Great post at DotCult: Having 1000 Twitter Followers Doesn’t Make You a Social Media Guru

The core of the argument:

Engagement is what matters. How many of your followers actually reply to you? How many of them comment on your posts? What percentage click on links that you tweet? Go ahead and ask your social media person – I bet they don’t have any answers for you.

On a related side note, I’ve recently had a twitter epiphany. My former strategy was to follow people back and just ignore them, using tweetdeck lists to pay attention to those I deem worthy, while maybe occasionally skimming those not on a list, as explained here.

This was a horrible strategy. Not only was a promoting/helping spam-bots that were auto-following anyone and everyone, but it made the web feed (and more importantly, mobile phone feed) less useful. Even with the new lists feature, I was getting a lot of noise.

In the past week, I’ve unfollowed over 400 people. I’m now following less than 800, and plan to keep defollowing people as I see noise in my twitter feed. I’ve also lost ~100 or so followers, and I expect that number to keep dropping as I unfollow people – I’m guessing their software can detect when they’re not being followed back, or they’re using a service like friendorfollow (awesome, btw) to determine who isn’t following them back anymore.

Here are some other posts on “Social Media Experts” – as ranting about social media has been a consistent theme in this blog

• The Social Media Guru (Video): http://nickroshon.com/just-for-fun/viral-video-friday-part-deux-the-social-media-guru
• Social Media Experts are Really Only Experts at Cliche
• And my favorite post by Ian Lurie of Conversation Marketing: 10 Questions to Evaluate a Social Media Expert

Have a nice weekend!

• Educate Your Team on Search Friendly Web Design – Part of the “Designing for Visiblity” series, giving tips on how to successful design (or re-design) your website to be successful in search, and how to engage your web design team in Search Marketing education.
• Tips for Using Google to Search for Twitter Related Results – Some advice and pointers to find relevant tweets and twitter related results through Google’s search engine.
• Is Google Suddenly Addicted to Speed? – A post overviewing Google’s recent discussion around the importance of page load speed, and why webmasters should take a look at their pages and try to make them load quicker (I’m a hypocrite here, as NicksCarBlog is horrendously slow…I just haven’t had time!)
• Google’s Proposal for Crawling AJAX: A post discussing Google’s adoption of a new protocol to crawl and index AJAX websites, and what websites should or should not implement it.

So, if you’re looking for some fun SEO related reading, I suggest you go check out http://greatfinds.icrossing.com or add the RSS feed to your preferred Reader. And as always, I’m tweeting away at @nickroshon as well