This is a really good (and personal) insight into Guy Kawasaki's tweeting mindset, why he uses ghostwriters and how he tracks progress. Brilliant stuff.

How I Tweet: Updated 7/2/10

Update: Holy Kaw

By far, the biggest change to my tweeting is the creation of a section of Alltop called Holy Kaw. I started it because of the popularity of my Posterous blog where I uploaded pictures and summaries of interesting stories—basically stuff that was too long for a tweet and too short for a blog post. I noticed that these posts were getting thousands of page views, and there’s nothing that I hate more than an unmonetized page view, so we added it to Alltop.com. By the way, it’s pronounced “holy cow” as in “holy Kaw-asaki.”

This is how Holy Kaw works: a team of ghosts and contributors and I scour the Internet to find interesting, educational, and funny stories. The editorial test is that the story elicits a “Holy kaw!” response when one reads it—for example, “Holy kaw, Facebook is now worth $23 billion!

"We write up the story or embed the video and post it to the Holy Kaw part of Alltop (we still use Posterous for this). These stories are then tweeted out to @GuyKawasaki and @Alltop.

We never write up so much of it that there’s no reason to go to the source. For example, if it’s a “top ten” story, we only include two or three of the ten. We include a link to the source story—we’ve never had a complaint from the sources because we send them thousands of page views. Indeed, this works so well that sites such as HowStuffWorks.com and National Geographic have contributor accounts so that they can write up their own stories on Holy Kaw to point back to their site.

We make money because there are banner ads on the Holy Kaw pages, and there is a link to a relevant Alltop topic site—for example, if the Holy Kaw story is about social media, we include a link to Social-Media.alltop. There are also ads on the Alltop page, so we monetize the Holy Kaw page itself, “self-advertise” to an Alltop topic, and then monetize the Alltop topic page too.

General

• Question: How can you follow so many people?

  Answer: I don’t read the timelines of all the people that I follow. Instead, I only deal with @s, Directs, and tweets that contain “guykawasaki” and “alltop.” I am not reading everything everyone I follow tweets, but I answer almost every @ and Direct.

  Update: no change.

• Question: Then why do you follow everyone?

  Answer: I follow everyone for two reasons: first, common courtesy; second, so that anyone can send a Direct to me. I like Direct messages because they are so much more efficient than email.

  Update: no change.

• Question: Why do you use @GuyKawasaki and @GuysReplies?

  Answer: I created @Guysreplies in order to reply to @s that all my followers do not need to see. For example, when people tweet, “@guykawasaki I loved Reality Check,” I don’t want to burden everyone with my thank-you @ reply. Also, people publicly attack me as a kind of “tweet bait” to get more followers. Because @GuysReplies has few followers, this scheme won’t work, and I can still appear to be “engaged” with the losers.

  Update: I no longer use @guysreplies because the only people who see my @replies are those who follow both me and the recipient. I added @Alltop as another account for people who do not want to see repeat tweets. It has the same tweets as @GuyKawasaki, but only once.

• Question: Why do you repeat your tweets?

  Answer: I repeat a handful of my tweets because I don’t assume that all my followers are reading me 24 x 7 x 365. This is the same reason that ESPN and CNN repeat the same news stories (without updates, simply identical reports) throughout the day. I’ve examined the click-through patterns on repeat tweets, and each one gets about the same amount of traffic. If I tweeted stories only once, I would lose 75% of the traffic that I could get.

  

  Update: Every Holy Kaw story is tweeted four times (the graph above shows a more extreme example of five repeated tweets), eight hours apart through @GuyKawasaki. I also manually tweet links to pages that aren’t appropriate for Holy a Kaw post (for example, a cool blog) through @GuyKawasaki and use Objective Marketer to also repeat these four times, eight hours apart. I frame some of these links with an Alltop link using Objective Marketer in order to promote an Alltop page—here’s an example. Again, @Alltop has the same Holy Kaw stories, but they are not repeated.

• Question: What Twitter applications do you use?

  Answer: I’m on a constant hunt for the ultimate Twitter applications. Right now, I use TweetDeck on my Macintosh and TweetFlip and Tweetie on my iPhone.

  My ghosts and I also use Objective Marketer to post tweets that contain links. This site enables us to create marketing campaigns and then schedule, frame, and track tweets. Disclosure: I am an advisor to Objective.

  Finally, I use TwitterHawk to thank people who have shared Alltop pages with their followers. This site enables me to search for the string “pretty good stuff about” and automatically send a tweet.

  Update: I now use Tweetdeck on my Mac, Twitterific on my iPad, and Twitter (formerly Tweetie) on my iPhone. The repeat tweets of Holy Kaw through @GuyKawasaki are made by a custom application. The single tweets of Holy Kaw through @Alltop are made by Objective Marketer. I no longer use TwitterHawk to thank people. I use Twitterfeed to post blog entries from How to Change the World into @GuyKawasaki.

• Question: How long do you spend on Twitter every day?

  Answer: Asking me this is like asking Tiger Woods how much time he spends playing golf: “It’s what I do.” If I’m on the computer, I’m on Twitter, and I’m on the computer eight hours per day. When I’m not on the computer, I use TweetFlip or Tweetie to mark tweets as “favorites” that I handle later using TweetDeck.

• Update: It’s probably not good idea to use the Tiger Woods analogy anymore, but I still spend a few hours every day on Twitter.

Ghostwriters

• Question: Do you use ghostwriters?

  Answer: Yes, four people contribute to my tweets: Annie Colbert, Gina Ruiz, Noelle Chun, and Neenz Faleafine. This is why you will see the initials “AC, “GR,” “NC,” and “LF” at the end of some tweets. If there are no initials, then it’s me or the automated feeds (see later).

  I use ghostwriters because I want to provide as many interesting links as possible, and five intelligent people looking for interesting stuff are bound to find more than one. Incidentally, I measure the quality of my links (and that’s what matters most to me) by how many times people retweet me. One objective measure of retweets is Retweetrank.

  Update: There are now six ghosts to find and write Holy Kaw stories: Noelle Chun, Will Mayall, Catherine Faas, Annie Colbert, Neenz Faleafine, and Paul David Shrader. In addition, seven organizations can post Holy Kaw stories too: HowStuffWorks.com, Futurity, Toxel, The Unofficial Apple Weblog, Answers.com, National Geographic, and BBC.

  The three sites that I now check to see how I’m doing are: TwitterGrader, Twittercounter, and Klout.

• Question: How do you and your ghosts find so many links?

  Answer: We mostly use Alltop to help us quickly find good stories. Principally, we scan Most-Popular.alltopTweetmeme.alltop, Science.alltop, Psychology.alltop, SmartBrief.alltop, and Oddities.alltop. I also have three RSS feeds that automatically post into my account via Twitterfeed: Toxel, Truemors, and How Stuff Works.

  Update: My personal sources are my MyAlltop page, StumbleUpon’s toolbar, and SmartBrief. I write up about three to five stories a day. I also assign approximately ten stories/day to the ghosts to write up, so even if a ghost writes up the story, there’s a high probability that I selected it.

• Question: Isn’t automatically posting feeds “cheating”?

  Answer: The goal is to have interesting tweets that people retweet which encourages more people to follow me. Whatever works, works. The editors at Toxel, Truemors (other a porn video or two), and How Stuff Works are so good—why shouldn’t I “cheat”? Pick your corner.

  

  Update: no change.

• Question: Do your ghosts respond to @s and Directs for you?

  Answer: No, they only tweet outgoing links to interesting sites and blogs. They never respond for me or as me.

  Update: no change.

• Question: Why did you hide your use of ghostwriters?

  Answer: I’ve never hidden this fact. As soon as I started it, I disclosed it (way back in January, 2009) here

  . My attitude is: “As long as the tweets are good, why does it matter who posted them?”

  Update: The ghosts and contributors are not hidden at all. In fact, their pictures or logos appear in their stories.

• Question: How can I see only tweets from you and not from your ghostwriters?

  Answer: You are making a mistake because they find great stuff, but try this search.

  Update: There is no way to see only my posts. Think of @GuyKawasaki as a news feed ala CNN or the New York Times.

• Question: Why do some people attack you so much for this?

  Answer: Most are angry, little “SEO experts” who cannot generate content, so they try to generate controversy in order to drive traffic to their blogs or get other angry, little people to follow them.

  Update: no change. There’s still a lot of angry, little people around. What they should do is learn how to avoid cluelessness.

Alltop Promotion

• Question: Why do you constantly promote Alltop?

  Answer: Twitter is a broadcast marketing tool. This is why I put so much time, energy, and money (my ghosts don’t work for free) into it. The Alltop “advertising” justifies and pays for my tweeting—you can think of my tweets as PBS content and the accompanying Alltop promotion as the fundraising telethon.

  Update: no change. By the way, Alltop traffic has increased 200% in the past year.

• Question: Okay, but what if I don’t want to see Alltop promotions?

  Answer: You can UFM (unfollow me).

  Update: no change. The economic and philosophical model remains: we find good stuff, we ask that you “pay” us for this effort with a page view. If you can find good stuff without us and think that our “fee” is too high, UFM and have a happy rest of your life.

• Question: What if I don’t like the Alltop frame that you place around the stories that you link to?

  Answer: You can click on the “x” to close the frame, or a more permanent solution is to UFM.

  Update: no change.

Additional Resources

Update: Here is a collection of all my Twitter tips.