OK! Let's return to our Real Time Journal. Yesterday we created the NeuroNow Twitter account and created some relevant neuroscience tweets.
Here's what NeuroNow looks like on Twitter today (go see it yourself at twitter.com/neuronow)
The 37 tweets were generated from the RSS to tweet tool that I used yesterday (I cheated a little and added a few more neuroscience blogs that I like). We got 11 followers the first day (I'll explain the "61 following" a little later).
Also added a cool new picture of a neuron to NeuroNow. Got it from www.iStockPhoto.com for $2. Keep in mind that Twitter doesn't like pictures with a file size bigger than 700K.
As you tweet, you'll attract some followers, but you need to follow back people that follow you, and follow additional people that you think would be interested in your tweets. You can do this by hand in Twitter, but I'm going to Use TweetAdder, a tool that automates most of that work. You can pick up TweetAdder at www.tweetadder.com for $50.
After downloading TweetAdder and registering it, you need to add the Twitter name that you're going to work with. I use TweetAdder with a bunch of Twitter names, so you may see more than one Twitter name in the screenshots:
This shows that NeuroNow is following 1 person, is being followed by 11 people and tweeting 37 times.
Logging into NeuroNow Twitter account through Tweet Adder, I can now start to automate some of the tasks necessary to make NeuroNow more popular. The first thing I'll do is search for people to follow:
I enter the keyword "neuroscience" and find the following tweets:
TweetAdder finds 572 people to start following. I add them all into TweeterAdder's database:
Now I need to start following them, as well as the 11 people that are already following me. Clicking on the Follow tap, I choose the default settings and click the "Start" buttons.
Then I set up the UnFollow tab. This ensures that the follow to followed proportion doesn't get out of whack. There's some controversy about this - for now I'll just use the default settings:
The Automation tab allows you to automatically run all these tasks. I run TweetAdder in the background ever day:
Tomorrow, we'll fine tune the tweets that we're sending, and see how our followers and followings have worked out.
