James Avery’s blog

OK, I’ll start with a caveat - of course, I do want as many twitter followers as possible. Who doesn’t?

But assuming the main way of getting twitter followers is to follow other people and get followed back, why should I place my trust in people who promise upto 400 new twitter followers per day? And why has everyone selected 400 as the magic number? My guess is that this is based on following 1,000 people each day in the hope that they will follow you back. This is the maximum amount that twitter will let people follow without bringing up a violation warning.

If you want to get followers, there are plenty of simple and free systems available, which don’t need any cash outlay to use. Oddly enough, the one I currently use, buzzom.com, was recommended by a friend, after I tried to use a wefollow plugin which didn’t offer any way of limiting the number of people I was following. This very quickly took me straight up to the 1,000 limit, which then gets really irritating, as there are other people I wanted to follow manually, but I could not do so for another 24 hours.

So if I admit to using an automated service, which could potentially add 1,000 new follows each day, why don’t I want to go this far?

Spam, Spam, Spam

Buzzom.com selects people to follow based on your user profile, and I presume it also looks at who you’re already following, and what kind of tweets you make. I’ll happily stand corrected here if I’m wrong, but for people I elect to follow personally, this still leaves a good chance of following people who are just out there to spam twitter with online MLM schemes or junk about making money online, when the only ‘product’ is a website which tells you how to make money online. I’m not into that - I want to build decent content, engage with people as I go, and talk about the experience. But even when I look for people to follow on behalf of Flightmapping.com, which is tagged up as a travel website, there are still a fair few spammers lurking.

100 at a time should be enough!

Every time I follow new people, I am likely to delve into their tweets, and read up on worthwhile blog posts they make. But I also have to do a fair bit of sifting through the spammers before I get back to reading the tweets of people I already know, and have chosen to follow manually. So for now, I think that working on 100 new follows at a time seems to be a reasonable balance. As I said in my last post about reaching the first milestone of 1,000 followers, I have guestimated that I need around 10,000 followers before things start ‘getting serious’. My initial expectation was to build this up slowly over a year or so, but this can clearly be done in around 3 months by getting 100 new followers each day. I just don’t think there are enough hours in each day to build up followers any faster than this, although of course, once you get established, there is no reason why you shouldn’t pick up lots more followers automatically, as you get established as a good quality contributor.

Balance follows and followers

Like it or not, twitter is always going to be governed by a certain element of  ’social proof’. If you are lucky or skilled enough to pick up loads of followers without having to make much effort, then fine, but otherwise it is best not to follow thousands of people until you start to get a few followers yourself. Having a massive imbalance just makes you look desperate.

Flushing Out

One key tool I like with buzzom.com is the ability to flush out users who haven’t followed you back. However, I think this is a bit easy to use too heavy handedly, as the default button to click is ‘flush and block’. Blocking out people just because they haven’t followed you back is needlessly harsh - not everyone uses a system to follow back people who follow them, and they may be away for a few days. Even so, it really isn’t worth getting so worked up about who follows you and who doesn’t - just remember SW-SW-SW: some will, some won’t, so what! When using the flush tool, it is key to pick out the people who’s tweets have been memorable, or who are known authority figures in their field (and not just because they tell you they are!).

I hope these are a few useful points about how to grow twitter followers in a sustainable manner - and no, I’m not making myself out to be an expert, just someone who wants to follow a steep learning curve, to help and be helped, and to use twitter as the great conversation tool that it is.