A Numbers Game

Posted by Gabe on April 9, 2009 under Twitter, Twitter for Beginners | 6 Comments to Read

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.

I will repeat that Twitter is about making connections, but the more followers you have the more people you can connect with.

There does seem to be a culture in the Twittersphere that says you command respect if you have lots and lots of followers.  This is one thing that is very odd to me.  What that tells me is that if I go out and buy a program that gets me over 10,000 followers in a very short time then I will command much more “respect” on Twitter than I already have.  This is rather sad but true.  I have seen people that have gotten those easy followers and people can’t wait to hear what they have to say.  Also, people will seek out these “uber-twits” and follow them thinking that they will get noticed if they get a retweet out of the deal.  I will say that I tried that in the very beginning.  I even did get retweeted which caused a cascade of retweets but the bottom line is that it did not amount to much. If you follow a person with over 5000 followers, your tweet becomes one in a haystack of tweets and more than likely will not be read.  There are a few of these folks that will answer you – @AlexKaris, @JesseNewhart (and of course me :) ) if you @reply to them, but many cannot be bothered or simply can’t keep up.  My strategy is the opposite. I love to follow the ones with just a hundred or two followers (or even less) because there is a better chance that they will pay more attention to my tweets.  They are also likely to be “newbies” which means I can offer assistance to them.  I will also be able to say “I knew you when…”  It is much easier to connect with a person like this.

Having said all that your case may be different.  How you deal with your followers depends on what you want to get out of Twitter.  If connections are important but you are not necessarily trying to increase your follower count, then I recommend you look at every profile of someone you may follow.  I also suggest not only selecting people that appear to be “just like you”, because you can’t really learn to expand your horizons that way.  There is much to be learned from someone with a different culture and/or viewpoint than yours.  I will warn you – it becomes much more work to effectively manage a large “gaggle” of followers and harder to remain connected with people.  So I do not recommend going after a lot of followers unless you have a specific need to do so.  I would love to hear your take in the Comments section.

Tools
At the time of this writing there were not many tools available to help manage followers – at least none that did exactly what I want.  There is http://friendorfollow.com which reports which of your followers are following you.  Be careful though, when I looked at this closely it reported a number of people that it said were not following me that actually were. I reported the bug – hopefully they fixed that.  The problem with that program is if you want to bulk unfollow it is very tedious and painstaking.  Then there is http://huitter.com. This will automatically bulk unfollow everyone who is not following you.  That was scary when I used it but I guess it worked.  The problem there is you may still want to follow some people that are not following you.  Even though it has an option to exclude people who are not following you, that feature hasn’t worked for me.  It also says if you are following more than 1800 people it costs $$ to use it after you have done it three times, although I do not knowq how much that is.  A third is http://useqwitter.com which is supposed to email you when someone unfollows you.  I signed up for this and have yet to receive an email from them. Either it didn’t work or I have a wonderful retention rate! ;)  Another one I know of is http://socialtoo.com.  It is supposed to send you daily stats of your follows and unfollows.  I received them sporadically and sometimes they had info and other times they said I had no new follows and no new unfollows. (I think everyone is suffering from Twitter’s growing pains.)

At this point the tool I find most useful is Twitter itself.  If you click on people you follow you see right under their name a link to Direct Message them.  If this link is not there, that means they are not following you.  There is a ‘Remove’ button right there for you to use.  I am hoping a better tool comes available (if you know of one please let us all know!) but until then I will stick to Twitter.

UPDATE 8/04/09: I have recently discovered a couple of tools that may interest you. One is Twitoria. This tool shows you of the people you follow which ones are less active or even totally inactive.  This is helpful if you follow someone without looking at their profile.  I don’t recommend this practice unless that is the way you wish to gain many followers.  Twitoria has been great but it seems to be down a lot.  Another is a new app called Tweepular, which looks really cool (it has the best progress bar ever!) and seems to have a robust set of features to manage followers.  The only issue is that it too seems to have bugs that report people as not following you when they actually do.  This has to be a bug in the Twitter API as all these tools seem to have the same problem.  I am looking forward to when this is worked out.

My biggest find for helping to find targeted followers is TweepSearch.  I can’t believe  I haven’t come across it until now.  This tool lets you search the bios of people – a fabulous way to find targeted followers. For example I search for “parent” and if anyone has that word in their bio they will appear in your search.  It’s also helpful if you log in to TweepSearch, because then it will tell you if you are already following a particular person or not.