Promote Your Site Using Twiends

Somehow through my drunk stumbling around the internet I happened onto a site called Twiends. You can use it to find new Twitter contacts and Facebook pages to like. The upside to liking others is that it gets you “seeds” which are then used to promote your site through your Twitter account and Facebook page.

At first I was absolutely in love with Twiends! The first day I gained 30+ Twitter followers and the same amount in Facebook fan page likes. I tweeted about it three or four times within a 24 hour period because I really liked it. I deliberately waited to write a blog post about it until I’d been a member for some time and could better speak about its pros and cons.

Honestly, I don’t want to admit this, but the week before I joined Twiends I finished up a paid Facebook campaign based off the advice on Problogger’s Use a Facebook Campaign to Find New Fans. It was a really small test of $20. I got 16 likes.

So… if you’re thinking of a Facebook campaign to promote your site through your fan page, I’d sink that money into Twiends first. You’ll get more likes, probably of the same quality or better.

How it Works

Everything revolves around the seed. Once you set up your Twitter account and/or Facebook profile you can determine, among other things, how many seeds you will offer others to follow or like it.

Naturally, you can buy seeds starting at 1250 seeds for $30 or a subscription of 75 seeds a day for $10 a week. You can also get free seeds through following and liking others, watching YouTube videos, joining the newsletter and referrals.

Supposedly you’ll get 25 seeds with every referral, however from my initial tweeting last week I referred several new members and they are all still “pending”. Twiends defines an active user as this:

An active referral is one where the new user has actually started using twiends. We monitor a number of things to determine whether an account is active or not. A new account may take a day or two before being considered active.

So I don’t know. Maybe the people I referred didn’t see the potential I did and haven’t used the site.

Set Up Your Interests

The first thing you’ll want to do is set up your interests to start targeting followers. You’re allowed up to five interests to help people find you. In their drop-down they include how many users indicate a particular interest so if it isn’t in the hundreds or thousands you might want to reconsider picking it. What’s the point in targeting your Twitter and Facebook page to a couple dozen people?

I have photographer and photography set up as a couple of my primary interests and definitely notice a lot of photographers and artists in the suggestions. I also set up my interests to match the topics I blog about, not my general personal interests.

When you go to follow users either on the Twitter or Facebook tab, you’ll see two columns. On the left you can filter either by same interests or same country. On the right are randomly selected other accounts. It is sorted with those paying the most seeds up top, so technically you could follow/like those offering a lot of seeds and then refresh to get more suggestions paying the most seeds. I just go through a whole section and Skip or Follow.

Set Up Your Options

Twiends allows you to set some options for both your Facebook and Twitter promotions. You can change the amount of seeds you offer with the minimum being two. One seed is used to “purchase” the promotion, so you’re actually offering another user one less seed than you set.

You can also choose to exclude users who haven’t been active on Twiends for a couple of days, but I don’t really see the point in doing that since they’re the most active users. For Twitter promotions, you can also exclude users that have a high drop rate.

So far, I seem to be retaining less than half of the Twitter followers and about 80% of the Facebook likes. I think that might have to do with how easy it is to stop following someone on Twitter.

How I Use Twiends

I’ve mostly stopped using Twiends to follow people on Twitter. All you get on Twiends is their bio, avatar and last tweet. I kept leaving Twiends to check out profiles on Twitter to determine whether or not to follow and it was too much of a pain. I don’t want my Twitter stream diluted to a whole bunch of nonsense I don’t care about.

I keep my seeds going toward Twitter promotion because I want more followers (I won’t lie, I want the numbers.) I’ve found some great Twitter folk from them following me on Twiends but I don’t want to earn seeds that way.

Facebook likes are more meaningless to me. It’s tied to me personally and it doesn’t matter if I like a zillion Facebook pages, whereas it does matter if I follow a zillion people on Twitter and they don’t follow me back. I also like the way Twiends presents the Facebook page for me to like: I get several recent status updates and it really helps me to determine the quality of the page.

A Worthwhile Tool?

Whether you pay for seeds or earn them through free methods, using Twiends will definitely get you more followers quickly!

Though Twiends is based off and focused on Twitter, I feel there is far more potential to grow a lasting Facebook following. The turnover is dramatically lower and I’ve noticed more interaction from my new Facebook followers than my new Twitter followers.

Considering more people are sharing links on Facebook than Twitter, Twiends promises to be an extremely valuable tool to promote your site and Facebook fan page!

Sign up on Twiends and tell me how it works for you!