Like everyone who has spent a fair amount of time on Twitter, I have developed a system for amassing huge numbers of followers quickly*. For the first time, I am going to disclose the details of that system. Anyone can do it.
Why build your followers list?
In my book, SocialCorp, I explain why companies need to consider social media initiatives in the context of their objectives in order to get the most out of their experience. There's no reason individual users shouldn't do the same thing. I am on Twitter to communicate with people with whom I share common interests, attributes or objectives. I am there to learn, to share and to help others achieve objectives similar to mine.
How to find people to add
When I joined Twitter, I had to find people worth adding. At the same time, as my followers list grew, people found me and added me. Use the Twitter "Find People" function to find people of interest. Use terms like "books," "attorney," "beer," or "Republican," single words that people use to define themselves, as search terms. You can also use Twellow, Just Tweet It, or any number of Twitter directories.
The ideal person to follow
When you find someone you think is worth adding, check for the following:
An avatar (aka thumbnail photo) of the user or representing the user. Unless you personally know the user, an account without an avatar might indicate a spammer, or someone who simply hasn't really made a commitment to engage on Twitter.
A profile. Twitter profiles are short, but should include the person's name (first name at least), what they do, and a link to a blog, Facebook page, FriendFeed profile, or some other secondary source of content and authentication of the user. Use MS Word to compose yours so you can keep the character count to the limit. Use words that get you found. Take advantage of every character. I threw "Zamboni driver" into my profile and I meet a lot of hockey players and fans and people who are fascinated by Zamobnis and curious about whether I know how to drive one.
Balanced follower/following ratio. Someone who follows 1997 people and is followed back by 13 is a follower collector. They are on Twitter only to amass numbers to engage in spamming users. Some even believe they can amass enough users to make their Twitter account attractive enough to sell. It's been tried, a couple of times on eBay even.
Celebrities, on the other hand, quickly cross over and become unbalanced in the other direction. (Most celebrities are unbalanced in other ways but that is not the subject of this post.) They will be followed by tens of thousands of users and only follow a few in return. These cases can be quite extreme, with people like Ashton Kutcher being followed by over a million and only following a handful back. These people are the most offensive of all Twitter users as they take advantage of their status to amass followers but seldom offer anything of real value in return. At least spammers and schemers are open about what they want from you. Witness this self-absorbed pap (via Tweeting Too Hard) from recording artist John Mayer: "Hey, it's weird. Know what else is? Two homes. Millions of fans. Getting to be an artist for life. I think I'll jump on the treadmill. :)" (Note that John has over 1 million followers and follows 45 in return.)
Who not to add
As people add you, you will be faced with decisions on who to follow back. I follow back any user who follows me with the following exceptions:
Spammers. Yes there are spammers on Twitter. Check out the person's timeline. If the tweets are all selling something, whether it's cell phones, arts and crafts or colon cleansers, that person is a spammer.
Racists, extremists, hatemongers. I don't follow anyone who hates a particular religion, race, nationality, political party, etc.
MLMers and get-rich-quick con artists. I really despise multi-level marketing schemes, aka network marketing. This country is suffering its worst economic hangover in 75 years because of get-rich-quick, money-for-nothing-and-your-chicks-for-free scams. These people are a scourge on Twitter and should be reviled. Often, they can be detected easily by their user IDs and profiles.
What to tweet
One of the most overlooked areas of how to use Twitter is kontent. I sometimes use the "k" form of the word to indicate my distaste for the notion of content. Information, perspective and analysis is hard stuff to convey to people. It has depth, meaning and thought behind it. Content sounds like some kind of generic commodity you stuff a pillow with. But I digress.
Here are a few ideas on what to tweet:
Links to your blog (if you have one). Link to new blog posts to drive people to your blog and encourage discussion, which will happen both on the blog, via comments, back on Twitter, and even on FriendFeed, Digg and elsewhere. The best thing to tweet is your original content. It shows originality, creativity, awareness of the world around you. It brings real value to the Twitter community. You've introduced something that wasn't there before. Post these no more than three or four times over a period of days. After that, stop promoting your latest post and write a new one.
News stories and blog posts of interest to the people who follow you. Tweet about stories that you found interesting. Provide a link and name the source. Characters are at a premium. For well known outlets, like the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, WSJ and NYT are acceptable. For more obscure sources, name them in full. Don't bother with the onerous "RT" (retweet) convention for stories from well known sources. The more people trip over themselves adding RTs to a tweet, the less useful information it contains. And statistically, there is no possible way your friend was the first person on the planet to read this morning's Washington Post (or Huffington Post), and even if they were, it's not such an important accomplishment that it needs recognition.
Tweets with cogent observations on the news and events of the day, humor, etc. authored by the person tweeting them. Unlike news items, these are the original thoughts of your friends and associates and require attribution. You can use RT, or the much classier "via" with the person's ID. Strip off the other people who RT'd to free up characters. They are unnecessary and anyone who really wants to track the progression of any tweet can do so by using Twitter search.
Trivial tweets. This is the subject of raging debate and subject greatly to personal preference. I'm not a cat person, so I find tweets about cats crawling across keyboards particularly annoying. Almost everyone needs coffee first thing in the morning. No one wants to know that you do. These observations are so common as to not be useful.
Other so-called trivial tweets have more utility. Even a mention of your current location, directly or through a service like Brightkite, is useful if you are hoping to find friends at that location. This is a way to let people know you are visiting their area, or to brag about all the exotic places you get to visit. Keep privacy in mind when you do this, though. Don't tweet that you're in the lobby of a competitor for example.
It is through these trivial exchanges that we come to know and trust people, but too much of it can be very annoying and grounds for unfollowing in some circles.
One word of caution. Tweets are permanent. If you tweet something you regret having tweeted, deleting it will not remove it indelibly. Unless you catch it in a few seconds, it will be picked up and cached (stored) in Twitter's database and available on Twitter search even though the original tweet was deleted. (I once beat this game by deleting a tweet instantly after regretting it, and it did not turn up in Twitter search, but I have only performed this dangerous maneuver once.)
Direct Message do's, don't's and please don't's (Those apostrophes look weird, don't they? What is AP style for "do's and don't's?)
Direct messaging is only enabled when two people follow each other. Most people dislike auto-DMs, messages generated automatically when a new follower is added. These can be annoying and mistargeted. I have often received auto DMs that say something like "Thanks for following me. I'll be sure to follow you back." This makes no sense as it is not possible to send a DM unless you are following each other. Other auto DMs say things like "Check out our system for making $5000 per minute online." Still others try to be personable with offers like "Great to meet you. Let me know how I can help you." I respond to these by asking that $100 be sent to my PayPal account. For these and many other reasons, don't enable auto DMs.
On the other hand, if you get a new follower, you can make their day and foster a relationship by sending a DM that says "Thanks for following. I really enjoyed your blog post on corporate social responsibility."
Grow!
Once you've figured out all of the above, you can start adding people. I recommend adding no more than 25 people a week when you are new. Be very selective. Mathematically, the first 25 people will do more to influence the quality of your experience on Twitter than the next five thousand (if you go that far.) This is because each of them will have a network of potentially interesting people that you will be automatically connected to. The followers of the people you follow will see your communications and will add you if you're interesting. It's geometric. A few hundred people can connect you to a million. The reason I recommend adding people slowly is to get accustomed to increasing numbers of followers and see if there is a point after which you have diminishing returns in your Twitter experience. For many people, just 10 or 25 people is perfect. It all depends on why you are there.
Twitter does put up some barriers to surpassing 2000 followers. You must be followed by 2000 before you can follow more than 2000 (basically, it's not exactly that simple, but close enough).
Don't participate in "Follow Friday" or other pyramid schemes designed to randomly add users. You will find yourself with thousands of followers, and no idea whatsoever why you have them. Maybe you collect thumbtacks and you have three million of them. It might be an awesome way to spend your time but in the end, what's the point? (Give me credit. It's not often you encounter a guy doing clean thumbtack jokes.)
Each of the topics above could be expanded into a blog post of its own. Maybe I'll do that, but of course, before I do, I'd love to know what you think about all of this. And please don't rip off my patented scam for adding followers. I wouldn't want the word to get out that you can build a network by being genuine, useful, kind and knowledgeable.
My usual disclaimer applies: Serving suggestion only. My strategy for managing followers is intended to serve my objectives for using Twitter. The extent to which you follow these recommendations depends greatly on whether you agree with how I use Twitter, and whether your use is for a different purpose. My views on RTs in particular are considered heretical by many. Oh well.
Tags: add, Twitter, followers, surefire, scam
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