Tag Archives: follow

New Bling!

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Look, I’m blogging on Monday!

This is going to be a short post to let you know about some new features on the site. Obviously there is a new appearance. I haven’t changed the rest of my website yet, but that will come soon.

I finally have a follow button!! It’s over on the right. You can put in your email address and then you’ll recieve email notifications of the posts. Horray! Please subscribe!

I also have a Like button now. If you particularly enjoy what I’ve said please press the Like! Of course, I LOVE comments, but sometimes I appreciate something without having anything to say about it and push the Like button.

I also think you can follow my blog as a wordpress.com user now and it will show up in your Reader.

The other stuff is mainly behind the scenes. I’ll be back tomorrow with A Writer Reviews Bellwether by Connie Willis. So be sure to come back or Follow me so you don’t miss it!

–Melinda

 

Twitter=Slot Machine

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Sorry I’m late. Please come back tomorrow for another excellent guest blog by Holly Jennings about finding an agent. Thursday I’ll post a photo prompt since I’m doing the Monday blog today.

I’ve been on Twitter now for a few months with my pen name and maybe a month with my real name. I’m no expert, but I’ve definitely come to some conclusions about Twitter based on what I’ve seen.

The first observation is: sex sells.

The word “sex” appears in my bio for my pen name and not for the bio of my real name. Otherwise, the two bios are similar in structure. I got on twitter with my pen name, followed a few people and otherwise did nothing with it for a month. After a month of doing nothing, I had around thirty followers. With my real name, I got on, followed a few people, but have been so busy now twittering on my pen name that I’ve neglected my real name account. I have four followers. Both accounts were essentially inactive for a month at the beginning. The sex one had thirty followers at the end, and the non-sex one had four.

The next observation is people are wiggy about follow backs. When I started paying more attention to twitter, I noticed that some people gave me 24 hours or less to follow them back or their follow disappeared. I do a lot of follow backs because you never know what connection is going to be a great one, but I find the people who have such a limited time on a follow back to be annoying, and I say good riddance. Not all people are on Twitter 24/7, and a fast unfollow says you’re really not interested in the content the person is sharing, just interested in them as a number for your own followers list.

My big observation is Twitter is like a slot machine. You tweet; you follow; you favorite all in the hopes that it will pan out into a bunch of follows for yourself, a bunch of retweets for your words of wisdom, or a bunch of favorites. It’s just like sitting in front of a slot machine, putting in your quarters and hoping for the 777. It’s addicting in the same way because it focuses on the reward centers of your brain. This means don’t neglect your followers. Every time they login to Twitter, they’re hoping for a dozen notifications that somebody has seen them. Give that to them just like you’re hoping to receive.

Now off to figure out how to get followers for myself without using sex :)