Our Twitter Philosophy: Why We Tweet So Darn Much And It Works

First off Thank you for following us on Twitter and reading nibletz.com “the voice of startups everywhere else” everyday.  Whether you say it under your breath, have tweeted us about it, ignored it, or just noticed it we tweet a lot and we retweet the same story a lot with a different text before the owl.ly link.  We originally published this story on our first highly successful new media site. We entered an agreement where we can’t mention that site by name.

Also, I speak about Twitter, social media and this specific philosophy that’s been working for four years, at conventions, conferences, and seminars across the country.  The chart above is from Robin Sloan’s research that supports our theory.

In the post Robin Sloan correlates the twitter findings to TV.  We correlate it between Twitter and my experience in Radio in major markets.  As much as “active” people tend to say they hate it, I was instrumental in the 90′s to deriving the current top-40 format where the “hits” are played sometimes 90 times per week which equates to every 70 minutes. Imagine in the mid to late 90′s when the Spice Girls and MMMBop were the songs getting that spin factor.  Irritating right? However the stations that used this programming and still do today, and the artists that experienced it saw great ratings (and still do today) and the artists sold more records.  More ratings meant higher ad prices so even the bosses were happy.

Why though…

Radio, like twitter, can be very passive at times.  Especially now most people listen to the radio in a short car ride, a short job, or passively at their desks at the office. Maybe you listen baking a cake, or making dinner. What else did you do when you were listening to the radio? Handle a fussing child? Laundry? Cleaned? Dishes? An Argument? It was passive.

For most (not all but most) people using twitter it’s a passive form of social media.  When you log on to facebook you check your updates, profile, friends updates, maybe you play Farmville or Cityville or Family Feud, but your engagement time on Facebook is more than that on Twitter. What do you do with Twitter, most people “scan” it, just like the radio, looking for something that strikes their curiousity.

Add that to the fact that our analytics show us a mix of 50% US based twitter profiles follow us with the other 50% being based in other countries around the world, and that is exactly why we post things so much.  Without revealing our entire strategy we rank the stories as their posted at thedroidguy.com based on our keywords from analytics and what people are currently interested in.

Also consider the variety in followers we have, we have brand new people to Android, people who like Android but aren’t gung ho into it, Android Enthusiasts, Ecosystem partners, Android Developers and modders. Based on this variety and what’s hot we rank our posts, a top ranked post gets tweeted once by word press automatically, then we do a manual bit.ly link almost immediately following and then based on the ranking we tweet it out 32-56 times over the next 2-5 days.  If it’s really hot we’ll post it every 40 minutes for the first couple of hours.

Now consider some of our top retweeters and people we know that follow us religiously and have for a while (Thank you again) we’ve noticed, and you may have too, that even these folks who are on twitter all day may actually retweet something that was fresh 7 hours ago.

Now Robin’s piece was focused on Hashtags and not actual tweets but it tells the same story. We want you to read Robin’s post so we aren’t going to re-post the whole thing but link to it here

Here’s what Robin Sloan writes to explain the graph

“The vertical axis (P) is a fraction of Twitter users tweeting with a particular hashtag. The horizontal axis (K) is the number of times they had seen that hashtag before tweeting with it. So basically, the graph is telling us: You need to see a hashtag four or five times before it really clicks.”

Robin summarizes by saying that if you use a hashtag repeat it, users are more likely to pick it up and retweet it after more exposures.

Now back to MMMBop at a radio station in Washington DC the 8th largest market in the country, Mmmbop actually played on the radio station 214 times before it started requesting on the phone lines.

Linkage:

Social Media: Why Wait For Zac Moffatt Of Course Romney’s New Twitter Followers Are Fake

A sudden surge in Republican Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney’s Twitter followers has started making the rounds in the news. Our friends at Mashable have reported that Zach Green of 140elect.com, a blog that monitors Twitter trends revolving around end Presidential election, found an abnormal surge in Romney’s Twitter activity.

Romney normally receives between 3000-4000 new followers per day on Twitter. Friday he received 23,926 followers, Saturday he received 93,045 followers and Sunday he received 25,432 followers.

There has been a lot of discussion as to whether the Romney camp paid a Twitter following agency, and if those followers are fake.  In fact Vincent Harris, who was a digital advisor to former Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, rang out on Twitter in defense of Mitt Romney’s digital director Zac Moffat. Harris and the Gingrich camp were also accused of buying fake followers for their candidate.


I speak on social media and Twitter quite a bit and have used Twitter virtually since the beginning. I use a tool called Tweepi to maintain the health of both of our key Twitter accounts, my personal account and the account for Nibletz. So when this story started to break I went myself and checked out Romney’s newest followers and here’s what we’ve found.

First off over 40,000 of Romney’s new followers have yet to change their Twitter icon from the cute little egg you get when you first join Twitter.  This is usually a good indicator that someone has a lot of fake Twitter followers.

The next big indicator is that over 25,000 of the new followers have 0 followers themselves. Again this is a sharp indicator that the Twitter followers are fake.  Now in the interest of transparency many of the new Twitter followers Romney has that have 1 or zero followers themselves are the same ones that haven’t changed their profile pic.

Of course the final big indicator is the fact that 30,000 of the new Twitter followers Romney has have tweeted zero times or have tweeted just one time.

Another big indicator for fake Twitter followers is that many of these new followers have never updated their biography in their profile as well.

Their are several ways to buy followers. There are sites that sell followers with similar stats to these. They use bots and other methods to set up Twitter accounts very quickly and then sell a bulk follow, typically automated at one time.

It would take hours and hours to check President Obama’s Twitter followers but the first 500 pages of 200 Twitter followers on a page of the account @barackobama, the newest followers look like this:

 

These newest followers of Obama’s look to be a much healthier set of Twitter followers.

There would really be no benefit to fudging followers in a political campaign unless Romney’s camp is just looking to cross the million follower count. Currently President Obama has over 17 million followers while Romney is hovering at 800,000 followers.

President Obama was the first candidate to really embrace social media ahead of the 2008 election. He has seen a surge recently in new followers as the race gets down to the final months.

Source: Mashable

Startup Quick Byte: twiDAQ

For todays Startup Quick Byte we take a look at twiDAQ a site that mixes both Wall Street and Twitter into one. Located in Bath, United Kingdom this company takes Twitter to another level that even has me interested. After having raiser $48,000 in funding so far, twiDAQ  is using peoples love affair for Twitter and wanting to do more with it to a whole another level.

While some sites like Klout mask and try and hide how things are rated, twiDAQ holds no such qualms as they clearly post it on their site Here

There are two principal models for setting the share price; performance & demand.  What we’re all seeing at this early stage in the market is the dominance of performance over demand which is allowing small stocks to rise in price.

Currently, only on the Web and iOS and free on both markets. So if you are into Twitter and just want more. Make sure to check it out. No words yet on an Android application yet.

Where to find:

Website

Twitter

Facebook

New Orleans Startup: Neighborland Offers Social Networking For Neighborhoods

One of the fastest growing segments in mobile and web life these days is the social network. Of course MySpace and then Facbeook put the social network on the map but now there have been slices of the social networking pie, carved out in unimaginable ways, that work.

Earlier today we featured a social networking app for pets. There are social networks for picture takers, business people and crafters. Now that people have stopped sitting out on the stoop and grilling in the front yard, a social network is a great way to connect.

Speaking of that stoop and grilling in the front yard, that’s the foundation behind New Orleans’ startup Neighborland.

One thing that makes Neighborland especially intriguing is the fact that co-founder Candy Chang actually took something physical and made it digital. There have been a lot of startups launched to do the opposite, take printstagram and stitchtagram for instance.

Chang came up with the idea after doing two, almost installation art projects, one in New Orleans and one in Fairbanks Alaska. In New Orleans she stuck stickers to structures that said “I Wish This Was________”. In Alaska she draped an abandoned apartment building in a sign that said “Looking for Love” she also installed chalk boards all over the place around the building and encouraged passerby’s to write things down.

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Follow Up: Twitter’s Fame Game Shut Down Already

Just a few weeks ago we brought you the story of the Fame Game. Fame was a side project for Adam Ludwin a principal at RRE Ventures in New York. The premise was simple, a raffle website “game” where the winner of the daily raffle got everyone who entered that days contest to follow them in one fell swoop. It was up to the winner to engage all the new followers into sticking around.

Well according to Betabeat, the Fame game is now over. The company sent out a Tweet on Thursday saying they planned to shut down the service because it violated Twitter’s terms of service. When it first launched Twitter didn’t seem to mind at all and in fact the team behind the Fame game thought they were clear because of a loop hole in the Twitter api.

“It was always a question mark about what Twitter would do,” RRE Ventures principal and Fame cofounder Adam Ludwin told Betabeat via phone. ”I have a lot of respect for the guys at Twitter and they gave us an extension, they gave us ideas about ways to change the app to conform more with what they viewed as in line with the spirit of their terms.”

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Frances Bean Cobain Corrects Her Mom On Twitter Faux Pas

Frances Bean Cobain says Dave Grohl did not hit on her

For those who aren’t in tune with the times Frances Bean Cobain is the daughter of Courtney Love and the late Kurt Cobain.

Last week Courtney Love  took it upon herself to report using her locked Twitter account that former Nirvana drummer, and now Foo Fighters front man Dave Grohl had hit on her 19 year old daughter. If you’re thinking eww gross Grohl is old enough to be her father, that’s exactly the case as he used to be bandmates with Kurt Cobain.

The younger Cobain sent out a very brief statement from her publicist. Frances Bean Cobain performs under the name “Fiddle Tim” as to not get any notoriety from her parents.  The statement read:

While I’m generally silent on the affairs of my biological mother, her recent tirade has taken a gross turn. I have never been approached by Dave Grohl in more than a platonic way. I’m in a monogamous relationship and very happy.

Twitter should ban my mother.

Cobain hasn’t formally requested that Twitter actually ban her mom from the social network, although the sentiment is clear. While many sites have suggested that Love and her daughter and chummy they aren’t exactly estranged either. As to where the rumor about Grohl originated from, we’re as clueless as you.

file under: Social

Source: NY Observer

In The Courts: Federal Courts Rule That Social Networking Can Contain Trade Secrets

In a move, that is interesting to say the least, a Colorado Federal Court and a California Federal Court have ruled that social networking accounts, and lists can contain trade secrets.

In the Colorado case an employee of a nightclub was responsible for maintaining the nightclub’s MySpace page. The nightclub had several thousand friends on MySpace and was often used to promote specials, and performances at the club. That was all well and good until the employee left that club to work for a competing night club in the same town.

Once the employee started working for the competitor he started to use the same MySpace friends list to market the new club to the old club’s patrons.  In that case Christou v Beatport the judge in Colorado ordered that the MySpace list of friends was protected by the Colorado Uniform Trade Secrets Act.

JDspura.com reported:
The court held that, using the same logic for protection of customer lists, a friends list could be entitled to protection if it meets the traditional tests under which customer lists can constitute trade secrets. The court noted that the list could not readily be compiled from public sources, and that the plaintiff had limited access to the employer’s login and password information.

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New York Startup: Get Shitter Puts Your Tweets On Toilet Paper

Before we dive into the bowl on this one let me first say that this is a 100% true story, now on with the runny details…

A recently announced startup that was founded by a four man team of developers in New York and Australia, has revolutionized the Twitter API in a way no one has ever thought of. These four men have found the ability to turn your tweets into four, useable rolls of toilet paper. This is actually brilliant.

All you do is log into their website at getshitter.com pay the $35 via paypal and voila your toilet paper will arrive shortly. It’s perfect for openhouses and press events, lets see how many rolls of getshitter paper we find at SXSW next year.

“Obviously this is fairly tongue in cheek, but we’re reasonably pleased we monetized Twitter in a way that avoided advertising,” said founder David Gillespie Told Venturebeat’s Ben Poper ”… The direction is still settling, but I think there’s some kind of course to chart around just trying to entertain people. I don’t know where the revenue is, it may very well wind up needing to be funded by brands when the right project comes along. I can’t imagine Kleenex having put their name to Shitter though!”

They may not be too far off fro funding as StockTwits founder Howard Lindzon tweeted that he wanted to invest in the shitter.

source: VB

New “Fame” Game Could Get You A Whole Lotta Twitter Followers (For A Day?)

Adam Ludwin a Principal at RRE Ventures and some developer friends have created an interesting new game called “Fame”. The purpose is to raffle off Twitter followers. One lucky person each day will be followed by everyone who has entered the contest. According to their website as of the time of this posting the current pot of followers is 359 followers.

How does this work exactly?  Well you login to the game at playfame.com with your Twitter account. You are then in the daily drawing along with everyone else who enters that day.  Logging in gets you one chance to win that day. Tweeting about Fame gives you ten more entries per day, and if your Tweet gets more people to sign up, you get one raffle chance per new entrant that signs up using your link.

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Twitter Acquires Summify To Boost Content

Screen Shot 2012-01-19 at 8.52.16 PM

Twitter has acquired news aggregator Summify. Summify is a Canadian based start-up that aggregates stories across social media based on the amount of shares. The more a story is shared across Facebook, Twitter and Google Reader the higher it ranks on Summify.

Summify has an iPhone app and began service as an email delivered summary of news.

Twitter’s acquisition will eventually result in the Summify website getting shut down and Summify employees relocating to Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters. Twitter hasn’t made a statement on how it will merge Summify into their current technology, but reports around the internet suggest it has something to do with Twitter’s new Discover tab.

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