My name is Bob Cristello and I make my living on the World Wide Web. I was first introduced to Twitter in May of 2009 when I opened my TweetClean account. I began to use Twitter at the urging of someone I met online who wanted to build a Twitter tool and I started to learn the API. Due to personal and professional reasons that are not germane to this article, I left Twitter with only 6 followers at the end of May 2009.
When I returned to Twitter on December 17, 2009 I decided to use the TweetClean account to open a Twitter Friendly Free Blogging System at http://www.tweetclean.com using the WordPressMU and dedicated hosting to provide free blog accounts. I had some idea of what Twitter was about but had never built a Twitter following in the past. In the first 10 days I built a list of 3,000 followers and wanted to share my experiences with the general community. When I began this exercise, I had four things going for me:
- I had a unique free product, my website, to promote
- I had a list of goals
- I had a list of things I would not do
- I had a list of things I would do
My Goals
To develop a strong list of followers in Twitter
To be a valuable part of the Twitter community
To be a contributor and not a leech
To learn the Twitter API and start to develop tools
To provide a non-intrusive service
My goals were straight forward and simple. One thing I believe I should point out is that I already have an income stream from the world wide web. This allowed me to enter into the Twitter timeline without any sense of desperation. I could take my time and engage other Twitter users in a friendly, relaxed manner. The primary goal I had was to expand on my knowledge of the Twitter API system and learn to use it in my php and vb.net projects. I actually wrote a tool in vb.net to aid in my exploration of Twitter and to aid me in my goal develop a strong list of Twitter followers. At this point, I am considering releasing it to the public for free.
I would suggest that you take the time to develop your goals for Twitter and your place within the community. What is your niche? What do you wish to accomplish? Knowing the answer to these questions will help you determine if you are close to your goals or further away from your goals on a day to day basis.
To me, one of the most critical factors in my success was to provide a non-intrusive service. One thing that always bugged me about Twitter was the non-stop messages and Direct Messages (DM) that I would receive on how to make my Teeth White, how to make money or how to get millions of followers instantly. It is my personal belief that people are much more receptive to reading an informative article or video than to the ‘buy my stuff now’ mentality. By providing informative data, I could then place Google ad sense or clickbank advertisements in unobtrusive places on my webpage.
What I was not going to do
I was not going to DM everyone who followed with a sales pitch
I was not going to spam my products constantly
I was not going to follow blindly and get a useless followers list
I do not have an auto Direct Message that gets sent to every person who joins my followers. That is a personal choice in keeping with my plan to be non-intrusive. If people know that my priority is in building quality contacts, they are more likely to browse through what I have to offer at their own pace.
I try to limit myself to 2 direct tweets a day concerning my website product. I make an exception when I publish a new video or blog post and try to limit those tweets to 5 times a day. The rest of the time, I believe it is critical to engage in social banter with people so they know they are dealing with a real person and not an automated bot.
People can only deal with “check out my product” tweets for a short period of time before they stop following me. I do agree that aggressive marketing can be successful. This is usually based upon the “impulsive buy” mindset. This is why they have candy and magazine racks at the checkout counter at supermarkets. I am sure there are twitter users making a killing with their incessant spam and DM campaigns. I do not believe that they have a great deal of longevity for followers.
I looked at auto-follower tools when I first started this exercise 12 days ago. I decided against that and utilized a tool like Twitter Karma for a few days, then developed my own tool using the API. I was very careful to examine each profile that followed me by hand. I will cover my philosophies about this more in What I learned to avoid.
What I was going to do
I was going to advertise passively
I was going to provide a free service
I was going to be informative
I was going to be polite
I was going to be myself
I was going to engage in actual conversations
Utilize the Twitter medium and vernacular properly
No matter what it is you sell, you are really only selling yourself. In Phoenix, where I live, I prefer to go to small specialty stores instead of huge grocery stores. I do this because when I walk into a huge grocery store I am part of the herd. I have a card, so I am a number. In the small specialty stores, when I walk in someone says “Hi Bob, how are things?”
My mindset when I came to Twitter was that I was not desperate to make a buck. In fact, I was giving away a free product. I tweet tips throughout the course of my day about twitter products I am using and I try to be informative. When someone asks me a direct question, I answer them without trying to sell them anything. More importantly, I am polite to everyone and I am myself with everyone I speak to. I participate in conversations about what people are doing in the course of their day and I even have two lists that I maintain with people who only are here to chat on Twitter.
If we refer back to our candy and magazine rack example of the supermarket, I do this because I am not interested in the impulse buy. My feeling is that I don’t want to spend the rest of my life hawking $1.00 sales to hundreds of people. I would rather that people feel comfortable shopping for knowledge from a person they will trust. When you sell something on the web, you can really only make money in one of three says. You can get paid per click, you can get paid per trial or you can get paid per sale. All internet sales boil down to these three forms of payment. It is my personal belief that if you want to develop a long term financial solution on the world wide web that building a stream of recurring sales is the key to your future.
You have chosen Twitter as your platform, or at least, as one of your platforms. Learn to use the vernacular. Know what hash tags, trends and lists are for and leverage them to your advantage. Be polite, be yourself and be consistent.
What I learned to avoid
“Churning” or The false follow backs
The auto-bots
The never-tweets
One of the main reasons I avoided using auto-follow and auto-following tools was that I had no idea what type of list of followers I would acquire. For all I knew, I would get a thousand bots or empty accounts. It might look as if I had a lot of followers, but were they really clicking on my links that I would place in twitter. I started using the twitter interface to examine profiles before I followed someone or followed them back. Then I wrote my own tool to slightly increase the speed at which I could accomplish this. I usually tweet, twice a day, that I follow back everyone who follows me and I do it by hand. I also tweet that I remove people I am following that do not follow me back, again by hand.
The first group of people that I have a difficult time with are those who are engaged in the act of “churning”. “Churning” is the rapid following and unfollowing of other people to hyper-inflate your followers list. Now, two numbers you should start to look at automatically when looking at someone’s profile are the number of people they are following and the number of people they follow.
If I have someone follow me who I am not following, the first thing I do is look at their profile. Usually, they will have roughly the same amount of people following them that they follow in return. A few hours later, I will check those that are not following me but I follow them. I can see that very same person but now, they are only following a very small number of people but they have a large number of followers. Why are these people doing this?
If you think of your Following list as your ammunition and your Followers as your acquisitions, the ammunition you have is limited by the number of acquisitions you have made. For example, if you have 2,000 followers, you can only have 2,200 people you are following. This is part of the Twitter 1.1 ratio limitation to keep people from blindly following thousands of users, hoping to get a percentage of follow backs in return. The people who are churning, will follow you to get you to follow them back. Then, once they reach their limits, they will remove all non-followers and a percentage of followers to have more ammunition to make new acquisitions. If you are going to use follow back lists as your primary method of gaining followers, make sure you check the ratio of following to followers on the people you intend to follow.
If a user is following 1,000 people and has 5,000 people following them, and they are representing themselves as a followback account, chances are they are not really following back everyone. Instead of blindly following everyone, take the 20 seconds of time it requires to check their profiles and look at their numbers.
The second group of people I avoid are the auto-bots. These are easily recognizable because you will have multiples of them in your list. For example, when you see ted1010, ted1040 and ted1050 in your list all with the same photo and profile, chances are these are auto-bots. They can serve a purpose though. I use these accounts and allow them to stay in my followers list, but I do not follow them back. For every one of these accounts I continue to allow to follow me and I do not follow them back, that is one other account I can follow that is an actual person with the chance of that person following me back.
The final group of people I avoid are the never tweets. Usually, these are also people who fall into the auto-bot category. You can see that they have followers and people they are following, and they just made the attempt to follow you, but they have not tweeted in months. I would treat these accounts the same as the auto-bot accounts and allow them to continue to follow you to inflate your followers, allowing you to follow more people in the hopes that they will follow back.
The power of Follow Friday #FF
The #FF phenomenon
Follow Friday, or #FF as it is referred to in tweets, is a wonderful way of gaining actual live followers on Twitter. During the week, I keep a text file. In my TweetDeck, I get a list of people who mention me. Anyone who mentions me during the course of the week I send a #FF tweet on Friday. It is usually in this format:
#FF @user1 @user2 @user3
Keep this tweet under 120 characters. This will allow others in your followers list to retweet this. Usually, out of courtesy, everyone who you give a #FF mention to will also mention you to their followers. Friday is the single largest day for me to get new followers from Twitter. This is why you should be polite and engage everyone in conversation that you can. Remember, that anyone who mentions you in a #FF tweet should also be tweeted in a #FF tweet of your own.
Another thing I do on Friday is to send a #FF tweet with the #list hash tag. Then I put lists I am following into that tweet. That would look something like this:
#FF #list @anthonystevens4/top-500-follow-all-back @TweetClean/top-500-followback-list1
Again, keep this tweet under 120 characters to allow others to Retweet this.
The power of lists
@Snowisle/top-follow-all-back-list
@MileHighFan/follow-and-list
@TweetClean/top-500-followback-list1
@anthonystevens4/top-500-follow-all-back
@eleesha/top-500-list-champions
Followback lists are the top way in which I have quickly gained Twitter followers. Any of the above lists contain Twitter users who promise to followback anyone who follows them. Remember, check the time since these users last tweeted or the following to follower ratio in their profile. Don’t hesitate to contact the list owner to ask to be placed on these lists or if members on this list do not follow you back. I usually give someone 48 hours to follow me back before I remove them from my list.
Another thing I do is maintain two follow back lists. The first is my top 500 followback list and the second is a trial followback list. This way, I am keeping my top 500 list pristine and using my trial followback list for new members I am following. Lists can be followed by anyone, regardless if they follow you or not. Building up a good list with a large amount of followers will get you recognized in the community and increase your followers.
Twitter Follower Services
TwitterFriends
http://www.twitterfriends.org/
Followe.rs
https://followe.rs/
The pyramid scheme for follow backs
Any article concerning gaining followers on Twitter would be remiss if there was no mention of the many varied Twitter follower services available on the web. These range from free to paid services and have their positive and negative points. I happen to like TwitterFriends simply because I have gotten to know the owner of this system. Dave is a stand-up guy who actually answers his emails and will discuss his system with you. TwitterFriends uses a point based system where you earn points for following others and can buy followers using these points. You can also purchase points from him and can be an effective tool in building a fast Twitter follower list.
The main drawback to these systems is the vast amount of “churning” that occurs. Dave at TwitterFriends, as far as I know, is the only person who offers you extra credits to counter “churning” to the best of their ability.
The pyramid scheme for follow backs is something I have never engaged in but I have seen it in action. You are directed to a webpage to sign up under anywhere from 5 to 10 people. They promise you thousands of Twitter followers. The only guaranteed person to benefit from this is the person hosting the list, who you are guaranteed to follow.
I am always amazed at the number of auto-tweets I receive from people who state they can get you thousands of followers instantly, while they themselves only have 50 to 100 people who are following them.
Twitter Auto Follow Tools
TweetAdder
http://tweetadder.com/
Twollow
http://www.twollow.com/
Again, any discussion concerning gaining followers on Twitter would be lacking if there were not some mention of auto follow systems. Quite simply, these tools give you the ability to send out a mass amount of follows based upon search criteria for profiles or against the Twitter public timeline. The idea is that if you follow 1000 people, a percentage of those people will follow you back. Don’t forget, once you reach the Twitter 2,000 follower limit, certain rates apply. At the writing of this article, I believe the ratio is 1.1.
I always try to keep my following and followers at a relatively equal amount.
Other Useful Twitter Tools
While this list is by no means comprehensive, it is a list of tools that I use in my day to day work with Twitter. I hope you will find them useful.
Twitter Karma is a web based tool that allows you to pull down your lists of followers and following. You may then compare the lists to see who you follow that does not follow you back, and to see who is following you that you do not follow. It also allows you to bulk follow, or unfollow, those lists.
http://dossy.org/twitter/karma/
TweetDeck is a windows based Twitter client that utilized the Twitter API and a flash based interface. It is a multi-column user interface that allows you to manage your Twitter streams in a much more organized manner.
http://www.tweetdeck.com
TwitterCounter is a system that allows you to get your current statistics concerning followers and following, as well as projections based on your current performance. They also provide counters and Wordpress plug-in to spice up your web page. The also provide you exposure to other members currently using their counters and plug-in.
http://twittercounter.com/tweetclean
TwitterBackgrounds provides free and paid custom backgrounds for your Twitter profile. Your profile is the first thing most people see when they start exploring you and making a good first impression is key to your success.
http://www.twitrbackgrounds.com
TwitterGrader is a website that utilizes proprietary algorithm to determine the score of your Twitter account based on followers, following and the number and quality of your tweets.
http://twitter.grader.com/tweetclean
Bitly is a URL shortening service that has an external API and it is free to use. It can also integrate with Tweetdeck and other Wordpress plug-in. It provides not only the shortening service and API, but also tracks your hits to give you a better idea of what kind of traffic you are receiving.
http://bit.ly/
I hope that you have found this article to be helpful in building your followers in Twitter. Please feel free to register and leave comments about this blog post or to tell your Twitter friends about this article. Please feel free to follow me on Twitter and I will follow you back.
Biography: Bob Cristello is a semi-retired Programmer and Web Developer living in Phoenix, Arizona. His first involvement with computers occurred in the military in the early 1980s where he was a member of the original MUMPS development team. He is the former Director of Performing Arts and Head of Computer Sciences at the Hyde School and the former Head of Internal Project Development at Rebar International. He has lectured in every major US City on a variety of technical topics. His articles have appeared in Byte, Infoworld, Visual Basic Programmers Journal and Computer Telephony Magazine.
