How to Kill it on Twitter, 1: Clean is Best

Doing Twitter right is a complicated thing. I can make it easier. . . a lot easier. I can't make it automatic. At least, I can't if we want to stay on Twitter's good side. 

And, yes, we want to stay on Twitter's good side.

Many account growth strategies are now active on what used to be The Web-App-With-No-Name(yet), now myTweetPack.com. People are asking for a rundown. 

In effect, they're saying, "Okay! That's waay cool! Now what?

NOTE: Since this post was first written, we made some changes. Thanks to a suggestion by Lynda Spiegel, we added a EZ-ToDo LIst and an EZ Shortcuts button to a Quick LInks bar. It's right on the dashboard and handles much of this.
Paul

Here's what. . . 

When you click the Account GRRowth button on your Dashboard, you go here. Yes, all pages are responsive so you can do this stuff on your phone.

The first time

The first time you access this page, you'll only see the Growth Settings button. 

That's normal. The App needs to know what you want it to do before it can do it.

We'll get to that in a bit.

The first thing to do

Hit that blue button up top that says, "Refresh ALL Relationships". (UPDATE: Now on EZ ToDo) I suggest you do this at least once a day from now on. It doesn't hurt to do it a few times a day, either.  

Be patient. 

All you do is click a button. The App does a whole lot more. 

It takes your linked accounts one at a time. It goes to the Twittersphere. It yanks down everyone who follows that account and everyone that account follows. 

It does that in real-time. 

It then compares the two lists to see who you follow but isn't following you back.

That can take a while for big accounts or if you have many linked accounts. 

It takes about 21 seconds to process these accounts. It can take a lot longer. I click and go pour a coffee.

Glacial, I know. But, it can't be helped.

UPDATE: Since this was written, many very big accounts signed up. This way of doing things doesn't work for anyone with more than 75000 followers. That's a Twitter issue, not a myTweetPack issue. Twitter only allows us to pull a maximum 75,000 people in any 15-minute period. Let's call it 60,000 for a margin of safety. One new account had 1.7million! 
We needed a new way to handle those big accounts.We found one. To you, it looks exactly the same, just click Refresh Relationships. Any account over 50,000 followers or following is automatically pulled to a different queue. There, it's processed in a different manner. Going forward, it is ignored from the Refresh All Relationships button.Paul

When it's done doing its thing, you'll end up here. UPDATE: Not anymore. People just clicked through quickly. This screen was abolished. The functionality was moved to the EZ ToDo List

The orange text is a list of account stats for when you refreshed your relationships the first time. The black text is for right now. Of course, if this is your first time, they'll be the same.

Note that the not following back number is for everyone who is not following you back. You may have started following them a minute ago. It's still early to unfollow them. Or, they may be on your Whitelist and you don't want to unfollow them ever. 

Either way, the system knows that. 

There are over 2000 people my accounts follow, but do not follow back. Yet, according to the portal, there are only 108 who qualify for unfollowing.

Click the Return to Previous Page button

Important Note: The system cannot tell when you actually started following someone or when they started following you. It only knows when that person was first entered in your lists. The first time you refresh your stats will be the date/time of record for all follows and following, regardless of when that follow actually happened.

For example, John White and I started following each other when I started on Twitter in May of 2015. In fact, I think John was the first person I followed. He was nice enough to follow back a complete newb. 

As far as the system is concerned, we started following each other a couple of weeks ago. 

That means you won't see any qualified unfollow candidates until your grace period has expired. 

That's a good segue to . . . 

Setting your Growth preferences

When you click the Growth Preferences button from the portal you'll see this.

That's why all my accounts have 3 days set.

Why this is important: Do the math. If I follow 700 people a day, I will have followed 3500 in 5 days before I even start cutting any out. My account is probably big enough to survive that many extra following. 

Most aren't.

Besides, we're looking for active users who are interested in our stuff. Is five days "active" enough? 

I think not.

UPDATE: Just because you can follow 700 people a day does not mean you should. The big maximum is more for really big accounts. I have 20,000 followers now and follow 200 people a day for a week. Then I take 2 days off from following. Rinse and repeat.
Paul

Why we limit the number of following: Again, do the math. RockSmallBiz is a new account. It only has a few dozen followers. One of the big red flags against following someone is when they follow far more people than follow them. 

Imagine what would happen if I set RockSmallBiz to follow 700 people a day! If the grace period was 3 days, I would follow 2100 people before culling any. Set the grace period to 5 days, and it would be 3500! 

Heck, even I wouldn't follow me!

As an aside, Arabic-speakers reading this may want to giggle at the name RockSmallBiz. Go ahead. 

It's funny in Arabic.

A few strategy tips (IMHO)

• Keep your grace period at either two or three days. I like three.
• It's a great idea to clean your accounts before you start any structured following program. Cull them now. Build them up a little bit later.
  
• Unless your account is brand-spanking new, try to make it so your account will never follow more than 3-4X the number of people who follow it. 
• If it is brand-spanking new, set your max follows to between 100 and 200 with a 3-day grace period.

No-Man's Land

Because of Twitter's maximum follow rules, account growth runs smack into a brick wall at about 4500 followers. You're allowed to follow 1000 people a day in general. But, your total number followed is 5000 or about 110% of your follower count. 

That causes issues.

It doesn't get very much better until you cross 14,000 followers. Sorry, Those are Twitter rules, not mine. The good news is that with this app it shouldn't take very long.

You'll need to be more hands-on. You don't want to piss Twitter off.

• Process your unfollows every single day. You're working with severely limited resources. Don't waste any.
• When you cross 4000 followers, drop your grace period to 2 days. Drop your max follows to 200. Don't schedule more than a week's worth of follows at a time.
• When you cross 6000 followers, raise your max follows to 300. Keep everything else the same. Start scheduling a few weeks' worth of follows at a time if you like.
• When you cross 8000 followers, raise your max follows to 400.  Keep everything else the same. 
  
• When you cross 10,000 followers, raise your max follows to 500.  Keep everything else the same.  You can start scheduling a month's follows at a time.
  
• When you cross 14,000 followers, raise the max follows to 700.  Keep everything else the same.
• When you cross 16,000 followers, raise the grace period to 3 days. Schedule as many future follows as you like.

Whitelists

Everyone has some accounts they want to continue following even if those accounts don't follow them back. Many automated systems will unfollow them anyway. That's just rude. Whitelists fix that.

Creating your whitelist is easy. Just click the Manage WhiteList button and go from there. 

UPDATE: Since this was written, we added Live Chat function to both the Members' and the Public area. If I'm at my computer, I'm usually the one behind the Chat screen. Help is always just a click away. myTweetPack.com started as a little web-app. Now it's a beast cloud-based software. No one, myself include, uses all 72 (so far) functions. Soon most of you will be using one function, member or not. Reach out anytime I'm online. I don't bite. . . much.
Paul

Your Action Plan

The first order of business is to clean out your account. You need to get rid of all those people you followed but who haven't followed you back. 

The safe way is to keep hitting the Refresh All Relationships button every day until you see a number next to the Process Them ALL button. 

Then hit that button.

The riskier way is to  set your grace period to 1 day. Run the account refresh today. Click Process Them All tomorrow. Set yourself a reminder to change your grace period to something reasonable after you click that button. 

You know yourself. If you doubt your capacity to remember to change the grace period, don't do this. If you leave it as is, people will think you're a dick.

Important Note: The system will unfollow up to 720 people a day per account. I suggest you don't start any structured follow program until your accounts are clean. So, if the system says you have 1400 accounts not following back (ex), don't do anything follow-wise for two days.

Follows and unfollows are scheduled. Don't worry about scheduling an unfollow now and they follow-back between now and the scheduled unfollow time. The system does a final check before pulling the trigger.

We'll get to follow strategies next time. (UPDATE: Did I ever write that part?)

Cheers