Twitter – who’s following who and how do I get more of them to follow me?

So people always ask me how do I get more followers and why do you have more than me? Then I direct them to some of the larger Twitter users like @mashable who at my last count had 1,802,915 followers!! So how do you get that many?

Well it’s not like you just sign up with some service and get free followers fast that’s for sure! LOL! Those services are likely to give you some sort of Twitter spam in your DM or send out silly tweets on your behalf all day long on your profile and you may not even realize it. So my suggestion is to do it the logical way, simply tweet more. And don’t just tweet about anything, tweet about what you have to offer and why people should be following you. There is an art, almost a science to this in a way…but read on, because it’s not that difficult.

For instance, I am in marketing.  It’s my passion.  So, for me, I truly enjoy helping others learn how to better market their products. It’s almost hard for me not to tell others how to do this.  I could literally write hundreds of blog posts a day (I won’t because I know that I would probably bore a lot of you). So, what I do is simple. I tweet about what I know about. If I see someone tweeting that they have a project that they are struggling with, I respond back with how I think I might have a solution. I don’t try to sell anything. That will just turn people off. That will not get you a follower. Free advice and general concern however, will get you more followers, and will in turn, will get people to interact with you and create a viral effect. Their followers will want to know what all this buzz is on their page between you and them. These followers of followers will then, follow you. See, this is getting interesting isn’t it?

Also, if someone does follow you, make sure you thank them for following you if you don’t already have an account with a service that does that for you like socialoomph.  I have an account with them, but sometimes I still will send a “Thanks for following me @newfollower” because it shows more personalization.  Or I will send out a “Welcome to my new followers and list off the last 5 or so followers.  It lets them know that I appreciate the time they took to follow me, and shows them, that I will mention their name. You know how we all are on Twitter. We love hitting the @ sign and seeing something there for us! So lets give them something to look at! You would be surprised how they respond to this, sometimes it creates even more of a flurry of people who want to retweet your tweets! Now, if you have creative content, you should not have to worry about the retweet right? Well, we all know if it was that simple then we’d all be getting retweeted! No, my Twitter friends, I am afraid that we all need help getting our tweets retweeted.  Sometimes you know your tweet is genius and your wondering, “Why the heck didn’t anyone retweet it?” Okay, I digressed a bit.

Lastly, don’t always tweet about yourself. If you’re only tweeting about what you sell or what your website offers..Well, what good is your twitter page to anyone? People want to interact. If they feel like there is a robot behind the Twitter account, they will stop following you. So if you are losing followers, try tweeting about what your having for dinner. Tweet about normal life. That is what Twitter was intended for. You’ve got to learn how social networking “works.” It does WORK! People will contact you for business! I have had a lot of people ask me to do work for them after a short time of being on Twitter. But the trick is not being this stiff person who won’t let your hair down. This is not an office. On Twitter, people expect a certain amount of openness. No, this does not mean you have to become a swearing sailor, just let people in a bit. Trust me, once you do this, people will start communicating back with you. Then you can start a conversation asking them “Hey, so what do you do for a living?”

The point here is simple, interact with people on Twitter! Add to their conversation and they will communicate with you and follow you, not forcefully or because you paid some service but because they find you interesting! I told you – you don’t need the free service, you just need to interact on Twitter as the HUMAN that you already are.

How’d they know to tweet me that I needed a hug? (or whatever you needed)

Have you ever gotten a tweet from a complete stranger who wasn’t following you and that you weren’t following, that seemed to know all about what you had been discussing for the day?  Have you ever wondered “How’d they do that?” Well, it’s not as confusing as you might think.

I had a friend call me last night and ask me about this so I thought I would write about it.  She got a bunch of “Hugs” after tweeting that she was sad…I laughed because I thought she knew better! Yes, my friends, if you want to get a hug, then just say you are sad or lonely.  So, here is how it works.

I subscribe to socialoomph.com as I have mentioned in the past, but you can do this with just about any of the online management systems for Twitter. So, feel free to use their systems as well, I just prefer socialoomph.  Using socialoomph’s system all you have to do is this:

1. Have an account set up
2. Click on my account
3. Click on other tools
4. from the lower tab choose keword alert emails

Click to enlarge the example below

You will be given a set of instructions that are easy to follow but I will explain them a little more just so you will be even more excited to join. What you get to do now is type in all the “Keywords” that you want socialoomph to send you an email on from people on twitter tweeting about…so, lets say you want to know every time someone says “I’m hungry, I wish I had something to eat. I’m starving” The keywords you would type in would probably be “hungry, starving, and eat” (one at a time of course) You can type up to 50 different keywords.  Now, what happens next is you can tell socialoomph how often to send you the digest.  Which is very helpful as well.  So now you understand why you get those random people sending you tweets, and following you.  I used to wonder why when I would say the word “sex” or “please porn stars stop following me” why I would suddenly have hundreds of them following me. Well, it was because they had their keyword alerts set up to know if someone types the words sex, porn, etc in their tweet, then they must want to be followed or they must be interested in something sexual.  It was a big mistake.

Side note, if that ever happens to you before blocking the porn star, go to their lists and see if its full of more porn stars and if so, block all of them first, then block the porn star that was following you.

Well, I hope all of this was helpful and you are able to use the keyword digest to better market your products in a tasteful way to some new tweeters.  You can really get creative with it as you can imagine. The downside is if your not careful, you can get yourself blocked. So be tasteful and always remember, people on Twitter are looking for useful information that can help them.

Do random followers on Twitter just get you a bunch of junk?

Following on Twitter is so interesting isn’t it?  You get the random followers and then you get the followers you definitely know like your family and friends..But what’s up with these people who follow you who aren’t spammers but seem to have good information?  How did they find you? Because you are just a random person right? Well I will tell  you what I am doing and that might explain what they are doing.

I learned from Pat Flynn that increasing your followers is easy if you find a “Guru” and follow their followers. He talks about it on his YouTube page. What he says happens when you do this, is that, when you find a person who has the same interest as you who is the “GURU” with a lot of followers then you can go to their followers and follow all of them. Nine times out of ten these people will follow you back if they have an auto follow turned on. But what about the rest of us that do not believe in API’s and auto replies? How do we interest them enough to want to follow us back?  We’ve got to have something on our profile that entices that person to want to follow us.  I would personally like to think that my blog is enough to get a person to follow me.

But, Pat teaches one more unique trick that has changed the game. If you want to double your chances at getting us those followers faster, that is.  What you can do is go to the “Guru’s” Twitter page prior to following his group of followers by sending a message with a “@guru” maybe something as simple as hey how are you, or ask a question or even mention something that they have been talking about.  Then when the followers come to your page to see who you are, they will see that you know the “Guru” and they will see that you are a “good person” who is likely someone they want to follow.  Pat has the insight on this and truly has changed the way I seek out followers. Previously I was gaining about 10-30 a day, since I switched to Pat’s method 2 days ago, I increased my followers by literally hundreds. I was at 100 followers a week ago and now on November 14, 2009 I am at 1025.  Pretty cool right?  Now, the important thing to remember about me, is that my circle of the world is BROAD because I am in marketing.  If your circle is small, you might want to do this a little differently.  I don’t mind having a few junk followers here and there.  I know I can always go back in and clean it up later.  The point is to get the followers so that when I post up information about my site, as many people as possible can get the data.

Hope this clarifies why you don’t need to click on any of those spammy get followers fast sites.

Twitter and PURLS make sense

When I use Twitter and PURLS what I am doing is tracking the success of my call to action which is my tweet.  If someone goes further and fills a form out on my “microsite” then I can track that within the software as well.  The vendor that I use has built in the ability for me to follow through and track which pages each of you have clicked on within my microsites, so once a person clicks on my tweet, I can actually tell if they clicked within a microsite and what pages they clicked on.  Should they decide to fill out the form, I now have real data as to who the “Tweeter” is.

Twitter and PURLS make sense.

Another quick tip. When tweeting and posting links, I always post in 4’s for business.  What I mean is if I am on my business page then I will post up a tweet and word it 4 different ways with unique call to actions to get folks to click on the same microsite.  Yes, I said the same microsite. If you think about this – IT MAKES SENSE for a business.  Most business pages have roughly 1000 followers.  Those followers have 1000 followers and so on.  For them to even see your tweet, your gonna need to post it at the very LEAST four times.  HOWEVER, you don’t want to be obnoxious or you’ll lose people from following you. So use this strategy wisely.  I myself have unfollowed people who tweet 10 times in a row because it’s just stupid.

Now, what this is going to do is raise your chances of having a great response on that microsite, but now I call this a tweet campaign not a microsite with high response.  Because if you base it solely on the PURL or microsite itself, then its not fair, because remember, your tweeting in 4’s.

Hope this helps you and you get tweeting with some PURLS! If you need some advice on who can provide you with PURLS at an inexpensive price, I have used a vendor down in Florida that I love! They even provided my CMS system that they programmed. Love, love, love it! Email me if you want the deets!