In Episode 8 of the podcast, I brought up Mr. Tweet as my pick of the week. I explained how the service worked and then ended my spiel unsure of how useful the information presented actually was. It seemed like data I could use, but it didn’t really strike me as all too integral to my twitter experience over all. And then I read some others’ comments on the service and how it really only gave them twitter celebrities to follow based on their information. After futzing around with the site some more afterward, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s usefulness really “depends.”
From the get-go, Mr. Tweet claims to look “through your extended network to help you build effective relationships on Twitter” by making suggestions on who of your followers you should be following back, as well as the influential people you should be following. When you get the data back (after a fairly lengthy time frame), you’ll notice that the most useful information is on the right hand side. The “Characteristics” section quickly explains whether or not the people listed are “worth following.”
For example: If I see that someone barely replies or follows back, I assume that they’re using twitter just to get follow numbers or they aren’t really using the service the way it was meant to be used. So, I don’t follow them. If I see that someone posts on average one to two posts a day, they’re probably not someone I’d be all that interested in following, either. But I’m not entirely sure, and that’s where another feature of Mr. Tweet becomes real handy.
Underneath the person’s username, there’s a list of people who follow said user. Usually this is a list of twitter celebrities or important people within your own network who find this person interesting enough to follow back. Clearly, if they think this person is worth following, you might think so too. This is essentially how Mr. Tweet operates. It gives you a bunch of information in the hopes of connecting you to more people based on your network.
And this is where the “depends” comes in. Based off of my experience with the service, unless you have a varied group of people you follow, the results might not be all that helpful. Before I signed up for the service, I was following roughly 320 people or so. After the report came back, I started following a “few” more people, but not all that many. A lot of my results were people claiming to be SEOs, or marketers trying to make it in the “business.” I had to weed through a lot of that to find people I was interested in following. Chances are, you’ll have more or less of that.
There’s another part of the site that tries to show you if there’s followers that you should be following back, but it does nothing to explain whether or not they’re spammers or not. In fact, one of the people they suggested I follow had their account suspended, so I couldn’t follow them back even if I wanted. And I couldn’t decipher, based off the data they returned, whether some of the other people that followed me were worth it.
It should be noted that Mr. Tweet is a relatively new service. Naturally, things will change over time. If you plan on using it, just keep what I said in mind. It might help you find a lot of new and exciting people to follow, or it might just give you a copious list of SEOs to follow. It might help you sniff out the spammers versus the genuine people, or it might not. It all “depends.”
Did you try the service? What do you think? E-mail me or join the discussion in the comments.
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extended network, Mr. Tweet, twitter, twitter celebrities
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