Is TweetBaiting Right?
May 12th, 2008. Published under General. No Comments.
First of all I am going to start with the fact that for people wanting to get their name out, Twitter is the latest way to comminicate with customers, friends, fans or whatever you call your followers.
The people with the long lists of followers have one distinct advantage over those of us just starting their carear in the web world…
They have alot more places to expose their twitter url! Take Diggnation for instance. They get 500,000 odd downloads a week and in the last 2 episodes Alex Albrecht has asked for people to start following him in return for a 1 in 20,000 chance of winning an xbox 360. That is because he is giving it away to one of his followers once he reaches 20,000. So they already have a fan base that a number of viewers will do what they ask. I started following Alex! But before the xbox giveaway was announced.
At the moment I have 5 followers, generally because I am a bit further ahead than all my friends who are just lagging behind.
But these big users now have another marketing angle. I have Twhirl on whenever this laptop is on and there are tweets coming in atleast once every 10mins. About 70% of these have links in them to a project, site or blog post that the sender has written or involved with. One technology blog in particular that uses TwitterFeed to send a Tweet every thim a new technology post is crunched (oops!).
But if I could do that I would be well away! I have 5+ sites I run and having a good basis where I could inform users about new projects they might be interested in would be great for marketing, even if its hardcore fans of the project as these people are the ones who help with beta testing etc.
Now for me being a lowly web developer I want to increase my Twitter presence and the newest phrase to come out to help us is “TweetBaiting”.
My view on this phrase is to contact or @ reply to a big name with something that will get them to reply to you, in the hope that their followers will look at the tweet and look into the tweeter more and possibly follow them. They could get their attention in many ways including complimenting, suggestions and the worst one being insulting them. Now if you put this into a real world situation…
I am walking down the road and spot Kevin Rose with fans following him around, I suddenly stand infront of him and say that “Pownce is a piece of shit Twitter wanna be” (I of course think Pownce is cool and think you should friend me up pownce.com/olliedude2k!). Then his followers would see what I was doing and follow me? Not sure that would be the case. I don’t just think it is not effective, but I think that insulting someone to get their followers to look at you is wrong. I know it’s not the only way of TweetBaiting but I still feel the whole concept of tweet baiting wrong. If you offer a good enough service the followers will come!
What do you think? Is what I have just written a load oh shit or do you agree with me?
Ollie
PS if you want to shorten your URLs for tools such as Twitter check out Litturl