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Tuesday, February 23, 2016


Are You Checking Your Twitter Followers?


If you are just starting on Twitter or have been there for a while, you are probably thrilled when anyone follows you back and you are growing your followers. Even though I have over 165,000 followers on Twitter, at least once a day, I'm checking through those followers and looking for several things:

1. Is this follower someone that I want following me? The world is full of people that I don't want to follow you such as porn or people who are only selling twitter followers or have no content. If I spot such a person, then I quickly block this person and exclude them from being one of my followers. Their tweets will not appear in my twitter feed if I block them.

2. Does this person speak English? I do not speak Arabic or Chinese or Japanese or ???. I speak English and only want to follow and have followers who tweet in English.  If you read their profile, in seconds you can determine whether they are writing in English or another language. Or possibly they don't have anything in their profile (as many new people don't). In these cases, I open a new tab and take a quick look at their tweets. If I see it is in another language, then I block these followers.

3. Is this follower in my target market and something I would want to see in my twitter feed (my home page on Twitter)? I make an instant decision and at times I block these people as well and remove them from Twitter.

From the outside, it may look like I follow everyone who follows me. I don't. It's important to make sure you have the right followers. I've written about the daily actions I take on Twitter. If you want to know more of these details, I encourage you to follow this link. I'm continuing to use these tools. In this article, I'm writing about some other simple and quick detailed actions I take with my twitter followers.


I appreciate the people who follow me on Twitter. While it may not seem like you have a lot of control over who follows you, you do. Take consistent action. If you attract porn or spam or twitter trolls, then others in these categories will begin to follow you as well. Through your consistent action, you send a message to others about the types of followers you want to have on Twitter.

From my years in publishing, nothing happens overnight. You will not have hundreds of entries in your blog without consistent effort. You will not have written multiple books without consistent effort. It's the same on your social media. Little by little and daily efforts for only a few minutes will make a huge difference.  

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Tuesday, August 07, 2007


The Origin of Junk Mail

In recent days I've seen several news reports about spam or junk mail. It's an element in our work as writers and editors and others in publishing. I know many people have spam filters. I will see it when I send them an email response to their question on Right-Writing.com. I have to fill out a form on their spam filter in order to get my response returned to them (an understandable nuisance--yet still a nuisance in my view).

Over the weekend, I was in Houston, Texas for the Texas Christian Writers event at First Baptist Houston. When I returned home I found the August 6th issue of The New Yorker. It includes an article about spam called Damn Spam, A hundred billion junk e-mails a day. If you want to know about the origins of electronic junk mail, read this article.

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