Sharing is Caring: Reblog Vs. Retweets Continued.

I'm happy to see some one else has picked up on the discussion we've been having on this blog about DM's for the last week. Since sharing is caring, here's the discussion:    

Thanks to everyone for all the awesome comments this week,

Jordan. 

 

Posted via email from Jordan Keats is Pre-Posterous

Thanks to 30 Friends For Proving Me Wrong: Reblogs Vs. Retweets Part 2

This post is to give credit to those who took the time to retweet Wednesday's post. It made it to thirty. My faith in Twitter is restored. These are the generous people (accounts & businesses) who helped me spread the message to 183,466 accounts, equivalent to more than half the population of the Greater Victoria:

1.  @SharonHayes
2.  @weretwt 
3.  @jodie_nodes
4.  @dobronski
5.  @kevwrites
6.  @RussLoL
7.  @gletham
8.  @hittofit
9.  @SeattleWushu
10.  @TeresaSims
11.  @RandoRay
12.  @mikevardy
13.  @thezonedotfm
14.  @toots11
15.  @LegendarySucker
16.  @TheCaskAndKeg
17.  @SocialSideMedia
18.  @davidmaguire
19.  @TweetTipsTools
20.  @anthonymarco
21.  @RajinderYadav
22.  @colmanfink
23.  @LinleyJena 
24.  @lacouvee
25.  @alleyjack
26.  @emilykeats 
27.  @LCTKD 
28.  @AnaLuciaNovak
29.  @brandscaping
30. @thefreeradicals

What did we learn?

Twitter is a like a badass radio station. Everyone's got their own channel and broadcasts whatever they want. The problem is the noise. We get so caught up with being the DJ we forget to take requests. Not every Dj can take every request, but some it makes the audience feel engaged if you take at least the good ones.

Of course a few people refused my request, but the majority of people who I asked did. For the last year and a half, I've been making an effort to help, promote, or collaborate with a lot of the people on this list.Take @RajinderYadav as an example. He was looking for information about toning his belly muscle, so I put him in touch with a fitness trainer friend @narinaanne. He was grateful for the hook up, so he helped me out. Otherwise, if I hadn't direct messaged my contacts that post would have gone unnoticed.

The people who were most likely to retweet were people who I reweet, talk to regularly, or share content for their specific consumption.

It may not be good for your mental health to pour our BackType analytics, but it is so easy to see who has done what with your link.  Only one third of the retweets of the link were unsolicited, meaning not asked through a direct mention (DM), and five of those ten retweets were from business accounts. When these businesses mentioned this post, I thanked them in my Twitter feed. Having businesses push my material on Twitter is a sneaky way to get noticed in the public timeline. Instead of paying Kim Kardashin an obscene amout of money for a sponsored tweet, it might be a smart business move to go another route and retweet.

You reward someone for their hard work, and you get mentions in return.

As of today, I have yet to get a like or reblog on my Tumblr account, but who knows what will happen with that post in due time.

If you are looking for a list of people who make Twitter an awesome Social Network: look no further than the list above. Follow Them. My sincerest thanks for taking the time to click the Retweet button; I hope no one got hurt in the process.

     These six songs go out to those who helped me reach my goal,

"Friends" - Flight of the Conchords

"Friends"- Ween

"Friends" - Whodini

"Deep Fried Frenz" - MF Doom

Jurassic 5 feat. Mya - Thin Line "A Lesson in Friendship"

Dionne Warwick & 'Friends'

Thanks to @scwink for that one.

Thank You All For Sharing & Playing Along,

Jordan

Posted via email from jordankeats's posterous

Reblogs Vs. Retweets

Kicking it with a few friends the other day, my pal Tim asked, "What's the big deal about Tumblr?". Tim (@Howlabit) is a regular Twitter user, who tweets about Scotch, and the aesthetics of the ladies who serve it, but he has yet to try Tumblr as an alternative micro-blogging platform. I've managed to break my obsession with my Tumblog, but I'd been a regular poster for the majority of last year, so I tried to explain the difference to him.

I'm no Tumblr Celebrity, like Julia Segal or Bohemea. The majority of my meagre four hundred posts consists of reblogged photos of: the Beatles, SelleckWaterfallSandwich, and Zooey Deschanel. I even forgot about my account for a couple of months.  When I checked into my dashboard the other day, this is what I saw:
Thirty people reblogged a Rob Sato photo I found online after seeing one of his shows in the gallery at the Giant Robot store in San Francisco.  Big deal, right? Thirty reblogs.  Many Tumblr Celebrities expect three hundred reblogs per post. However, I'm humbly surprised that one of my posts was reblogged more than the amount of people who follow my Tumblr account, and happy I could share Sato's awesome art with some folks who may not have heard of him before.

Recently, my Twitter account surpassed one thousand followers:

Again, big deal. Paul Pierce's account has over 1.6 million followers (more than three times the population of Boston), and he only follows twenty seven accounts back. Still, for me one thousand followers is a considerable Twitter milestone, and a significant audience to share with. However, with Twitter's amassing audience I've begun to doubt the hype of the "million person reaching" retweet. With the recent changes to the Twitter interface, retweets have been removed from your @mentions, and quarantined in their own tab. Combined with a new option to block retweets from specific users, and the option to turn off RTs completly with Hootsuite, the dream of having one tweet "go viral" is over.             

In less than six hours, or one profile screen length without scrolling, a tweet from an account the size of mine has been lost in the noise. Unless one of the big time Twitter celebrities, like @jianghomeshi or @sharonhayes, sees your tweet, and retweets it - the only person who will read it is the archivist at the US Library of Congress (Lucky them!). Perhaps this is one of the reasons Jon Mayer quit Twitter for Tumblr? 

Here are a few solutions to maximize your reach with Twitter Retweets:

1: Automate - Scheduling a few tweets with a third party service, like Hootsuite or (my favorite) Posterous, can help you reach different time zones, which can be helpful for those of us who live on the Pacific side of the continent. Change your text a little, space your second tweet more than six hours apart, and some bloke will be reading your article at Tea Time in London, UK, (or Ontario). Be careful though, this tactic can make you seem disingenuous if someone asks a question or sends you feedback through an @mention, and you take twelve hours to respond, or look like a spammer if you repeat the same tired blog post every hour for twelve hours.

2: Don't Expect - If you send an @mention to someone you mention in a blog post don't expect them to reply, but don't be surprised if they do. One of the most awesome parts about Twitter is it's ability to connect producers with people, and @mentions are faster to respond to than emails.

3: Leverage Influencers - Each tweet is assigned a unique URL, DM that puppy to someone who you know will Retweet you. Again, don't be a spammer and attempt this trick with every one of your boring tweets, but if you have something of value for the person you are sending to then hop to it, with respect. For more information on identifying influencers read Gary Lee from mBlast's: The Hype Over Influencers

For more information on Retweeting check out Ben Parr's How To: ReTweet on Twitter
& the update by Josh Catone:  How To: Use The New Retweet Feature

Thanks for Reading, Reblogging and Retweeting: I'd love to be proven wrong!

Jordan

Posted via email from jordankeats's posterous