A Numbers Game
Posted by Gabe on April 9, 2009 under Twitter, Twitter for Beginners | 
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I find numbers can be fascinating. Especially as to how they apply to Twitter. There are all kinds of postings and links telling you how to get more followers. I will admit that acquiring more followers can be intoxicating. People might say that they don’t care about followers – it’s the connections you make on Twitter that are important. This is absolutely true – followers without connections mean absolutely nothing. However you cannot tell me that a sudden onrush of followers doesn’t make you feel good. It’s simply human nature to enjoy the concept that people are interested in you. I will readily admit that my numbers are important to me. I crave them not for my ego, but for more exposure for Kids Are Heroes. When I embarked on this social media journey the fuel for me was to gain exposure for this web site because it is an application that works on a global level. And it is indeed working. So I do crave numbers – I said it. However, I will not utilize the methods of gaining them that do so in a cavalier manner. Just today I received a reply in Twitter from someone I wasn’t even following telling me about their free auto-follow program. You can even pay for a program that promises so many followers after just a few months. They claim they are “targeted followers”. I don’t use any of these pyramid schemes to get followers (and I immediately unfollowed the guy who sent me that link). At the time of this update I have over 9,000 followers. By the time I reach my six-month Twitter anniversary I will have reached 10,000. I say that not to be boastful, but to save you from paying for one of those “get more followers” programs. I am going to reveal the “secret” to you how I got my “followers” (I prefer the term “colleagues”). I get Twitter followers by 1) being active on Twitter,by 2) engaging and making connections, 3) maintaining an unreproachable reputation, and 4) effectively managing my following/follower ratio. How do I manage my ratio? By keeping an eye on who returns my follows. (See the tools I use for managing followers at the bottom of this post.) I have said in the past that I do not automatically follow people who follow me, but I do return the follow much of the time. (If you would like to see why I follow and unfollow certain people, see my post on this subject here.) This gets more difficult as time progresses because the more followers you acquire the more spammers you must weed through. http://twellow.com and http://wefollow.com are good sites to look for people to follow. I will also use the Twitter search feature to find new people to follow. I will search for hash tags such as #parenting, #education and #philanthropy. If I find someone I like I will check out their followers to see who else likes them – I might like them too. I also see who they follow – if it’s someone I know well I trust them to have already weeded out the spammers. I look at their profile to see if I might like to follow them and if so I do it. If after a week or so I see that they are not following me back, then I assume they are not interested in me. So I unfollow them. I have also said in the past that the best way to connect with people is if there is a mutual following there, otherwise at least one person isn’t listening. As your numbers grow over 2000, Twitter will limit the number of people you can follow to no more than 10% above the number of people that follow you. This is also a good way of maintaining the proper ratio.
