How To Get 8379 New Twitter Followers By Christmas
by Naomi Dunford, IttyBiz
Repost

I assume that if you are reading this, you want to know how to get new Twitter followers.

I also assume – In order to sleep at night and to keep my Non-Asshole Marketing Commission membership card – that you’re not reading about how to get more Twitter followers because you are a jerk, but because you legitimately don’t get it.

I finally assume that you are sick and tired of hearing people tell you “social media isn’t about the numbers” and you feel that you are enough of a grownup to make up your mind about whether it is or is not about the numbers in your situation.

Having said all that, we’ll move on, shall we?

How To Get More Twitter Followers, Phase One

First, you have to look like a reasonably interesting person to follow. If you have not yet been active on Twitter, you’ll need to have about 25 recent tweets before it’s worth trying to follow anyone. Less than that and you look like you don’t know what the hell you’re doing, which is, of course, true. You’ll also want a bio that incorporates key areas of you (mine is here) and a photograph. This makes you look like a human being.

Over the course of not less than two days and not more than one week, tweet 25 times. Do this throughout the time, not all at once. A handful in the morning, some in the afternoon, whatever works.

About a quarter of these tweets should be retweeting something somebody else said. If you’re so lost that you don’t even know how to find what other people said, go to my Twitter page and retweet something I said. (This is not particularly self-serving since, yes, you’re retweeting me, but nobody’s reading you so it’s not like I’m being helped.) If you’re not remotely connected to my industry and know nobody in your own, find a celebrity and retweet them. (Find them by googling “[celebrity name] Twitter”.)

Another quarter or so should be responding to things other people are saying or asking. Again, if you can’t find anybody saying or asking anything, use me or a celebrity or someone else you dig online. Either answer a question or say something somewhat relevant. Don’t worry about this step. If they ask a question, they really want to know the answer. They’re not going to think you’re an idiot. (This is probably not the best place to wildly disagree with them. You’re trying to make friends here. Save the fighting for when you’re famous.)

Another quarter or so should be sharing cool stuff you found on the internet. Links to blog posts or the New York Times or something. You can either do this by simply giving the title of the post or article with a link (shorten the link by going to a url snipper like gd or tinyurl) or you can add a little commentary of your own. “Awesome!” or “Super neat!” or “I LOVE kittens!” is fine. Do not overthink this.

The last quarter should be stuff that comes from your own head. “Man, it’s hot. Who said June in Maine was going to be this much of a scorcher?” is fine. This is not rocket science. The purpose of these tweets are to show that you are a human being with thoughts and opinions.

Once you have done this, you should continue tweeting (ideally daily, but at least every weekday) between 10 and 20 times a day, following the same approximate ratio.

How To Get More Twitter Followers, Phase Two

By now, you have established yourself as someone who doesn’t totally suck to follow. Now you go get followers.

Step 1: Figure out what you’re on Twitter for.

You want to get a book deal? You have a book deal and want to sell more copies when your book comes out? You want to look like an expert? You want to feel like A Big Deal On The Internet at conferences? (Mine is the last one, by the way.)

There is no big, esoteric meaning behind me asking this question. It’s because when you know what your reason is, you’ll be less likely to quit when this process becomes eye-bleedingly boring come day 16.

Step 2: Figure out who in the world is likely to be interested in what you have to say.

Mothers of new babies? Small business owners? Fellow lovers of the Gilmore Girls? Knowing who they are makes it infinitely easier to find them.

Step 3: Hazard a guess at what these people would say to indicate who they are and what they’re into.

Lovers of Mustangs, for example, might say “Mustang”. New mothers might say “my baby”.

Step 4: Enter the word or phrase you have come up with in the Twitter search box. See who’s using your word.

This will lead you to a real time list of people using your exact phrase. As people type “my baby”, you’ll see it come up in a constantly updating timeline.

Step 5: Check out their profiles.

Are they really into your thing or is it a fluke of language? (In the “my baby” example, they could be referring to their Mustang or their MacBook Pro instead of their actual baby.) You also want to see if they’re active community members like you are. (You’re checking to see if they converse with other people, if they retweet, if they’re at least marginally interesting. The operating principle here is that if they retweet what Jim Bob says, they might retweet what you say. If they never retweet or talk to people, they won’t retweet or talk to you.)

Step 6: If they’re cool, follow them.

Probably 70% or so will follow you back.

Step 7: Do this 50 times a day until the end of the year.

After about a week of practice, it should take you about fifteen minutes a day. As you go, you’ll figure out other things to search for. (After looking for “my baby”, you might discover that people say “#babydust” when they’re trying to get pregnant tonight. Not recommended for the squeamish, by the way.) You’ll figure this out as you go.

Step 8: Every couple of weeks, purge.

Go to a service like Refollow that helps you filter your account by different criteria. You could find people who haven’t tweeted in a month and kick them out. You could find people who have sent you @replies but you’ve forgotten to follow them. You could find people who refuse to follow you back no matter how many times you engage with them, and so on. Do with this what you will.

Advanced Step 9: Stalk your power users.

This one is optional but very powerful. A lot of people choose not to get notified when someone follows them. (I’m one of them.) So if you follow me, I don’t know about it. If creating a relationship with a certain person is important to you, put them on a special list (private or public) that you check extra regularly. (I’m told there are Twitter application thingies that will pretty up this process for you, but I use the web interface for Twitter so I don’t know the details about this.) Make a point to engage extra regularly with those people. Eventually, if you consistently don’t suck, they’ll probably succumb.

8379 Twitter Followers: A note on the math

This number was roughly based by me figuring out last week how many days there were until Christmas, multiplying it by 50, and taking 70% of that. It’s also fairly common knowledge that as you get bigger, you get even bigger simply by being bigger in the first place. So I figured I’d add 10% to your median number (4000-ish) to account for people who follow you just because. Truthfully that number will probably be higher, but I don’t want to get into math wars in my comments.

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