Confessions of a Six Figure Professional Blogger

The Big Secret To Lots of Followers on Twitter Is…

May 27, 2009 | Feature, Social Media

Follow lots of people.

Seriously. Oh, you want more? Ok…

Twitter Makes It Easy

We all know that simply having high follower counts on Twitter doesn’t matter one iota. You can have 10,000 followers, but if those people are completely untargeted, it doesn’t matter AT ALL.

One strong way to find targeted people on Twitter is simply to look at your competitors (if you want to look at them that way). In other words, find other opinion leaders in your market. Then, look at the people who are following them. You know what? If those people are following that other person who is in the same market as you, then chances are they are a targeted person for you.

So, follow them. See, that is one of the beauties of Twitter. Everybody’s list is PUBLIC. It is right there for everybody to look at. You can look at any other person in your market and look at their follower list. You can basically just take their list.

So, here is a step-by-step procedure to build your Twitter follower count:

  1. Visit the Twitter profile of another player in your market.
  2. Click on their follower list on their profile. You’ll get a list of everybody who follows them.
  3. One-by-one, start following that person’s followers.
  4. Over the course of a few days, you’ll notice that a good percentage of those people end up following you back.

How Feasible Is It To Follow That Many People?

Most people who have a lot of followers also follow a lot of people. Above is the reason why. But, it is easy to wonder how it is possible to follow that many people? How can you keep up?

The answer is… You Don’t.

See, when I follow a person, I do it because I am able to tap into their thought stream. It doesn’t mean that I necessarily want to see every single thing they say. I have a “short list” of people who I want to pay closer attention to and I do that using a group in Tweetdeck. Everybody else just streams by.

Twitter is a great tool for keeping tabs on the collective consciencness of the Internet. You don’t necessarily need to read every tweet to have the tool at your disposal. This is the difference between following 50 people and following 5,000 people or more.

It is all about filtering. If you want to be a “big boy” on Twitter, you need to give up on the fact that you’re going to read everybody’s tweets. It isn’t going to happen.

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  5. What Is Your Twitter Grade?

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  • I've added some great people for my list by actually reading what they are up to. There are lots of great people on Twitter. I also got caught up in automated twitter adding programs... wow, now I have to weed through the quagmire! Better just to do the work and find like minded friends and business associates and let it grow organically. The "my list is bigger than yours" syndrome is not the measure of success in most cases. thanks, Mark
  • Thanks Dave

    These 4 tips on using Twitter are exactly what I plan on doing today! Since I signed up to twitter I always wanted to know exactly how to use the thing and just couldn&t figure it out.

    ben
  • I was wondering how to filter out people. I was happier a week ago when I was just following people whose tweets I was actually interested in and clicking through, but growth gets a bit stagnant. Going to look into filtering as it seems the perfect answer.
  • Very Interesting Strategy in (Twitter Makes it Easy) section - one that I must adopt right away…
    In fact, I haven’t looked at Twitter in that way before.
    I do agree, the beauty of Twitter is having targeted traffic following you.
    However, if the majority of followers aren’t a target market – then what’s the point.

    Cheers David
  • Concise, straight to the point. Very good advice. Thank you.
  • But does this all translate into more money? maybe, but you have to keep working at it...you have to keep tweeting.

    David, the idea with targeted traffic is right, targeted traffic is what you are looking for, but what if you targeting search engine traffic too? People who are using search engines are more likely to buy something than someone just using twitter or facebook.

    Using social networking is time consuming (you must use them of course, but not too much) compared to seo, and ranking in the se's pays off in the long run.
  • I started doing this soon after I really got the hang of Twitter, and I was seeing immediate effects.

    If you're going to use this technique, make sure you have a detailed description on your profile page. Make sure people know what your goals and interests are.
  • I'm really not of a fan of people who follow me just because I'm following someone else in that niche. It seems that the Internet Marketers are the worse, it seems anytime I follow someone that I'm a fan of, suddenly, I'll get dozens of others that really have nothing to offer.
  • Robyn Durst
    Brilliantly simple and effective. Thanks David!
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