamo) November 2, 2018

Some people on Twitter felt left out because they were paying members and they weren't notified, but a quick email seems to have solved that.

Other people seemed to be sad that the service was going away. I totally missed the announcement until just recently when I started this blog post but I didn't get a chance to publish it.

To be honest, I'm going to miss the TwitterCounter system. They have been around for a long time and pretty much became part of the Twitter ecosystem.

Thanks for all the stats guys! Best of luck on your next venture.

So the TwitterCounter shutdown seems to be just like general business failure, it's already updated on Wikipedia and there's a footnote in there in reference to a hacking incident coming from Turkey I guess but it's unclear if that has anything to do with its decomision.

So as far as I can tell, no foul play for now.

But in other news...

No foul play there, unlike the Chipotle incident! Now, that's controversial right now, isn't it? There's a whole lot of people on both sides although I think it's going to unravel even more and totally lean towards one side.

What do you think? Do you think we've heard everything we have about that or we'll we hear about it again soon when more unravels for one reason or another?

Here's PhillyD's take on it, starting on the first story:

Here's Tim Pool's on the Chipotle incident, titled: Chipotle is LYING About The Racial Profiling Controversy:

Our world is going crazy, but you keep your eye on the prize. Focus on the good stuff around you, especially with Thanksgiving coming up just around the corner.

Be thankful for what you have and Happy Thanksgiving!

The post Twittercounter.com Closed Down on November 5 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.

I have set the automatic Twitter updates with different wording for the foreseeable future using Tweet-wheel.

I'm going to explain how I set up the content wheel so that you don't have to actually be on Twitter 24x7 to post updates and get Twitter traffic.

• You're going to need a WordPress blog or website.
• You're going to need this plugin: Tweet Wheel.
• The Auto Tweet Machine

Before you set up the automatic tweet cycle of content component, I recommend having at least 10 blog posts published. Each one will have at least 5 tweets associated with it, that gives you about 50 tweets. This means you should be able to tweet about five times each day without repeating a tweet for 10 days.

The best situation is if you don't repeat a tweet for 30 days or longer. As your blog and collection of content grows, you'll be able to tweet for weeks without repeating a tweet word for word, but every tweet will be automatic.

Case study status

• Day #1
• Following: 424
• Followers: 200

The Setup

The setup is really easy, but there's one step that may be out of the ordinary for many people. Getting developer access for Twitter, but I'll cover that.

Install and configure Tweet Wheel

Get Tweet Wheel, then install and activate the plugin like any other plugin. Although you can use the free version of the Tweet Wheel plugin, as I get towards the end of how I do this for other accounts, you will see that the paid version is much better if you're serious about growing traffc to your blog from your Twitter account and at the same time providing value to your readers.

Get Twitter developer access

Go to Twitter and apply for developer access, it's easy and it's free, just go here to do it.

Make sure you're logged in with the Twitter account then you'll need to connect that user profile to the developer account, it's easy to click to continue once you have verified that it is the right account.

On the next steps, you'll need to designate this as a "business" or "personal" account. I use the personal access request for this since it's just a blog and a twitter account.

On the next step where it asked for the name of the project, I just called it "Blog Connection" and the country of operation is United States. Told you it was easy.

This next part can be tricky because there are so many options and if you're just a blogger like me then you may not know what these options mean. Let's just say that I don't think they mean a whole lot for us as bloggers. If we were really developing an application for Twitter, I think they would be more meaningful.

You can use my screenshot as an example of what to check and what to say. If you notice, I say a whole lot of nothing.

If you want to copy it, verbatim, here it is: "This is just for me to connect my blog so I can automatically send specific quotes and excerpts from my articles to Twitter. It is designed to take pieces of text from a specific article and then tweet that out at a random time within a period of time. It does so in a way that it will not repeat the same tweet for at least 60 - 90 days if ever at all."

The last part, that is not in the screenshot is a question whether your project will give information to government entities, and the answer, of course, is no for that.

The last step is to accept the developer end user agreement. They also try to get you to sign up to their email list, so decide if you want to do that and continue on. This should be the end of it. I had to confirm my email address so I did that.

After you do this, you'll get to a screen that says the application is being reviewed and they'll get back to you when they have decided. I've never been denied, so it should work for you too. If it doesn't, re-apply in a couple days.

Back to WordPress

Back on WordPress, using the Tweet Wheel settings,  you can create a schedule for your main queue. If you're using the free version of Tweet Wheel, you only get one queue, the paid version has multiple queues and schedules.

For this part I will be using the pro version with another website since Twitter is taking its sweet time to approve my developer application.

First, a quick overview of Tweet Wheel.

Tweet Wheel lets you create a queue of tweets to be sent out at a specified pre-scheduled time. You set up your time similar to how Buffer does it. Pick as many time slots as you want per day. Then you add posts to that queue. The result should be that your posts will be tweeted out in a round-robin fashion as the designated scheduled times come up. The part where Tweet Wheel excels in scheduling tweets is that each one of your posts that is part of the queue can have multiple tweets assigned to it.

Scheduling your Tweets with Tweet Wheel

A picture is worth 1000 words so let me explain with each screenshot.

As you can see, you can schedule as many time slots as you can fit per day. This is why it's important to have a good amount of blog posts ready when you start using Tweet Wheel.

Using this example, if we have 3 slots per day, times 7, we'll be tweeting 21 times each week. So you'll need to have either 21 blog posts, or seven blog posts with three "tweet templates" each.

The templates for Tweet Wheel

Tweet Wheel uses "templates" to tweet out whatever message you want. You should use at least three separate ones per blog post. The next two screenshots will help explain.

So you can see the titles in bold are the titles of the actual blog post, while the text in regular font shows what is going to be tweeted out for that post. You can edit these directly from each blog post's edit screen, and you can add as many as you want or none at all.

The plugin will automatically use the title of the blog post and the link to the blog post as the content for the tweet.

You can see that {{TITLE}} and {{URL}} appear in some places. {{URL}} is required, but {{TITLE}} is not. this is how you can come up with different tweets. This is where you can get creative. Test out how people react to various words and messaging by adding and removing tweets over time.

You can use quotes from the article if you don't want to get creative. You could also try different titles for the post and see how people in Twitter react to that, you can ad some posts with hashtags others without them.

Bringing it all together

The outcome should be that all the posts in the blog should be added to the queue and spread out so that the tweets don't get repeated earlier than 30 days. As your collection of content grows, your frequency of posts per day should increase as well.

So if you have 50 blog posts, each with 5 different tweet templates (total of 250 tweets), instead of posting three times per day, you should post at least five times per day which will give you about 50 days before you repeat a tweet.

Even when increasing to 5 tweets per day, that is only five tweets per day. We really should be tweeting out more like 10 - 20 times per day AND creating some engagement.

In subsequent posts, we'll cover how I add another 5 - 10 tweets that are current and relevant right now, and how to create engaging posts and engage with strangers on Twitter. I'll also cover the haters saying this follow and unfollow method doesn't work; it does work if you do it right and that's what I teach. I'll go over Rewst as well, but you can get a quick glance at that from a previous post here.

The post The Tweet Wheel of Fortune appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

Nonetheless, I think there is still value in growing your account and using it to drive traffic. If Neil Patel still uses and recommends Twitter, then it's still a go-to social network.

This is the first post about a case study I'll be doing to see how much if any impact the growth of a Twitter account has on the traffic to the website it promotes.

The case study

Here are the details of the case study, it's simple and straightforward I hope.

The objective

Take a small account on Twitter from about 160 followers to 1000 followers. We'll document traffic generated from Twitter and impressions of tweets as well as time to reach the 1000 followers. This post marks day 0.

Techniques

• We're going to use the following, connect & unfollowing technique. To clarify, this doesn't mean we follow and then unfollow automatically. We will follow accounts indefinitely so long as they are legitimate, unique and would like to engage. We unfollow those that don't follow back or fail to engage back.
• We'll be recycling our own content 3 - 10 times per day as we grow and interact.

Tools

• I'm going to be using Rewst for the following and unfollowing mechanism.
• Tweet Wheel to recycle content.
• Buffer and or Minideck

The Challenge

The main challenge on this is getting followers. Can I find and create enough content to share and post that will grab other people's attention and compel them to follow me.

The niche, in this case, is small in most regards, but it's growing so it's a good test and a fair challenge.

The follow and unfollow mechanism only works well when you have really big accounts you can model after. In this case we'll be using the keyword feature for Rewst mostly to find likely Twitter accounts that would follow us.

The Goal

The goal is to increase traffic to the website and clicks on tweets.

So the baselines are in the screenshots:

• 163 followers, following 240
• 26 sessions originated from Twitter in August

Wish me luck!

The post Twitter Growth Strategy & Case Study appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

Today, Twitter is vastly different. Most people come to Twitter to absorb information about their favorite topics. The other majority is looking for information curated by the people they consider experts or knowledgeable about a specific topic.

The landscape of the Twitter world has changed dramatically due to technical changes and shifts in internet culture. That's not to say that you can't make personal connections and grow your business using Twitter.

One of the notable things that has changed for businesses is the fact that it's almost required for a business to have a Twitter account.

Having an account isn't enough though. It's like a muscle, you have to use it and exercise it if you want it to grow and give you results.

You, as a spokesperson for the business, must nurture and work on the account regularly. It's great to talk to your prospects, existing customers and anyone that might be friendly to you or your cause.

But if you have that covered, what else can you do to leverage Twitter?

If you want more Twitter traffic, share your content on Twitter

Sharing your own content on social media must be a part of your plan to grow your business and influence. This sentiment is shared by most of the top online business people and influencers. Even if they don't tell you that they're doing this, their actions usually reflect this.

But some of the helpful social media and online marketing experts, like Neil Patel, actually teach these techniques. Neil suggests that we share 10+ articles which go back to our content, each day.

He also talks about how to grow your audience on Twitter fast on this video:

But Twitter can be exhausting, after you talk to people, and respond to conversations pertinent to your interests and objectives, you may feel too tired or overwhelmed to share your own content. And didn't Neil say to share your posts 10 times each day IF you already have a lot of followers?

What if you don't have 200,000 followers or more like Neil does?

The actual number of times you should share your own articles each day may vary by a number of factors, like how many articles you have and how many followers you have.

If you have a few hundred followers, you may annoy them really fast if you share 10 or more articles about your own stuff every day; this could hinder your growth and hurt existing or budding relationships.

But you can determine the right number of articles for yourself by experimenting. Maybe you share 10 articles total, four that are yours, and six about the industry by other influencers or media outlets. Maybe you can switch that ratio.

Play with those numbers, but remember that if you want more Twitter traffic, share more stuff on Twitter. BTW, if you agree with that by now, do me a favor and hit the following Tweetable quote just by clicking on it.

If you are skeptical or hesitant to share a lot of your own stuff, I totally understand, in fact, I had a question about sharing other articles instead of mine and how I should split that ratio. I didn't expect it, but Neil actually answered my question right away:

By the way, my traffic did go up, significantly.

But even if you could magically determine the exact number of times you should share your own content, the problem remains the same for you. If you don't schedule all these articles at once, you have to consciously share the articles every day at random times throughout the day.

This is exhausting, and time-consuming. Add to that the fact that you are also trying to respond to people on Twitter or initiate conversations, and run a business, you may feel like giving up quickly.

I get it, it's a lot of work.

But technology and tools are here to make our lives easier, don't overcomplicate things.

Use the right techniques and tools, as Neil suggests and as I show you in the video below, you can schedule all your own content to be shared in advance, on a set schedule. You can set this up once a week, or once a month and schedule all of your content.

On a future blog post, I'll show you how to weave your own content with niche content by other influencers in your industry so that you can keep a healthy and interesting balance of content. Make sure you subscribe, or follow me so you don't miss it if you want to see that.

But here's the video I made explaining how to use Buffer's power scheduler feature to accomplish what we've been talking about.

This is one of the strategies that has helped me triple my Twitter followers. By the way, if you aren't following me, you can right here: @Notagrouch.

TL;DR

In conclusion, you should have a Twitter account to help you grow your business. One of the strategies to grow on Twitter and get more traffic from Twitter to feed your business is to share relevant content that you've created on top of the regular, one-to-one interactions with your followers.

The easiest way to do this is to schedule all your own content in advance using a tool like Buffer coupled with the technique I demonstrated in the video.

I'm in the draft mode for another post that will simplify this process even further, and will make you a Twitter powerhouse without breaking the bank. Make sure you stick around or subscribe to my list to get notified when that comes out. Of course, you can also get notified if you follow me on Twitter.

Have you tried this before? Are you hesitant? I love teaching and sharing my expertise, but I also want to hear back from you about this and would love to know if you've done this, or not. If yes, what kind of results have you seen and if you haven't done this, why not?

The post How To Schedule Your Content on Twitter Once a Month appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

But I see a resurge on Twitter and I see some good things that are going on. But I'm also deeply concerned about its apparent censorship and favoritism displayed over the past year and more so in the past few weeks.

If you haven't kept up with these developments, apparently, Twitter has been revoking the verified status from many accounts. It appears that Twitter is reviewing its verification program and will probably be removing the verification status from many more accounts.

It seems that some accounts claim that they've been unfairly targeted and singled out for suspensions and even permanent bans as a result of this "review", because of opposing viewpoints or what they call "wrong-think" like in  George Orwell's 1984 novel.

Twitter never comments on specific cases, but usually points questions and requests for comments to their Terms of Service document which like most T.O.S. documents is vague and even ambiguous; this allows for conspiracy theories, and alternate possibilities to be considered plausible by some.

Many argue, in contrast, that other accounts that are more in line with Twitter's political bias are allowed to remain active and verified despite exhibiting similar behavior as that displayed by the accounts that have been reprimanded arguably because of holding the wrong set of ideas or opinion.

You can't really change any of that... but this is what you can do.

And at the end of the day, you can't do much about Twitter's decisions anyway. But you know what you can do, is be a good person, be a decent individual and stop doing these three things on Twitter.

Trust me, they make you look like an amateur and it's time somebody tells it to you straight. I'm going to make this blog post mandatory reading for all my would-be customers and existing customers.

So without further ado, stop doing these things that make you a jerk on Twitter:

#1 Sending Automatic DMs

This is one of the worse things to have ever been turned into a thing on Twitter. If you follow me on Twitter, you surely have seen my top-most pinned tweet.

I've had it on for most of the year and it gets a good reaction.

https://twitter.com/notagrouch/status/828005553519472640

Nobody cares about your life's story in your auto dm. Nobody clicks on the links you send in there. Essentially, if you use Auto DMs when someone follows you, you're a jerk. You're forcing us to look at some crappy message and usually, you haven't even taken the time to  look at our account let alone follow us for a while so we can actually get to know each other.

I'll take that back. I'm sorry, I give you the benefit of the doubt, maybe you didn't know prior to reading this blog post. Ok, but now you know so if you're still using Auto DMs, now, you're a jerk. Ok, I'll grant you a grace period, you can take a few minutes and then go turn off those automatic DMs.

Sending auto dms on Twitter is like throwing garbage out the window as you drive down the street, or like that crappy junk mail you still get delivered to your home address. Do the senders don't know that those pieces of mail survive only the walk to the nearest trash bin?

In Twitter, it's digital littering, you're doing nothing but creating digital garbage.

Please, don't. Just don't.

If you don't know how you're sending automatic direct messages because you set them up a long time ago and don't remember how, just click here to go to your Twitter apps permission page and click on "revoke access" next to all the apps listed there that you don't recognize.

This will reset your Twitter account's permissions and prevent 3rd party apps from sending those automatic junk messages.

#2 Sending Thank you for nothing messages.

Yes, it is absolutely true that you should acknowledge your new followers and engage with them. You should also engage with your existing followers and build connections with them. This is the reason we call Twitter a social network.

But don't confuse digital garbage for gratitude.

When it comes to Twitter, stop the automatic @ mentions messages with generic, repetitive and boring messages. Just like auto DMs, they're digital garbage.

If auto DMs are like mailbox flyers that are sent to you via postal service, then thanks-for-nothing tweets are the maybe-more-annoying door and car flyers you find after you come home or back to your car in the parking lot. More garbage and you're forced to look at it. And if you're sending these automatically, yep, you're a jerk.

These noise maker tweets sound a bit like this:

Thanks to my top #twitterfam followers (or some hashtag that sounds like a community exists): @mention1 @mention2 @mention3 @mention4 #famlov https://somefreejunk.net.

You don't need to thank everyone that follows you as if they just did you a favor. That's what people do on Twitter they follow each other. Instead, take it a step further and learn something about the person and comment on that. "Thank you for following me" messages are so 2008, and digital junk.

Generally, Twitter users fall prey to become these apps' advertising parrot-heads and use them with the promise of gaining a following or getting more "social mentions" which can be valued by some social influence measuring tools --also useless, but I digress.

At the end of the day, these tools primary purpose seems to be to generate digital garbage.

Instead, spend 15 - 20 minutes each day doing what I do to remain personal, and engaged with people on Twitter. It makes Twitter relevant again, believe it or not, there is a growing active user base on Twitter.

I explain how I engage with new users next.

What should you do instead?

From personal experience, thanks to Rewst.com and a dedicated 15 to 30-minute planned daily activity on Twitter, I've been averaging about 40 new followers each day. Thank you and welcome, all of you!

But to show gratitude, I take the time to check out each new follower and either like a few of their latest interesting tweets or maybe I'll follow them back. By the way, you don't have to use Rewst.com, it just makes things easier.

Another thing I do to show appreciation and acknowledgment to new followers is to retweet one or two of their most recent interesting tweets. I use Buffer to spread the tweets over a few hours or a few days.

Even doing an @ mention responding to a specific tweet they posted recently, or a compliment or positive feedback about their profile may go a long way.

These actions show you are there, and you're active and not just a twitter-bot pushing a message out. Taking the time to acknowledge your new followers shows gratitude.

Seriously, the other automatic, canned junk is bad. Forget it. Be real, be genuine and be there, even if it's just a couple times each day. Automatic "thank you @mentions" Just like I advise you for Twitter auto DMs... Just don't.

#3 Tweet Only your products

I'm a big proponent of automation. But you should work on intelligent automation. Once you get a work-flow going where you can read and share interesting articles on Twitter easily and timely, you can start sharing content that your followers may be interested in without any additional effort.

This video shows you how you can schedule all your tweets easily.

You can use something like Buffer or Hootsuite to schedule tons of tweets in advance. But just be careful with this convenience.

Don't fall for the temptation to tween only for your products or services. You should have a mix of content.

How much is too much self-promotion?

Advice tends to suggest that we should be following a rough 80/20 split where you share industry news, relevant events information, quotes by captains of industry, interesting reports, case studies and news for about 80 percent of the time, and you share your own content the remaining 20 percent of the time.

If you are on Twitter and spend 15 to 30 minutes each day tweeting and engaging, then you'll find that you can be tweeting around 20 times organically.

Add to that count, 10 or so tweets you can pre-schedule as you read the type of content I suggest you share above. You could easily be tweeting anywhere from 30 - 40 tweets each day effortlessly. And that still doesn't count your own content.

Some people claim that if you were to just tweet your own content, you would lose followers and they'd feel like enough is enough.

But, I think if you're tweeting 40 or more times each day like I describe above, it's a fair ratio if you want to insert your own tweets 10 times a day. Mix them around in Buffer and continue to engage.

If you're trying to keep track of growth, you can also use Rewst.com to keep track of your growth. You could also tabulate the data yourself using Google Sheets, and I think Twittercounter.com will also help you track following and followers.

The big asterisk disclaimer on there is that my opinion is you should be engaging and sharing other content too to balance out your own content and to understand what others are sharing around your own topics of interest.

This means you could schedule around 8 to 10 tweets every day to your top 100 blog posts and go through them every 10 days or so. This will help you get a good amount of exposure and keep your followers looking at your content.

Neil Patel suggests you share at least 10 of your articles each day and look at the results based on the data --see video below: How to Get More Twitter Traffic (fast).

I tend to follow his advice and I usually share about 8 or 10 tweets of my own content and the rest are curated tweets.

I follow a ratio of roughly 50/50, and I think as long as the content is interesting, useful and valuable, even following Neil Patel's advice and only sharing 10 articles for your own blog may be fine.

After all if your own blog post isn't worth sharing, why did you write it at all right? And if it's worth sharing, why not share it?

Conclusion

These three things you need to stop doing on Twitter may seem a bit like rants, but based on my personal experience and in that experience of most of my clients, these are some of the biggest things that annoy other Twitter users and generally just contributes to a bad overall experience.

I'm not a big fan of telling you how to use any of the social networks. You should do what works for you. But if you insist on doing these things I listed, you have to wonder if annoying a large part of potential new followers is something that works for you.

Full automated Twitter accounts exist, and some of them have tons of followers, but they tend to be single-purpose announcement type of accounts. You can assume that all the unsolicited advice I provided here is meant for accounts that represent a person or a brand and want to actively grow and generate more engagement and traffic to their blogs.

The post 3 Things You’re Doing on Twitter That Make You a Jerk appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

Before we go further, for reasons I don't discuss in this post, I think you absolutely should be on Twitter if you have a business or are trying to grow a business, but for now I'm putting in my "regular-joe" hat and ranting a little bit about the future of Twitter.

One idea tells me it's going to take off --this is Twitter's year. And the other idea is that Twitter is dead, --why doesn't it just shut down already!?

I have written a few articles about Twitter recently encouraging you to grow your Twitter account. See: How to get 1000s of followers on Twitter and How to Grow your Twitter Account. But then the most recent post I wrote about Twitter explained how to unfollow everybody and in a way, start from scratch.

One of the caveats about unfollowing everybody on Twitter was that a massive amount of people will also unfollow you. And this proved to be true. I had about 8200 followers and within 48 hours I had lost about 500 followers.

But you know what? I didn't care. It didn't matter anymore. Most of the people that unfollowed me were just reciprocating. They were "unfollowing me back" in the same way that they followed me back in the first place. I don't need those followers, I want to earn your follow!

Back in 2011, or even 2013, I would have felt bad about losing that many followers in 2 days, maybe I would have been sad, but this time I was indifferent.

Even though I bounce between both feelings about Twitter, I've been leaning more towards the notion that Twitter really is doomed, even Jay Baer thinks so. Twitter reminds me of a fish that has been out of water for a few minutes too long and it's starting to gasp for a rush of oxygenated water.

Twitter reminds me of a fish that has been out of water for a few minutes too long and it's starting to gasp for a rush of oxygenated water.

For a moment, last year we thought Donald Trump would be one of the saving graces of Twitter, and I believe his antics have attracted a large number of new users to the platform, but at the end of the day, It seems that even Trump can't save Twitter.

Twitter's stock is down and has been on a steady decline for a while now. I expect that Twitter as we know it will close down in the next 18 - 24 months.

Maybe a big media company will just buy its data and intellectual property, but I just don't think it can survive in its current course. It has issues of censorship and favoritism, where it used to be all inclusive and once helped spark revolutions.

[bctt tweet="Twitter used to be fun. Now it's just an automated stream of bots talking to bots." username="notagrouch"]

Please tweet that! The interaction with a human being is scarce. I appreciate and seek genuine interactions but they are so rare.

Now Twitter feels like a burden, like something you have to do if you're an online marketer or a social media manager, and maybe even if you're a small business.

The only saving grace for Twitter right now is that there isn't anything quite like it out there or anything that can replace its potential. Keyword: potential.

Snapchat has more mindshare than Twitter ever did, but it's cumbersome and arrogant, and with an IPO coming up soon, its future is going to be tested as well.

Twitter doesn't know if it wants to allow long format posts or stick to the tired 140 character limit. You can post videos and photos, even live video but none of it works as well as it does with the other guys. Video is better on Youtube, photos are better on Instagram, and Facebook live video is dominant.

They keep throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks and so far nothing has stuck and I feel like they're running out of stuff to throw up.

So why stick around on Twitter?

For the time being, I'm keeping my account because of a few friends --see my Code42 list. Oh yeah, and also for the savagery that is @Wendy's account. Forget Donald Trump, maybe Wendy's will save Twitter.

The post Good-bye Twitter? appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

I decided to completely clean up house and start from scratch. I started unfollowing people on Twitter one at a time, but that's a long tedious process, and it's very easy to get distracted.

Then I tried using tools like Rewst.com or Manageflitter.com but those don't really have a straight up mass unfollow tool. I love Rewst, don't get me wrong, but I needed a nuclear option for this task.

I had forgotten why I was following most people, so I had to clean up my account.

The solution

So here's the solution I found to work and might work for you if you are in the same boat.

Start off by creating a couple of lists where you will put people that you don't want to lose track of. I already had a number of lists so I just made sure the people I really want to follow were on one of the lists I had.

Then I found this Chrome extension called: Twitter unfollow. The extension works really well and it's easy to use.

Keep in mind that if you are following more than a few hundred people, the extension might stop working before it finishes unfollowing everybody. This happens because Twitter has limits in place to prevent people from trying to game the system by following thousands of accounts and then unfollowing them all right away.

How to use the extension

1. It's easy to install, just go to the link, install it and it will show up as an icon on your toolbar.Small inconspicuous icon denotes that you have installed the mass unfollow extension.
2. Go to your following page on Twitter, this is the link: https://twitter.com/following
3. On your following page, you'll notice a new button that says "mass unfollow." Click that button and sit back until it's finished.

   

If the extension stops working, wait a day and try again. There probably isn't anything wrong with it, the problem might be that you have reached one or more limits in your account.

For me, the Twitter unfollow extension stopped mass unfollowing at around 700 people. In 24 hours I'll run it again and keep doing this until I reach 0 following.

Enter the lists!

After you have unfollowed all the people, then that's where the lists I have in place are going to come in handy. I can then go to those lists and follow the people I want to follow again and the natural order of things is restored.

There are a couple of caveats when you mass unfollow everybody.

Expect a lot of people to unfollow you as well.

Some people will only follow you as a "follow-back" and they don't really care about what you have to say. That's okay, this will give you a more accurate number of the people that actually follow you and are paying attention. Think of it as a purge.

Twitter has limits

Twitter has limits in place when it comes to following and unfollowing people at high rates. You may need to do this process over a period of several days and wait 24 hours to run another batch of unfollows.

Keep in mind, when you finish mass unfollowing, you may not be able to unfollow people manually or even follow people again for 24 hours or longer. Twitter doesn't release all the details about their limits, but it's a combination of the actual amount of followers and following, as well as your account age and usage in your account.

So that's it, easy and straight forward method of unfollowing everybody, also known as mass unfollow. If you want to learn how to get more followers then check out this post.

The post How to Mass Unfollow on Twitter appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

I've used this technique to get 1000s of followers. When I started using Rewst, I had just around 3000. I'm close to 8000 followers now and continue to grow.

I have to remind you that you have to be mindful of how you use Rewst, or any other Twitter growth tool. You MUST work on engaging with your followers and those that you follow. Without real engagement, the number of followers you have becomes nothing more than a vanity metric.

One of the things that is great about Rewst that I didn't mention in the video, and maybe I'll cover it in a future blogpost is their virtual assistant service. If you don't think you have the time to do what I showed you in the video, they have a service where a person will do the work for you.

The post How to get 1000s of Followers on Twitter appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

I don't care how you feel about it, when you use it correctly it can be an effective marketing tool. You can meet new people that align with your point of views and you can also find challenging ideas that make you think outside the box.

You can find prospects, leads and clients on Twitter. You can find new partnerships. You can learn about your competition. You can even advertise. I have met dozens of people that became my friends, Twitter has enriched my life financially and emotionally, probably more than any other social network.

I think Twitter has a lot of potential and to ignore it seems like a foolish proposition. If you aren't using Twitter already, I encourage you to start today. If you are using it and you aren't getting results then I encourage you to try new strategies and tactics to make Twitter fuel your path to achieving your goals.

Here is the thing with Twitter. Twitter is noisy, twitter is busy, it's a crowded space. You need to stand above the rest if you want to garner attention and develop trust.

If you'd like to follow me on Twitter, you'll find me here: @Notagrouch.

But HOW do I stand above the crowd?

One of the easiest way to do this is to grow the number of followers you have. Many people will tell you that it's not about quantity. It's "all about quality" they say, and they will tell you that it's better to have 10 really engaged people following you than having 100 quasi-engaged followers.

This is false. All things considered, the more followers you have the better. This is true for ALL networks, this is true for all businesses.

To stand above the crowd, you also need to be different. You need to offer value, you need to interact and you need to make the experience of following YOU, a special one; I'll cover that in a subsequent blogpost.

Today I want to show you how to increase your followers. In the tech community, we use the acronym: YMMV. YMMV means your mile may vary. What I'm about to show you works and is incredibly effective, but YMMV.

How To Get More Followers on Twitter

The first thing you need to do to get more followers on Twitter is to have the basics of using Twitter nailed down. If you don't do this, your results will not be optimal. Here's a quick list that covers some of those basic things:

• Have a complete profile. Profile picture, profile banner and a bio.
• Make your bio interesting, appealing, intriguing, or funny, but stay away from dry boring descriptions about what you do.
• Consistently post a variety of content of interest to you. This shows some of your interests.
• Post content that is informative and, or entertaining to your target audience. This shows you understand what your audience wants or needs.
• And last but not least ENGAGE with followers as much as you possibly can. This means that you care.

With those basic elements out of the way then you can follow what I'm about to show you to rapidly grow your followers.

When you follow somebody on Twitter, they receive at least one notification that you have followed them in the Twitter app. The notification looks like the one below:

Sometimes they receive additional notifications via email, sms, or via 3rd party apps if they have turned those notifications on.

This is important because it is an easy opportunity for you to let somebody know that you're interested in them. If they are paying attention to their Twitter account, then this is a good "first touch" outreach to them.

Just as a matter of fact, many of the people that you follow, will follow you back. You can then confirm that they have noticed you. This opens up a channel of communication that could be stronger than other alternatives like emailing them out of the blue.

Unfortunately, if an account follows you back automatically or quickly after you followed them, it could be an indicator that the account is not really being managed by a person but instead it is set to automatically follow back anybody that follows it. -- You don't want to follow these accounts.

To weed out the fake accounts, or those accounts that don't really want to engage, you can then look at those accounts that followed you back and analyze them, then engage with them.

Using these techniques, in just over 2 weeks, I went from roughly 3000 followers to a little over 5000. My goal is to get to 7500 followers before my birthday on August 6. It's a lofty goal, but I think it is doable.

How do you engage with Twitter accounts?

First, avoid the old, tired and boring "thank you for following me" message. This message is useless and makes most people go "ugh." Instead, thank your new followers by asking them a question about their profile, or one of their latest tweets, or visit their blog and acknowledge one of their posts.

This is infinitely more effective than just saying "thanks." Whatever you do, DO NOT pitch them your product or service in your first couple of interactions. And do not direct message them to pitch them either.

Based on their response to your approach, you'll be able to determine if you should continue to follow them.

For example, if you see that they have posted links in the past few minutes or hours, but they take 2 days to respond to you or don't respond at all, then most likely they are just posting links automatically. Maybe they are not a great account to follow.

So how do you find new (good) accounts to follow?

There are a few ways to find good new accounts.

One way is to use the search feature in Twitter to look for keywords and topics that are in line with you and your purposes on Twitter. Another way is to look at the accounts that are the leaders in your niche and look at their followers, then try to attract those followers.

You can also look for the trending topics on Twitter and find people you may find interesting there.

The numbers matter. The numbers matter a lot.

Twitter is a lot about talking to each other and learning from each other, but by definition, Twitter establishes that there are "followers" and there are leaders.

You want to be a leader in your space or niche, so you need to keep an eye on those numbers. The numbers I'm talking about are the number of people you follow vs the number of people that follow you.

You should aim to have more followers than the number of people you follow (following).

For example, if you only have a couple hundred followers, you should not be following 1000 accounts. At the time of this writing for example, I follow around 2700 people and I have just over 5500 people following me.

This approach does two things, it helps other people follow me more easily because from a psychological perspective they think "well, all these people follow him, so I probably want to follow him too." But it also demonstrates that you care about the well being and maintenance of your own account. And a third unintended consequence is that you are seen as an authority.

[bctt tweet="In business, being an authority is not important, it is imperative." username="notagrouch"]

If you simply follow back every account that follows you, by definition you will be following a lot of junk accounts, a lot of spammers and this will just clutter up your Twitter feed. Eventually you'll get tired of all that junk, then you'll find ways to automate your own activity on Twitter and then you'll be contributing to the noise without getting any real benefit, or creating any value. Don't "followback" just because.

If you follow everybody that you find, and you never revisit them, people will see that you follow lots more people than follow you and this will come across as a "needy" or "begging" behavior. Don't do this, remember, numbers matter.

How to clean up and lower the number of accounts you follow

I explained how to vet accounts, and how to find accounts to follow. So how do you determine which accounts to unfollow?

Look for spammy behavior. When you follow an account that seems interesting, see how they respond to your interactions. Do they immediately invite you to like their Facebook page, or sing up for their list, or do they immediately send you an automatic direct message?

Many accounts have automatic messages that you get immediately after following them, 98% of the time these are junk accounts. Take a look at their posts and you will notice that they have the same message going out to all their followers all day long.

If you believe that they just made a mistake and don't know what they're doing and you really want to follow them, then ask them a question. Engage with them and see how they respond. I am willing to bet most of them will never respond, because they have the account doing all that stuff automatically, they probably haven't been on Twitter for weeks or months.

This sounds like a lot of work does it not?

This is what I've been teaching people. Twitter is not easy. It can be really rewarding if you put in the time and effort. But you don't have to do all this by hand.

I would like to introduce you to Rewst. This will show you How to grow your Twitter account.

This is a new tool that helps with all the stuff I've mentioned above. It helps you find new people to connect with on Twitter and it helps you boost your numbers, organically. It hasn't officially been launched, but soon you will see it everywhere.

In addition to managing your account numbers, Rewst (pronounced like roost) also lets you schedule your tweets in advance, suggests the best time to post and has a lot of other goodies that will make your life easier.

Finding followers with Rewst

If you want to find new people to follow, you can use Rewst to help you do this. There are a few different ways that you can do this.

You can find your Fans, people that follow you but you don't or haven't followed back. You can find all the people that are new followers as well.

Also, you can copy followers, and find new people by searching for keywords in their bios or follow the suggestions provided by Rewst.

The copy followers feature works like I mentioned earlier. You enter a username that is in your niche and that has a number of followers, then you'll be able to follow all the people that follow that account. This initiates the first contact interaction that I mentioned above.

Cleaning up your Twitter account with Rewst.

I mentioned before that you should keep a ratio favoring the number of people that follow you vs the number of people you follow. This is easily managed with the Unfollow menu in Rewst.

The three main ways to unfollow people provided by Rewst follow the principles I mentioned earlier.

Unfollow inactive accounts, you can also unfollow accounts that are not following you back and you don't necessarily want to follow anymore, or non-followers, and you can also unfollow accounts that recently unfollowed you.

Don't get into a habit of following people and then unfollowing them, this is not considered good practice but in some cases it may be necessary, YMMV.

If you find people that you don't want to see anymore on your searches, or copy followers function, you can blacklist them so they don't show up again. The blacklist only applies inside the Rewst app.

For those times when you still want to use the unfollowing features in Rewst, but you want to avoid unfollowing certain people, you can use the whitelist function to exclude them from this screen.

Hope this introduction to Rewst was helpful and I hope you give it a try. If you want to grow your Twitter following, you definitely have to try this. It has been the most helpful tool in helping me grow my following and I believe it can do the same for you. Check out Rewst here to get started.

The post How to Grow Your Twitter Account appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

Topics and notes

Swarm - some people say it's "too difficult." It just works. Install the app and get it to work like millions of other people or don't. I like it. I like the separate functions from Foursquare and Swarm.

Why use Swarm? - To check in and let people know where you are. It can spark a connection or an impromptu meeting. Great way to discover where your friends or colleagues are or have been going to.

Here's a great writeup about the reasons Foursquare split Foursquare into Foursquare and Swarm. Geez, that was confusing.

For those of you new to the whole SMMOC thing, let me tell you about it quickly then resume with the notes:

Social Media Mastermind Orange County

SMMOC meets on Saturdays with some exceptions. Check out their meetup page for the latest schedule. Here's a quick promo video I made for the meetup:

With the new location and a sense of renewal and a fresh start, I can only expect SMMOC to reach new heights in attendance and quality of the meetings. Come and re-visit if you haven't been in a while.

And if you've never been, then what the (enter favorite expletive here) are you waiting for? People from San Diego all the way up to Ventura County drive on Saturdays to make this place one of the hotbeds of Social Media discussions in the West Coast. #TrueStory

Ok thanks... back to the notes

Ello - A simple Facebook. Still in beta and by private invite only. The general consensus is that "it will not take off" it is too simple. It is too late to start a new "social network."

Some people still waiting for an invite. Comments to that... "Too little too late, Son"

Questions? Can you use it anonymously?

I like it, it's clean and I feel like it's the next attempt at fixing what the Diaspora group set out to fix. It may be too little too late, or could just vanish into the sad backburner of abandoned projects. But for now, I am all for it. You can find me at @Notagrouch there as well.

Muut

A simple way of running a group. The point here was that it is hard to convince people to leave Facebook to do anything outside of Facebook.

---
The real legacy of Facebook or Twitter or Google... their power comes in the form of the login api they have. They are almost everywhere. We use them even without knowing.

Long after the "social networks" craze goes down, Facebook, Twitter and Google will have the login system to millions of accounts and apps.

---
Video

Video Hosting - Where to host your video? Vimeo, Youtube and Wistia. -- all are inexpensive. Don't even try to host your own, it's not worth it from any perspective unless people are paying for access and you can cover all costs (nearly impossible). Under most circumstances, most businesses need to use one of those three solutions.

* My personal recommendations are Youtube and Vimeo. Youtube first, Vimeo only if you absolutley must control who, where and when your video is watched. Please consult with an experienced professional before you restrict your video to a smaller audience than Youtube has to offer.

Music Rights for a commercial video or Youtube videos

Look for "royalty free" music. Some will be free and some will be paid. I recommend you look at TeknoAxe for a great collection of totally free, downloadable royalty free songs to use. You can also pay for the rights to use songs.

Some of the sites out there with music or sound effects have music created for this purpose so they'll have one song with variations of it, matching bumpers, intros and outros.

Here are a few examples:
http://www.neosound.com
http://www.pond5.com
http://www.videoblocks.com
http://audiojungle.net
http://www.youtube.com/user/teknoaxe

http://incompetech.com (thanks Valerie!)

Thanks @Zengy for noting those down in the SMMOC Secret group.

You can also use commercial musical hits by purchasing licensing through 3rd party brokers. Usually the fees are very expensive for online media but this option is great if you want to play a song for an audience at a paid event. Say the "Eye of the Tiger" at a motivational conference. -- Yes I did go there with the cheesiest example I could think of.

I use TeknoAxe's music for almost every video I make, for fun or profit, for me or clients. See my latest project where I use his music here: PapiDaddyTV. But it has a certain vibe to it that may not fit all projects.

One more place worth mentioning is the AudioJungle website by Envato. You can buy music clips for most uses for $5.00 to $30.00 and from $50.00 to $400 for massive broadcast rights, like in a movie or TV with audiences greater than 10,000 or something like that. But the cheapest license is good enough to use in Youtube videos. This is probably the best bang for your buck in terms of quality, diversity and completeness.
---
Apple pay - not ready in iOS. Comes out in about a week.
---

Facebook Hypertargeting

Introduced my buddy Brian Switchkow to the #SMMOC crowd. Want to learn Facebook Hypertargeting? Learn what he has been up to with Facebook ads. Amazing, incredible and admittedly a little creepy. The prank stories are awesome though.

Business Insider - http://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-use-facebook-advertising-to-prank-and-scare-people-2014-9

AdWeek - http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/roommate-makes-his-friend-paranoid-creepy-facebook-ads-160320

Brian's Own Blog - http://mysocialsherpa.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-my-roommate-with-targeted-facebook-ads/

 Pictures from the meetup

The post #SMMOC Meetup Notes appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

By the way, recently Youtube changed their "Watch Later" playlist and removed the "removed watched" button. I was pretty irritated with that change because it is such a critical function for the whole thing. BUT... I am happy to announce that they brought it back. There's a removed watched button back on the Watch later Youtube playlist! Yeay! -- Okay back to our normal programming.

I thought I'd share with you some of the tips and tricks I use to help me keep my digital life somewhat in order. Each year I do quite a bit of this cleaning up and I try to keep it up during the year, but you know what Sweet Brown says.

Email Cleanup

First, email. I use Thunderbird to backup my email and as a side effect I get the benefit of sorting email quickly by date, or sender or even subject line. All I have to do is click on one of the columns and the email instantly sorts that way.

The benefit of this arrangement I've just described is that I can sort my email by sender and scroll down just looking for "big senders," these are easy to spot. You can't quite do that using the web interface of Gmail (or any other web client).

Some of these bulk messages are social media alerts, or software updates and newsletters. So as I scan down the list I'll notice sometimes more than a screen's worth of email messages so then I click on the first email, then scroll down to find the last one on the list.

Once I find the last email on the list I press the SHIFT key and then click on that last message and this combination selects all the messages in that block. Then I just press DELETE and the messages will get deleted. Even though I am doing this on Thunderbird, the changes get synchronized up to Gmail automatically.

You could also do this on the web based version of your Gmail, but you'll need to do searches instead of just scrolling through. Some people might actually like that approach better, but I'm not going to cover that today.

After a quick pass looking for big senders, I then sort the email by subject line. This gives me a view that helps me find alert notifications, newsletters and other repetitive emails that get sent out daily or multiple-times per day. Facebook email notifications for example, or Twitter alerts, Google Alerts and other similar ones.

Some of my big senders were: Google Alerts, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Empire Avenue, Youtube, Zendesk, Instagram, Hubspot and a few others. They'll probably different for you.

As I scroll down the list sorted by subject, it is pretty easy to spot the bulk of the emails that I'm looking for and I can then delete them just like the ones before when I sorted by sender.

Then I just do another quick scroll up and down looking for any other big blocks of patterns. I'm looking for blocks of 100 or more emails at a time so I'm looking for senders, or subjects or anything that stands out and even maybe a few of these searches:

• "mentioned you on Twitter"
• "is now following you on Twitter!"

Once you do a major round of cleanup you'll see why I like using Thunderbird for this. Outlook would work as well, or any other visual email client like these two I've just mentioned. All you have to do is make sure the bulk of your email is downloaded locally to your computer using IMAP. If you don't use IMAP then the changes won't be saved on the cloud (generally).

After all that I've mentioned above, I take a look at the drafts folder and delete as many as possible. Really, if it's not something you started in the past 2 days and needs to go out today or tomorrow, it shouldn't be in there. I'm guilty of keeping over a hundred drafts in there. I usually get rid of them indiscriminately.

If I feel a draft is worth saving then I copy and save it into an Evernote for more incubation. Clearly the draft wasn't ready to be an email to anybody if I didn't send it  yet. So back to the drawing board for a few messages, but for the rest of the drafts emails. Just delete them.

At last I move down through the folder or tag list whatever you want to call them, and some of them get emptied completely but the folder remains. Some of the folders get deleted themselves along with the contents.

This is the last round of cleanup I do through my inbox and I do this all throught Thunderbird. Why? Because Thunderbird helps me sort emails quickly, lets me do background searches and I can look at all my accounts in one location without having to login to one, then log out. Login to the next, then logout. This way I can do it all at once!

In this case I was able to delete about 15,000 emails or more which gave me about 1GB of space back in my main Gmail account!  So that works for me!

Notes Evernote

You know how I told you before Evernote is my second brain? It's like my extended memory. But it also needs some TLC from time to time. This one is a little bit simpler than email I think.

I do a couple of things for Evernote:

• I search for "Untitled note" - This will usually bring up a bunch of blank notes that had potential but just weren't meant to be. Nuke em!
• Switch to all notes view and sort by date. Go to the oldest and scroll up for a bit. This does two things, highlights any notes that may just need to be deleted and reminds you of possibly forgotten projects.
• Check folders from automation system and other apps. For example, I use Skitch a lot, skitch creates its own notebook so I go in there and clean that up. Do the same for any apps you use in conjunction with Evernote, like IFTTT, or Docusign, Zapier or even other Evernote apps.

A quick note in practicality. Evernote, like Gmail encourages you to save everything and just file stuff away without deleting stuff. For the most part that has worked out for Gmail quite well, and it works okay with Evernote but I still think it's good to do some housekeeping once in a while. Sometimes I just want to get rid of things, so this is how I do it on Evernote.

I think that's good for now, I will show you a little bit about files and a few other places where cleanup is needed on a regular basis, and at least for spring cleaning. It's funny how fast you can write 1,000 words about something you like. So if you liked this, let me know in the comments!

The post Digital Spring Cleaning appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

There's a cool app that lets you create a short video summarizing some of your social activity and that includes Twitter. They say that a picture is worth a 1000 words, then a video must be worth 1,000,000 words right? Well here's a quick view of my Twitter account.

The app is called Vizify and you can find it here. It does a lot more than create a visualization of your Twitter account, but that may be the funnest feature they offer. Enjoy!

The post My Twitter Account in 55 Seconds appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

Sam aka Sammytown started the punk rock band Fang in the early 80s but a series if events led to the band's break up. You can read all about it on Wikipedia if you want details.

[singlepic id=713 w=650 h=0 float=center]

Sam is a pretty cool guy. At first I was a little bit nervous. I can't deny it, reading about his past certainly makes you a bit nervous if you're going to meet him and don't know much more than what you read online. But the doubts and uncertainty was washed away as soon as I met him. He's a down to earth dude and actually pretty pleasant to be around. So go and check out his Twitter account and friend him or follow him. Some great things should be coming out of his new venture.

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What's #Foodiechats all about?

I found #FoodieChats by accident while I was working on one of my other accounts @incentivegifts. FoodieChats seems to be as the name suggests a Twitter chat for foodies and food lovers. Lots of good stuff went on, here's their official website:

http://www.foodiechats.com/

Below is a recap of the tweets I found would represent the chat well. Thanks for reading and visiting!

By the looks of it, @steveGOgreen is the host of the twitter chat. He's another person I invest in at the time-sucking ever-growing Empire Avenue. Find Steve here http://empireavenue.com/STEVEGOGREEN.

What do people talk about on #Foodiechats

Maggie Rupel - @MaggieRupel
Choux full of vanilla pastry cream #foodiechats http://t.co/0MqnSUoP

This little pastry reminded me of #mochilato in Irvine. So tasty!

Mary Kay - @MKinChiTown
Bacon wrapped scallop @drinkingbirdchi. It's HUGE. #TWSS #foodiechats http://t.co/NyAT3Mgu

Totally different than the previous picture, but this is an absolute favorite of mine. I love scallops, bacon wrapped? even better. It's making my mouth water just thinking about it.

Shirley Lum - @ATasteofWorld
Next: "burger" flavoured potato chips;-) @kingofthenerds I mean really, who the hell wants "hot dog" flavoured potato chips? #FoodieChats

Meh, I'd say who the hell wants a "burger" flavoured anything other than burgers? burger-flavor isn't like bacon-flavor. One does not simply make something "burger-flavored".

Steve Green - @steveGOgreen
I am editing #Foodiechats 1-Year Video & U R in it @seamless @ramon_deleon @eatatunion @chi_dmb @NickCanHelpU @mommacuisine

One of the things regular #Foodiechats members have to look forward is a video that @steveGOgreen is putting together.

Steve Green - @steveGOgreen
Love your segment in #Foodiechats 1-Year Video @mafiahairdreser

O apparently the video is up already? I just don't know where it is... must investigate.

Michelle - @browneyedbaker
Nothing better than a blackened hot dog fresh off the charcoal grill! Pass the ketchup!

Delicious food, not the healthiest, but who cares? I'm imagining a good grilled hot dog just because of this tweet!

#Foodiechats - @FoodieChats
Spicy Tina and avocado go great together. #foodiechats http://t.co/Jd0tpJsK

Spicy Tuna & avocado, yes, a great combination. Avocado goes well with everything, including bacon. Sweet, sour or savory Avocado is the man!

Green Global Travel - @GreenGlobalTrvl
RT @myschatheriault 20 Cost-Effective Cucumber #Recipe Ideas #foodiechats

This was a great post with a lot of good ideas. I love cucumber, but didn't think about all these options before.sd

In Closing

It seems that I joined #FoodieChats at an odd time. The 25th should be much more active as it appears that there is a real life meetup for this in San Francisco I think. Well anyway, That does it for testing out more "live blogging" with Dashter.

The post FoodieChat on Twitter 6-20-2012 appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

I've heard this now a few times. Meetup.com Is that the network is the best real "social" network. I see it as connecting real life interests with virtual communities and truly bridging the geographical gaps.

When you realize that there are other people interested in the same things as you are, and you can likely find a group of them meeting on a regular basis, within 10 or 15 miles from your location, that's cool. This has never happened before at this scale. These people are meeting, quickly online and then in real life. And trust me! they're not just tweeting about it, they're not just blogging about it.

Take for example even SMMOC is fueled by meetup.com. Meetup.com is quietly growing and will be shaking things up quite a bit. Connecting people in real life, that's where it all comes down to.

That's powerful. That's a strong network. And my thoughts on #Foursquare is that #Fsq is cool but in comparing the two, Meetup.com vs Foursquare?

They're very different so I wouldn't compare them much. Meetup.com joins you with like-minded individuals in a comfortable group setting. Foursquare in the other hand tells you which places are the happening spots around your current location.

Cheryl Hawley - @CherylAHawley
To find events in your area do you favor @foursquare or @meetup? #smmoc

I thought this was a great topic of discussion. Regarding a choice between the two, well they're really both two different things. Meetup is really good at bridging the digital knowledge and virtual relationshiphs into real in life meetings.

I've met some really great people at different meetups. But like @24x7media said, the people attending all have a common interest.

Foursquare in the other hand is good at telling you what type of places might be good to visit because they are trendy. Or at least trendy within social media circles, scratch that... at least within those that play Foursquare. In the grand scheme of things Foursquare isn't that big. But it's getting there...

Jeff Hester - @jeffhester
RT @DarinRMcClure: Time to lurk the #SMMOC hashtag & enjoy the cutting edge thought on the social space that happens there... Good Morni ...

See!? Everybody does it, so you might as well do it and next time you have to miss #SMMOC just lurk. Use the hashtag (as covered in today's meetup) to follow what people are talking. You can choose to participate or just watch.

William Blumberg - @WilliamBlumberg
Here are some operators for Twitter http://t.co/JuwRRj0T #SMMOC

Not the smooth operator kind, but the Advanced Search Operators. As mentioned in the meeting today, these are called Boolean. You can find more info about Boolean searching with this basic intro to boolean searching on the internet page .

The basics boolean searching is that you can pick a search that has multiple parameters, perhaps joining two different sets of data, or excluding a section of the data by using a filter and excluding certain terms.

Bob (Robert) Watson - @TopBrokerOC
One way to totally irritate your customer #ATT is to throttle back my iPhone data speed. #SMMOC

AT&T... You really don't want to upset @TopBrokerOC... He's got Klout and a room full of people every Saturday morning. Just cut the crap and let people have unlimited data, really. This is just greedy!

This post was curated with: Dashter

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The software you pay thousands and thousands of dollars a year per employee just because "that's how you've always done it" may not be necessary for you. IN fact, like the author, I've moved many processes and organizations to the cloud and it always turns out to be easier and better than everyone expected. Read on...

To be realistic, we assumed that a minimal amount of customization would be needed to integrate applications and make minor adaptations. We asked our department heads to select these SaaS applications — we didn’t ask IT.  Obviously, IT was a valuable partner in the decision-making process, but we let department VPs make the final call because they owned those processes.

via Move to the cloud? The two decisions that matter — Tech News and Analysis.

Found this from my buddy Louie Baur on Twitter:

Move to the cloud? The two decisions that matter bit.ly/yu187C

— Louie Baur(@louiebaur) March 11, 2012

The post Move to the Cloud? The two Decisions that Matter appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

If you didn't know about Formulists, it doesn't matter much now, but I'll give you a quick rundown.

Formulists was a tool to help you manage Twitter lists. You could create lists based on certain parameters and then Formulists would keep those lists up-to-date. For example, a list of people that often talk to you directly.

The service never really worked for me because you had to constantly keep logging into it, and the time it was supposed to save me by making my lists was instead taken up by me having to log into the service.

Maybe this is part of why they didn't succeed. But I wish the team the best, and like they said in their goodbye blogpost, I'm sure they've learned a lot of good lessons along the way. Every failure is a true success if you learn and adjust. It is rumored that Henry Ford failed at least three times before FORD motors was born. Imagine if he had given up at the first or second try!

Good luck to Formulists, it was nice to know ya.

For those of you that want to find something that can help you with Twitter lists, take a look at SocialBro. Even though it isn't automatic, it can help you dial in a group of people and easily add them to your lists.

The post Formulists for Twitter is Going Away appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

• Updating from cron or automated tasks
• Updating from your terminal
• Update certain events from a logfile
• Updating Twitter from a low-powered computer, TTYtter runs on anything that has a web connection and can run Perl.
• Checking or updating when you're stuck at a slow internet connection.

Maybe you don't need a reason and just want to try it out? Maybe you're just more comfortable in the command line than in the graphical interface. No matter your reason, you'll be glad to know that you can now update Twitter from the command line. Or will you?

TTYtter has been around for a while now, and it seems to be updated regularly; last update happened just recently, in August. The reason I found this handy little app was because a couple years back, my buddy @skehlet and I ran some quick scripts that would update Twitter from the command line. That ability to use my script broke after Twitter made some changes to how apps authorize (earlier last year, see this reference article). The secret to authorizing to or with Twitter now is to use oAuth, and I haven't had time to learn a whole lot about it.

After my script broke, I went on the hunt for a new way to update twitter from the command line, but instead I found a full blown client. TTytter, a Twitter client for Perl. The application is pretty cool and you can get it setup quickly. You'll need Perl though, if you don't know what that is then stop reading now. This isn't for you, I promise!

If you're still with me, then you probably like torturing yourself with the command line,  just for kicks. So I'll tell you that I installed TTytter on my on my Dreamhost account and bam! I was up and running with TTYtter. I had a fully interactive Twitter client in the cloud, on my Dreamhost server.

Now I don't expect anyone to jump out of their seats with excitement about this, after all this isn't a replacement to your current Twitter client, nor should you try it as such, this isn't even new, but I am excited because I just discovered. But if I have you reading past my warning above, then you might find this tool to be pretty  amazing if you know how to use it. If you're interested in automation, and automatic searches and those kinds of things this might just be the client for you.

Just like most good command line apps, this one does something and gives you ouput, apparently you can also feed it something else, like the output from another script. Get my drift?

I'll let you read through all the guts over at their own website , but TTYtter could be that simple utility you can use to schedule updates from the command line, or via cron, or even automated tasks. I found it because I need to have a reliable way of updating a twitter account for a brand new project. I'll let you know how my experience goes. This will also help our Liberam project that I mentioned a couple months back.

This isn't for the casual user of Twitter, nor is it for the social media enthusiast, it really isn't for anyone that likes their afternoons and sanity... unless he or she likes things like Vim or Emacs, Perl or Bash, or get excited about connecting via ssh to wget stuff.

Oh yeah, and TTytter gets props for reacting in an intelligent way when out of old habit, I issued an "exit" command while still in command line mode. Old habits die hard right?

TTytter - Twitter client for Perl - http://www.floodgap.com/software/ttytter/

The post TTYtter, yes Twitter from the command line appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

William Pitcher even asked me if I thought the potential for EA was really there, I told him, yes. Bigger than FB and Twitter? he asked. I told him... "maybe."

I don't think it will ever be as big as FB or Twitter, or even Linked in. These three are the Three Kings of Social Networks, as I call them, and the reason Empire Avenue will never be as big as any of them, is because EAv actually depends on those sites for its services.

You see, EmpireAvenue is one of many attempts --albeit, one of the successful ones-- at measuring influence online. How much is your content worth? I think that is the real question that gets answered by the site.

The site works in two ways, depending on your opinion of it. One popular view is that it's just a game; the other view, MY preffered view is that it is a super powerful networking and filtering tool. I take it a little more seriously than most, but then again I take a lot of the things I do online more seriously than most people do. After all, I've been making my living with online resources, since 1999.

EA gives you a handle, or rather you pick it, and this becomes your "Stock Ticker" akin to a corporation's stock ticker in the NYSE. After you join, they'll give you a number of Eaves to start with (their own fictitious currency). Mine is (e)OG. You can change it anytime you want... for a price.

Once you start and join, the rest is up to you, you can buy into other people you find interesting, amusing, or simply when you want to show support for their cause. Other people engage in what they call "reciprocity" and I call bullshit. Pardon my french but I stand by my post in reciprocity.

Reciprocity is good only if its genuine, otherwise its just a cheap way to game the system, whatever system that is.

With that mini rant/intro I'll try to get back to the original title of the post. Have we reached a tipping point for EmpireAvenue to become mainstream? And I mean mainstream, only in the circle of social media enthusiasts. For if you really think about it and look up some numbers, Twitter is not really "mainstream" yet, most people (despite what you believe) are NOT on twitter.

Don't believe me? Ask 3 of your neighbors what their twitter handle is? Ask your Tax person who they "follow" on Twitter? Ask your doctor where you can follow his updates... I'd venture to guess that 8 out of 10 people will simply give you a googley-eyed look and wonder WTF are you talking about.

Certainly EA has gone through a tremendous explosion over the past few months. Some big names in the tech world, social networking arena and other fields have joined. And I wonder, why haven't others? Is it really a waste of time like many people say? I don't think so (more on that later).

You can now find people like Chris Pirillo, Darren Rowse, even big name brands like Ford and ATT. But aside from those two brands, do you even know who the other people are? I happen to know of Chris from years back because he's *been* there from the get go, in the tech industry. As I was learning systems administration and computer support for Windows in the early days of my career, his posts would often come up with solutions to various problems.  As for Darren, he is one of, if not *the* most popular blogger in the planet when it comes to monetizing the whole blogging thing. He makes millions blogging.

I would be curious if all the people I invited in the early days are still hesitant to join, do they still think this is a time waster? Do you think that way? I can tell you that I've enjoyed the site quite a bit. People wonder what "business" value I've gotten from it, and I can't pinpoint it, but I've gotten some true value. I'll give you a couple examples, I met Adriel Hampton on there, and eventually he reached out for some website help. He's a happy camper now and I thank him for approaching me for help, and I thank EA for creating this space where I met him. I also humbly help moderate the WordPress group *in* Empire Avenue, where people ask random wordpress related questions. This group gave me a connection to other wordpress professionals that I probably would never have met.

I love EmpireAvenue. Truly, I do.

I've met a few other people on the site and now follow them and interact with them on Twitter. I have found some amazing blogs to read that would probably never have come up in my normal circles of friends or searches.

But EA isn't mainstream, nor do I think it will ever be. I think by the time social networks are really mainstream, it will be something new, something different.

Thanks for reading this rant. And if you end up joining EmpireAvenue, let me know if I can help. After all, helping is what I do.

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