There is a new Twitter app that has a fresh approach to Twitter social networking. It is called Twitroduce.
It has been described as a service that formalizes #FollowFriday, except for it makes sense every day of the week. You know #FollowFriday or #ff, the popular hash tag to use on Friday’s where you recommend people to follow?
Twitroduce takes this to a whole new level. I should know, I helped develop it!
The idea was simple.
Create a tool that would allow you to make a twitroduction between two of your Twitter friends. It grew into a tool that allows you to twitroduce dozens of people to your Twitter friends and track the connections that were made.
Why do this through a 3rd party application?
There are a few shortcomings of suggesting followers through Twitter.
- The first has to do with the “firehose” that is Twitter. Most of the time, I do not even see peoples suggestions because they have been pushed off of my Twitter home page due to the other tweets.
- Second, if I do see a tweet it generally has 6-8 names. I have to click each name and scour their profile to determine if I would like to follow them. This is time consuming. I generally want to know more about them than what is available on their Twitter profile.
- It is almost always a battle against the 140 character limit when making a suggestion.
- I have absolutely no idea if anyone is actually following the people I suggest, or if they even see my tweet (the downfall of real-time competition).
- Occasionally, I want to know a little information about the person sending the suggestion.
When you make a suggestion on Twitter, assuming it is in good faith, you are publicly making a recommendation. Essentially you are suggesting these people because you believe they would provide some sort of value to your followers. It is like giving a vote of confidence for the suggested person. Sometimes you suggest someone just for fun. Sometimes you are suggesting them as a potential company to hire, and sometimes you are suggesting them as a potential Friday night blind date! Whatever the purpose, there is usually a reason behind it.
In a world full of Twitter spam accounts, inactive accounts, suspended accounts, and accounts that provide no real value to anything or anybody, Twitroduce has the capability of formalizing recommendations and suggestions for the purpose of legitimizing and enhancing social networking.
What is the proper way to rank a Twitter account?
I took a few minutes to look at multiple sites that rank Twitter accounts and oddly enough, most of the top ranked accounts were accounts that are known for some form of spam or automated messages.
Others were at the top of the list because of the large number of followers they have.
People are beginning to demand more than just an ordered list. What we need is an algorithm. An algorithm that takes into consideration tweets per day, age of an account, types of tweets, sources of the tweet, who is following the twitter account, who has recommended/suggested the twitter account, which accounts the twitter account is interacting with, etc and assign a number to this rating. After all, your average user is not interested in details of an algorithm, just that the end product of the algorithm gives them what they are looking for, which is a score that is accurate.
Ask yourself these questions: Is Ashton Kutcher’s Twitter account really the most valuable Twitter account? Is The Ellen Show’s Twitter account really the second most valuable? And is Britney Spears’ Twitter account the third?
Frankly, to find valuable Twitter accounts, you generally have to look on lists that have a top 200, and start looking at 50+.
Imagine if you could make a suggestion to a friend, and find out if that friend viewed and/or followed the users you suggested? And then your friend used part of your suggestion for one of their friends? Twitroduce will make all the proper social network connections and report this data back to you.
Consider this:
As we all know, Google considers a link from one website to another, as a “vote”. And over the last five years, at least, we know that getting people to link to your website will improve your search engine rankings. Especially if the “people” linking to your website are authority figures/websites themselves.
The same idea can be applied here for ranking Twitter accounts. When someone suggests a friend on Twitter, they are “voting” for that person.
Twitroduce’s hope is to formalize this relationship to help improve the way we network on Twitter.
What can Twitroduce actually do?
- First and foremost, it allows you to send follower suggestions to your Twitter friends via a direct message and by providing a status update (*optional). It will report back to you if your friend viewed the message and if they followed any/all of your suggestions.
- Twitroduce stores your sent and received messages indefinitely. A year from now, maybe you would like to revisit a message you sent to a potential client, or maybe find the SEO expert you suggested to your co-worker, whatever the reason, the messages will be archived.
- Twitroduce will tell you who is suggesting you and who the suggestion was made to.
- When you receive a suggestion, you can follow each user with a single click.
- Twitroduce takes a Web 3.0 approach by mashing up information for each suggested user. Before following them at Twitroduce, with a single click you can see a screenshot of their Twitter account, their status updates, Tweetmeme activity, Klout Score, TwitterGrader score, user tags, influential friends, recent activity, and tons more social media information for each suggested user. Now you will know if you really want to follow that person.
- Over time, as suggestions are made and followed across the site, Twitroduce will make suggestions as to potential connections for you (it will build your social network for you!). Do you suggest or receive a lot of education related Twitter users? Or maybe traveling? If there is a connection to be made, Twitroduce will make it and present it to you as an option.
- Find out who is hot in your domain. SEO gurus are always keeping tabs on all things SEO. What if there was a way to find out which Twitter accounts related to SEO were being suggested the most? This goes for almost any keyword, term, or phrase imaginable. If you can type it, it can be tracked.
In a nutshell, Twitroduce simply facilitates and simplifies suggesting followers on Twitter without character restrictions.
And since a suggestion or recommendation is one of the most valuable things in social networking (word of mouth, or letters on screens, for lack of a better phrase) why not formalize it and advance our knowledge with it?
Any service that can substantially increases the ability to place intrinsic value on a Twitter account is a great service in my opinion.
So do I HAVE to use the Twitroduce.com website?
No, absolutely not. The website exists to provide advanced functionality and a central location for all things twitroduce.
There are generally two ways to use Twitroduce outside of the website.
- Twitroduce yourself.
Simply include the hashtag “#twitroduce” with your tweet and we will use our #twitroduce tracker to find your tweet! Remember, you’re trying to convince people to follow you, so have fun with the tweet! Do you like twizzlers? Have you climbed Mt. Everest? Do you work for Google? Are you a hula-hoop expert? Tell us a little about yourself!
- Twitroduce your friends.
Use the “#twitroduce” tag to suggest your friends and/or followers. Our #twitroduce tracker will grab your tweet and record your suggestion(s). Include a reason to help us categorize your suggestion. For example, “These are great traveling experts: @traveler @MRTravel @Orbitz #twitroduce”.
Obviously, using the website is a better way to make a suggestion, but it is not always the most convenient way.
The goal of Twitroduce is to never limit the number of ways to twitroduce someone, but to expand and improve upon them.
As always, I invite you to share your opinion with a comment below!
Joshua Odmark is a technology consultant at Simply Ideas LLC and also blogs for Performance Marketing Blog. Follow him on Twitter or connect with him on LinkedIn
