Being a BadAss on Twitter #6: Denouement

I haven't been active on LinkedIn lately. My search for a good way to measure ROI on the Twittersphere led me astray. Heck, it darned close became an obsession.

Mea culpa.

There's some good news. I got to put my coder's hat on for a while. I dusted off some long-neglected programming skills.

Last we spoke, I started data mining the Twitter feed. The idea was to find a pattern that I could use to quantify ROI. It morphed into automating the tasks as much as Twitter will allow.

The automation idea came up because getting an accurate per-tweet ROI just isn't possible.

Trust me on this one, I tried. I tried hard. 

I tried very hard.

Since the last post in this series, I have pulled in about a half a million Tweets. I have sliced and diced them every which way. There just is no rhyme or reason that my poor little head can see.

I know Twitter works. I just don't know why and how much it works.

So, I went back to basics.

ROI is Return on Investment. It's a simple ratio. I can't quantify the Return part of the equation. I decided to work on reducing the Investment side of it.

Twitter is free so the Investment part is the time we devote to working it. Most pundits suggest working a system as I originally did. That takes about thirty to sixty minutes a day. 

That's somewhere between fifteen and thirty hours a month.

You could tack on the cost of one of the better Twitter Tools (Statusbrew, Crowdfire, etc). Why bother? The monthly cost in dollars is a pittance compared to the value of fifteen to thirty hours of your time.

Here's where I think I fell on my head but don't remember doing so. Rather than signing up for one of those excellent tools, I decided to write my own.

No, this is not a sales pitch. I will not be monetizing my system. 

It isn't that the system doesn't work. I will not be monetizing the beast because it works far too well. 

Voltaire -- or Spiderman's Uncle Ben, if you prefer -- said, "With great power comes great responsibility." 

Voltaire actually said, " Ils doivent envisager qu’une grande responsabilité est la suite inséparable d’un grand pouvoir." Roughly, "They must understand that great responsibility is irrevocably tied to great power."

Uncle Ben said it better. 

But, I digress.

The system works. It works too well. The potential for abuse is too high.  

The system also fixed the ROI issue. When the "I" is near nada, any "R"eturn is fine by me. I don't need to quantify it or trace it any further than that. 

I will listen to Uncle Ben and keep this thing to myself. I will share it with writing clients I have on contract.

No, I will not accept twitter management contracts without a writing component.

No, I will not give you the code. 

Mind you, if you want to write your own I will help you get over the undocumented issues you will bump into. They kept me up at night.

I can, at least, save you from that

That's what friends do.

The basic system

The idea is to expand on the general follow/unfollow-if-no-follow-back method. We want to engage with the most active, most engaged people. We want to target them more closely.

• Follow those who follow you 
• Follow those who retweet you
• Follow those who mention you
• Follow those who like your tweets
• Follow those your chosen influencers mention
• Follow those your chosen influencers retweet
• Follow those who retweet your influencers' tweets
• Follow those who mention your influencers

Notice that I don't bother following the people who follow my influencers? Say you want to target my followers... I have 7883 followers. Only a few hundred regularly mention or retweet me. Target those few hundred not the other 7500.

The first four steps don't require anything special. The last four are impossible without access to a web and database server. You also need to code in PHP, SQL, Javascript and Python.

There are, however, some things you can do to make your life a little easier without needing a server.

That will be the subject of the next (last ?) post in this overlong series. It will be a big step back in terms of tech-talk. In it, I will introduce you to 

Octoblu

We'll see.

I should probably look into aggregating this series into a Medium white-paper.

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