Like many marketers, I wanted to increase my sphere of influence via Twitter, and get there as quickly as possible.
I used a service that allows me to auto-follow people with the hopes that it will prompt them to automatically follow me back. I was fairly selective on who I auto-followed, but still, I ended up following about 200 people. I went from 300 follower to about 650 in 30 days. I could have gone wild and gotten more but I wanted to actually follow people who actually tweets – not “dead accounts”.
Here’s my conclusion after about a month or so of doing this:
1) I did receive quite a number of new followers doing this – so the reciprocal follows actually work.
The problem is, most of these people are not “listeners”. They too were collecting followers. At the end of the day, it became apparent to me that it was a “everyone is following everyone game” – and few were actually “listening”.
While my clickthru rates for my links are higher, they are not substantially higher. At the end of the day, real people, and real relationships matter.
2) I also auto-tweeted messages using TweetSpinner. I would send between 2-4 automated tweets a day around my topics. This actually got me quite a few followers. This leads me to conclude that the number of quality and relevant tweets matter as to who and how many followers you receive. My friend Dan Hollings of TwitterTwenius.com recommends up to 10 tweets a day to get the maximum number of effective followers.
Focus on topics relevant to your niche to get the best followers around your topic.
3) The more people I followed, the LESS CONNECTED I became. I would check in once a day or so to tweet and read my messages. As the number of people I followed increase (especially because I didn’t know them because they were from autofollows), I was not connected to them. I had no real interest in what they had to say, and at the end of the day, the “noise to data” ratio was just not practical. Most of them were also using auto-tweet bots with affiliate links, so it was just “noise anyway”. This means, the people whose opinions matter to me were getting lost in the noise.
I felt disconnected with the people I wanted to hear from. This was the most unsatisfactory outcome of this exercise.
4) Anything worth spreading is worth retweeting. One of the things I came to realize is that retweeting good content from people I follow is a great way to a) acknowledging them b) enhancing/building on the reporte c) Give my followers good content.
5) Reruns is not only good – it is necessary. Twitter is sort of like a TV broadcast station in many ways. People are not glued to your tweets 24 hours a day. Not every one of your tweets are read or followed. If they don’t show up on the first or second screen on your follower’s twitter account, good chance that it gets lost and never read.
So if you have a particularly good article, or resource that you think is worth re-tweeting, then put it onto a auto-retweeting service. I use a service called TweetSpinner.com. This is a great service for just $15/m. It allows me to store up to 150 tweets and allows me to schedule them like “one every 5 hours” or whatever schedule I want.
At the conclusion of this, I ended up deleting my follow list down to just 40 people or so.
If you like this article, please retweet it.
Sincerely
George Tran
Author of “The Social Marketing Manifesto”
Success Strategies for Small Businesses using Social Media
www.socialmarketingman.com
www.twitter.com/georgetran
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