After seeing Kevin Rose: 10 Ways To Increase Your Twitter Followers in TechCrunch, I decided I’d get around to writing this.  I recently did some work for a web startup that resulted in me bringing their Twitter account’s follower count from 0 to well over 300 in about five hours of work, more than 1 follower per minute of work.  I gained some important insights into how to rapidly gain followers effectively.  Some might call this spamming, but if you execute correctly once you have rapidly gained followers, you can build a good twitter brand and sense of community.  The key aspects of rapid adding of followers are:

1. Content.  Your Twitter page’s content and presentation should induce people to want to follow you.  It is important not to give the impression of being a spammer or unidirectional marketer who is not interested in their followers as anything other than an audience.
   • Have an icon – lack of an icon is a dead giveaway of a spammer.
   • Use your Twitter account details shown on the top right to link to your webpage, and include an interesting bio about your company or self that doesn’t sound spammy.
   • You should initially have at least half a dozen or so tweets, so they reach the bottom of the browser on most monitors, lessening the impression of being new to Twitter.
   • Your tweets should be engaging and interesting, not spammy, and it is especially good if they invite @ replies.  It is also good to have some @ replies in your tweets to indicate community participation.
2. Following the right people.  To maximize the effectiveness of your time, you need to find people who have a high probability of following you back and/or would be a valuable follower.
   • Follow high-profile Twitter users such as @guykawasaki and @chrisbrogan who follow nearly everyone who follows them.  There are various websites with lists of the top Twitter users.
   • Obviously, follow everyone who @ replies to you or otherwise mentions you in a tweet.
   • Search Google on site:twitter.com for as many keywords you can think of that people who would be interested in you or your company/product would be likely to have listed in their Twitter bios.  For example, I searched for at least a dozen occupations and hobbies related to the company I was doing the work for, and variants of those words.  Add anyone for whom you think there is a remote chance of them following you back, i.e. anyone with a followers/following ratio of less than 10.
   • If you or your company/product have a geographical focus, use the location toplists at Twitter Grader to find top Twitter users in your area to follow.
   • As a last resort, you can find people who are mentioning related keywords on search.twitter.com.  This is initially what I tried but I found the noise level to be far too high.  You will have to sift through a lot of unrelated and bot tweets to find people tweeting about what you want, and this method is not a very effective use of time.
3. Managing your following/followers ratio.
   • This ratio is probably the single most important aspect of your Twitter page.  If most Twitter users see you with a low ratio, they will assume you are a spammer and not return your follow.  Try to avoid letting this ratio get below 2/3 early on.  Once you have hundreds of followers you can probably afford to let it get a little lower, perhaps to 2, but avoid a difference in the number of digits of followers and following – I think it has a subtle pyschological effect, like the price of something being $99 instead of $100.
   • In order to avoid a low following/followers ratio, you need to be constantly unfollowing people who have not reciprocated. One to two days is probably a good amount of time to wait before unfollowing someone, depending on how impatient you are.  However, if you notice someone who has tweeted since you followed them (except if their tweet was from a mobile) and has not followed you back, unfollow them as long as it has been at least 15 minutes since you followed them (you can assume they checked their email and decided not to follow you back).
   • If someone follows you on their own, follow them back.  It still decreases your ratio, and if you did not reciprocate they would be more likely to unfollow you at some point in the future.  You are most likely not a celebrity or famous website (otherwise, you wouldn’t need to do much to get followers), so you can’t expect to have a ratio over 1.
   • If you are not on a deadline, a good way to do this is to follow a batch of people once a day, perhaps 50 or 20% of your follower count, whichever is higher, and then unfollow the ones who didn’t reciprocate before you do the same the next day.
   • Use SocialToo.com to automatically unfollow those who unfollow you.
   • Don’t unfollow any of your followers unless they are extremely offensive; doing so is considered bad Twitter etiquette.

This is just how to rapidly add followers.  Once you have them, you have to come up with a strategy to keep your tweets interesting and engaging, and you may have a few unfollows a day, so unless you are generating organic follows by then, you will occasionally need to follow some more people.

Trackback This Post | Subscribe to the comments through RSS Feed