Get OFF the Twitter #UnfollowTrain

Are you making it easy for people to unfollow you on Twitter? 

Did you know that Twitter accounts are sorted by various social media management tools according to a variety of criteria in an attempt to help users decide who to follow or unfollow? If your account is not up to par and is at the bottom of the list, you are likely showing up as "someone to consider unfollowing" on many of these tools.

Here are 10 common reasons why your Twitter account might be labeled "a great candidate to unfollow" by various social media management tools:

1. You are inactive.
2. You are "too quiet" or "too noisy." 
3. You do not have a profile photo or your profile is not complete.
4. You are not following people back.
5. You are not engaged or have a low engagement score.
6. You do not have very many followers. 
7. You have a low Trust Score or low Social Authority. 
8. You are following the wrong crowd (i.e. spammers, inactives, etc.).
9. Your follower-to-friend ratio is too low.
10. You are not adding value to your followers or the community.

If your account is falling into this category which I call the "Twitter Unfollow Train," you will most likely continue to be unfollowed at a higher than average rate, making it very difficult to grow your community.

SocialBro got me off the Twitter #UnfollowTrain and back on track!

I have tried many Twitter management tools and prefer SocialBro. Using SocialBro, I turned my Twitter #UnfollowTrain around, broke thru the 2001 barrier and got back on track!

Here are some suggestions for improving your performance on Twitter so you can get off and stay off the Twitter #UnfollowTrain and get back on track!

Social Media Addict? Take this Quiz to find out!

Give yourself a "plus one" for each of the statements that you can identify with.

"You may be a social media addict if you have ever tried to plus one or like an email." +Dirk Talamasca

You may be a social media addict if...

1. You realize in the middle of the night that there actually ARE people online and you suddenly have a lot of friends that live in other time zones.
2. Your Empire Avenue portfolio is doing awesome but your bank account is overdrawn.
3. You have ever tried to scroll through TV channels with the remote.
4. Your pocket often vibrates... even if your phone is on your desk.
5. You realize you are growing very fond of the people who give you the most +K.
6. You are the Mayor of a gas station.
7. You have circles for your Facebook and Twitter followers and Twitter lists for your Facebook and Google+ followers.
8. You have created a spreadsheet to track your network scores.
9. You have a XeeMe profile.
10. You belong to more than 25 Facebook groups.
11. When you plus 1'd #10, you weren't counting secret groups.
12. You type a + or an @ sign before you type someone's name, even during those rare moments when you are NOT using social media.
13. You have sent over 5,000 Tweets or have pinned more than 10,000 pins and you aren't even sure why...
14. You know what IFTTT is and you are a master at creating recipes.
15. You have photos ready to share for every #caturday for the rest of the summer.

"You may be a social media addict if you already have 45+ networks and you are looking for more." +Steven Krohn

"You may be a social media addict if you add the hashtag #birthday onto a birthday card." +Adrian Bold

"You may be a social media addict if you have ever played the bitly memory game."
+Christine DeGraff

In the comments below, please add to this list by filling out the rest of this sentence: 

You may be a social media addict if __________________________________________________. 

Thanks everyone! See you online!

The New MySpace :: How to Become a "Top Fan"

Become a Top Fan in Five Minutes or Less

I never used the "Old" MySpace, so I can't really compare, but I think the New MySpace is pretty cool. I have always been a music fan and I like the look and feel of it - and I am definitely into social media, so the ability to connect with people that like the same music as me is fun.

In a nutshell, people that are connected to you can see what artists, albums, photos, songs, etc. that you are connected to and can then connect as well. The New MySpace also has a "Top Fans" feature. Still in Beta, Top Fans are "people who have interacted the most with an artist and their content."

Being a "Top Fan" will eventually (supposedly) give you access to exclusive content from the artist (tickets? autographs?)... so imagine my excitement when I realized I was one of the Top 10 fans for Metallica - possibly my all time favorite band! I bet I started listening to their songs twice as much - and then I was #2.

As silly as it may seem for a 44 year old, I was very excited and proud of my "accomplishment"... 

Become a Top Fan of Your Favorite Artist (or any artist) on the New MySpace... in 3 steps and in less than 5 minutes

I checked my rank on some of my other favorites... and discovered that I was in the top of quite a few. I do tend to be a little OCD and listen to the same bands a lot, so I guess that isn't TOO surprising... but it did make me curious about just how easy it might be to become a top fan of other artists. To get to the point, I figured out (I believe I am the first, or at least the first to write about it) that actually playing or listening to the music has very little or nothing to do with how a "Top Fan" is calculated on the New MySpace.

I am writing this in order to tell others how they can get to the top of the Top Fans list for their favorite artist in the hopes that once the "secret" is out, it will get corrected so we can truly see an artists' Top Fans, rather than who is good at the social media game. Think about it - as soon as there are rewards involved, it will just become another social media numbers game of who can connect the fastest.

The 3 Keys of Online Marketing :: Acquisition

Acquisition, Conversion, Retention

In my previous post in this series "The 3 Keys of Online Marketing," I talked about the importance of correcting any conversion problems you might be having before wasting time trying to acquire new or more traffic. Assuming you have done so and are ready to continue, let's talk about "acquisition."

Acquisition: Driving or acquiring traffic to your website.

Traffic to your website is basically going to come from 3 major sources:

Search—Google, Bing, Yahoo, MSN and others provide an excellent source of traffic for many websites. This type of traffic will be either be free ("Organic") or paid ("PPC"). Getting highly ranked in the organic search engine results pages ("SERP") depends upon whether or not your "score well" in the search engines' algorithms, which attempt to determine whether or not your content is relevant to the user's search query.

Referring Sites—When someone visits your site by clicking a link or banner ad from another site or by clicking a link in an email*, this is known as a "referring site." Building links from quality referring sites can also improve SERP as many search engines use this as one of the ways to measure the importance of your site ("PageRank").

*Direct—These are the visitors who are demonstrating brand awareness by typing your website address into their browser... but direct traffic can also be any traffic that is not recognized as coming from search or from a referring site.

The 3 Keys of Online Marketing :: Conversion

Acquisition, Conversion, Retention

This post is the first in my series "The 3 Keys of Online Marketing" and will begin by covering the topic "conversion"—getting your visitors to take a desired action. 

I have found that many businesses tend to focus first on getting traffic to their website only to later discover that they have problems with conversion. In my opinion, there is no point in discussing ways to acquire more traffic to your web, blog or social media sites until you have corrected your conversion problems and optimized the conversion process.