Recently I found many posts about twitter autoresponders. Many people treating Twitter autoresponders as spam and unfollow these users.
Here is what they say:
· You look spammy.
· Now I can't trust you.
· I don't want to visit you on another site. I'm on twitter. Here. Twitter.
I'm intent to disagree with such statements, as it depends who set this autoresponder and what he says. The idea of Twitter as mini-blog proved itself and become very popular. It started when people really followed other people based on their personal interest. If you start follow some celebrity and you will receive auto responder from him, would you treat it as spam? Most likely not.
Why? Because you know who is on other side.
How many other people we can follow? 10's? 100s? 1000s?
I think naturally you will not follow more than 100 people. Following 100 people is full time job. If you asking what is my point? My point is if Twitter user follows thousands other users, means this is not regular person, but actually someone doing business. Most likely autoresponse from someone who is following thousands is spam or kind of promotional message.
I introduced 2 new measurements to rank Twitter users based on followers and following numbers:
TFF - Twitter Following/Followers ratio = Following/(Followers+0.1)
TPR - Twitter Popularity Rank = 1/(TFF+0.1)
Here is example of Google twitter user: http://twitter.com/google
Following: 223
Followers: 2,125,435
From my opinion, these numbers are logical.
When I see twitter users following thousands, to me it not sounds logical. How can you manage all these tweets?
There are many online services now offered, to get thousands of followers, but main idea behind is you follow someone and he will follow you back. You can easily identify such users.
For example: Following=3125 Followers=3023 - this user is too much socialized.
Below I show examples of different types of users and calculated TFF and TPR indexes:
|
Twitter User |
Following |
Followers |
TPR |
TFF Ration |
|
223 |
2125435 |
9.99 |
0.0001 |
|
| Someone1 |
3123 |
2125 |
0.64 |
1.46958 |
| New user |
10 |
0 |
0.01 |
100 |
| Someone2 |
2125 |
3123 |
1.28 |
0.68041 |
| Regular user |
80 |
10 |
0.12 |
7.92079 |
| Celebrity |
0 |
1222034 |
10 |
0 |
The lower TFF, is better. Meaning you have much more followers compared to number of users you are following. In this example TFF is almost 0 for Celebrity and Google which means the proportion of following and followers and big. At the same time Someone1 and Someone2 have very close numbers of people they following and number of people following them. In this case TFF is close to 1. Users with such ratio and very big number of people they are following, most likely are trying to promote their twitter users. I personally would not follow such users.
The TPR index shows how popular you are, where 10 is the maximum popularity (similar to Google PageRank). Again in our examples, for Google and for Celebrity, the TPR is almost 10, meaning they are popular Twitter users.
Bottom line, if I will receive autoresponder message from Twitter user with high TPR and low TFF, I will be OK with that. In addition I will follow such users, and not ones with low TPR and high TFF. In this case I will not receive any autoresponder message from these users. Don't treat autoresponders as spam, but instead think twice before you follow someone.
Autoresponders, in fact, can be helpful and beneficial to both sides. When you create autoreponder message, try to cover 2 things:
1) Show you are care about them
2) Let them to learn more about you
It is not easy task to cover these 2 things in 140 characters.
Don't start promoting your business or services in autoresponder message. This looks as spam. Give a chance to your followers to learn about you, and post your tweets to share your services.