As one of the first guys to talk about online networking with the release of The Virtual Handshake in 2003, Scott Allen is someone I listen to very seriously when it comes to social media. So when he wrote 5 Reasons You Need LOTS of Twitter Followers NOW on his blog last week, I sat up and took notice.
I've always believed in growing your network organically, connecting with people with similar interests and not playing a numbers game of collecting business cards and Facebook friends. Granted I don't know all 2460 on my friends list. Only a small percentage I invited myself, and of those, most were people I knew personally while a small number were those I knew of but had never met. The Pied Piper of Facebook herself, Mari Smith, is a great example of the latter. You need to be connected to Mari if you want to learn anything about Facebook.
The rest of my friends were people who invited me to join their networks--those who had bought Smart Networking, who had heard me speak somewhere, or who saw me on other friends' lists and wanted to connect.
Twitter had been the same way; I've been growing that organically for the past year. I'd follow people whose names I knew, and would look at the profiles and tweets of those who had chosen to follow me first before deciding whether I would follow back. It was a time-consuming process that I thought kept the quality of my Twitter network high, albeit small.
Scott made a pretty compelling case for me for why it's crucial to get more followers. LOTS more followers. So I bought the special report he recommended, Brute Force Twitter, whose author Richard Bryda (@BigRichB) has nearly 78,000 followers and put it to the test.
If you're interested in testing this out for yourself, Rich is selling a limited number of copies of Brute Force Twitter so if building your Twitter follower base is something you think would better support your business model, for $97 this program is worth checking out. Get more info or order it here.
Oh, by the way, if you're not yet using Tweetdeck to filter your Twitter stream, you're going to want to set that up before your followers pour in.
I really appreciated the content and flow of this post! Thank you for sharing your resources.
I've always followed the organic, quality over quantity strategy as well. Now you've piqued my interest! Thanks for providing another perspective.
What I am seeing is that by having access to a large list, I can offer things at a lower than usual price, a great product, and everyone wins. I'm marketing my networking program, Networking Naturally, www.naturalway2network.com through Northwestern University (my alma mater) and their huge list has made a big difference in scaling and keeping quality high.
Your comment about adding people organically with similar interests and such is how I started doing and lately, I would just add anyone I get an invitation from. This morning, I just dropped two people. Why, because these so-called Twitter and social networking people were firing off a tweet about every 5 seconds. To me that is highly annoying and abusive, so off they go. No wonder Twitter's server gets maxed out fairly often when you have people hogging bandwidth.
Then again, I'm not using Twitter to sell anything either.
Thank you for sharing your resources and content
realy great !
I will certainly follow-up on some of your recommendations.
I joined Twitter only a few weeks ago. Then, I joined a group on LinkedIn called Twitter Innovators http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=139663 and through this group, I have been able to pick some good tips.
A few weeks ago, I asked members of the group to share the worse offense they witnesssed on Twitter http://tiny.cc/b4zgX
Then, I compiled the responses (over 30 or so)and made a list of the top do's and don'ts of Twittering and here they are:
Do’s
1. Limit your tweets
2. Space your tweets throughout the day
3. Use DM when you need to reply to one person only
4. Build relationship
5. Unfollow spammers
6. Mix your comments: useful, personal, humoristic, newsy
7. Contribute regularly to the groups you create
8. Use to network
9. Inform your followers that you will be away for a period of time
10. Create a personalized background on your homepage for branding
Don’ts
1. Hug the tweet stream with one tweet after another
2. Use auto-directing messaging
3. Use twitter as a chat room
4. Hard sell
5. Be in for the number game only
6. Criticize publicly
7. Have to follow all your followers
8. Register multiple accounts and tweet same message everywhere
9. Manufactured twittering i.e. several people joining force to push a
blog or someone as part of a marketing plan.
10. Create a series of tweets to deliver one message, use tiny url
I am now collecting comments and will update the list soon. Some are having a bit of a debate on some points. Hopefully this little list is useful to some. Again Liz, thank you!
Best,
Great post. Im fairly new to Twitter and have been indecisive whether I want to go the organic route or try something like BruteForce or the TrafficMachine. I would like to get more followers and traffic in a shorter period of time but those programs always sound like impatience and cheating to me? I could be wrong.
Facebook and Twitter both are quality websites, people love twitter because its simple and quick to exchange messages with friends where facebook provide many other features as well.