Over 2,000 followers – http://twitter.com/unbigme
Thousands of ad impressions
More and more entries into our $50 giveaway http://unbig.me/contest_3_1_10.php
Lots more work to go!
I’m not sure if you’ve seen this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Falls but it got me wondering what people would have thought about this if it was discovered in Biblical times. Maybe I’ll even take it one step more – lets pretend that this is a sign from god and that global warming needs to be stopped! Does this blood from ice show us a sign of the coming apocalypse?
Lets all breakout our bibles and get praying, lest we all be sent directly to hell! What does Pat Robertson think?
On a more serious note. Doesn’t it seem likely that a lot of the occurrences in the bible were merely unknown happenings? To me one of the reason religion has such a strong hold on people is that there remains one more great unknown – what happens to us when we die. Just like the Greek and Romans didn’t understand lightning (and other natural happenings) – so they imagined up Zeus and other gods…
I’m not trying to turn this post into a religious debate but I do think this kind of “strange” occurrence deserves a thought or two…
Now that I have 1,000 plus followers – how the hell do I get them to participate? I guess $50 isn’t enough money to get people interested or maybe its like CJ on HN said “I don’t think you’ll find many people willing to annoy their followers/friends with advertisements, even in exchange for some pocket change.“ While I get the sentiment I don’t buy that everyone who follows you on Twitter is your friend. It’s possible that people think the contest is scam or something like a scam – maybe that’s keeping them away? I might “buy” another 1,000 followers just to see if increasing my exposure would help me give away $50… here’s the link to the contest just in case you’re interested – remember it ends March 15, 2010.
After this contest runs its course I might have to see if I can get Reddit users or Digg users to enter a free no strings attached $50 giveaway. If at first you don’t succeed…
I got to thinking about my last post – where I said jokingly “I wonder if I could buy followers”. We’ll late last night I came across a web site http://followmonster.com/ that said – “we can get you 1,000 for $19.99.” So whether it was my late night brain getting the best of me or my frustration of trying to gain more followers, I decided to give it a whirl. I know what you’re thinking – wtf is wrong with you – you’re going to get 999 fake Twitter users and 1 real user following you and it will be a waste of 20 bucks. I knew that was a distinct possibility but hey, late night and days of frustration = a “laissez-faire” attitude.
Well here I am the morning after and what do you know, I now have over 1,500 followers and they “all” seem to be real people. As I watched the followers come in I was thinking how the hell are they getting these people to follow me?
With a little bit of research I think I found out how. Apparently some Twitter users aren’t very “sophisticated”. I think most of the users came my way via this “scheme” http://fastfollowertrain.com/ – who in their right mind would give an unknown website your user name and password? I guess a lot of Twitter people. All I can say is I understand the reasoning why Twitter-ers would use the follow train site because I have been experiencing what a pain in the ass it is trying to gain more users – but folks don’t give out your user name and password to unknown sites! Trust me when I tell you that – I didn’t give my password!
Now if I can just convince these new followers that its worth while to be one of my Twitter followers…
Day 5 of my Twitter foray – and I’m kind of bored with it but don’t tell anyone. Although I am kind of enjoying watching the tweets go by (as I’m typing it reminds me of a Talking Heads song). Some tweets good some not so good. But what does it take to get more people to enter our free $50 giveaway? I mean sheeze – $50 for doing basically nada! Just in case you’re interested here’s the link http://unbig.me/MCpR1b to the giveaway – hurry it ends March 15th. Anyway, I’m sure it’s not the contest – its most likely my merger efforts in trying to get the word out or rather my ineffective efforts. I’m not much for giving up – so next up more “pushing” of the contest and attempts at getting more followers. I wonder if I could buy followers :p
Stats Update: 127 Followers up a whopping 7 users since last post…
Well I added approx more 25 new people to the group of people that I’m following – to see how many would follow me back. I found the new people to follow based on the search “i follow back”. The new count is 120 as of today. That’s 12 new followers out of 25 so using the search “i follow back” works about 48% of the time – not bad but it’s a time consuming process.
My current contest http://unbig.me/MCpR1b isn’t drawling in many participants but its only day 2, maybe when we get closer to the giveaway date more people might enter? So far about 100 people have looked at the contest but not nearly as many have entered. I’ll keep you posted.
I’m also thinking of running a quick contest. Basically, I’ll give away $10 to the person who can get the most of their current followers to follow @unbigme – the catch is they only have 15 minute to do it. I’ll let you know if I decide to do the contest and if so how it goes.
One day after my first attempt to gain users. I started trying to gain users by “following 100 more people” just to see what would happen. My first attempts to find to people to follow didn’t seem to be very fruitful (I searched via subject, location, anything I could think of to find people to follow) …. until I discovered an easy Twitter search method that produced good results; I searched for the words “I follow back”. I know, not rocket science but low and behold by using that search I was able to go from 60 followers to 108 followers in one day and if I would have started my “follow 100 people” initiative with that search I bet I would have gained more. Maybe tonight I’ll trying following 25 more people with the “I follow back” search just see how many follow my back. I also started a $50 giveaway today to see if I can gain users and followers that way… so far not much action but I’ll keep you posted.
I’m starting my first real foray into to gaining Twitter followers or rather attempting to gain Twitter followers. I’m starting with 60 followers so it will be easy to track the result. I got those 60 followers basically by following people who then started following me back. I guess I should set a goal of how many followers I want to gain so I can measure effectively. I guess it would be cool to have 1,000 followers so that will be my initial goal.
For fun I am going to start following 100 more people today to see if I gain any more followers that way. I’m also going to start checking what’s trending and add my 2 cents to the onslaught of tweets. Tomorrow I’m going to start a contest to see if that helps gain followers. You can follow what I’m up to at http://twitter.com/unbigme
Wish me luck…. I’ll keep you posted.
Ok, I’m going to chime in on the iPad not having Flash. I’ve developed a lot of Flash stuff and I’ve developed a lot of non-Flash stuff… Flash is great for some things and not so great for others – that being said. It’s insane for Apple to think that leaving Flash off the iPad is a good idea. I can understand the reasons Apple wants to keep Flash off the iPad. It might kill performance, it might cause the system crash (although I can’t say I’ve seen that happen very much on other systems I’ve used), it would allow people to develop “apps” that don’t go through the app store, and recently I glanced at “An Adobe Flash developer on why the iPad can’t use Flash” where the author talks about touch screens not having mouse over functions so Flash wouldn’t be great on the iPad. But take a look this Moss Puppet video that really sums up the stupidity of not adding Flash to the iPad. The iPad has so many “hacker” issues (no web cam, no USB ports, no Flash) that its more of a device for non-geeks – which is fine – except that those users are going to really want Flash – even though they might not even know what Flash is…
For instance my wife really likes her iTouch – she can listen to music, play apps, interact on Facebook… so I ask her if she would like to get an iPad – and to my surprise she was like no. I ask why and she said, “Why would I want a frick’in large iTouch it wouldn’t fit in my purse, it doesn’t have a webcam and I won’t be able to play games on Facebook…
To sum up… I really think its a large glaring error for Apple to omit Flash - the average user won’t like what the web looks like it without it!