How I've Made $200k in the iOS Education Market

Now when I'm deciding if it's worth pushing the app to someone on Twitter, I check if they have a rational following to followers ratio.

Even when following a normal amount of people on Twitter, the sheer amount of traffic means that your link will probably get lost in the feed.

The first is this general flow of information en masse. If you're at a party or other social event, it's like the general tone of the room. Have you ever been to a shotgun wedding? Or a corporate event where a huge success is being announced? You can walk in the room and get a sense that something good or unpopular is going on, just from the atmosphere. That's the mass twitter stream.

The second is the specific, targeted communities. My colleague down the hall is huge fan of horse racing. He curates a list of handicappers, jockeys, horse trainers and owners. If an important handicapper posts something, he's literally reading it in seconds. If my friend is following a specific horse race, he pays close attention to what race fans and trainers are saying about the horses.

If you're failing to get traction from Twitter, I would argue that you're getting lost in the stream -- you're one voice among many. You need to identify and figure out how to get in front of people who matter. That means that you need to be doing something real and useful -- not periodically tweeting some pitch.

Other social networks are similar. On Linkedin, for example, some people, especially recruiters, collect thousands of people like baseball cards, then mass-spam useless PR or other nonsense. That defeats the whole purpose of "social media"... social media is powerful because I trust and listen to people with whom I have a connection. If a friend or someone whom I respect says "Hey Duff -- you need to check this out, you'll love it", I'm there.

However, my experience with Twitter is that people don't even click the link in the first place. I used to go through people's twitter feeds, people with thousands of followers, and look at the bit.ly stats for their links. It was rare to see any link clicked more than maybe 5 times. More often than not, it was precisely zero.

Unfortunately, t.co has made that game less easy.