My Big Twitter Experiment

I’ve never really been convinced by Twitter.

I use it to follow people who I’m really interested in, and it’s great for that.

Recently though, I invested in a membership site called SocialOomph and this has been the tool I’ve been happiest with, particularly for bulk uploading my tweets, something that I do find very useful.

I set up ‘auto-follow’ and left it to its own devices, with my followers growing as rapidly as the people I was automatically following.

It wasn’t until some web pals and I came across TwitterGrader that I discovered that I’d become Cumbria’s number 1 Tweeter!

Yet I was following more people than I could possibly keep up with and I reckoned they were only following me because I was following them.

So I decided it was a pretty meaningless exercise … and deleted all of the people I was following, just adding back in the 17 or so that I’m really interested in.

I expected to tumble right down in the list of Cumbria’s ‘Twitter Elite’ but it actually enhanced my ‘quality’ score.

So, with just 1139 followers, being on 14 lists and me following 17 people, I’m still Cumbria’s ‘Number 1′ Tweeter – for now!

So what can we learn from that?

Well, I wouldn’t not be on Twitter as I have it set up to feed my Facebook page and it’s easy for me to add updates as I go through the day.

It does bring me traffic too – poor quality traffic – but I see the clicks I get when I run Giveaways via Twitter.

One of these days I’m going to attend a social media conference and learn how to do this all properly, but in the meantime I’m intending to continue using Twitter in a quiet way, along with Facebook, and we’ll park this as project for a later date.