Facebook and twitter are 2 social networking sites which can increase the traffic to your website dramatically. However you need to have facebook fans and twitter followers first to benefit from them. So I started using twiends.com in an attempt to increase the number of twitter followers on my account as well as likes on my facebook fan page.
Twiends use the terminology “seeds” which is basically equivalent to points or money. The more you have, the better as it will enable you to get more followers. When someone follows you on twitter, your number of seeds decrease (mininum 2 seeds for each follower but you can increase that to 5 if you want to attract more people). When you join twiends, you get 15 seeds to start off with but if you complete your profile, you’ll get an additional 40 seeds.
So I had 55 seeds in my account and I decided to add my twitter page now. As soon as twitter was linked, I saw my seeds decreasing. In the space of a couple of minutes, I was down to 25 seeds. I checked my twitter profile and I saw I was getting new followers. However that was not what I wanted – I wanted twitter followers from a specific country so that it’s more targetted when I tweet. I searched quickly on twiends help page but had no luck. Google did not bring me any good results as well and within like 10 mins, I was at 0 seeds. This means that no one else would follow me as from now. I then performed another search to see how I could change my settings to get targetted followers and manage to find it. You have to click on Settings, then select Twitter from the left hand menu and edit your preferences. I specified the country I wanted to get followers from, gave 3 seeds for each follower, chose a Drop Rate of average and left the Membership Length at the recommended settings.
The Drop Rate is basically when someone follows you (you lose seeds because that person gets the seeds for it) and then stops following you after a short period of time. I’ve had a couple of people do that on my account. Out of 23, 7 stopped following me within an hour. So it’s a waste of seeds. The membership length should however be left at the recommended settings as new users are the ones who are more likely to follow you.
Since I had 0 seeds on my account, I couldn’t get more followers. I checked other free ways to get seeds and found out that if you join their newsletter, you will get 50 seeds. Referring other people to the site will get you 25 seeds if that person becomes a member that is. You can also buy seeds; for $30 you can get 1250 seeds.
With 50 seeds in my account and followers targetted to a specific country, I did not experience any bad/unwanted follower. Actually I did not get any followers at all because the country I’m targetting does not have many users at the moment. Anyway, let’s see what the future holds for twiends.