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Twitter Tips
By Sean | September 23, 2009
I’m just about to cross the 10k mark for followers and thought I’d share how I got 10k of followers in just two months. Yes there are faster ways but I did it manually and I did it selectively.
I just began following indiscriminately for a few days but, always being a stickler for quality, I found that I didn’t just want any old list of followers.
Of course I’d read what the social media gurus were all saying — “it doesn’t matter what quality of followers you have — you’ll get the same response rates”.
While that may be true I just don’t like trashy looking things and when I looked at some of the gurus follower lists I simply could not allow myself to build something that didn’t look good even if short term profits are not as high.
So far I have not tried to market anything with Twitter and I may never try to sell anything directly with it. However I do plan on using twitter to build a presence that is known for contributing something of value to the online community. In the end I expect to monetize my Twitter efforts but I like to build things that last.
Therefore the last thing I want to do is go for a quick buck and build a following of “quick buck” people who’ll pay a little for even less. Nobody changes the world for the better by grabbing quick dollars at the expense of long term satisfaction of having built something that is sustainable.
Having said all that here is my simple system for manually building a list of great followers:
1. Follow people that look and act like real people. (I know that there are a few on my follower list that are not and were just built robotically. However at least they took the time to seem like a real person and that counts for something on a “social network”.
2. I found that at first I’d only follow a hundred or so people a day. I also managed my follower count so that the follower/followed count were in the same ballpark. I mean why follow 2000 people and have only 50 followers and just wait for that to catch up? It doesn’t look right. I wanted to develop the same habits while I was small that I’d need after the 2000 glass ceiling. Guess what? When I hit 2000 nothing changed. In fact if anything my account was increasing faster and the 2000 mark had absolutely zero effect on holding me back.
3. Other than a couple experiments with automation software — the only automation tool I have used was twitter karma for bulk unfollows. When I got closer to the 8k mark I had to switch to other tools and I don’t recall the names. I just did a search on google for “bulk unfollow twitter users” and several tools appeared. I tried two or three and have not settled on one just yet but they all worked well. Note that Twitter Karma craps out completely around 8500 users or so.
4. Once I got up over 5000 users I noticed I was following/ unfollowing around 500 to 600 users a day. Sounds like a lot right? I barely noticed it. Two batches of 200 to 300 users a day went by in short order.
5. Manually following people taught me a lot about how twitter works. Things the bulk machines don’t know. I’d share them here but people would just take advantage of it and unfairly exploit it. However I must say that you cannot manually follow and build more than 5000 users without learning some cool things about twitter. Just build manually and you’ll see some interesting things.
6. One problem I encountered was over the 5k mark Twitter would stop me from following people before my follower count was exceeded by my following count. Example: I’d have 5500 people that were following me but was only following 5300 — yet Twitter would restrict me from further followers for 24 hours. Finally just for something to do — I figured I’d cut some dead wood out and began making my follower list smaller.
7. That’s right by culling some crap out of my follower list it solved the problem and I was able to follow more people without waiting for the 24 hour restriction. It seems that twitter may not like it when you have too many followers that you don’t follow back — who have been there a long time. Fact is that I didn’t want to follow back porn profiles and others that didn’t look like real people. Therefore it seems that twitter would rather I cut them loose — either that or Twitter just changed their policy and it was coincidence that I did some culling at the same time.
8. I hope you find this useful. Take a look through my follower list and see the density of real looking profiles. On the most recent pages there is always some deadwood who follow me and when I don’t follow them back they take a day or two to cut loose. But take a look and see if I don’t have a pretty high density of quality followers. Go ahead and follow as many as you can. Most of them are very responsive.
9. Now that I’ve virtually hit my 10k goal I’m going to slack off on building my list of followers and focus on generating as much value for them as possible. I’ll be tweeting and RT’ing more. For now I don’t feel any particular need to continue to focus on growing fast. Yes I could probably build the second 10k in 1/3 the time it took to build the first 10k but I’m not going to do that until I have first learned to increase the value i deliver to the first 10k.
Please comment with any suggestions or ideas you may have that may help me deliver value or build a better presence of value to my list.
Thanks!
Topics: Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
September 23rd, 2009 at 7:00 am
I’ve only just started on Twitter and I’m only here for social reasons, but also I check each follower and eliminate the dodgy ones. And I’ve had some! I really don’t care how few people follow me, as long as they’re real. And look as if they can read lol.
September 23rd, 2009 at 8:08 am
Joy thanks for stopping by and sharing your thoughts. Indeed it is kinda nice when the people following you can read.
October 16th, 2009 at 11:36 pm
Interesting post, good suggestions and insights. I enjoyed reading your take on manually following folks – I get so tired of hearing about automated follow programs and I suspect many people don’t realize that they use your account to send out automated messages (sometimes direct messages – even worse) announcing that you’re using them (as do some of the game applications). And there is nothing like getting followed by someone who hasn’t posted in 3 months to raise a little warning flag for those of us who take the time to investigate profiles before following.
Again, thanks for following and looking forward to your tweets. Cheers!