A lot of people have contacted me over the past couple of days asking about the best way to build a twitter profile. While there is no hard and fast rule, there are some best practices that should really be followed if you want to make the most out of your profile (And not get banned aswell!). Most, if not all of these tips are to do with running an account using the twitter friend adder. If you are making an account by hand then these shouldn’t really apply.

Choose A Niche
While this one may seem obvious, to some people it sure as hell ain’t. Many a time i have seen someone create a plain and boring looking profile, with the obvious fake picture of a blond babe. While I’m sure there is enough idiots on twitter to go around for a while, even my personal profile on twitter gets bombarded with friend requests from these types of profiles. Now to me, a niche is more like an angle i can take my twitter account. Which is really taking me onto my second point…

What To Tweet
Now if we have a lock stock standard profile with a display picture of a hot model. What can we tweet about? You can try and ewhore your way through twitter but that will get you banned pretty damn fast. You can also do what everyone else does and blog about eating eggs for breakfast, but no body wants to follow a stranger that is just tweeting what he is eating. With a niche profile you can make tweets targeted directly at your audience. For example i have a basketball account. I know absolutely nothing about basketball, i don’t play it, i don’t watch it. And yet i manage to amass a huge amount of followers for one reason…. Youtube!   If I’m tweeting about videos showing slam dunks all day and Kobe ripping up the court. People are more likely to be interested in that then eggs on toast. The videos never run out either. My second favourite source is news sites. There is always something basketball related in the news floating around the web. With these two sources you can basically fill your profile with “helpful” tweets, and almost coax them into following you.

Don’t Tweet Ads 24/7
On almost all of my profiles, i only tweet an ad once every two days. Once a day at the very max. Tweeting ads everyday sends off a warning to everyone following you to not take any notice of what your saying. If your constantly tweeting ads, everyone reading your tweets will silently “shut off” and not read what you have to say. More then likely you will get reported sooner or later to @spam.

Remove Non-reciprocal Followers
What’s the biggest thing that says your a spammer other then masses of ads on your front page? A huge following to follower ratio! If you follow 2000 people, and you only have 200 following you back. It is quite obvious that your going balls to the wall adding people who you don’t know, and don’t intend to know. Removing some of these people to make your ratio more respectable is definitely the way to go. There is a tonne of sites out on the web that offer this service, aswell as downloadable products. The one that i personally use is Twitter Karma, of which i include a link to in the twitter friend adder application.

Note : This one is a bit 50/50. I have heard people blaming mass removing of friends as the reason for their ban. However it seems illogical to me. There is plenty of whitehat sites out there that offer this service (One of which being twitter karma which i personally use). Not only that, but nothing in twitters TOS (or API documentation) does it say mass unfollowing is a no go. It does say mass following can get you banned. However that should be a no brainer.

Take It Easy!
The most important rule of all is take to take it easy. Don’t get greedy both adding friends and spamming your ads. I generally add no more then 400 friends per day, and i always give atleast one day a week rest to my accounts. I have already told you above about tweeting. However i cannot stress enough about taking it easy adding friends.

I guess the above is a tad messy, but it was just my thoughts all quickly written down. So hopefully i get a little less emails about people getting banned. Remember Twitter Friend Adder is only a application, it is up to you how you apply it.