Quantity vs Quality for Twitter

Posted on March 6, 2013 by admin

Over the past 4 years of testing and building twitter programs the same question  comes up. What is better quantity of twitter followers or quality. Our first Hummingbird program focused on quantity of followers in building your twitter accounts. Back then we could easily follow a thousand people a day and twitter was just starting so quantity was easily the winner.

Today twitter has restricted its use though so the question is not as easy to answer. Lets go through the challenges then and see what you come up with.

#1. Twitter has restricted the amount of people you can follow per day and monitors it closer than before. This could lead one to think that quality is more important than quantity. If we only take this point into consideration we would still have a debate.

#2. Twitter monitors account building closer than they used to and have set up automated systems to look for Excessive Churn. Excessive churn on twitter is aggressive following and unfollowing of your tweeps. When building accounts we are safer when the people that we follow will return with a follow-back so it becomes mutual. If they do not follow us back then a couple things happen.

a) Our ratio of following to followers will grow and eventually we will be unable to follow more.
b) We unfollow people we are following to allow us to follow other people. This is what most automated programs do and also what Twitter looks for with churn.

What this means for us is that we want to avoid unfollowing people whenever possible to prevent putting our accounts at risk when building them.

#3. Our purpose of using Twitter is basically to get the links and word out to as many people as possible. This also includes the tweeps of our tweeps and every page we can. So if we think that quality is better here you are wrong. Quantity is our objective when it comes to viral tweets not quality of the people following us.

#4. What if we take a look at clicks or building traffic to my site This has to be quality of tweeps right? Not really it appears that again it is a percentage game and the way to increase percentage is to increase the numbers not to increase the quality. You day and time is limited and after spending 10 hours a day working a test account and grooming the account I found that there was no difference in my clicks or site stats. Instead I spent more time and actually put my SEO at a standstill. That’s right your tweeps and tweets can assist in your page rank and SEO as well. As of the end of 2012 Twitter was number 5 in page rank influences for Google. So quantity will again help instead of quality of followers.

#5. Time invested is a big detail in this comparison as well. If I can increase my followers by 100 per day and not have to invest over 10 minutes a day doing it then is it worthy of my time. This is also a reason that people look for automation these days. The challenge is if the automation is too automated or if the logic of the automation provides you poor results. Twitter is a business tool and like most business tools you have to work it and not simply put it on automation. This is why over the years we got rid of our total automation platform to go back to the basics. Lets build accounts and allow people then to work them.

If you look at these points you might find that quantity is the winner of quality even today when building your twitter accounts. Keyword following is a scam that allows marketers to simply be put into their own little networks. It is a good thing as well because it allows real marketers to market to the people that will buy their products and not marketing to the same people selling the same thing. It also helps us to keep affiliate marketers that are doing nothing but spamming the system to isolate themselves and frees up twitter for professionals.

Even today Twitter provides many benefits and for marketers and people that own websites it is even more valuable today. If you are looking for the quick money and hoping to make a twitter killing then you might be disappointed though. If you are looking to build your reputation, and business you are on the right track.

Doc Magi

#1 Twitter Program for building Accounts

Hummingbird Redux

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Hummingbird II Tip

Posted on February 14, 2013 by admin

Hummingbird Redux or as our old time family calls it Hummingbird2 is built on Internet Explorer. Over the years we have tested many different types of build and platforms. Internet Explorer seems to be improving and now might even be better than Firefox.

There are a few things though that you want to make sure you do with Internet Explorer settings. As you are aware a browser no matter what browser you use will collect temporary files. They do this for a lot of different reasons when they build the browsers. One being that it appears to load the pages faster. There are some challenges with temporary files. They can bog down your system and slow down your browser and computer. They can also prevent you from reaching your destination at times if the browser is set up wrong.

Open up your Internet Explorer and click on tools then internet options that is at the bottom of the list. On the screen that pops up I recommend that you check Delete Browsing History on exit. This will allow you to delete all the temporary files when you close your Hummingbird Application. Click on Apply to make the setting stick. Then click on Settings on the same window and check every time I visit the webpage. This will force Internet Explorer  and Hummingbird to actually download the page and not go from the temporary files. Just to be safe change your disc space to 1024 which is the max as well just in case you start to get memory errors while using Hummingbird on Twitter. Remember that each page that Hummingbird goes through will be included in your temporary files till you either close down the program or manually delete the files. This is why I suggest you make these setting changes.

Have a fantastic and productive week and we are working on some improvements to the program.

Doc Magi
cropped-hblogosmall.jpg

 

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Hummingbird Supports Camp Country Jamboree

Posted on October 27, 2012 by admin

One of the core values of Hummingbird is giving back to the community. For this reason we support a camp for children with cancer and their families each year. You can find out more about the camp at http://campcountryjamboree.org to find out why we support this cause and more.

We cannot think of a better way to give back than to provide support for this great cause. Imagine what life is like for children with cancer and how it is filled with different challenges that we might take for granted. Just the diagnosis alone is devastating to the child and will change the lives of the family forever. A group of Optimist started this camp back in 2005 and it has been growing every year since then. Once you see the looks on the child’s face when they go to this camp I am sure you would agree that it is a worthwhile camp to support.

In 2013 the camp will be Hogwarts and it will be a magical camp for all the kids. Part of the camp will be where they actually fly using their nimbus 2000 or maybe it will be an upgrade to the new 3000 model if enough people support the camp.

It costs $250.00 to send one child to camp and next year the goal is to have a minimum of 100 campers all enjoying the new camp. It moved and the new camp puts a new dimension on the camp with an adventure and comfort that has not been seen before.

It would be nice if you go to the website and make any donation that you can to help send more kids to camp. It is an official non-profit now and they are working on getting the 501c3 soon. If someone wants the tax deduction now that can be made as well. Help support sending children with cancer to a great camp in 2013 by visiting http://campcountryjamboree.org and make a difference in the lives of children with cancer and their families.

Doc Magi

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Build Twitter Followers Faster

Posted on August 28, 2012 by admin

We have been testing the new twitter standards and found some interesting changes. Twitter restricts how many people you can follow per day and overall as you might already know. Here are some of the restrictions:

1) If your account is at or over the 2000 following mark then your account is restricted to 10% over how many is following you at the time. This prevents people from doing what they are currently doing on Google Plus and other accounts by simply mass following everyone. Twitter put this restriction on to prevent people from simply following everyday to build spam accounts. The concept that Twitter set up is that the follow should be mutual and we are building friendships instead of commercial spam accounts. This means that if you follow 2000 people on Twitter you will not be able to follow any more till your followers increases to over 1800 in most cases. This also means that the hardest time to build your account is after 2000 and before 4000 because you are only going to be able to follow between 200 and less than 400 during this time. The key to getting past this restriction faster is to increase your follow back percentage and nothing beats Hummingbird2 for doing that still today.

2) Unfollowing people from your Twitter Following List is monitored by Twitter closer than any other thing that we have noticed. According to a contact with Twitter support they told us that keeping it below 300 a day is fairly safe. Our personal preference here is 200 a day because we like to be a bit more conservative on our accounts because it takes longer to build good branding accounts than it used to. In our opinion Twitter is stricter on this because this is your number one sign of aggressive account building or in some cases churn.  One more good reason to use Hummingbird 2 to get the best follow back percentage possible and lower the amount of people you have to unfollow on your Twitter Account.

3) Daily follow number seems to have increased safely according to our testing. We used to recommend only following 300 per day and unfollowing no more than 200 to keep your account safe. For the past 6 months we have been working on 400 a day not counting our follow backs and we have not had an issue with any of the test accounts. This might also be because if you have noticed Twitter is using the following and followers list of other accounts to promote a couple people to follow as well. This is a good move by Twitter and might be a reason that they are lightening up on this practice. It makes perfect sense to take our Twitter Account building practices and turn it into a profit for Twitter themselves. I am hoping that this will also be a new trend for Twitter going forward. If they can make a profit off from what we are doing then I hope they will be more flexible in allowing us to grow the practice even more. Maybe we should consider creating a program that simply follows the people that they recommend this way to build our accounts as well :) . I cannot imagine someone paying Twitter to have this done and not setting up an automatic follow back on the account. Maybe in paying for the promotion this is already provided by Twitter. That would be nice. We will check it out.

3) The automated Twitter accounts promoting different links to blogspot.com about buying followers is growing. The accounts appear to be simply automated accounts that someone has set up spamming the same messages over hundreds of twitter accounts. They stay ahead of Twitter and Blogspot by simply creating new accounts and rotating them through. The sites they promote are simply spam and scam sites promising the world but remember that buying followers is a con job these days. It has been around for several years and does nothing to assist you in building revenue or even getting a return of your investment of purchasing the followers. We have researched tons of them over the years and set up test accounts to see how they work and what the return is and I can tell you will all confidence that they are a scam and worthless. There has been one situation where I found them to be valuable and even recommended them to the company that wanted some information. The company was an agent for a singer and they needed to show a twitter account that had thousands of people on it for a record company that they were working on a deal with. The people did not have to be real is was simply going to be a front to get the deal. In this case I referred them to a cheap company that provided them with thousand of followers for their account. I never heard if they got the deal or not but in that case I thought it was a good choice.

 Have a fantastic week and thanks for reading the post.

Doc Magi

#1 Twitter Program for building Accounts

Hummingbird Redux

 

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Advantage of Hummingbird2

Posted on August 14, 2012 by admin

Hummingbird for Twitter used to have a lot of competition a few years ago. We originally created Hummingbird to build Twitter Followers fast and worked on making it easy for anyone to use it. Over the years Twitter has changed several times and we have changed with it. We had even created a version of Hummingbird that would be more like a Twitter Account Management program (the original Hummingbird 2) but it appeared that the more automated the program the less effective it became for twitter professionals to use.

Twitter has focused on preventing spam on their network for years. This new direction of suing programs that sell spamming software like TweetAdder and TweetAttacks has proven that our focus on not providing spamming software is a good one. We have not heard any news about TweetAdder and the lawsuit and it appears that they are simply not telling their customers anything which is a common practice for software companies these days. Why tell anyone that does not already know that you have a lawsuit against you to put the sale at risk :) .

Hummingbird is the top Twitter Account builder and that is our focus still today. How can we help you to get the most followers faster on your accounts is the question we ask our team every week. We found the answer years ago and it still applies today. Follow people that are building their accounts and are active on Twitter. It is actually that simple and that is also why keyword and other targeting systems does not work as well. They follow accounts that tweet something or in some cases accounts that are simply tweeting. The challenge with this type of focus is that there are still programs and networks out there that tweet all the time automatically. This does not mean that they are actively following back though and that is what you really want these days. A follow for a follow is the key to your success. Hummingbird2 provides the best way to do this.

There is another key advantage that is often overlooked in using Hummingbird for Twitter. This advantage is that Hummingbird uses a browser so you actually navigate to your Twitter Account page and you can be interactive with your Tweeps. One of the major disadvantages with all the other programs out there is that they provide you an interface that restricts what you can do on your Twitter Account when using their program. Hummingbird does not restrict your access and allows you to do even more than what the automation provides. The key is to automate some things that you would do anyway on your twitter account when building your accounts and allow you to do the rest on your own. It is so simple and works so well that customers love the results it provides. Check around and you will find that others charge you 50-100 a year or month just to provide one feature like unfollowing or following and we simply ask you to pay one payment and get all the benefits and more.

I am amazed that some people will pay 5.00 a month for a subscription to something. That is 60.00 a year and 120.00 for two that might provide you a couple features. Right now we charge 70.00 for a program that you don’t have to pay another dime for in the future that provides all the tools you need to build your accounts and a nice extra feature that deletes all of those spam direct messages on your accounts. The other key is that you can have a many Twitter Accounts as you like as well and we do not charge you anything more.

Doc Magi

 

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Assisted Maintenance Video

Posted on July 26, 2012 by admin

Here is a new YouTube video that we just uploaded showing you the new operation of our assisted maintenance section of Hummingbird for Twitter. Currently it is still in beta testing and is part of your current version. There is a file we can share with you if you want to test the features now. We expect the release to be in a week for everyone.
Hummingbird Assisted Maintenance Video
 

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Account Maintenance

Posted on July 18, 2012 by admin

We are currently running a beta test on our new automated features for Twitter Account Maintenance. Here is what we are testing and a look at the new features.

Hummingbird will have a new item in the toolbar called Assisted Maintenance that will bring up this box.

The grayed out area will list your accounts. (The area is grayed out to protect some accounts here ;-) .) The bottom area has check boxes for “Follow-Back People, Unfollow, and Delete Direct Messages” which you select any or all automated features you would like to have Hummingbird run. After you select which accounts and what features you want to run you will simply click on start and Hummingbird will go through each account selected and perform the functions. You will be able to see the results as well in the 4 columns to the right of  the account. The window will also provide you a live tracking and status of what is being done.

In addition to the functions above you can double click on one of the accounts that are listed and it will bring up the graph “image above”.  You select the dates or you use our dropdown “image below” for quick selection.

Then click on refresh and the graph will be created.

The graph will be created by your Hummingbird data in My Documents and you can also choose how you want to look at the data. Create it by Hours, Days, Months or even Years “image above”.

Right now this is in beta and we are accepting some of our Hummingbird family as beta testers to see how it performs on different systems.  So far the tests have shown that this new automation really assists in managing multiple twitter accounts easily.

Doc Magi

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New Hummingbird2 Coming

Posted on July 15, 2012 by admin

We just updated Hummingbird for Twitter to improve the performance of the functions that we already provide. Some of the improvements are:

1) Fixed the previous bug in unfollow function so it stops correctly.
2) Status Updates now provide you an actual number of how many so you can have peace of mind on what the automation is doing.
3) Increased the timeout function so Follow-All function does not time out while loading page.
4) Fixed a bug in the Cleanup Direct Messages so it goes through all the messages easily.

We have decided to postpone the API version of Hummingbird because of poor performance and results. We do not want to provide a version of Hummingbird for Twitter that looks nice but is cumbersome and lacks in results for our members. Our focus for years has been to provide a program that is easy to use and provides the best results possible so you get a return for your investment. There are a few programs out there that advertise that they either are easy to use or that they provide you with great results. Over the years though we have found that totally automated programs do not provide the results and programs that might provide some results are not easy to use.

We are going to provide a valuable update to our current program allowing for more automation. Consider the automation to be designed for upkeep of your Twitter Accounts. One of the automation processes will be an Automated Follow-Back Feature that you can select which accounts you want the program to log into and automatically go to your followers list and follow these members back. Hummingbird will still keep track of the people that have been unfollowed to prevent following these people back as well. Another automation will be to clean up the Direct Messages automatically on all your accounts that you select. This will allow you to simply ask Hummingbird to go through and do some maintenance on all of your accounts while you do something else.

We are also working on providing you graphs and reports in this section so you can track your results. Just a few click and select the time-frame and Hummingbird will provide you a nice graph of follows and unfollows to see your progress. This will be a valuable tool to compare different techniques.

I know that many of your were looking forward to the API version. So far the only benefit of the API was the ability to sort, and filter results. The challenge is that this just seemed to waste a lot of time and to be honest Is a lot of work with no security of being able to use it for long with Twitters policy changes. We also felt that this was putting accounts at risk because it identified all accounts using the program. We have not totally given up on the idea though and after our new release we will look at this more.

Doc Magi

#1 Twitter Program for building Accounts

Hummingbird Redux

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Hummingbird Auto-Follow Tip

Posted on July 5, 2012 by admin

Sometimes Twitter has a challenge with the more button on a followers list. To be able to ensure that you can follow the proper amount of people using Hummingbird Redux for Twitter you can do a couple things before selecting Follow All on the Twitter account.

1) When you navigate to a Twitter accounts followers or following list go down to the bottom of the list and you will see the more button. Click on it and see if it activates. If it does not activate correctly go to the refresh button next to the sign in and click it. After the page refreshes you should be able to go back down and click the more button to have it load more people.

2) Remember that each page consists of 100 people so if you click more you have loaded another 100 Twitter accounts to follow. Consider that there will be some people that you have already followed a lot of the time and some people might be blocked or Hummingbird might skip them because you followed or unfollowed them previously. This is why I always load 100 more than what I set Hummingbird to Automatically Follow. So if you want to follow 300 people this time then click the more button 3 times and you have loaded 400 people for Hummingbird to follow.

Following these two easy steps ensures that I always follow what I set the Hummingbird to follow and eliminates the challenge that the Twitter site has at times.

Doc Magi

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Hummingbird Tip

Posted on June 27, 2012 by admin

Hummingbird for Twitter is still the best program that builds followers fast and works off from the Twitter website. The concept of Hummingbird was simple when we started and it stays just as simple today “Build Followers on Twitter Accounts Fast and Easily”.

The power of Twitter is based on the amount of people that you can reach at one time. This was the draw back in 2009 and is still the secret today for many professionals. In order to build your followers fast you want to find people that are active and building their accounts as well. When looking at a twitter account you have two major lists for each account. The people that the Twitter Account is following and the Twitter Accounts that Follow know as followers.

The people that are being followed “Following” are not always active nor are they more likely to Follow-Back on Twitter. These are normally either people that the Twitter Account follows because they like the Tweets or Person or they are following them in hopes of having them Follow Back when building their accounts.

The Twitter Accounts listed in the “Followers” are people that have followed this person and range from people building their Twitter Accounts to some automated accounts that will automatically follow you back quickly. You are sure of one thing with this list in my opinion and that is that they do follow some people :) . This is why the Follow-Back percentage on the Followers list will provide you better results than keyword or following from a search on Twitter.

So if you want to build your Twitter Account faster then follow people from a Twitter Accounts “Followers” rather than spend time with the other lists. Another thing that I have noticed over the years is that following too many of these people also will decrease your results. This is why programs that collect names from a Twitter list will not provide you the results that we do with Hummingbird.

If you find that the Twitter site has a challenge with the more button when following we have a suggestion from one of our Hummingbird family members. He found that by simply hitting the refresh button on your Hummingbird program and then clicking on “Follow All” again you will be able to continue on from where you left off. I tested it myself and it does work great and makes it easier.

Doc Magi

 

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