Apparently it is very popular to setup an automated scrip so that when a certain account is followed that account will automatically distribute a DM with their affiliate link or something like that to everyone who follows them. It usually looks like this: “Hey thanks for following! If you want to earn money online click here LINK.com”. Some DMs are more imaginative than others but all of them annoy about the same.

Twitter viruses?

Next to the automated scripts setup by users themselves, we also have the standard Twitter-virus-auto-DM-sending-infections that will infect your account and automatically distribute DMs to your followers. These work similar to those viruses that you can get via e-mail and which automatically send themselves to all your address book contacts. You need to watch out for those because they will KILL your account and everyone will hate you. Especially if you have a corporate account, imagine how bad that is for the companies image.

Follow programs vs. manual following

Somewhere at the end of last year I started using a Twitter following service (going to write about it soon) where you follow others and earn points. You can then use those points to award users that want to follow you and so on. I’ve been using that on the @TheKReactor account for the Knowledge Reactor website and ever since I have been getting a few DM messages from every person I follow.

The messages are really annoying and extremely useless. Got about 450 of them in a month and I never wanted to waste my time deleting them. Generally I was  afraid for my account that it would be flagged as spam for having so many undeleted messages. That motivated me to find a quick delete solution.

I have never and I mean NEVER had a useless or spammy DM sent to me while following people manually. When I see someone tweeting about something interesting, I click follow and see what that person is about for the next few days (See how I got 300+ Twitter followers without mass following others). I guess this is another reason to ignore all those auto-follow programs – I have yet to find a good one. They all seem like questionable Twitter marketing tactics to me.

Mass deleting Twitter DMs with a single click

I found a great tool which does the job perfectly although I can not guarantee that it won’t pick up your personal Twitter data Just to be sure, I changed my Twitter log-in password before using it and then changed it back after.

You go to this link: http://dcortesi.com/tools/dm-deleter/ and you can read about it. To make it work you need to find the link “Bookmarklet: DM Whacker” where the word DM Whacker should be a link. You will want to drag and drop that link to your bookmarks bar.

After you do that, you log into Twitter, go to your DM inbox and click the bookmarked DM Whacker link which contains a snippet of Javascript code that will generate a few options on your Twitter page that look like this:

Now you can edit in a few options and click the “Delete!” button. After that you will have to wait depending on how many DMs you have. I had 450 and waited less than a minute for the scrip to do it’s magic. After that, not a single DM in sight.

Conclusion

I hope my post has helped you get rid of your inbox spam. Watch out for viruses and automatic DM scripts because they can discredit your Twitter account over night. Let me know in the comments your experience with DM spammer and how you deal with them. Do any of you use any “Get Followers Fast” services?

Related posts:

1. Hashtag Heaven – Getting Started On Twitter
2. How I Got 300 Twitter Followers Without Mass Following Others

When I first started using Twitter a few months ago I was kinda disappointed being surrounded by people with hundreds and even thousands of followers. It seemed like a closed circle. If I wanted to get exposure I needed to tweet my message to a lot of people and if I wanted those people to follow me I needed to let them know I exist.

When I found out about Twitter hashtags and the proper way to use them, it was an entirely different story.

What are Twitter hashtags?

Twitter hashtags are strings of text after the # symbol that tag your tweet to a specific topic or just a random word you want. It might not be the easies thing to explain so I like to compare hashtags with TV channels.

Image Twitter to be a huge TV broadcasting network and you tweeting your tweet is actually like asking the network to publish your ads. You also get to pick on which channels your tweet is broadcasted on.

How to use hashtags

Take this Tweet for example:

Check out my new blog post about Monopoly – “Is Monopoly a Game Of The Past?” – http://bit.ly.addy #boardgames

Using the #boardgames tag in the tweet above will make your tweet visible not only to your followers but to everyone that is monitoring broadcasting on that “channel”. Every tag you put in your tweet will also become linkable and by clicking on it, you can watch that channel.

Maybe boardgames is to strict. Not many people are on Twitter to find out about boardgames. So why not add another hash tag so that your tweet appears on both channels.

Check out my new blog post about Monopoly – “Is Monopoly a Thing Of The Past?” – http://bit.ly.addy #boardgames #games

Now that we tagged our Tweet with 2 hashtags we have a much bigger chance for someone to pick it up on their twitter streams. The #games hash tag is going to give us much better results since it’s a much broader term.

Hashtag “Code Of Honour”

Like every feature across the Internet, hashtags can get abused, spammed and therefore ignored. It’s up to the vast Twitter community and its users to have some kind of “Code Of Honour” and to use the tags that are related to their tweet.

Another important thing to remember is to never overuse the tags so that your tweet gets to be secondary to your tags and the hashtags are the first thing someone sees when you tweet.

Remember to leave enough space in your Tweet for someone to re-tweet your message and if you are re-tweeting new tweets, re-tweet them without the hashtags because if that message has already been broadcasted on a channel you don’t want to repeat it again in the same minute or 10, maybe later though.

What I like to do is re-tweet peoples tweets and put my own little hashtags in them just to help others that don’t know how to use the tags or didn’t have time to think of a tag, get more exposure. Of course, I do this only for tweets and accounts that I think are worth my time and so should you.

It all comes down to …

finding the right hashtags. If you like the idea of using hashtags, you are going to want to do some research and find out which hashtags are the most monitored in which subject. Every letter in the hash tag can make a difference like when using #socialnetwork or #socialnetworking or #socialnetworks.

Those are basically the same thing but on Twitter, they are 3 different channels and maybe the first one has 5.000 people monitoring it and the second one has 2.000 people – but the third one has 150.000 people watching the steam.

A single letter in a hashtags can be the difference between getting 10 clicks and 2 re-tweets or getting 50 clicks and 10 re-tweets.

Saving space in your Tweets

A great way you can save space in your tweets so someone can re-tweet them and still use hashtags is using hash symbols in your sentence to transform certain words into hashtags.

Here is an example:

How to start #blogging without having any #copywriting skills – http://bit.ly.addy

Do not hash every word in your tweet, not only that it’s pointless but it looks really spammy as well.

Hash tag research

There are new hash tag directories poping out every few weeks – and they should I guess. It’s one of the “honest” ways to improve your chances of getting twitter followers without joining any paid bogus script programs that automatically follow people.

So far, I have been using the good ol’ Twitter search box. I just think of a hash tag that might be used and write it in the search box along with the # symbol. After a few minutes I can see how often there are new Tweets on that channel and see if it’s worth tagging my tweet with it.

Some hashtags are pretty basic and don’t require any research such as #marketing #blogging #twitter #charity . You can’t go wrong with using the basic form of the word and of course you can always just put all 3 or 4 variations of a word after the hash but remember the “Code Of Honour” we talked about above.

Four sites I suggest to get you started:

http://hashtags.org/ – The best tool I have found so far to get the most out of hashtags

http://search.twitter.com/ – Twitter search box, only bigger

http://tweetchat.com/ – Website that can help you monitor certain hashtags

http://help.twitter.com/forums/10711/entries/49309 – Twitter help explains what are hashtags and how to use them

Spread the word

If you know someone who has just started using Twitter or a friend who would like to, share this article and help spread the right way Twitter hashtags should be used. Thanks for reading and don’t forget to voice your opinion in the comments!

Related posts:

1. How I Got 300 Twitter Followers Without Mass Following Others

While most people might like this tactic and the fact that they might get a lot of followers in a short period of time, it really doesn’t guarantee your twitter account quality. Let me tell you why.

Quantity vs. Quality

You click on a persons Twitter name, you see 8500 following and 8000 followers. What’s the first thing that comes to your mind? Is this person thinking:

“So what if I follow 8000 people, who cares, as long as they follow me back and they get to see me tweeting my blog links.”

Or is he really interested in what 8500 Twitter members want to say? Ok I understand you might want to return someones follow just to be nice, but what’s the point? I’d personally rather have 100 interested followers that will click on my blog post links and read at least half the post (may even comment) then 8500 people that will ignore my tweets and just spam their own stuff.

Social networking should never be exploited for one-way communication broadcasting, information/link dumping or spam. Unfortunatley there aren’t rules against all of those mentioned but there is a thing called online credibility. Social interaction can improve your results in the long run and I’m sure a lot of people with more experience with social media would agree.

Information overload

How do you effectively track 8500 people tweeting so that you can actually benefit from following all of them?

Twitter is pretty close to being real-time and I don’t know about you but every time I search something, a few seconds after I get the results displayed, the yellowish banner slides on top saying “XXX more tweets before you started searching”. It’s impossible to benefit from everything even if you spend 24/7 online, in front of your computer.

Something you tweet at 12:00 may already (any probably is) kicked down to and out from someones visible twitter stream by 12:03. Depends how many followers your followers actually have.

If you maintain a high following to being followed ratio, it will make your account look popular and more people might decide to join in!

Twitter lists

This is where the new Twitter lists feature comes in. You can follow a small number of people that you really like directly with your account. Then you can follow dozens of lists with hundreds of members about certain niches if you really want.

Are you doing it right?

There is a field called Average Time Spent On Site in Google Analytics which tells you the average time users spend on your site. Read one of your blog articles in a normal pace, time yourself, crosscheck the times. If your reading time is close to the average time spent on site from the stats, you’re doing a decent job, especially if you are a beginner. On the other hand, if your average time on site is 20 seconds and you have thousands of followers, you might want to rethink your strategy 

This can of course be most accurate if your main promotional method is Twitter like mine is at the moment. But even if it’s not, the tactic is great and you should use it.

What’s my secret?

No secret what so ever. Just be an altruist (I just had to use this word because it’s best describes it). What this means is, follow people you are actually interested in, ignoring your followers count. Ok, you can use it sometimes to motivate yourself and follow back people you might find interesting.

My Twitter account followers graph from Su.pr

Re-tweet things you come across that you think would benefit people with the same interest as yourself. Also re-tweet other peoples posts out of the blue, without waiting for that person to return the favour and re-tweet one of your posts.

So how do you spread your tweets if you just joined twitter and have no followers. Simple, you use

Hash tags

Hash tags are strings of text written after the symbol # which then turns that string of text into a link – when clicked, takes you to a search page for that word.

I’d like to think of hashtags as TV channels where you can broadcast information even if you don’t have followers. This method of tweeting can usually lead to people noticing you and following you. Especially if they think your tweets will benefit them.

Don’t forget to socialize and make friends!

You don’t have to … but after all, Twitter IS a social networking site. Don’t be a mindless Twitter drone just tweeting your own stuff not even caring about someone elses content.

I’ve met some great people on Twitter among my 35-ish followers that I wouldn’t change for anything. These people have given me ideas and motivation to do some things I’ve never even knew I could. Would I have noticed these people if I had 1.000, 5.000 or 10.000+ followers? Maybe – probably – not really – if you’re lucky.

It is not my intention…

to badmouth people who follow a huge amount of accounts. Some of them are also good friends of mine. That’s why I’d like to leave this in the air and let you comment why you guys think it’s good or bad to follow a lot of people and how do you manage to find the perfect tweets in your overpopulated twitter stream.

Conclusion

Wrapping this post up, I want to show you two examples of great Twitter ratios which just give out the impression that these two individuals are great content providers.

Thanks for reading! Don’t forget to share your opinion and to share this post with your friends if you think it’s worth it.

Related posts:

1. Hashtag Heaven – Getting Started On Twitter
2. Getting Rid Of Twitter DMs
3. Questionable (Twitter) marketing tactics

The anonymous beneficiary

A month ago, after being “followed” by an individual on Twitter, he contacted me promoting his website that was about a Twitter marketing e-book. The e-book was completely free, as the website said on numerous banners and flashy-text and the person suggested that it would really help me.

At that point I was quite amazed because it was the first time someone personally approached me via Twitter PM and offered a friendly suggestion, for free even.

So I went for it and clicked on his website link. Got to the website, scrolled down a couple of miles and found the 300 x 500 pixel download button and as it usually works, entered my name and e-mail after clicking the download button.

The download started and finished in a few seconds and after seeing the PDF file size I asked myself – “How could anyone fit anything useful into a 15KB PDF file?”. Boy was I surprised when I opened that PDF file. There where only a few pages, most of them blank and one with a short introductory text and a Pay-Pal “BUY” button.

The realization

After realizing that I have just almost been tricked into buying something that was firstly presented to me as being free – I closed up the website, deleted the PDF file and blocked the person who so nicely offered to help me out for free.

There is one thing I want to make clear here: It was not a problem for me spending those $5 or $10 on that book that might have good content in it but the fact that the website was just a big lie really insulted me.

I guess the owner thought people would get to the “BUY” part and think to themselves “Ah well, if I came along this far in the process of getting the e-book, I might as well pay the money.”

Conclusion

If you are doing Internet marketing, affiliate marketing or just selling your own product on the street next to a hot-dog stand somewhere, the most important thing is credibility (would like to give props to Lisa Irby of “2 Create A Website” for all her texts and videos about credibility in affiliate marketing, it has taught me a great deal).  How highly do your potential customers think of you and your opinions (or of your company if you present one)? Always try to play fair and don’t mislead your customers because a few failed sales can hurt you a lot less than one disgruntled or insulted customer.

Thank you for reading and I would like to know what YOU think about my experience and other similar situations. If you have personally had a similar experience I would love if you would share it in the comments.

Related posts:

1. Getting Rid Of Twitter DMs
2. How I Got 300 Twitter Followers Without Mass Following Others
3. How to Spice Up Your Product Presentation