How I Tweet: Just the FAQs

post from How to Change the World on 04 July 2009 10:57:00 AM. © How to Change the World

General

Question: How can you follow so many people?
Answer: I don?t read the timelines of all the people I follow. Instead, I only deal with @s, Directs, and searches for tweets that contain ?guykawasaki? and ?alltop.? I am not reading everything everyone I follow tweets, but I answer almost every @ and Direct.
Question: Why do you use @GuyKawasaki and @GuysReplies?
Answer: I created @Guysreplies in order to reply to @s that all my followers do not need to see. For example, when people tweet, ?@guykawasaki I loved Reality Check,? I don?t want to burden everyone with my thank-you @ reply. Also, people publicly attack me as a kind of ?tweet bait? to get more followers. Because @GuysReplies has few followers, this scheme won?t work, and I can still appear to be ?engaged? with the losers.

Ghostwriters

Question: Do you use ghostwriters?
Answer: Yes, four people contribute to my tweets: Annie Colbert, Gina Ruiz, Noelle Chun, and Neenz Faleafine. This is why you will see the initials ?AC, ?GR,? ?NC,? and ?LF? at the end of some tweets. If there are no initials, then it?s me.
I use ghostwriters because I want to provide as many interesting links as possible, and five intelligent people looking for interesting stuff are bound to find more than one. Incidentally, I measure the quality of my links (and that?s what matters most to me) by how many times people retweet me. One objective measure of retweets is here.
Question: How do you and your ghosts find so many links?
Answer: We mostly use Alltop to do this. For example, Most-Popular.alltop, Science.alltop, Psychology.alltop, and Oddities.alltop.
Question: Do your ghosts respond to @s and Directs for you?
Answer: No, they only tweet outgoing links to interesting sites and blogs. They never respond for me or as me.
Question: Why did you hide your use of ghostwriters?
Answer: I?ve never hidden this fact. As soon as I started it, I disclosed it (way back in January, 2009) here.
Question: How can I see only tweets from you and not from your ghostwriters?
Answer: You are making a mistake because they find great stuff, but try this search.
Question: Why do some people attack you so much for this?
Answer: Most are angry, little ?SEO experts? who cannot generate content, so they try to generate controversy in order to drive traffic to their blogs or get other angry, little people to follow them.

Alltop Promotion

Question: Why do you constantly promote Alltop?
Answer: Twitter is a broadcast marketing tool for me. This is why I put so much time, energy, and money (my ghosts don?t work for free) into it. The Alltop ?advertising? justifies and pays for my tweeting?you can think of my tweets as PBS content and the accompanying Alltop promotion as the fundraising telethon.
Question: Okay, but what if I don?t want to see Alltop promotions?
Answer: You can UFM (unfollow me).
Question: What if I don?t like the Alltop frame that you place around the stories that you link to?
Answer: You can click on the ?x? to close the frame, or a more permanent solution is to UFM.