Andy Cook Tell 'Em

Everyone wants more followers. The only problem is 3 out of 4 new accounts are spam account posting endless links using API to pointless services and products for sale. My personal experiences with Twitter and gaining a solid following has been based on concise, meaningful tweets regarding interesting articles, photos, and anything else I’d like to share with the world. Lately, I’ve been trying out Twitter feed and I’m not sure how I feel about it…

Anyways, here’s how I did it.

• Pick a unique name that will grab people’s attention. (Twitter allows you to change your username)
• Pick a market segment you are interested in becoming a part of. (ex: Marketing, Sports, SEO, Gardening, etc..)
• Be mindful of your tweets! Do not post articles you yourself do not want to read, chances are no one else is going to read them either
• Try to keep a balance between posting blog articles, @replies, what you’re doing, and everything else – people do not like following bots.

Now the question of whether to autofollow back and to auto-dm comes into play. I chose to follow users who follow me back and not to auto-dm. Auto-dm’ing is a big no-no when it really comes down to it. I hate having 2000 messages in my direct message inbox making any DM that might be of any importance lost in the loads of spam I have.

But, I’ve come to find that autofollowing followers back is the easiest way to grow your Twitter network. An easy way of setting this up is to use TweetLater (Sign up, link your Twitter account, check autofollow) and this will automatically follow users back!

WARNING! This autofollow practice will lead to your homefeed becoming very busy and you will follow many unwanted users such as spammers, bots, people who then unfollow you, etc… So now what?

There are many services to combat these cases. The ones I use are

• ReFollow – Showcases followers/following under any method of sorting, allows bulk follow/unfollow (One of my favorites).
• Twitter Karma – Similar to ReFollow, bulk follow/unfollow capabilities.
• TwiPing – Desktop software to bulk follow/unfollow target groups of users, contact management.
• FlashTweet – Many bulk follow/unfollow options.

These options help manage and maintain your follower/following ratio very quickly and easily. Using these services on a regular basis will keep your followers and following lists squeaky clean.

Now the only problem is breaking into the already packed segment of your interest! There are ever increasing advertisements of programs which will help you “Get 500+ followers a day!!!!” and may seem tempting, but they rely on the fact of people following you back when you follow them. I guess I can’t really bash these as I have used HummingBird in my early stages of developing @andycooktellem. These programs follow a mass amount of users based on target keywords these users have in either their names or bios and hope that these users follow new followers back. From my experiences, it works… but not as well as advertised. Click to see my TwitterCounter graph of followers. About 40% of the people you follow will follow back and of that 40% about 5% to 10% are targeted, solid users.

Here’s a couple of these programs for followers

• HummingBird – One of the first and continuously updated programs.
• TweetAdder – Newcomer but works flawlessly using targeted keywords. (Free trial download offered)

All in all, follower counts are all up to you. There are many programs, services, and MLM based pyramids for followers offered but ultimately its your tweets that keep people interested. So next time you’re thinking of making a quick 50 cents from tweeting an ad, keep in mind your beloved followers.