I conducted an informal survey the other day on twitter about what people think about auto DM’s.

As some of you may know I have multiple twitter accounts two of which are @chadengle and @DCTH.

What having multiple twitter accounts has made me able to do is to discover new things that I would not have been able to if I only had one. For example: my personal account (@chadengle) I follow people based on RT’s and connectivity (do you chat with me etc.).

On the Design Community Twitter Account (if you don’t know what DCTH is check out #DCTH. I am following any and all designers/creatives. This has enabled me to see what mass and mass amounts of people use Auto DM’s. I personally hate them, canned responses that say “Hey thanks for the follow here is a lame plug for my website so I can get more traffic. www.lametwittermarketing.com”. Lame right? On my personal account I would unfollow without hesitating. But on DCTH I am just letting it fly. I polled my twitter followers the other day about what their thoughts were on Auto DM’s here were their responses.

@chadengle: QUESTION: Do you think that personalized DM upon follow is annoying?

@nickwichman: nope, if its for reals and meaningful, its cool. automated = lame-o + 1.

@chaseswindler: A personalized one is nice, not a canned response. Now if it’s a canned response I get pissed.

@kristofcreative: Re: personalized DM. Only annoying if it’s a canned DM or pitching a product/service. If it’s sincere, it’s cool.

@cdharrison: If you’re going to send someone something, just @ them. A DM gives the impression it’s potentially automated, IMO.

@andrew_cohen: Personalized? no. Automated, yes.

@moritzangermann: Ohh yes. I’m if someone sends me a DM the likelihood I will unfollow him is very high.

@mckelvaney: It can be, if it has any kind of boiler plate text in it.

@visualrhetor: If it seems genuine, I don’t find it annoying.

@mrrichardson: I would say personalized DMs are good. Automated not so much.

bellmas: No, just don’t sub a name in a canned response. If you make the time to DM make the time to briefly vet the person you’re DMing.

@robbmajor: just my opinion, but I think DMs thanking me for following, thanking me for RT, thanking me for a #followfriday are unnecessary

@CardinalPtREVA: Personalized DM not annoying. Prefer public convo BUT don’t think u should judge how someone uses Twitter – not 1 size fits all.

Ok, so as fate has it Auto “canned”, one size fit all DM’s are not the best method for twitter. Most people will tolerate them if they appear to be genuine and original per each user. So then ehy oh why do so many people use them? For that I am unsure. I am hoping that lame twitter marketing somehow educates these people and makes it easier for people to learn the correct way to use twitter.

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Be sure to read “Drop Your AutoDM’rs Day“

There once was a little bird named Twitter. A social butterfly who, one day, decided to share their sweet tweets with the world.

It was a magical time of coding, and building, and fixing, and growing. Soon, there were thousands new little tweeters joining their wonderfully engaging community each and every day.

Even with only 140 teeny tiny characters to express their lives, their passions, their dreams, and even their secrets, they shared with each other — and shared well. So well, that many would re-tweet the songs of others and following’s blossomed. Follower’s who helped one another when it was needed and interjected opposing tweets when it was also needed.

Life in the world of Twitter was grand. The grass was green, the skies were blue, and finger tips were pink from pecking.

It has been a fabulously exciting year and Michael Kristof (@kristofcreative) and Chad Engle (@ChadEngle) of Lame Twitter Marketing wish to bestow upon Twitter their gratitude and best wishes for the holiday’s and for many prosperous years ahead.

Thank you Twitter!

One of the first things you probably noticed when joining Twitter is the number of followers people have. And those numbers can be really large. The top current Twitter user has 80,000+ followers (we won’t count Barack Obama’s 151,000 follower’s). See full list of top 100 Twitters.

Although the core premise behind Twitter is about interaction between people — building a community and relationships, many people place a huge emphasis on the number of followers they have.

To many, the number of followers designates their popularity — their social standing in the the Twitter community. And for the most part, this is true.

People Like Being Followed

People like being “followed” by other people using Twitter. Part can be attributed to the ego boost from being popular and part to the opportunity to connect with others. And if you’re a business marketer, this can also mean a huge boost in revenue. For example, Dell made $1 million dollars last year from tweeting special offers to their followers.

That said, it’s important to remember; it’s not just about the number’s. It’s about engagement.

Who’s Engaging With You?

Now ask yourself the following questions and make a list of Twitter user names for each.

• How many Twitters do you engage with on a regular basis?
• How many actively engage with you?
  • How many followers actively respond to your questions or requests for help?
  • How many followers ReTweet (RT) your tweets?
  • How many followers actually click on the links you’ve included in your tweets?
  • How many followers Direct Message (DM) you (outside of auto messages from following them)?
  • How many followers simply say “thank you” when you help them and/or promote their tweets?

Now, make a list containing all the followers you listed above and you’ll have a pretty good idea of the number of actual quality people who are following you.

Don’t be surprised if that number is small.

The truth is, there are only so many people you can follow and actively interact with. Think about it. Outside of any other communication, do you think a popular Twitter user such as @problogger (who currently has 22,113 followers and is following 5,283 people) can actively engage and build a relationships with 5,283 people? If he can, I really want to know his secret. In reality, he probably interacts with a couple dozen on a regular basis. Otherwise, he’d need to tweet once every 16 seconds in order to cover every person he follows.

I’m not saying that following a bunch of people is bad. Only that there is only so much time in the day.

Remember, the majority of people following you are doing so because they’re more interested in what they can learn from you rather than wanting to become your “friend”. But that also isn’t a bad thing because people follow people with common interests.

So it comes down to this; Quality vs. Quantity.

When Quantity is Bad

If you’re looking to build quantity, you can simply follow everyone. Then a percentage of those you’ve followed will automatically follow you back and your follower count will increase. Heck, you can use a script to automatically do this for you and you can have a couple thousand followers in no time. But why?

The majority of twitters using scripts to follow others are spammers pitching their products and services. To them, it’s a numbers game. The more people they follow, more follow back, and then the spammer can auto DM new followers a sales message and website link. And I don’t know of anyone who like receiving that kind of crude.

To quote what has already been said by @acclimedia,

“Sure, you can play the numbers game successfully but quality suffers. I’d prefer 10 substantive relationships over 1k empty ones.” (tweet)

Now, you may not care if a bunch of spammers follow you. I mean, they’re not really hurting you, right? Wrong.

Although spammers may not directly affect what you see, they do affect what potential followers see.

I, for one, look at the profiles of those who are following me, and in turn, who is following them. I do this in order to gauge whether I want to follow them back. If I see they have what appears to be a bunch of spammers following them, I have to seriously consider why they didn’t block the spammer. If I have to think about it, I generally won’t follow back. Now, that isn’t the only factor I take into consideration, but it is one of them.

Which brings me back to Twitter and their commendable efforts to create a tighter and higher quality community.

Cleaning House

Twitter is currently in progress of “cleaning house” by implementing a spam list removal protocol which will remove of old, non-used (read dormant) accounts and those they have marked as spammers. This quote from their blog;

we’ll be releasing a change later this afternoon that will start removing deleted and suspended users from your list of followers. As this hasn’t been cleaned up previously, you may notice your follower counts go down. This is to be expected.

I don’t know how often this will happen but I hope it’s at least a few times a year, if not on an on-going basis.

As this happens, you will be losing followers. And as numbers work, the more followers you have, the more you can expect to lose.

Good for you. Good for all!

For example, @pistachio lost 365 followers in one day. That’s a pretty big number, but still relatively small considering she has 12,293 followers as of this writing. For another quick example, @christinelu lost 269 followers.

This loss means you will now have a more focused group of followers you can engage with and will hopefully engage with you.

As an added bonus, if you happen to like Twitter rating sites like Twiiter Grader, that loss will actually improve your score.

In conclusion, if you’re jumping into the Twitter community looking to build huge numbers, you can easily do that through some sleazy and unscrupulous methods. But in the end, people will unfollow you and you’ll be back to square one.

On the other hand, if you want to build a base of quality followers and relationships, then simply tweet quality information and people will find you — and follow you.

Additional Articles on Quality v. Quanity

• There’s Too Many ‘Me, Me, Me’s in ‘Follow Me’
• Quality or Quantity. What SMM Strategy Do You Use?

Stay tuned as we’ll be posting information about Twitter Best Practices for following here on Lame Twitter Marketing.

In the meantime, I’d like to hear your thoughts on the subject. How many followers have you lost from Twitter’s spam protocol? Do you think it’s helped you, or perhaps hurt you?