Andy Cook Tell 'Em

There’s one thing that will be missing from Sunday NFL games this fall: Twitter. The league brought down the hammer on the microblogging site Tuesday, instituting new, strict rules that will limit when players, coaches, team personnel, and media can tweet.

According to CNET News, the folks mentioned above must stop tweeting 90 minutes prior to a game and cannot resume until post-game interviews are complete. These limitations are supposed to protect “policies prohibiting play-by-play descriptions of NFL games in progress,” according to a statement from NFL officials. Not only targeting Twitter, the rules apply to other social networking sites like Facebook, too.

While it’s no surprise that the NFL has put the clamp down on its players, coaches and team personnel, it’s a shame that the media won’t be allowed to tweet from games. With the news that a man had received credentials to tweet from press row at St. John’s University men’s basketball games, there was hope Twitter might gain some legitimacy among traditional sports journalists. Oh well, like the old sports axiom says, “There’s always next year.”

I just heard about an interesting, yet very useful feature you can use from the Google Chrome Omnibar. You can Tweet just as easily as search or typing in a URL. This takes about a minute to set up and can be very useful in Tweeting in a hurry!

Here’s how to do it:

1. Add a new search engine – Click the settings button (the wrench) then click options.
2. Click manage next to default search engine.
3. Add a new search engine using the following url:

http://twitter.com/?status=%s

4. Name it Twitter, then for the nickname choose something easy to remember such as “tweet”
5. To tweet, simply then type into the omnibar “tweet Testing out tweeting from the Chrome Omnibar!”‘

So check it out and enjoy tweeting from the Google Chrome Omnibar!

As we all know, as of this morning Twitter experience about 2 hours of downtime due to a Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. The members of the online imageboard community 4chan.org have claimed responsibility although no one knows for sure who did it. Keeping in mind that Twitter has had a multitude of security problems lately this attack proves that it the downtime was not on their end, but caused by someone with malicious intent.

But who has it in for Twitter? Who knows, this attack could have been by anyone or any organization. For now, Twitter needs to beef up security and figure out who did this.

Click for larger view.

Everyone wants more followers. The only problem is 3 out of 4 new accounts are spam account posting endless links using API to pointless services and products for sale. My personal experiences with Twitter and gaining a solid following has been based on concise, meaningful tweets regarding interesting articles, photos, and anything else I’d like to share with the world. Lately, I’ve been trying out Twitter feed and I’m not sure how I feel about it…

Anyways, here’s how I did it.

• Pick a unique name that will grab people’s attention. (Twitter allows you to change your username)
• Pick a market segment you are interested in becoming a part of. (ex: Marketing, Sports, SEO, Gardening, etc..)
• Be mindful of your tweets! Do not post articles you yourself do not want to read, chances are no one else is going to read them either
• Try to keep a balance between posting blog articles, @replies, what you’re doing, and everything else – people do not like following bots.

Now the question of whether to autofollow back and to auto-dm comes into play. I chose to follow users who follow me back and not to auto-dm. Auto-dm’ing is a big no-no when it really comes down to it. I hate having 2000 messages in my direct message inbox making any DM that might be of any importance lost in the loads of spam I have.

But, I’ve come to find that autofollowing followers back is the easiest way to grow your Twitter network. An easy way of setting this up is to use TweetLater (Sign up, link your Twitter account, check autofollow) and this will automatically follow users back!

WARNING! This autofollow practice will lead to your homefeed becoming very busy and you will follow many unwanted users such as spammers, bots, people who then unfollow you, etc… So now what?

There are many services to combat these cases. The ones I use are

• ReFollow – Showcases followers/following under any method of sorting, allows bulk follow/unfollow (One of my favorites).
• Twitter Karma – Similar to ReFollow, bulk follow/unfollow capabilities.
• TwiPing – Desktop software to bulk follow/unfollow target groups of users, contact management.
• FlashTweet – Many bulk follow/unfollow options.

These options help manage and maintain your follower/following ratio very quickly and easily. Using these services on a regular basis will keep your followers and following lists squeaky clean.

Now the only problem is breaking into the already packed segment of your interest! There are ever increasing advertisements of programs which will help you “Get 500+ followers a day!!!!” and may seem tempting, but they rely on the fact of people following you back when you follow them. I guess I can’t really bash these as I have used HummingBird in my early stages of developing @andycooktellem. These programs follow a mass amount of users based on target keywords these users have in either their names or bios and hope that these users follow new followers back. From my experiences, it works… but not as well as advertised. Click to see my TwitterCounter graph of followers. About 40% of the people you follow will follow back and of that 40% about 5% to 10% are targeted, solid users.

Here’s a couple of these programs for followers

• HummingBird – One of the first and continuously updated programs.
• TweetAdder – Newcomer but works flawlessly using targeted keywords. (Free trial download offered)

All in all, follower counts are all up to you. There are many programs, services, and MLM based pyramids for followers offered but ultimately its your tweets that keep people interested. So next time you’re thinking of making a quick 50 cents from tweeting an ad, keep in mind your beloved followers.