8 replies to this topic

[dsellers]

I notice when I visited the Twitter accounts of others, and decided not to follow them, in the next day or so they show up and start following me. This is mainly internet marketers that have been able to do this. Somehow they are able to see I've viewed their Twitter account, even though I did not follow them.

Anybody know how to pull this off. I've searched for apps but haven't got anywhere. Thanks for any suggestions.

[Jill]

It must be a coincidence. They're probably seeing you out there just like you're seeing them.

[Randy]

I don't use Twitter personally, but such stats would be very easy for them to provide if they chose to do so. After all, if you're logged into your Twitter account this small fact would be something that should get recorded to their log files, just like it does when you log into any other type of Membership site.

I set this up on one of my membership sites once, purely out of curiosity to see which and what percentage of users were utilizing certain areas of the site. When it was up and running I could tell you every single page any of my members ever touched. Fascinating stuff if you're into information overload.

[Jill]

No, you don't get stats in your twitter account. Although...that's a great idea. Perhaps that's how they could finally monetize Twitter by providing additional stat information...hmmm....

[Randy]

Yeah, stats would be a good thing for them to provide. I'm amazed they don't!

That said they do have a Twitter API, correct? I'm pretty sure they do, but don't know how well developed it is having never used the service. If they have something there that would allow you see if a user was logged in when visiting your profile page or whatever app being used to access your tweets it would be a pretty simple process to drop those usernames, ids or whatever into a file or database.

Like I said, I don't use the service so don't know its capabilities. But since I assume there's some type of user authentication involved it shouldn't be too difficult to latch onto that information.

[Jill]

Yes they do have an API and there are literally hundreds of twitter add ons. But nothing like that.

[Randy]

It may be that they don't make the necessary information available for access Jill.

If it's any consolation I'm going to be tinkering with something here in the near future for a friend that's kind of the polar opposite of what we're talking about here. He does a bit of tweeting and wants to be able to track visits and (hopefully) conversions that come from his twittering endeavors. Apparently, it doesn't work to simply look for twitter.com referrals because roughly half of twitter users use an app to access the tweets. So too many show up with no referrer, essentially masking itself as a direct hit.

I've pretty much visualized a way to maybe do this, but I'll need to set up an account to test a few things first. Look for that one in a week or two.

[dsellers]

Thanks for the insights. I'm almost 100% sure it wasn't' a coincidence. Somehow, these people were able to see I visited their twitter account, but did not subscribe to follow. Like smart entrepreneurs, they came and signed up to follow me though.

I know this type of tracking was possible with Google analytics a while back (you could see all the twitter visitors in the reports because Twitter once passed through the info in the cookies), but now it's not - twitter stopped passing this variable through.

Anyway, if anyone comes across any solutions for this, please let me know. This would be another great way to save prospects.

[Jill]

I'm almost 100% sure it wasn't' a coincidence. Somehow, these people were able to see I visited their twitter account, but did not subscribe to follow. Like smart entrepreneurs, they came and signed up to follow me though.

No, I really don't see how there's any way they could know this. Of coruse, if you clicked through to their website rather than just their profile, that's another story.