As I have been delving into social media lately I have been looking for ways to grow my Twitter following. I came upon something I had never heard of called Twiends. Twiends is a directory of sorts where people can find your Twitter profile by location and interests. It is free to join though there are some features you can pay for. It seemed intriguiging, and I figured it was worth a try.
Here is their promo video:
How to use Twiends
To get started you create an account using your Twitter account as the login (or Instagram but we are just using Twitter for this post). It then forces you to authorize their app which I didn’t like, but I couldn’t find a way around it. You are taken to your home page which is basically a dashboard. It has suggestions for people to follow, a stats chart, how many seeds you have, and a few other things.
The way you use the site is simple. It is all based around giving and receiving what they call “seeds” (their form of currency). Your main goal is to collect a bunch of seeds and then offer them to others to encourage them to follow you. You choose how many seeds you want to offer to people who follow you. The more seeds you offer the more appealing it is for people to follow you. Keep in mind the higher your offer the more seeds you will need in your bank to pay out. When you run out of seeds you have to earn or buy more in order to get more followers.
There are four main ways you can get seeds:
- Browse and find people you want to follow on Twitter and follow them using Twiends. The amount of seeds you will receive varies based on what that person has chosen in their settings.
- Use the “Discover” section that rewards you with seeds just for looking at someone’s posts page for a few seconds without actually following them. (I use this when I need a few extra seeds but don’t see anyone I want to follow. However I would not recommend being on the other side of this transaction, because I doubt many people actually get follows this way.)
- Use the paid side of Twiends. If you don’t want to follow others to get seeds you can buy seeds. This is definitely the easier way as seeds can go fast, and most of us don’t want to follow people that you aren’t really interested in.
- Invite others to use Twiends. If they join and use it you will receive 20+ seeds (varies based on the quality of the profile)
It is important to note that they penalize people for following and then immediately unfollowing people. This encourages at least a little longevity in the followers you get. It also means you should be selective about who you follow because you will want to wait a bit before unfollowing anyone.
Oasis Interactive’s Twiends Strategy
When I started I decided I wasn’t going to just follow anybody. It wasn’t worth it to me to junk up my account. Since I am using this for my business page I want to follow other businesses and business people. The easiest way to do this is to go to the “New” tab and select the settings (in blue bubbles) to New, Twitter, Same Interests, Detailed View, and Long List. This filters the list to give you a better starting point and shows a little bit about each person to see if they are a good fit. I scroll through and select the follow button only on profiles of people I really want to follow. In my opinion quality is always better than quantity. You can also select the “Follow Back” filter and see the people who have recently followed you. If they are a good fit (and have seeds available) you will want to follow them back.
Our Twitter results
When I first started using Twiends my business Twitter page was fairly new and I had 17 followers. Within 3-4 days of using Twiends I was up to almost 50 followers. While some of the followers were not my target audience, a lot of them were. At this point I only go in every once in a while and get a few additional seeds. I have maintained most of my followers and attrition seems to be lower than I expected. Overall, I felt like this was a pretty good return on my time investment (I did not spend any money). With my experience so far, I would definitely recommend Twiends to any business trying to get a small boost in their Twitter followers.
Give Twiends a try and let me know what you think. Happy Tweeting!
Jade Stanley
Vice-President
Oasis Interactive, Boise, ID
The Boise Website and Branding Specialists