Twitter Growth Case Study Gutenberg and Random Eyebrows.
So that Twitter growth case study I'm doing is moving along. It seems that the application for the Twitter developer access is taking time.
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.
- Provide quality content.
- Provide engaging activity.
- 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
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
