How I Failed With Twitter

I don’t know if you noticed this or not, but yesterday I flipped my Twitter account on its ear.  I changed my username, started a new account under my old name (@robmcguire), and then announced on my old account where people could find me if they wanted to reconnect.  This wasn’t an accident; I chose to do this.

I had not been pleased with the overall state of my Twitter account for several months.  I was missing too much information and seeing far too much spam.  I had to steer clear from DM box as it had become a festering pit of never-ending requests to take quizzes, send gifts, malware links, etc.  The situation I found myself in wasn’t ideal, but it was one of my own creation.

A while back, I decided that I wanted to greatly increase the size of my Twitter network for these two reasons:  I wanted to promote websites to a much bigger audience and I wanted to network my business by creating meaningful relationships with other talented people.  So I began to build up my network.

What I did to increase my followers isn’t really a secret; thousands of people do this every day.  I followed people in the hope that they would reciprocate back.  If they didn’t follow me back within a few days, I dropped them.  I followed almost everyone back who followed me so they wouldn’t go away.  I started getting more followers slowly and in a short amount of time I was gaining hundreds of followers every day.

As my number of followers grew, so did the amount of people I was following.  Tweetdeck is my preferred Twitter app, but even with sorting people into several groups it became difficult to keep up with everything that was going on.  Soon it became impossible to track what people were saying.

Eventually, I had amassed a following of nearly 25,000 people and I was following back nearly as many.  I use the term “following” liberally as it was pretty safe to say that I didn’t have a clue what was going on with most people, just the ones who were placed into separate Tweetdeck columns.  About that time I stopped building my followers because it had only become a numbers game at that point.

By then, I had already noticed that I wasn’t able to drive any significant amount of traffic to any website with the following I had amassed.  I did the math and figured that anytime I pushed a link to one of my sites it had a click-through rate of 0.05% or less.  That equates to less than 1 person out of every 3,000 followers.

I can safely assume this stems from one or both of the following: I am an extremely uninteresting person (possibly) or my Twitter network was as uninterested in me as I was with them (very likely).  In my quest to build a huge network I ignored common sense and chased the numbers.

In the end, my Twitter account resulted in me having a network of thousands of people with whom I never shared one word.  And my timeline was littered with things I was not interested in (tooth whitening, get-rich-quick schemes, etc).  It was a mess, and I took a drastic measure and started fresh.

I took a few things from this experience that I am going to apply to my newly restarted Twitter account and that is to limit the amount of people that I follow to a manageable level and focus more on connecting with those in my network.

How is your Twitter experience been for you?  Have you done anything like I have that you regretted later?

Tagged as: Twitter