Understand Your Niche

This is not exactly related to Twitter, but it’s nearly Sunday which is a day of reflection for some, and I’ve encountered lots of seemingly nonsensical (even clearly ‘bad’) belief systems on Twitter, so reading this might be appropriate for some. What I’m going to do here is give you some tools for helping identify and then rid yourself of these ‘bad’  belief systems.

Before we go on to the nitty-gritty, let’s be clear about what I mean by ‘bad’ belief systems. I am not meaning ‘bad’ in a judgmental manner. I simply use ‘bad’ as a shorthand for a belief system that limits you in some way, one that prevents you from getting where you want to go, or something that you are holding onto as perhaps a way to prevent yourself from taking a risk you’re afraid of taking. It’s not that the belief itself is bad, its effect on you and your life is limiting, disabling, or debilitating.

Here’s an example: let’s say I am short-sighted and cannot see very far. I believe this short-sightedness is a good reason why I’ll never be able to drive on the highway. As a result, I rely on the public transportation system to get from one place to another, or I might ask my friends to drive me to any place that I cannot reach via local roads. If I need to get from my house to another city in which there’s a concert of an artist I would dearly love to attend, and I cannot find any friend that also wants to go, I’m unable to attend that concert.

The tool I’m going to give you is a set of three questions:

1. Is this belief true? Ask yourself if it is really really true that you cannot drive on the highway because you’re short-sighted. What if your life depended on it, would you drive on the highway to get away from a natural disaster, or to save a friend’s life? Hold the belief up and examine it, and in turn examine scenarios that are connected with that belief, and see what you would do in each of these situations.
2. What would my life be like if I didn’t hold this belief true? Envision your life without this belief, what previously inaccessible goals you could now reach, and what you’d lose as a result of not holding onto this belief. In the example I gave above, obviously it now becomes possible for you to drive yourself to the concert and it reduces your dependence on friends also going. Looking a little deeper, now you’re more independent, can make more choices for yourself, can enjoy more of the opportunities available to you, and can live a more fulfilling life w/o blaming your short-sightedness for limits you place upon yourself.
3. What underlying beliefs are now brought to the surface? Perhaps discarding this belief exposes an underlying belief that is congruent with the removed belief? For example, I’ll be a safety risk to other people by driving on the highway, because I am afraid of making a mistake and killing someone. If you find such a belief, go back to point 1, and ask yourself the first question, is this belief true? In what way am I more of a risk to people than other drivers who do not take their physical limitations into account? At the very least I am aware of any risk my physical limitation may cause, and I’m in a very good position to counter, reduce or neutralize the risk, by for example driving extra-carefully.

So you see — that’s what I mean by ‘bad’ belief systems. These three questions are powerful tools that can help you overcome many obstacles that at first seem like uncrossable deserts and barriers.

Good luck! Now go and remove your obstacles!

Recently I found out about a really simple tool, Follow Lists, designed to allow anyone to create a list of tweeple in a category. It’s just starting out, so there aren’t many lists yet; even so, I found a few worthwile lists:

• SEO — a list of the top 20 SEO experts to follow.
• Google Apps — a list of Google Apps with twitter presence.
• Top Web Designers — a list of 15 top-line web designers on twitter.
• Eco — a list of some cool eco-minded tweeple.
• Mesiab Lab — a list of the people working at Mesiab Lab Inc.
• Domain Traders — a list of active domain name traders.

The service, as I said, is very very new, and still in its infancy. However, I can see how it can be very useful for a variety of purposes:

• Looking for an expert in a certain subject? Search Follow List (when they add search functionality) to find them. You can already search indirectly, by searching for the #followlists tag — that’s how I found the lists I mentioned above, so you can do it too.
• Make a list of your friends, make a list of clients, make a list of ex-girlfriends or ex-boyfriends, etc. etc. etc. — the possibilities are endless.
• Use a list for your #followfriday faves and recommend all of them with one tweet — just tweet the URL of the list instead of the @names on your list.

There are some missing features that I’d like to see them add, besides the already-mentioned missing search functionality:

• A “follow” button next to each name in a list. That way you can follow right from the list, instead of having to visit each profile and click “follow”, which is kind of clunky.
• An “unfollow” button.
• Optionally show the bio, #tweets, #followers, #following, last time they tweeted and what they said, next to each name in a list. That way you can quickly determine if you want to follow them, without having to visit their profile.
• Adding a whole list of tweeple to a list at once, maybe as a comma separated list.
• I didn’t test it enough to determine if there’s support for editing an existing list you own, but if not, that would be a great function to have.
• Tweet-to-your-list. What you’d do is send a direct message to Follow Lists with the name of the list you want to tweet to, and the tweet. Of course this should be allowed only for the owner of the list, to prevent spamming.
• Follow-a-list and Unfollow-a-list. You’d send a direct message to Follow Lists with the name of the list for which you want to follow all members. Follow Lists would then behave as if you pressed the “follow” or “unfollow” button next to each name in the list.

So, the bottom line is that this is a great service with a lot of potential. Please support them and use them, so that  they can quickly grow and find out what users want.

URL: http://followlists.com/

Here’s a list of 5 Twitter tools to manage the list of people you are following. As you probably know, initially there’s a limit of two thousand tweeple you can follow; and after you have two thousand followers, you can follow only 10% more than are following you, so for example if you have three thousand followers, you can only follow 3300. Finally, you can only follow one thousand new tweeple each 24 hours. All of this dictates that you should manage your following list carefully, if you want to grow your twitter account as fast as possible. You want to be following the most active tweeple, the ones who will help you reach a large audience, and the ones that are genuinly interested in your topic. And that means that you want to use your precious follow slots for active accounts only. To weed out the inactive accounts and tweeple that are useless to follow for whatever other reason, you need to use the tools we describe below.

Now before we go on, a word about our reasons for wanting to grow the @understandniche twitter account as fast as possible. UnderstandYourNiche.com is a business. We want to get the word out about our superior niche research products, and we want — need! — clients. Twitter is one of the avenues for us to get clients. While we try to make the twitter account worthwile to follow independent of the agenda we have, by for example providing interesting and generally useful information, our goal is to get referrals. We use follows and various other means available through twitter — such as encouraging retweets — to get exposure. Now we realize that this reasoning may very well not apply to you and your situation, and that’s fine. But we just want to be clear about what we’re doing here, and make no apologies for using twitter in the way we are using it.

So here’s the list of tools we use:

• When we had fewer than 1600 followings, we used Twitter Karma regularly to prune our following list of tweeple that do not follow us back. Remember, the goal at that stage is to get more than 2000 followers, so any account that you follow and that is not following you back means a wasted follow slot. Yeah, it sounds harsh, and it is. Twitter Karma does not work very well when you have a larger account, so at around 1600 followings we started using Twitoria, described below.
• Twitoria allows you to page through your list of followings one hundred slots at a time, and will show you accounts you are following that have been inactive for a defined period of time such as a month or two weeks. We used this tool to prune our following list and remove any accounts we were following that had never tweeted or had not tweeted in the last month. That freed up follow slots and enabled us to obtain the necessary 2000 followers to move on to the next stage of growing our twitter account. Be careful though — twitoria sometimes does not get it right, and may say someone has never tweeted while in fact they have hundreds of tweets. Trust but verify.
• Finding tweeple that you should be following is also important. We use Who Follows Whom, a great tool that will reveal the “inner circle” in any niche given two or more twitter accounts. By triangulating using this tool, we were able to find tweeple that are authorities in our niche — internet marketing — and follow them. Even better, the list of tweeple following all of these “inner circle” authorities are our target audience, and this tool reveals which twitter accounts are in this category.
• Once you have a large following list, it is often very difficult to determine whom among your followings is following you back. Because we use following in order to get exposure, after a short while we will unfollow tweeple that do not follow us, so we can use that follow slot for someone else who may be more likely to follow us back. Huitter does this automatically — it is a simple tool that rips through your following list and unfollows accounts that do not follow you back. We use this tool sparingly, at most once a week, as it is an all-or-nothing tool; usually we do not actively promote our twitter account during the weekend, so on Mondays anyone who has not followed us back yet is a candidate for unfollowing.
• For a very detailed overview of our twitter account, we use Tweepular — it shows us how our account is growing, who we are following that isn’t following us, and so forth. It lets us unfollow in bulk, sort by various criteria, and all the information is neatly arranged in paginated format and easily accessible. Good stuff.

Let us know which absolutely essential tool you are using that we may have missed, and please comment on this list! Thanks!

@bubbamike asked for a clarification on what I call Twitter ‘follow slots’, so for everyone’s benefit I decided to write this up as a blog post.

OK, so what is this thing called a ‘follow slot’? Before explaining, here’s some background:

• When your twitter account has fewer than 2000 followers, you can only follow 2000 other tweeple.
• After your twitter account has 2000 followers or more, you can only follow 10% more tweeple than are following you. For example, if 3000 are following you, you can only follow 3300, etc.

Obviously this makes each twitter account you follow occupy a ’slot’ in your allocation, given to you by Twitter. If you lose slots due to bugs in the twitter API implementation, this is a big deal, because it limits how fast you can grow your account by following real people. Think this can’t happen? Think again — today (04/19/2009) the ‘follow’ button on the Twitter website was messed up, so that it would not actually follow the twitter account you intended to, but still it would count each press as an actual follow. So the end result is that you’re losing a follow slot.

Again — why is losing follow slots like that bad? Because you cannot follow real people using these slots, they’re gone forever. You cannot recover them with unfollowing, because the follow didn’t ever really happen. Bad all around.

Be careful out there and watch your twitter follow slots like a hawk — they’re the most precious resource that Twitter is giving you, much more valuable than even the ability to tweet your message out any time you want.

OK, so after using Twitter for a while, we’ve developed a toolchest that contains a few tools we find useful. Please comment on this post to suggest tools that we have missed and that you consider indispensible. So here we go, in no particular order:

1. If you use Firefox for browsing, you should have TwitterFox installed in your browser. It’s an add-on that provides a lot of functions that make a tweeter’s life easier and more convenient.
2. With TwitZap, you get a very nice alternative browser based Twitter interface. Everything happens w/o refreshing, which is… refreshing
3. If you’d rather use a desktop application to get your twitter fix, then TweetDeck is a must. It’s super-feature rich, and very robust.
4. Backing up your twitter presence is a must, and we find Tweetake complete, convenient, reliable, and very fast.
5. To keep your timeline active when you must be away, or during periods of low inspiration, you can use Twaitter to inject pre-scheduled tweets into your timeline, to keep your followers well fed. We also use it to remind people to do their backups, and to help some of our  own and our friends’ sites get traffic.
6. You can see how well your twitter presence is doing by using Twitter Grader. It gives you an overall grade — ours is 99.3 what’s yours?
7. The Twitalyzer site gives you a very deep and detailed insight into how your twitter account is growing in terms of influence, reach, and impact.
8. TwitterCounter provides a nice graph view of how your number of followers is growing over time, and predicts where you’ll be in 30 days.
9. So you have a huge follower list — which ones are actually active and listening to you? Find out with Twitoria and use it to prune your following list so you don’t waste follow slots on following back inactive tweeps.
10. We use tr.im to shorten URLs. It’s a very nice tool, provides the absolute shortest URLs, and has powerful real-time stats on how many clicks your shortened URLs are getting.
11. Did you know that twitter itself has a very powerful search tool? It finds tweets by account name, by keyword, by hash tag, etc. Very useful.
12. To watch trends as they are developing and fading, use TwitScoop — very entertaining.
13. Want to draw special attention to your tweets? Use FlipTitle — but use it sparingly.
14. Find out what URLs are popular on twitter right now, with TwitUrly, kinda like Digg-for-twitter.
15. Get alerts when a keyword thats interesting for you gets a lot of discussion, with TweetBeep.
16. Keep track of the tweeple you like and dislike, and rank them, with TwitTangle.

These are the tools that we find the most useful. We’re sure you have your own. Please tell us about them via your comments, and we’ll gladly add them to our arsenal and to this list!

The title of this post really says all that I should be saying on the subject, but this whole @oprah first tweet thing being hailed as the second coming has me all riled up, right after Ashton Kutchner (sp?) @aplusk win over @cnnbrk in the race to one million followers. Bleh, feh, barf, yawn… Etc.

Now don’t get me wrong: Oprah and Ashton are great people, Oprah is using her TV show for good, and Ashton’s and CNN’s use of the one million follower race to fund a charity was awesome.

What I’m up in arms about is more about how they use Twitter to communicate. See, it’s all one-way, from them to us. If you want to maybe be noticed by Ashton or Oprah, you have to use an @reply and address them specially. Plus, they don’t tweet much, or anything interesting, so in my book they have not earned my attention. Now I may be wrong, but Twitter in my humble opinion is all about attention, and about being listened to. In Twitter, you cannot force anyone to listen to you, and you only get attention through having something worthwile to say. You cannot hijack a conversation, and you cannot force yourself into an ongoing communication between other people — Twitter has this wonderful damping mechanism that makes it so that the only people that listen to you are the ones that are interested — people that strongly agree with you or strongly disagree,  people that find you entertaining, or people that think you are just plain stupid and that enjoy your stupidity. Whatever your shtick is, only people that want to hear it will, on Twitter.

People that follow celebrity tweeps in the hopes of somehow being noticed by those celebrities are in for a disappointment. Celebrity tweeps are just people like me and you — they are celebrities when they perform to a script. Plus their uniform behavior of not following back is an indication that they themselves have not made this distinction yet. This is not encouraging as an indication of how successful they’re going to be in the long run in transferring their brand to the Twitter medium.

I’m very proud, actually, of the fact that I do not follow any of the people Ms. Winfrey follows, since they all don’t get Twitter.

We recently found out about http://twaitter.com, a full-service web based twitter scheduling solution, currently in Alpha. Here is our initial evaluation of the service:

• Twaitter’s set up is straightforward; if you have a Twitter account, you already have a Twaitter account also.
• The multi-page multi-pane user interface is fast, easy to use and intuitive — A+ for CHI design. Some small glitches remain, which is expected since the service is in Alpha.
• The UI actually is a complete web-based Twitter interface, you can use it for all your interactions with Twitter.
• The functionality is organized into five pages, Account Home, Calendar, Scheduled Tweets, Feed Manager, and Settings. I’ll let you explore these pages for yourself, each one contains about what you’d expect.
• Scheduling facilities are *very* complete: you can schedule a tweet for a certain time in the future, or on a repeating schedule. You cannot schedule a specific tweet for more than once a day, but this is easy to get around by scheduling another tweet on the same daily schedule but at a different time. There does not seem to be a limit on how many tweets you can schedule or for how far into the future you can schedule a tweet.
• We were unable to figure out how to edit already-scheduled tweets. It seems that, at least at this early time in the life of Twaitter, this is not possible — you have to delete the scheduled tweet and reenter it with the modified information. There’s also no way at present to clone an already-scheduled tweet.
• There’s various small bugs as you’d expect from an Alpha-stage web application; for example, tweets scheduled recurring from today but at a later time than now actually only start tomorrow. The service also  seems to allow you to schedule a tweet for an already-expired time, without warning; at least, it did not warn us. And there are small glitches in the user interface such as buttons hidden by other elements, etc. I am certain that these issues will be fixed by the developers, who are very easy to get a hold of and eager for all feedback, both positive and negative.

Overall Verdict: This looks like the ultimate tweet scheduler. The developers are engaged and eager to fix the current problems and they are very happy to take input and comments, which is all a very good sign. I’d be willing to pay for such a service, if they decide to charge for a premium service, to support the features it provides. Clearly some kind of monetization will be necessary, since the service needs dedicated web servers to run, and must scale with use. It will be interesting to see how Twaitter.com will address this.

OK, so we’re hard nosed. I admit it, the bunch here at UnderstandYourNiche is bad-ass. We are hard core and we mean business.

And that applies to how we use Twitter as well. To make things crystal clear, I thought it’d be useful to publish our rules for how we decide whether to follow or unfollow someone on Twitter. If you use Twitter for business, you might want to consider whether we’ve got something here:

1. The absolute most important rule of all is that we only follow people who will follow us back. We’re on Twitter to do business, not to be groupies for celebrities. And anyways, celebrities on Twitter could also do better  and take a lesson from e.g.  @scobleizer who follows back, so why can’t you? Too important to follow us back? You’re gone, baby. No exceptions. If I happen on a profile that has a bazillion followers, I’ll look if they’re likely to follow me back. If not, I don’t even bother following them — these people are on Twitter for the narcissistic factor, and we’re not gonna help them get their rocks off. Sorry.
2. We as a rule do not follow people with protected updates. Too much hassle to go through the approval process. What you’re tweeting is probably private anyways and not of general interest. Move on. If you have protected updates and are following us, do not expect a follow back — won’t happen.
3. We as a rule don’t follow people with the default icon as a profile icon, or with a profile that doesn’t show a  name. This is to cut down on using follow slots for following unserious Twitter users, or tweeple with an agenda such as pushing their product.
4. We give 24-48 for you to follow us back if we follow you first; after that you are likely to be pruned from our following list. Twitter’s allocation of following slots makes them a severely limited commodity. We optimize our Twitter account for maximum reach and we cannot afford to expend these precious slots on people that do not follow us back.
5. Periodically we’ll use Twitoria to prune our following list further. It allows us to find people that we follow, they follow us back, but they are not active tweeters. If you have not posted any tweets in N days, then we unfollow you. Again, follow slots are precious, we’d rather use them to follow someone who will follow us and is active on Twitter, so they’re going to hear our message. Profiles that have zero tweets are *always* unfollowed, every time we use Twitoria. No exceptions.
6. If a profile is too spammy, or to porney, we may unfollow it. At our discretion. No hard and fast rules here, we have tastes and preferences too
7. We hate people that use Twitter for one-way communication, blaring their message out via twitterfeed or WP to Twitter or any of the other automated blaster mechanisms. If we need a follow slot and you use twitterfeed or some such automated solution, you’re a candidate for unfollowing.
8. If you’re tweeting a lot in a language other than English, sorry, can’t follow your tweets anyway, so we’ll probably unfollow you.

Brutal? Yes. Hard nosed? Yes. Practical? Also yes. As I said above, we’re on Twitter for one reason, to develop our business.

Please send us your comments.

P.S. Although the ‘understandniche’ twitter profile is probably our best known, we have others. That’s why this entry is written in plural (’we’) and not singular person.

Summary

I’ve tried to investigate what this Twitter worm does and how it works. Here’s what I learned so far, I’ll update this post as I learn more.

• The worm was injected into Twitter by a site called StalkDaily, by inviting Twitter users to visit an infected user profile. When you visit the Twitter profile page of an infected user, your account is likewise infected, and *hijacked*!
• The exploit uses Javascript, which could be added to Twitter profiles in addition to simple URLs.
• From then on, the StalkDaily infected profile inserts tweets into the timeline of the infected user to invite that user’s followers to visit the infected profile. That is how the worm propagates itself.

How To Tell If You’re Infected?

View your own profile on Twitter (mine is http://twitter.com/understandniche, in general it will be http://twitter.com/ followed by your profile name). If you see any tweets at all that you did not write yourself, you are infected.

How To Cure The Infection?

Fortunately, curing the infection is straightforward.  Cange the password on your Twitter account. From then on, your Twitter account cannot be used by the worm for self-propagation, and also cannot be used for whatever nefarious purpose the perpetrators originally had in mind.

Also edit your profile Bio section back to normal, removing any infection code.

For good measure, I’d also go through my list of past tweets and remove any suspect tweet, to prevent your account from being a source of future contamination.

Are You Vulnerable Even After You Cured The Infection?

UPDATE!!!! Twitter now confirms that they have closed the hole used by this worm, and you will not be re-infected by this exploit. Furthermore, it also means that the worm can from now on no longer spam a user’s tweet stream and it can also no longer propagate.

Good work Twitter, time to fix was around 6-7 hours. Not bad at all.

The official Twitter news is here: http://tr.im/iEsz

Please Tweet About This Page!

OK, this is acually going to be a teaser post… Sorry but I’m not revealing the method yet. I just wanted to put a note down here, that I’m really totally amazed at the response I’m getting. See, I’m posting a tweet with a link, and I’m getting upwards of 10% (yes, you read that right) clicks on the link.

Amazing.

Tomorrow, or perhaps in a short while later, I’ll discuss what this method is and how I’m making a killing with it.

Stay tuned.