How Do You Twitter?
A while back, I noticed a crapload of followers that were obvious spammers following my tweets on Twitter. So, in a weird moment of decision, I locked my profile down and started the slow process (back when it was still broken) of trying to block everyone I don’t know from following me.
I’m sure twitter is an effective tool for promoting your blog posts, but I haven’t seen that much of a bump. Since mid-August, 30 visits were referred from the service. Perhaps that’s because I’ve had it locked down for a good percentage of that time.
Do you have your account visible to friends only? Do you post your tweets via a widget onto your website? How many extra visitors does your blog get because of your tweets?
I also notice a couple of my friends use twitter as a substitute for instant messaging. I’ve noticed that the ones who use iPhones are the most likely to do this and the most likely to want to just use twitter to send messages. One of my friends has a handle that ends in an underscore, which makes me more inclined to send him an SMS text in reply than try to type in d username_ on my Blackberry Pearl keyboard in TwitterBerry. (Uh, yeah, if you have a weird character in your name and it seems like I’m ignoring your direct messages, it’s just that I’m driving or marching or something. I’ll get back to you, though.)
How much has twitter replaced your instant messaging? How about your SMS texting?
I’m just curious about how all of you use twitter and whether it’s part of your blog pimpage program. My friend, Eric, insists that you always have to be pimping your projects fairly constantly in order to gain an audience. I’ve had huge traffic over these last eight years from spammers (81 comment and trackback spams in moderation since May 1 — Akismet caught 8543), but not so many from actual people. Should I open my tweets back up to the world and just manually block the spammers I find?
Related Post: Declining Your Friend Request, 08 Aug 2007.
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