On Twitter you have “retweets”. What is it called to post the same blog post twice? Probably lazy. =D
In it’s entirety (including some hot air) from the iliveisl blog:
We have been messing with many social networking platforms such as Google Groups, Facebook (rock Ener’s world and become a friend), LinkedIn (connect to Ener), Ning, blogging, Twitter (tweet iliveisl or Ener), Flickr, Blip.tv, CafePress, several Second Life forums, the Second Life Wiki, Wikipedia (as editors), Yahoo 360, del.cio.us, plurk, technorati, threadless, Busted Tees, websites (both iliveisl and enerhax), and even Urban Dictionary (vote for enerhax!).
While a few of these are not strictly social, they still provide the opportunity to raise “brand awareness” in the overall social community. Blogging is simply a necessity and works very well and it is easy to interpret the analytics. I think blogging can replace the conventional website for many endeavors, including ours.
All the channels we use do add to our visibility and the top ones, for us, are the blog, Twitter, and Flickr. The blog has many different analytics attached to it, Flickr Pro has fairly decent analytics, and there are third-party analytics for Twitter. Our favourite Twitter one is Twitter Grader.
Twitter is an interesting one for us and has resulted in several pieces of business (land sales on the estate and custom projects for me).
One could argue that the best analytics are resulting monetary measures.
In that case, Twitter is the winner for us. But it is hard to fine tune Twitter. You certainly do not want to fall into the “get 12,000 followers for $12.95 schemes”, nor do you want to use any other ones that basically lead to crappy followers (I can’t think of a better word).
Twitter Grader looks at many factors, much more than simply a ratio of followers to following. This is exemplified below. While coachoncall (respected life coach from New Hampshire) has double the followers and less than one percent the following, you would think her ranking should be higher. Much higher. Yet it is not.
On the iliveisl Twitter, we carefully follow those that offer informationwe can use, or those whose message we want to support, and we tend to tweet on the light side (read: silly).
We are vigilent about dumping the people we follow if all they do is post on how to get more followers. We also have this blog automaticaly tweet new posts (a great time saver by the way).
Using tools like Tweepular‘s Build Tweepularity may be tempting, but it seems to lead to crappy followers and a lower score and rank (I experiment with a few other Twitter accounts). Tweepular does have great tools, such as No Follow Love. We also use UnTweeps to remove “stale” tweepers (more than 30 days silent).
Use Twitter as it was intended to be used and your rank will improve. Collecting followers is dumb (how is that for an “official” opinion?).
What does it all mean? Beats us, what’s your take on all the social networking out there? :)
about subQ: typically behind the scenes at iliveisl, avid elearning guy and speaker at subquark.com, custom sim developer and all around Second Life consultant (who talks straight and even talks people out of Second Life if it is not right for them), experimenting with OpenSim as an alternative to eliminate draconian limitations, and the world’s second biggest fan of poutine. The honour of number one would go to our very own Ener Hax.
And yes . . . long winded and you are stuck with me for a bit as Ener deals with some other challenges.