This article is not meant to show you ways of offering interesting tweets or of growing your number of followers but merely how to avoid losing the ones we have because many people don’t take this scenario into consideration; it’s useless to get a large number of followers in a day if you lose a larger number at the same time.

1. More tweets or less

Even if you may have much to offer and you want to share that with your followers, there has to be a limit as having your timeline filled only with your tweets will sooner or later make your followers leave. The other way around isn’t good either as a tweet once a week shows a rare usage of the network and who would want to follow someone who offers a link per week.

The best solution is a mild approach, offering tweets whenever you have something really interesting or when you need someone’s help. A frequent mistake is to tweet too often in a short period of time as the follower’s timeline is filled for some minutes only with what you offered and sometimes it’s irritating.

2. Irrelevant twitters

Nothing is more annoying than to receive idiotic tweets telling you, for example, what John had for lunch, how did he wake up or if he got the morning paper or not. When you tweet, you must be sure that it may be useful to someone. To tweet just so the number will grow will not be benefic to you, furthermore some followers may get fed up and leave. To offer useful links and interesting information you need time to search, so you must not forget that to become an important user of Twitter, you must sacrifice time, a lot of time that could had been used for projects. And in the end we come to the same conclusion that time is money. The Twitter account can be efficient long terms mean of publicity if it’s properly maintained.

3. Excessive Promo

Twitter is a mean of advertising but you need an intelligent strategy to make it truly efficient. First of all, by sending links to you portfolio in every tweet will not bring you more views but only a decrease in the number of followers. The thing is not to force your followers but to make them curious. To be more specific - an arrogant and boring tweet like “Hey, this is my portfolio. Am I not the best designer?” can be replaced with a more conservative and interesting “I am waiting for you opinions on my last logo. I appreciate any comments.”

4. Incomplete account

The bio reserved for each user is intended to offer a clear idea about each person and about what they are doing. To complete it just partially or not at all isn’t a sign of bravura nor justified by privacy concerns. As well, the users should upload a photo of themselves so the followers know if they’re dealing with a real person or just a spam. The customization of the background is not compulsory but an original one would be an extra source of attraction and so, of users. To conclude - un incomplete account represents a source of mistrust and the followers lose that feeling of “Global community” that’s so attractive to most of them.

5. Private tweets

Another new concept that Twitter brought on and with it won their users’ hearts is the total lack of privacy. Your tweets can be seen by everyone. Despite this concept, you still have the options of hiding your tweets from the users that are not your network friends. I may be an extremist to some people but this option is stupid as the initial idea was giving up on privacy.

On the other hand, the arrogance of showing tweets only to some will surely have a negative impact on the number of followers…And it’s a justified call.

6. Automated DMs

In Twitterland, DM stands for direct message and represents the direct communication between the follower and the followed. An sign of total lack of respect is sending automated DMs to your followers. Even if you’re sending an automated thank you note, that is still very similar to spam even if it’s a thank, you spam. What’s your opinion on DMs? Are they a sign of appreciation or not?

7. Growing the number of followers with the help of different applications

I saved the best for last. This is the biggest sin a Twitter user can commit. The burning desire of having more and more followers in a short period of time was noticed by certain individuals with a good sense for business who launched some applications that for small fees can bring you followers. Apparently that’s a good piece of business, but more likely a huge mistake. First of all, the hundreds of followers you are buying are nothing than worthless accounts with no people behind them. What’s the use of being followed by thousands of spams? Aside from the chance to brag about your number of followers, it’s useless.

Let’s just say that these accounts have people at the other end who follow you for a few dimes the result is essentially the same. Indeed, at some point you will have hundreds or thousands of followers but in time they will abandon you as your tweets do not have any relevance to them. And so this type of business is bankrupting. When a user follows you for the few cents you are offering, do you thing he’s interested in your tweets…I doubt it.

My conclusion is that Twitter is a fantastic application, but to gather a large number of followers and to become influential you need time, patience and interesting tweets. What’s your opinion on the matter? How should a quality tweet be? Feel free to use the comment form to share your interesting thoughts with us.

About the author

This article has been written by Daniel Pintilie a freelance writer working for for Go-Globe.com, a Shanghai Web design company that provides web design solution in Beijing, Sharjah and Middle East.

Twitter addiction?

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Write guest posts for KnowTeBook

If you’re a writer and know a lot about Twitter, social media, design, mobile marketing  …… or owning a small business, you can give great advices on branding, marketing, productivity, dealing with clients (and other related topics), or you can write ‘how-to’ posts, please get in contact with Sebastian.

Photo: Flickr / eldh

Sometimes, it’s even the simplest interfaces that are the hardest to build - when you have a huge amount of features and only a limited amount of space on the screen, it can be challenging to cut features out, or hide them elsewhere in the app (yet still have them be accessible). We’ve created a collection of 15 applications that have done an astonishing job of uncluttering the interface and leaving a beautiful, simple design that’s a joy to use.

Tweetbot

Tweetbot by app designers Tapbots is an iPhone app that makes tweeting easier, and has clever shortcuts for viewing entire conversations and for favouriting tweets.

Hipmunk

Hipmunk aims to take the agony out of booking a flight online by displaying flight search results in a much simpler, easier to understand way.

Square

Square allows you to take credit card payments on your iPhone or iPad, easily.

New York Times Skimmer

Skimmer by the New York Times is a different interface for browsing through news, predominantly designed for tablets. As it’s name suggests, it makes skimming through news stories easy and fun.

Batch

Batch is a new iPhone app which makes uploading and sharing photos through Facebook & Twitter a breeze.

TeuxDeux

TeuxDeux is a task management app that makes adding and crossing off tasks simple. It’s perfect for people that like their to-do applications minimal and unfussy, but still beautiful.

Greplin

While Google handles searching the web, Greplin aims to help you search through your life. The app connects to your email accounts, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and more, and lets you search everything all in one go. Despite it’s complexity, the interface has been kept beautifully simple and elegant.

Oink

Oink is the newest iPhone app from Digg founder Kevin Rose.  Instead of rating places, Oink allows you to rate the things inside - everything from the best coffee in a café to the best films on at the cinema. The interface is uncluttered and sophisticated, and it’s beautiful design feels natural and intuitive to use.

Calvetica

Calvetica is an iPhone calendar app that aims to provide a minimalist way to organise your life. It’s clearly had a lot of attention, design-wise, but it’s also simple and easy to use, whether you’re drilling down to specific events or just quickly glancing at it - it’s simplicity gives you the information you need, and nothing else.

Flipboard

Flipboard is an iPad app that turns RSS feeds into easy-to-browse articles, like a digital magazine. The interface is both beautiful and intuitive, which makes the whole experience fun.

Stypi

Stypi is an online document editor, similar to Google Docs, which allows multiple people to all work on writing the same document at the same time. It’s a fairly complicated idea, but it’s been executed perfectly here - following the Apple philosophy, Stypi “just works”.

Basecamp

Basecamp is a project management tool which has both a web interface and an HTML 5 mobile optimized site. Both interfaces work perfectly for the medium they’re on - it’s always easy to navigate around and view calendars, timelines and tasks and clearly a lot of thought has been put into usability.

Twitter for iPad

Twitter’s official iPad app looks simple, but hides a wealth of features and shortcuts. Selecting a tweet and sliding down with two fingers, for example, reveals the whole conversation. It’s a brilliant example of a stunningly elegant user interface.

Reeder

Reeder for iPad makes RSS feeds easier to browse through and has clearly focused on making a simple, beautiful and usable app. Scanning through articles and blog posts is very intuitive and the design of the content is easy to read, with plenty of white space.

Things

Things for iPad is a task management app that allows you to tag tasks, add them to particular projects and archive old tasks in a logbook. Despite having quite a few features for power users and fans of “getting things done”, the interface keeps things simple - only showing you what you need and never cluttering up the screen with unnecessary distractions.

Are there any user interfaces that you think deserve a mention? Let us know in the comments.

About the author

Alex writes for printing experts Print Express, who specialise in postcards, business cards and flyer printing.

Other Beautiful User Interfaces?

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Write guest posts for KnowTeBook

If you’re a writer and know a lot about app design, mobile marketing, social networks …… or owning a small business, you can give great advices on branding, marketing, productivity, dealing with clients (and other related topics), or you can write ‘how-to’ posts, please get in contact with Sebastian.

Screenr

This app gives an instant screen cast for Twitter. You can create screencasts for your followers as easily as you tweet

TWitVid

TwitVid could be precisely defined as one of the easiest and quickest applications for those that want to share videos on Twitter. This is one of the easiest and quickest ways to enjoy your video.

TwitCasting

TwitCasting is a fun new way to share your tweets using live feeds. After you sign in to your Twitter account, you’ll be greeted with a split screen with one showing video from your iPhone camera and the bottom with your Twitter timeline.

Twitcam

Twitcam allows twitter users to start streaming with live chat this apps help in using and post your video description directly live.

Greetter

Greetter helps you to share photos, videos and texts to Twitter. You can tag people in these photos and link to their twitter page. Also you can view and comment on other photos and videos.

BubbleTweet

This is a fun way to make a short video of your business or product business and bubbletweet it. It makes your twitter page special. They added a short video that played on a video player Bubble floating on your Twitter page and when finished, it came and went.

Tweetmojo

Tweetmojo allows you to share your videos, photos, and documents on Twitter easily. You can also add more mojo by recording from your webcam and adding more text to your tweets!

12seconds.tv

12seconds.tv is a Twitter-like video status service. It gives you 12 seconds to share video moments from your life.

Twiddeo

Twiddeo is a powerful but simple service that lets you do one thing very well

Tweetube

TweeTube allows you to share YouTube videos via twitter

Tvider

Tvider is a twitter client application that allows mobile phone users who have a twitter account to send multimedia files audio, video and photos directly to your twitter timeline.

Twitlens

TwitLens is a premier photo & video sharing service for Twitter

Zocial

This is a site that will let you know which videos are being watched on Twitter and Facebook at any given moment. In that way, you can determine the popularity of clips in the two services that have come to define what the Social Web is all about.

Streamd.in

Streamd.in is a simple web based Twitter client paired with Google Maps. See what’s happening around you, let others know what you’re doing or broadcast your thoughts & location with live video.

Mov.io

Mov.io describes itself as the spot on the World Wide Web in which you can capture and share your life through videos

Twidiko

Simply share your video on Twitter. No registration needed

Screentweet

With ScreenTweet you can easily share your pictures, screenshots, mobile pics, YouTube / Hulu videos and sounds on Twitter

Reeltimetweets

Reeltimetweets collects all movie Tweets from Twitter and classifies them as good or bad opinions. People can get an instant rating for that movie as soon as its releases based on real peoples thoughts.

fflick

fflick is an instant movie review system based on Twitter. You can check out what you and your friends have been saying about movies.

TweetReel

Tweet Reel lets you shoot pictures and video on your iPhone, upload them to TweetReel.com, and share them on Twitter!

With such an amazing and good quality twitter video apps available to you, world has really come closer. You can share with us your own thoughts and comments regarding all such video apps. You may come across some amazing video apps from Twitter. Let us know as we welcome all suggestions and comments.

Have apps or tools for twitter and video?

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Write guest posts for KnowTeBook

If you’re a writer and know a lot about design, coding, …… or owning a small business, you can give great advices on branding, marketing, productivity, dealing with clients (and other related topics), or you can write ‘how-to’ posts, please get in contact with Sebastian.

Definition: Twittertising

I’ll try to sum it up and hope to have your help in this to make it ready for the guiness book ;- ):

Twittertising (twitter + advertising) is a Twitter based advertising model using the short and quick messaging service for businesses to promote products or services…. your text here!

Lobalized already wrote about a german start-up company Be-A-Magpie (BAM) which is the first advertising agency to surface which is solely using the power of Twitter to generate awareness for brands and companies.

What we like about BAM is that it blends the advertising message into the normal message stream of the twitterer and therefore triggers a conversation among the followers, which in turn generates impressions among the followers followers and so on. The chain reaction can have a massive effect on the actual amount of people you reach. This is definitely something to create not only awareness but also a high click through rate (if your message contains a link), which, according to BAM, is currently at 9% on average and therefore much better than any other ad system on the internet.

Since Twitter will introduce his own busines model this year finally, they may involve creating premium or corporate accounts so that the big Twitterbubble could find his end. Lets start here to have a word in this.

TweetDeck is a realtime application that allows users to monitor that information in a single concise view. TweetDeck currently integrates services from Twitter, Twitscoop, 12seconds, Stocktwits and now Facebook.

But at the heart of TweetDeck is its ability to group people together and search across the twittersphere. Grouping friends or work colleagues separately means you have a window on all aspects of your twitter life. Searching across the twittersphere means you can monitor any subject within Twitter. These additional columns automatically update so providing the user with a very effective dashboard of realtime information.

Anybody using Twitter will discover the mass of tweets can be somewhat overwhelming and difficult to digest. TweetDeck enables users to split their main Twitter feed (All Friends) into columns allowing a broader overview of tweets.

Additional Features

• Catch up with overnight global twitterings as TweetDeck stores all updates whilst running
• Continual status updates of TweetDeck and Twitter
• Resize TweetDeck as either an unobtrusive column, full screen or anything in between
• Especially useful running full screen on a separate monitor
• Filter tweets using the tweet text, username, source or timeframe
• Auto updates from the Twitter API

Video preview

Main features

• Live notifications.
• Easy participation by multiple contributors.
• Posting from the front page of the blog - without using the WordPress Administration Panels.
• Comments on the front page of the site with in-line editing (no page refresh) with AJAX.
• Threaded comment display on the front page, as well as on single post pageviews.
• Live tag suggestion.
• Show/hide feature for threaded comments.
• Keyboard shortcuts for faster posting and navigation.
• Feeds for the blog, comments, authors, tags, searches, and more.