Wednesday, September 25, 2013

Twitter’s Follow Limit: Tips and Warnings

You may find yourself in this predicament like we did when we first joined twitter, You vigorously followed numerous people some of whom followed back and others who did not and before you knew it you reached an unexpected limit and could no longer follow more people back.

Surprise, Surprise by default your follow limit on twitter is 2000 or a ratio of your number of followers, in the past it was once stated as 2000 or 110% of your actual followers which ever was greater, but twitter now indicates the ratio supposedly varies by follower. For us it's been pretty consistently at 110% knock on wood!

Here’s some ways you can manage that which we’ve found useful.

As mentioned, when we initially joined twitter, we followed a monster load of celebrities, entertainment and media organizations (LOL), who for obvious reasons didn’t follow back, which put us in a predicament we still navigate to this day, where we have to follow in waves and where long time followers are often followed back first and new followers at a later time. Over time, hopefully we will be able to balance things out and reciprocate follows more closely to when a new person follows us.

More importantly as long as your followers are happy you provide a value add from their follow of You, they are not necessarily overly concerned you have not returned a mutual follow in most cases.

Now onto some of our own personal Techniques:
  1. For Business or similar entities or celebrities that aren’t likely to follow you back anyway, consider adding them to a List. This way you can still track their tweets, although it won’t show up in your regular twitter timeline, it will require discipline to every now and then visit the list you've created under your profile and see what those on the list are tweeting about.

    NOTE: To access or create Lists in Twitter, click on your Profile name right above the box where you compose tweets from and at the next menu that opens select "Lists"

    1. For example:
      1. One such list we’ve created was Film Festivals, for the most part many of the Film Festivals on our list do not follow us, but as they do follow us we make an effort to reciprocate. We do however, follow some key Film Festivals regardless of reciprocation or not. Having this particular list also helps us track Film Festival happenings without having it being lost in our stream of other organizations we follow and from time to time we advertise the list to our followers who may be interested in discovering just what Film Festivals are on Twitter.

        One great benefit of lists is they can provide your followers a way to track the same thing or a convenient way for them to pick and choose people or organizations to follow from your list, often a value add for those who take advantage of doing so.


      2. Another such list, which is Private, we’ve created is one of media outlets and studios, this allows us to track what’s happening as reported by media outlets and studios and keeps us from unnecessarily pushing up against our follower limit while allowing us to more freely follow people who will reciprocate our follow.

    2. Lists can be either Public or Private, however you can have only 20 lists.

      1. VERY IMPORTANT When creating your Lists, be sure you check whether the list will be Public or Private first! Anyone added to a public list will be notified that you’ve added them. If you intend to make the list Private not checking it first could have folks giving you the evil eye once you change it from Public to Private LOL.

    3. Lists also allow you to better categorize the people you are following under similar related conversations.

  2. It may be time consuming, but peruse who you are following and see who is following you back (i.e. go to your following list, click on the person’s profile to bring it up and you’ll see an indication “Follows You” if that is the case), you may be surprised to know a very large number may not be.

    1. One way to improve follow back is when following someone consider sending a tweet saying “now following @username please follow back” or something of that nature. You can judge whether they are likely to do this by seeing if the person you’re requesting a follow back has a ratio of followers to following of 1:1 or pretty close to 1:1. For example:

      1. a person following 5 people with 100 followers, may not be likely to follow you back even with a request, which may be ok, in that case consider adding them to a list instead.

      2. a person following 90 people with 100 followers may be more inclined to respond to your request and follow back.

      3. For those who chose not to reciprocate a follow, Ask yourself the important question if this person isn’t following me back, but I follow them am I mutually benefiting from this non-reciprocal follow back? Then act accordingly. It is social media after all, you’re trying to build two way engagement with people.

  3. You can also use some of the web based tools that show you who isn't following you back, as well as show you any inactive accounts you may be following which might be worth consideration for un-following. As an example, an account inactive for over 6 months or a year may be a good candidate to unfollow or you could simply add them to a private list of inactive accounts and from time to time see if they return to active use on twitter and if not then consider unfollowing.

    1. Some tools to help with this are: http://www.justunfollow.com/ and http://who.unfollowed.me/

      1. These tools also help you see who you yourself may not be reciprocating a follow to.
      2. A word of caution when signing up for the tools, be sure to play close attention to the check mark boxes asking if you’d like to tweet your activity to your followers when using them, based on your personal preferences check or uncheck accordingly
    2. Personally we use another tool no longer on the market for free at least, called Socialbro (it’s officially a paid service now).

  4. Twitter frowns on mass following and un-following so when you do this during any particular day, whether directly from twitter or the suggested tools, do it in small bursts,

    1. i.e. manage 50 or so unfollows/follows and then on another day pick up and do the same until you get your following and following ratio to such a level where you can selective follow new people.

  5. Twitter also has a less known limit on how much you can tweet and included in this is the number of profiles you can view in any particular 24 hour period. So, say if you have 500 followers and are also tweeting during the day, too much follow management that involves checking profiles to see who follows you while also tweeting can cause you to enter into what’s called “twitter jail” where for an extended period you can’t do anything on twitter, generally until the next 24 hour period.

    This latter applies regardless whether you’re doing the management directly in twitter or using a tool outside of twitter like the aforementioned.

These are just some general guidelines and observations based on our own experience, please reference twitter's help guide for full details about all their guidelines and subsequent changes which may date this information.

Tuesday, September 24, 2013

A (PSA) - Our Twitter Rules We Live By

A Public Service Announcement(PSA)
for our twitter followers regarding hackers, hacked accounts and unsolicited @ links from those with whom we are not mutual followers of one another.

First a word of Encouragement:  We love hearing about our follower’s work or discovering new followers as recommended by those we follow. If You currently do not follow us, but feel it is important to share Your work with us in hopes of us passing it on: 

We encourage you to Follow us: @FilmTVDiversity First, it speaks volumes about your belief and support about what we do, and then share as you please with us and we are much more likely to follow back and as a result of our mutual connection, we may share your work with our followers based on our adopted guidelines 
  1. Check first, if you’re our follower or if you've been recommended by someone we follow.
  2. Does your @ to us have ample explanatory text or context as to what or why you’re sharing this with us?
  3. Validate the link (i.e. does it have a fully identifiable web address or a shortened one, with the latter highly scrutinized if not from reputable or widely used/recognized shortening services).  
  4. If we conclude the link appears valid, we visit the link and check the content for relevance and value add to what we support.
If all this criteria is met, we are very likely to share what you’ve shared with us to our followers. 

On the flip: We may block anyone who @‘s us with links not meeting our preferred standards or hijacks conversations with unrelated links that don’t pass the above criteria, because we consider it spam.

In most cases, we freely share content of others that our current followers recommend when they @ us once we've validated at least the link works.

Our Following Guidelines:
A) We try to follow most people back, but do so in waves, your bio and or interaction with us is a major determining factor in doing so. Blank bios are like blank resumes, so we are not as likely to follow with so little to go on about you or your interests.

B) We generally do not follow egg avatars unless validated by someone we currently follow that you the account owner are a person or organization just starting out on twitter. We may change this policy at anytime and not follow any egg avatars in the future.

C) We block ALL accounts with egg avatars and undecipherable names and tweets, as most often these accounts are associated with hackers.

Regarding Direct Messages(DMs)
Any DM from us is likely preceded by a public conversation we have decided should be taken offline or is in response to a DM you sent us.

We don’t mind DM conversations or requests, however, due to a larger than normal number of DMs sent our way recently by what appears to be hacked accounts we’d, like to remind everyone of some of the tactics hackers may use to get access to your account.

In general they “prey on your fears”.  99.9% of DMs with Unsolicited links by people you follow who DM you should be approached with extreme caution, especially if the link has no explanatory or introductory or conversational related text or cyrptic messages such as:

  • “is this you”, 
  • “someone is saying bad things about you”, 
  • “did you mean this or look at this photo” 

etc., are likely hacked accounts looking to do the same to your account once you click the link.  DON’T CLICK THE LINK no matter how tempting!  Our approach is to simply delete the DM conversation.  

Some recommend that you contact the person and let them know via a direct @ not via DM their account may be hacked, but we refrain from inundating our own timeline with such reminders and we may be forced to unfollow the offending account if the DMs continue.

For the most part we don't respond to DMs that appear to be auto-generated in nature which often say things like.

  • "Thanks for following", check out our FB/website or look at my work..
PSA: This may  all seem extreme, but our approach is predicated on protecting ourselves and our followers from Hackers and Spam via our own tweets and thus maintaining our trustworthiness and brand integrity we've worked hard for and for which our followers have come to depend on and expect for the links we share. Hence, we take hackers and spam extremely serious.  

Make Your first interaction with us pleasant for us both, because we work tirelessly to ensure that all content that we share with our followers is pleasant and/or value add on some level for all our followers.

Thank You for your continued support of FilmTVDiversity and its vision through your Retweet(RT)s and interactions with us on our timeline, it is indeed invaluable and always much appreciated. 

Together We are changing the face of Diversity in Film, Television and Theatre.

Monday, September 16, 2013

Looking for New Narratives to Celebrate

A Reflection on an article brought to our attention: Why I won't be watching The Butler and 12 Years a Slave via Twitter Post

In many respects I can sympathize and relate to not wanting to see The Butler or 12 Years a Slave, though I’m not knocking nor hating that the actors in these films are turning in great performances.

We’ve even celebrated their accolades, as expressed by others, on our own timeline, yet in my mind personally these films leave me disappointed that mainstream celebrates them so glowingly when there are so many more roles featuring people of color, that aren’t about being subservient or slaves, even this year, that deserve accolades and attention.

I for one look forward to the day where films from this year like

films like “Four”, which stars Wendell Pierce in a strikingly different kind of role, Trailer:
FOUR Trailer from 306 Releasing on Vimeo.

add to this list Ryan Coogler's “Fruitvale Station”, this summer's indie sensation “Filly Brown”, the upcoming “Black Nativity”, available now on netflix & itunes “Luv”, screening festivals and theaters currently “Licks" and “Blue Caprice” and compelling Web Series and Shorts from the likes of @GenoBrooksTV & @lamontpierre's @BOAcollective such as "The Therapist", other talented works such as “The Marriage Tour”, "DL Chronicles Returns" many of which we’ve featured on our social media timeline and several I've personally seen or have plans to see, for the record.

Yes, these latter are the genre and stories I too hope one day catches the attention of the mainstream media and where appropriate the Oscars and other award giving orgranizations around the world.

So indeed, it's ok to not want to see the aforementioned films, such as The Butler and 12 Years a Slave, because for some of us we're looking for a new narrative of Films and Stories about People of Color to be Celebrated and made known about.