Brainstorm Design Blog

One secret of Twitter that many new users take too long to work out is that putting together a good, solid list of accounts to follow is just as important as who, or how many people, you get to follow you. You don't want your Twitter feed clogged up with useless rubbish - you want links, information and discussions that can benefit your business.

So, you should avoid the temptation to follow everyone who follows you. There are a few obvious warning signs that your new Twitter follower is a spammer or time-waster:

• They are following hundreds of people and have very few followers themselves. 
• Their user name is complete gibberish, usually a weird and random collection of letters and numbers.
• Their profile picture is a young girl (usually blonde), typically showing a generous amount of cleavage.

 There are endless books and articles being published that deal the subject of gaining followers on Twitter. Less is written about unfollowers. It’s important to understand why people stop following you on Twitter as this can alert you to things you might be doing wrong. You can be unfollowed for a number of reasons:

1. You tweet to often: Your followers feel that they’re being spammed by you with constant updates.
2. Your content of your tweets may not be relevant to your followers.
3. You tweet too infrequently: Your followers may not feel you have much to say.
4. Your tweets are just links to articles, you don’t actually say anything.
5. Your tweets are full of conversations with other tweeters that mean nothing to the people who follow you.

Over the last few months, I have been inundated with emails from offshore web development companies suggesting we outsource work to them. The emails usually start "Hi" or "Dear Sir/Madam". None of the emails are addressed to me as none of these companies have bothered to find out what my name is. Several of the companies have sent me repeated emails during the last few weeks that say "awaiting your response", clearly surprised that I haven't replied - Well, I'm not going to reply because I don't respond to unsolicited emails. Surprisingly, one of the companies spamming me claimed to be an ISO9001 registered company.  

One of my clients this morning forwarded me an email that they received from iBusiness Promotions guaranteeing them a #1 placement on Google. Their website states that:

"we guarantee that your website will be found in the regular (unpaid) top 10 results on Google for the keywords of your choice. No catch, no strings attached"

• Rule No.1: No one can guarantee you a #1 position on Google. Google themselves make this clear in their own guidelines.
• Rule No.2: Don’t buy from anyone who promotes their services via an unsolicited email. Spam is unethical as well as illegal. Would you trust a company to promote who uses unethical business practices to promote your website?
• Rule No.3: This is probably the most important rule of all. Getting to the first page of Google doesn’t mean your website will get more visitors of even more business.