Hi everyone,
I'm speaking out on behalf of quieter members about something that bothers me greatly.
We're doing the blog challenge to improve ourselves but we're also doing it as a group and EVERY group member deserves reciprocal support on Twitter.
I've been seeing tweets between people frustrated about the fact that they've followed 500+ Twitter profile because of this challenge and they have barely gotten any reciprocal follows.
This is a terrible habit and it happens not just here but in many of the other groups outside of Blogfrog.
Those of us who are on the Tweepml list are getting the benefit of being followed by everyone who comes later. Please make the effort to check your Twitter every day and follow back the 31DBBB people.
If you want to make it easier, check the Tweepml every couple of days and click follow all to make sure you don't miss any new people.
I know in my case that even the group leaders don't follow back. Why? Because Nirvana Mama is the only one who has "walked the talk" for me.
This is extremely important for this group to do this task because if you don't, it negatively affects our members.
1) When a blogger is trying to monetize, one of those unwritten stats that they are reviewed on is Twitter ratio. An acceptable ratio is 1.5:1. This means that if you are following 150 people, you should have at least 100 followers.
For someone in my case, I have enough weirdos and bot twitters (I don't follow those followers) that followed me for me to take the hits from 150 people who don't follow me back.
For some of our newer members, they just went from 200 follows to 700 follows and they started with 20 followers and now are at 60 followers. 700:60 is not a good ratio for them. It will take them a tremendous amount of time to build up enough outside followers to offset all the SITS members who are not reciprocating.
It is also not good for them to suddenly stop following those new people because Twitter doesn't like that sort of behaviors and they may accidentally get banned. It would take them literally months to slowly unfollow in order not to cause problems.
2) Our challenge is about building a better blog. Part of that is having a dialogue with your followers and audience. You can't have a conversation when it's a one way street.
When people who are part of your community is reaching out, the polite thing to do is to accept and make sure you have a way of seeing what they have to share.
Note: I'm not trying to start any drama. I believe that most people don't know how the Twitter situation can hurt someone else. This discussion is to let the group leaders and the rest of the community know that I've seen quite a few frustrated tweets that they don't see because I'm following back everyone from 31DBBB.
