List Building on Twitter - Gaining Followers

• By: Daiv Russell
• On: 12/27/2008 07:09:38
• In: Internet Marketing
• Comments: 2

Quality vs. Quantity

Here's where I impose my quality vs. quantity rant upon you (again).  It's far better to have fewer people on your list who are actually paying attention than to have thousands of people on your list who don't really care what you're talking about.  This is the same thing I tell you guys when I hear about "getting clicks" or "driving traffic" or "getting brand impressions".  You can give me branding impressions all day long for your Rib-Eye Special, but being a vegetarian of 20 years now, I'm hardly going to be motivated.

I'll use @RachelRofe as an example, due to recency, who tweeted:

Think I'm gonna re-think Twitter & start following a zillion people. There are 5 or so ppl I look at all the time-can just manually type in.

Added 1,930 new ppl. Will see how it turns out. 2 interesting new ppl so far.

She's not even going to really read what those 1,930 people say, she only reads 5 or so.  I was one of those 1,930 she decided to follow.  She is following a total of 2,000 people - how they were selected, I have no idea, but I have very little in common with her, other than apparently, we're both "awesome", as her bio says.  In case you didn't know, a lot of people have a robot hooked up to their twitter account which automatically follows anyone who follows them.   So, by this morning, she has 980 "followers".  How much do you think those 980 people care about what she has to say?  She apparently doesn't care much about what THEY say.

So, if you want to get 900+ followers quickly, just look at RachelRofe's list of follower's, and follow each and every one of them.  Chances are that most of these followers have robots installed to auto-follow you right back, and you'll have tons of followers "instantly".   I could write a program that grabs a list of followers and just "follow", "follow", "follow" all day long.

But, you don't want "crap traffic", now do you?  Nooooo... you don't.  (If you want crap traffic, stop reading... go away, I don't want to try to convince you otherwise... just go... we have nothing further to discuss)

Okay... now that those losers are gone, it's just us "quality" list builders.  You may read on 

Finding Your Target Audience

How do you find people who are interested in the same stuff you are, that might be interested in the stuff you do?

First and foremost, tweet about stuff that matters to you - things in your line of work or hobbies that are about your world.  For example, if you're an entrepreneur you could tweet about the little things, "I think we need a new accountant... the books seem all screwy." and "Working out today's schedule, I hope our staff doesn't call in sick due on account of the good weather." and "Wow, phones are ringing off the hook this week, it must have been those adjustments to the website that @DaivRawks helped me with."

You see, your best followers actually read the tweets from those they're following.  If you have nothing on your page of tweets, people won't know if you're talking about things they want to read about.  So you have to seed your page a bit first with good stuff, to let the know what they're in for.

Once you've laid your "bait", as it were, you can start networking with like-minded folks.

Twitter Search Engines

Here are a few "search engines" for Twitter I've used that have helped me find people who are talking about the same stuff I am (thus, my target audience).

• http://Search.Twitter.com - lets you conduct real-time search on conversations you can hop on into
• Twilert - sends daily recaps of tweets with keywords or keyword phrases you subscribe to.

Once you see someone talking about something of interest to you, you can give advice, ask for advice, try to say something witty (be careful with this one), and then follow them.

This will send the person you followed an email telling them you've just followed them.  They will look at your profile to see if you're someone worth following, and then your network grows.  Just like search engine marketing, you want your follower-base to grow organically, lest you be accused of spamming and get booted out of Twitter.

So, start with a few, then add more, and more and so on.  Keep tweeting all the while, the more tweets you have, the more likely it is that someone will tune into your tweets through one of the search engines.