If you have been thinking about social media for yourself or your business then the first step is to sign-up. The sooner you sign-up the better.

If you wait you may find yourself without the desired user name you want. Just like domain names there are name squatters on twitter, youtube and other social media sites. If you have a Trademark or can prove to these social media sites you are the real person or business they will help you get the account from these squatters. That can take awhile though so I do suggest securing your name today if it is available.

Choosing a user name can be difficult. If your a business try to secure your business name so that you can brand your business. If your not going to use the account for business at all then you have the freedom to pick any name.

Some people wonder if they should have 2 accounts. One for the business and one for their personal stuff. You can have 2 accounts but as the key to social media is to be a person I would suggest you have 1. I have tested doing multiple accounts and watched people with 2 accounts one for work and one for business and they all seem to lean towards only using one account (which is always personal).

If your not registered I suggest heading over to twitter, youtube and facebook today and get started.

This post was sponsored by Bob Songs for Blogathon. Bob is a great musician and writer. You should check out his site.

Want to sponsor a post for Blogathon? Full details.

Twitter has a feature on their site which shows current trends. The system is setup to show what the majority of people are talking about. For example Iran and Michael Jackson are currently trending on twitter because a lot of people are talking about it.

A hashtag is a convention used on twitter to make a keyword search able on twitter. A hash is just a #. So an example would be #FollowFriday.

From time to time you will see these hashtag trend for things that allow people to learn more about one another. A good example of this is #thingsboyssay and #thinggirlssay which was going around on twitter for a few weeks.

This week I want to try an experiment and see what it takes to get a hastag trend started. With the death of Michael Jackson it brought up the ‘Where were you moments’ conversations on twitter. So this week answer the following and include the following hashtag….

#wherewereyou for the death Princess Di?
#wherewereyou for 911?
#wherewereyou for the Challenger accident ?
#wherewereyou for death Lennon?
#wherewereyou for JFK?
#wherewereyou for M. King? MJ?
#wherewereyou for anything you feel was a where were you moment?

I look forward to seeing how this works. You can follow along and view the results here.

This morning I woke up to find my twitter account had been suspended. A bit confused I immediately tried to submitted a ticket to support but I could not find it on the twitter help page. I googled and found it of course and submitted a ticket. As my account was suspended I started searching for others who had been suspended to see how long it could take. One post suggested it could take up too 30 days. As I continued to search I found there was very little help for when you need it at twitter.

While I was suspended I learned a great deal about twitter though. For example did you know that twitter is owned by obvious.com. Also I found a phone number where you can call twitter and leave a message. This is the info on their whois…

415-896-2008

Another interesting fact that I learned was that the twitter.com domain was previously owned by someone in South Korea. I wonder how much they sold it for? Bet  they are kicking themselves now for selling so low.

I also found that they list the twitter employees on their site. Here is a list of those employees that I can find…

I do not suggest you harass these people as it may get you permanently banned.

At this point I tried calling the obvious.com phone number which is a different number on that whois. That number was disconnected so I do suggest that they update it.

Around this time I noticed that my ticket had been updated that delbius was the person reviewing my ticket. I fired him a quick @ with my ticket number letting him know if he had any questions to let me know.

Less then a hour later delbius had resolved the issue and my account was  back online.

The problem with my account was there was a spammer sending out RT’s using my username in them and someone at twitter inadvertently suspended me too.

So what should I have done? What would you have done in this situation?

If you use twitter you know that you will come to learn that it has the ability to send someone a message. You can only send a message if you follow them and they follow you. This should prevent spam because if someone sends you a message (DM) that is sales like you can just unfollow them. Problem solved!

Well awhile back problogger (I believe it was him) said we should all go out and use a service to send out an Auto Direct Message whenever someone follows us. That way it would build rapport with new people. What a great idea!

The problem ended up that a lot of people did set it up. Auto DM’s now flood our inbox when we follow people. They try to sell us on products, sites, memberships and more all when were just getting to know them.

Now as we have learned if you shout at people long enough they will start to ignore it. What happens when to much noise comes from your Direct Messages? Right people are going to start ignoring it.

There are already people working on convincing the services that allow Auto DM’s to disable them. There is no need for an Auto DM other then to spam and well as I am sure you would agree no one likes spam.

Not convinced Auto DM’s suck? See this poll we did.

I am currently beta testing a script I created that will allow you to remove spam from your twitter DM’s using Filters. The cost of the script will be $20. If you would like to beta test the script I have 4 more beta spots open. Want to beta test it? Leave a comment and I will email you the script.

When you sign up for twitter you might be a bit confused as to what to do next. If you just start tweeting you might feel a bit lonely and not sure why you are doing it.

I suggest you create a follow plan for your account. Here are some plans I have seen and how to achieve them…

Friends and Family
If you just want to follow friends and family then twitter makes it easy for you to invite them using there email address.

Also if you use services like Gmail, AOL or Yahoo you can import your users on twitter as well.

If you want to find friends from Facebook you will have to do it manually by going to each friends profile and viewing their email. That can take awhile but the Facebook Terms of Service prevents you from using a program like Profilicious 1.

Around Me
If you want to follow people that live around you twitter search is a powerful tool for that. I like the ability to know what is going on around me and having neighbours who can answer local questions. This technique also allows for more tweetups as you get to know the other people around you.

To find people around you set your near this place, within this distance and click search.

Niche Follow
If you talk about one topic or several topics you might want to only follow others who are in that niche. To do that simply do a search for a keyword and start viewing and following profiles you feel are interesting.

I suggest for better results to add -http -www to your search term.

Follow Me Follow You
Some people believe that part of social media is to follow those that follow them. They say if they have taken the time to get to know you then it is good manners to get to know them. You can manually add people by click in your Followers in your profile and click on the ‘Follow” button for those people you are not already following.

Market Me
If you purely want to use twitter as a marketing platform and do not wish to follow anyone you may find that twitter might not be the best platform for that. I used twitter as a marketing platform for the blog before understanding it. The results were not as good as they have been since moving away from this model.

If you wish to market yourself I suggest you mix in 1 marketing tweet with 3-4 person tweets for a better result.

What is your following plan on twitter? Is it working for you?

If you have been on twitter for awhile I am sure you have encountered the #FollowFriday phenomena. The idea behind this was to share a person or group of people that you feel your follows should follow as well.

In recent months the #FollowFriday has become frantic and the meaning has started to lose it’s value.

I have seen the following trends…

• Multiple people being listed with the hash tag #FollowFriday. It seems to some it is a contest to see how many people they can fit one tweet.
• Multiple #FollowFriday tweets.
• No reasons provided as to why we should follow the people listed.
• People retweeting others #FollowFriday for no reason.
• People retweeting #FollowFriday that they are listed in.

I will start off by saying you can do whatever you want on twitter in regards to #FollowFriday. If your doing what your Social Media plan is and it is working then by all means continue.

If #FollowFriday does not change then the purpose of it will be soon lost. More people are starting to see the tweets as just noise. Less and less people actually are following because it is seen as noise. When there is no value in doing it to anyone then it will die.

My suggestion is that if your going to do a #FollowFriday tweet you should limit it to one person or one group of people that have something in common. You should be able to provide a bit of details as to why we should follow.

An example is…

My #FollowFriday is @example. He is a father, an entrepreneur, a hockey fan and good at helping me with php issues.

What do you think? How do you do #FollowFriday?