Personally I can’t wait for the spammers to tire of Twitter. It is most annoying looking at tweets that have a link and a bunch of usernames…and nothing else of value to anyone at all. Do these users really think people are that gullible? That we actually hit any of these links?

I don’t click any of these links, not even out of sheer curiosity. What do I hit though is “unfollow”.

Even worse are the followers listed under one person as many, but in reality it is the same person and even the username is the same except for some numbers attached (ie Spammer16, Spammer25, Spammer32)

Having spent a bit of time lately finding connections for my clients I was shocked at the changes I see on Twitter now compared to 6 or 8 months ago. I see usernames that are almost duplicates of each other but with a different number added to each, and lots of them. One person’s follower list I was on the other day had more than two pages of the same person. That’s more than 40 followers in their numbers but in reality it is one person. That’s a real valuable connection to have – Not!

My recommendation to anyone looking to make useful and purposeful connections on social media is to ignore all these people and tweets. Don’t click any links and unfollow them.

The fewer people they are connected to the more of a waste of time they will incur. It does take time for these users to create the tweets and profiles they do – if that investment does not pay off they will move on to another venue to try ‘hocking their wares”.

Eventually they will get the message – keeping the twitterverse clear for the rest of us who get a benefit from it whether personal or business related.

Technorati Tags: quality, Social Media, virtual assistant

I have kind of experimented somewhat with Twitter these past few months when I opened a second profile.

When I started @timeontaskva I built my following one by one, picking people I wanted to be connected with and following them back if I made the choice.  Nothing automated about it.

With @mytwitrva I started it off with some followers and then sent it on its merry way with some automated systems for following.

The results are most interesting…

The profile I built by hand has more followers that have value to me, ones I enjoy connecting with. The more automated profile is building up contacts that seem to have tweets/updates that don’t do much for me.  Oh, there are contacts there that I do value, but the majority seem to publish updates such as: Make Money online guaranteed or Quickly grow your Twitter following go here …

The scary part is a few of these (not these two above) I recognized from having helped clients fix up some spamming and hacking issues with their twitter accounts. Each time, my clients had signed up and entered their twitter username and password to the systems promising lots of followers. Soon after, some funky stuff started happening with their accounts – spam posts/updates were published from their twitter accounts. In one case the account was suspended. Not good.

I keep cleaning out the second account so that it will give me connections I would prefer, but that takes more time and eventually I will have to spend even more time and energy to make the contacts I wanted in the first place.

Lesson learned from this is an age old one: Quality vs Quantity.

You can certainly build up quantity and have quality; but only if you seek out quality while doing so. Many of these promises and guarantees may not bring you the value you are looking for, not that I am saying they are all bad .

A little something to keep in mind as you go about “Building your Tribe”.

Technorati Tags: contacts, quality, Twitter, virtual assistant