Klout, Momentum, and You.

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Subtitle: Be like the turkeys in the photo below and don’t stop; just keep going!

A friend of mine (let’s call her Kathy) had a Klout score of 71. Not sure how she achieved that since she doesn’t tweet much, and when she does, it’s about sweepstakes. She has just over 1,000 followers. On Facebook, she has over 1,500 friends and again, posts mainly about contests and sweepstakes. Often.

Apparently Klout thinks her practices are important enough to grant her a score of 71. Klout doesn’t find my tweets valuable even though they mostly consist of giving Klout, original blog posts providing the reader with marketing insights, and greetings to various followers. Oh, and I have 35,000 more followers on Twitter than Kathy does yet my Klout is presently at 66. Sigh. 

However, that’s not the point for today. Kathy was busy for a couple weeks; not with Klout, but with life in general. She didn’t tweet; she didn’t post much on Facebook.

You already know what I’m going to say next. Kathy’s Klout score took a nose dive, down to 64.

Now, apparently, Klout doesn’t take the quality of your tweets into consideration. They loosely claim to take who you interact with into consideration though, however, Kathy rarely interacts with others on Twitter and Facebook. Yet her score was that high!

So what happened to Kathy’s score? 

It was a quantity issue. There she was, breezing along at a good clip, with several tweets a day, then, nothing. Klout wants to see you out there on a regular basis and participating in some fashion in the world of social media. WHAT you post isn’t all that important to them. 

This does bring up an important point in social media. For a change, I agree with Klout on this one. You need to be consistent and build-up that momentum. And keep it up! Once you “fall off the wagon” much of your effort can slide and the build-up needs to start all over again. And in Kathy’s case, a two week absence cost her about a point in score for every two days that she was gone from social media. 

You’ve heard the expression “out of sight; out of mind”. In the social media realm whether you’re an individual or a business, this is true. If you’ve got momentum going, don’t suddenly stop! This applies to your activity on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, Instagram, any other social network that you are a "regular" on, and of course your blog!

Little Eva sang about turkeys trotting in the early 1960’s tune (see below) and now that your momentum is picking up again DO stop and visit our For change that’s positive and refreshing, visit our website, or on Twitter, Facebook, or Google+. 

Fake Profiles, Twitter, and You

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We all enjoy a good laugh, no? You don’t have to be on Twitter to enjoy this little romp but if you are a Tweep you get to groan a little too.


Routine: I check to see who is following me once a day. And more times than not, I find myself not following tweeps back more and more. The majority of new followers seems to be MLM’ers, Rap Music aficionados, unclothed “babes”, people who tweet in Chinese or Russian, or tweeps who don’t even exist. One guy's bio beckoned me with a "hey bitch". Sweet.


No thank you, @mary647251 ...I don’t need your babble about not having a grip on your saddle and @sassyjenna60 no thank you to yet another link to a website that’s going to make me rich without my even flexing my pinkie.


I've been gathering up some of the more interesting profiles before I block them to share with you. First up is Sondra; she can free up your time so you can play more games (wow!). But dearest Sondra, did someone make off with your shirt?


 

Shortly after meeting Sondra, I couldn't help notice she was now going by the moniker 

Anette and enjoying a career change:

But wait! She appeared yet again, with a cute, boyish name and a proclaimed love for marketing and networking. And poor Randee! She appeared to have lost her previous job and was simply on Twitter to meet "interesting" people. I wasn't one of the interesting people that cared to meet her and at this point was starting to be concerned if perhaps she was feeling a bit chilly:

Randee already had over 1,000 followers and made 15 lists in her new career! I wish her well. BLOCKED.


Next up is Emily who likes to party and show cleavage in a similar fashion to  Sondra/Anette/Randee:

Wow, Emily...you'd follow ME back? What an honor! Can I send you a sweater? And this was before I met Brett the astronaut...

How I admire her ambition! Bet she's in Houston right now preparing for her dream date. And note, she doesn't want to be ON the moon...heck no! She's going to dig herself a little foxhole and snuggle IN the moon. You gotta admire her precise goals.


And last but not least, there's Margo who sports a bikini and loves to dance in a 60's style; do you have the boots that are made for walkin'? Wonder if Margo shares my admiration for mid-century modern architecture and furnishings too? 

Seriously...would you follow these incredible women back? Lots of tweeps do. My guess is that they have an auto followback set up, something I recommend that you don't do. Take time for a close look at your new followers. Nowadays, lots of them are people you would never tweet with, while many others aren't even real people!

They ARE good for a chuckle though, aren't they? Now, excuse me while I select BLOCK.

In honor of Margo and her pals, enjoy this groovy tune. 

Stop by, say Hi! There's the website, Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ ...and thanks for stopping by here.

Do You Need to Weed Your Google+ Garden?

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Has it happened to you yet? A couple of weeks ago a witnessed a plusser’s frustration because she couldn’t circle people back on Google+.

You may not be aware of the fact that Google+ has put a limit, much like Facebook, on the number of people you can circle in a personal account. Unfortunately, there’s been a few times when I’ve attempted to add a circle of interesting folks that someone has shared with me and Google+ won’t let me do so. Why is that?

It’s because the limit on circling (or following; the terms are interchangeable) for Google+ is set at 5,000. Of course, people are free to circle you regardless of how many you’ve circled (or not). As of this writing, I’ve added 4,546. I’m getting a bit pickier now as far as whom I circle back. Some ground rules I’ve now set (and you may enjoy these as well) includes not circling people with a profile pic and a minimum number of people I have in common with that person. Would love to circle back everyone though.

Sort of brings it down to a popularity contest, doesn’t it? Okay, Google+ is pulling a Facebook maneuver on us here. Especially if you’re trying to run your business from a personal profile…oh wait! Just like Facebook. No limit on pages on either platform, right?

But shouldn’t Google+ think more like Twitter in this case? My main account on Twitter has over 29,000 followers. I’ve followed 98% of them back. I can’t even imagine how I’d begin to weed out tweeps if I was only allowed to follow 5,000.

In preparation for the day when you and I will HAVE to clean up the flower beds on our personal Google+ accounts, I curiously conducted a quick search.

Aha! There's a plug-in for Chrome that can assist us with this Google+ issue: Uncircle Uncirclers+. Already had it installed but never got around to exploring. Ran it. The two of the first four people on the list are people I know. And they have circled me back. Uh, guess they’re still getting bugs out on this one! Proceed with caution. Let’s move on.

What I’m really looking for is a plug-in that gets rid of “dead wood”; you know, those accounts that were created months ago just for the sake of being one of the first to be on Google+. Yet, they haven’t posted anything! Sadly, I know some of those folks quite well too.
Eureka! There is one!

It’s called Uncircle Inactives. Spot checked a few followers and it appears to be accurate. The ones I looked up have been inactive at least since October. It lists your circlers and has two columns of boxes. The column to the far left shows those who are inactive; the ones who are active are in the column directly to the left of the name of the person. And you can just call up one circle at a time and mull through! Sweet!

Now I’m waiting for these plug-ins to become available for use with pages. In the meantime, I’m back to doing a little gardening of my Google+ account. 

The Rolling Stones can assist in "blowing away those dandelions"...click here.

Get Creative: Use Those Twitter Lists!

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Twitter lists have been around for some time now and when I mention them to friends and clients, most say they don’t really use them. Twitter even provides a primer to introduce you to lists, click here for that.

If you are familiar with the basics, let me point out a few more uses for them that go beyond the conventional reasons:

Use lists when building up your followers. At some point everyone has experienced that 2,000 follower “hurdle”. This is when you’re suddenly prevented from following more tweeps until you’re within a 10 percent ratio of followers to follows. Yes, it’s Twitter effort to slow down the spammers; otherwise they’d just keep following and following and following regardless of how few follow back.

Sigh.

Was discussing this situation with a client yesterday. I advised that he build up some more followers and get over the 2,000 hurdle. He is working hard at doing so. However, he stated “there’s plenty of people out there on Twitter that are in my neck of the woods (he is a local business) however, I really don’t want to follow them; not so sure I like what they are tweeting.”

My suggestion was to follow them and put them in a private list so that he can easily monitor them before deciding if he wants to hang on to them. He can choose to unfollow them once he gets over the 2,000 follower hurdle or keep them and remove them from the “I’m not sure about you” list.

Which brings up another point: Not all your lists have to be public. Private ones that are for your eyes only are great for monitoring your competition (when you don’t want them to know you’re paying any attention to them) or perhaps for catching up with a celebrity that really has nothing to do with your business and you feel it’s not good for your reputation to let people know that you have an interest in them. So go ahead and follow Ozzy Osbourne via a list in private then.

And did you know that you don’t have to follow someone to include them in a list?
Need a few ideas? Lists can be:

• Your favorite people, friends
• Your favorite businesses or products
• Tweeps in a certain region or city
• Tweeps that share a common interest with you
• Potential customers for your business
• Past and current customers for your business
• Celebrities that you admire
• Tweeps that post lots of quotes (perhaps they inspire you?)
• Current events and news (make sure they’re reliable sources)
• Foodies (we all do eat at some point, no?)
• Tweeps that make you laugh (we all need some comic relief sometimes)
• Causes you are interested in.
• Politicians
• Tweeps you tweet with on a regular basis.

And the lists go on!

Remember that when your lists are public, everyone can look at them. Do think about whether you want to show the world what’s on your lists or not. Any given list can be public or private and you can also change them if your preferences change in regards to display them or not.

The lists feature is there to make Twitter work better for you. Hope you’re inspired to explore the possibilities some more now.

Not a favorite tune, but it does have the word “list” in the title, plus it is Valentine’s Day so the word “kiss” is appropriate too. Have a lovely day! Click here for the video.

Are You Committing Twitter Snobbery?

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“I won’t follow anyone back on Twitter who doesn't have a lot of followers.” A friend made this statement to me a while ago.

Is he seeing Twitter as a numbers game or assuming that this person doesn’t know what they’re doing out there?

It’s definitely not a numbers game, but a matter of how you choose to manage your account. Couple of options:

• Following back most everyone: Your public timeline will be messy though, however, you can control the quality of what you see through lists.

• Being targeted towards only those in your industry and/or those tweeps who would be genuinely interested in your product or service. This works, but do remember that you’ll have less reach overall; fewer replies, fewer retweets.

Don’t assume that they don’t know what they’re doing. Granted, that could be the case, however, keep in mind that people are joining Twitter every day and getting their feet wet. They may only have a few hundred followers, but do check them out. Some things to look for:

• A profile photo, not an egg.
• A full bio of who they are and what they do.
• Intelligent and engaging tweets. Okay to have some humorous ones too!
• A URL to a website that is professional and well organized.
• Lack of spammy tweets. Sharing the URL to your Facebook page is not spammy, but touting teeth whiteners is.
• They’re not a bot.
• Their tweets are interesting to you.
• They’re tweeting on a regular basis; in other words, they’re active and not simply just gathering followers.

Now, about giving them the benefit of the doubt, if they’re newbies, they may not be using Twitter protocol as they should be. I made two incredible blunders when I first joined Twitter. One gent firmly but politely corrected me on one of them; it may have been not using @ when replying. I remember feeling very small, but grateful that he took the time to tell me.

I recommend correcting someone via a DM. Save them a little embarrassment. Unfortunately a lot of people just dive into Twitter and try to swim without gaining the knowledge of what it’s about or formulating any strategy first. And many will drop off quickly; others will paddle ahead and some may even start doing the butterfly stroke.

So, what did I say to my friend after he made that statement?

"Give them a break; remember, you were once just starting out too and I'm sure you wouldn't have appreciated that kind of attitude while you were getting your feet wet"

‘Nuff said.

Join modlandUSA on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ …and please do say hello.

A nice place to get your feet wet.

Nobody is a Square on Google+

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Circles are similar to lists in Facebook, however it’s much easier to add and remove people from them, simply by dragging and dropping. I gave up on lists for the most part in Facebook because I just don’t have the time to type all those names until they pop up to create one list at a time. That’s already a bygone era.

With circles, it easy to share the more personal items with just your “friends” and exclude your “acquaintances” and “followers”. When sharing, just add the circles and with the folks that you want included; it’s all right there, no learning curve required. You can also add a circle with folks not on Google+ but with Gmail accounts; they’ll get the info you’re sharing too.

Circles take seconds to create. I have six right now, but will really think through how I want to divvy things up going forward. Still haven’t decided how personal or how public I want to be, and I’m still waiting to see how Google+ will treat businesses.  Obviously in Facebook, there are advantages to having a page for your business vs. a personal profile (see my recent post on that), but Google+ may go an entirely different route. Who knows?

Creating new circles is simple and you can even change the names of the four given to you at the start. In one article I recently read, there was mention of a circle named “people I hate”…why anyone would have people who fit THAT category in a circle is beyond me, but to each his own. But the point here is you get to name them whatever you want…

…and no one knows what you’ve named your circles, nor do they know which circle they’ve been placed in. So I may think Joe is an acquaintance and he might consider me a friend. But neither of us will ever know how we’ve been categorized. Unless Google+ decides to add an option to make circle names and who is in them public at some point.

And, you may add people to as many of your circles as you like, again, simply by dropping and dragging them again and again. And again, I have to stress that Google+ is light years ahead of Facebook here.

My big question is: Regarding circles, I’d like to know why on my profile there are fewer people who have added me to their circles compared to the higher number on my circles page.  Apparently there is a delay of sorts; a long delay. My initial observation tells me that the lag time can be half a day or more. What’s up with that? Shouldn’t it be “instant” much like follows on Twitter or friending on Facebook? Still curious about this one, but it’s certainly something I can live with.

On a rating scale of 1 to 10, with 10 the highest and 1 the lowest, I’m giving circles a 9. Sorry, but I’m a hard rater! I suspect many of you will go ahead and give that 10.