Twitter Marketing: Why You Don’t Need to Mass Follow Users
A few days ago Twitter announced on their status blog that all Twitter users are only allowed to follow a maximum of 1000 people a day. This rule was designed to cut down on ‘follow spam’, the act of following many Twitter users in order to get them to follow you back or click on your links.
When combined with the already existing limit based on follow ratios, this means that it will be more difficult for marketers or self-promoters to rapidly increase their Twitter follower count by following many people. The old days of following thousands of users a day to get thousands of followers back are gone.
That’s not to say the strategy of mass following users to increase your Twitter followers doesn’t work anymore. It does. Why? Because many people use tools to auto-follow anyone who follows them. And there are new users who think its only polite to reciprocate. So you can easily get tens of thousands of followers from this strategy over time.
I see quite a few people still practicing this method. Some are social media enthusiasts or consultants, some are internet marketers or bloggers. All of them are people who want to get something in return. They want to:
- Make money. The goal is to monetize Twitter users by linking and recommending products or services, either their own or others if they are an affiliate. They do this by tweeting out links and sending automated direct messages with the same offers when someone follows them back.
- Improve their reputation. They amass followers with the aim of improving their reputation in a specific field like marketing or social media. They also use their followers to boost their prominence on other social arenas like Digg or Facebook.
- Get more visitor traffic. More followers means more visitors to their websites so they can get more subscribers, readers and members. They also want the ability to make specific content go ‘viral’ and become popular by sharing it with their followers.
Many people think that to achieve all of the above, they need to build a large list of Twitter followers and broadcast links to get free traffic. It’s a simple strategy. The more followers you have, the more people listen to you, and the easier it is to spread your messages.
But do you really need a large number of followers to promote yourself successfully on Twitter? The answer is no. Not at all. But many people still persist in mass following users. Let’s look at some of the reasons why you don’t need to use this marketing tactic.
Low-Value Followers: Automatons, Spammers and Self-Promoters
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Many products on Twitter marketing have been released by internet marketers looking to profit from the growing interest in Twitter. These products give you the same blueprint: just get more twitter followers. All you need to do is to follow many users everyday, drop non-mutuals and then follow more. Repeat until you get a ton of followers and look like a social media rockstar. If people follow you, you must be awesome, right?
The only problem is that these are low-value followers. Not because they are dumb or socially inferior but because a good amount of these followers are not ultra-targeted, active or responsive. Many of them are self-promoters, spammers or automated feed accounts. These people aren’t interested in you. They don’t care about you. They didn’t REALLY opt-in. They even followed you automatically, didn’t they?
If we were to draw comparisons to a email list or newsletter, these types of people are the ones who would use a temporary email address to sign up so they can get your freebie and disappear. Most of them aren’t going to end up retweeting your stuff, most of them don’t even read your tweets. Most of them don’t give a damn about your ideas.
It’s not about the follower count, its about conversions. A carefully cultivated list of 1000 followers can beat a list of 10,000 twitter followers anytime when it comes to spreading content or getting traffic/sales. A social media strategy that only involves mass following all sorts of people and shooting out links in order to hook buyers or readers is quite inadequate.
Low-value followers are incredibly easy to get and the only positive thing about them is that they’ll make you look good. Judging influence by the follower count is something that people do. It’s social proof. So you have 80,000 followers. You can probably start a social media consulting business and tell everyone that you’re an expert. Or write that ebook and flaunt your follower count on the sales page. You can fool a lot of people and you’ll make money too.
So play the Twitter game of mass adding and dropping users for a few months. You may even meet some cool people but don’t assume that you have 50,000 users who actually read your tweets or are interested in you. They aren’t. And you’re irrelevant to them.
Remember, you’re not getting natural opt-in follows preempted by interest. All you have is an inflated number. Maybe you think that’s something to be proud of but if a 7 year old kid can press a auto-follow button and get 500 followers in 24 hrs, you’re not that impressive.
Twitter Marketing is More Than Just Getting Followers
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Unless you are a celebrity or a famous brand, you will never get hundreds of thousands of natural follows from people who are interested in what you have to say. If you want to look like a VIP, you can fake it by manipulating follower counts like most self-promoters.
But do you really think that’s effective Twitter marketing? Sometimes I feel that marketers should stop this obsession with volume and carefully think about cultivating a better follower list as well as other more effective ways of using Twitter for marketing.
I don’t want to blindly label all mass-following users as spammers. Some are not malicious nor are they aggressive self-promoters. I’m just questioning the overwhelming focus on this tactic, as if its the only way to accumulate influence or market yourself on Twitter. It’s not.
This isn’t an attack on anyone. If you think that mass following many users to boost your follower count is great, keep doing it. I’ve got no problems with that. I’m just offering my opinion on why I think its flawed. This comes from having actually experimented with this strategy, so it’s not just theoretical postulations.
In my opinion, while having a large number of Twitter followers is not a bad thing, there are some other key factors you should consider if you’re want to use Twitter to market yourself or your website/brand. These are points which I think are quite important even if your ONLY reason for using Twitter is to make money or get traffic.
The most important thing you should remember: It’s not about the number of Twitter followers you have, its about who follows you and the responsiveness of your audience.
Who Follows You: The People Who Give You Their Attention
It matters who reads your tweets. Are these people interested in you or your business? An interested follower is naturally more engaged with whatever you put out on Twitter. People who automatically follow you do not count as interested followers.
Are your followers active? Active users share your links, they give you feedback, they talk to you. Automated or semi-automated users are not active users that will interact with you.
And do the people who follow you have influence? Would you rather get 50 retweets from users with 10 to 100 random followers? Or you rather get 10 retweets from influencers in same niche, with all of them having 1000 to 10,000 very relevant followers?
How about tweeting out a link or idea and having someone with a blog in the same niche write about it and link to you? Can your army of auto-followers offer the same? Not every Twitter user has the same audience size. Some users can reach more people much faster and these are the ones that can help you.
This is not to suggest that the average twitterer is useless but to highlight the unequal influence of each user. Who follows you matters a great deal because powerful Twitter marketing involves not just link-blasting but networking and relationship development.
Responsiveness of Your Audience: Are They Engaged?
Image Credit: seizetheday
Responsiveness is the degree to which your Twitter audience is engaged with whatever messages you put out on Twitter. A responsive audience connects with you, retweeting your links and answering your questions. They interact with your Twitter stream.
When we talk about a responsive email list, we’re talking about subscribers who are willing to buy or take action on your offers. Responsive Twitter followers are similar: they take action on your tweets by spreading them or talking back to you.
An easy way to measure responsiveness is to ask a question and see how many people respond. The no. of link clicks and retweets are other factors as well but anyone can click on a random link: it just shows that they’re interested in the link title or story. But are they interested in you? Actual responses to your queries are a good measure of that.
A responsive Twitter audience naturally develops when people are interested in you, what you do and who you are. Celebrities have the most responsive followers, many of their subscribers even sign up for a Twitter account just to interact with their tweets. They’re actively looking forward to reading new tweets from their favorite personality. This anticipation and interest makes them a perfect audience for conversions and call-to-actions.
If you’re not already famous, you will have a tougher time building a responsive audience because you don’t get natural interest in you from the start. One way to generate this interest is to develop a reputation in your field so that your name or brand is known.
This means you shouldn’t just spend your whole day following/unfollowing, tweeting links and chit-chatting. You have to work at your brand away from Twitter. If you put out an interesting tool or piece of content, you’ll get interest. If you’re selling a product that solves a problem, you’ll get interest. As you become more known online, you will get people following you.
When on Twitter itself, you can develop responsiveness through reciprocation. By actively interacting with other users, you will induce them to pay more attention to your updates. But don’t just send out updates and only talk to people who reply to your tweets. Actively monitor and engage users. Over time they will warm up to you and responsiveness will increase.
Remember, you don’t just want a large follower count. You want a responsive group of followers. People who are genuinely interested in you and people who will click on your links, retweet you or respond to your queries. Ultimately this group of Twitter followers can help you popularize your website or grow your business.
My Follow Strategy for Twitter Marketing
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Instead of autofollowing a ton of people and rinsing them out to get mutual followers who are either not interested or very poorly interested in you, go for ultra-relevant Twitter users.
There are two types of twitter users you can target: people who have the power to help your business grow and the average user who is a potential customer. Whichever type you choose depends on your goals and what you want to get from Twitter.
Generally I’m more in favor in targeting twitter users who can best promote my business interests so you can get customers/buyers/readers through their efforts instead of your own. Potential end-users/customers are equally important although you’ll have a tougher time trying to determine their level of interest in your website/product.
Yes, you can use keywords to track tweets and find prospects on Twitter directories but interacting with each and every prospect (there are thousands out there) takes a lot of time and energy. I would prefer networking with influencers who can promote my site/brand in and outside of Twitter because they have a built-in audience and a platform.
Mass following can get you followers. But it doesn’t drastically improve your reputation, no matter how attractive a high follower count looks. A mass follower tweeting out a link is very different from an authority in the field endorsing a link by putting it in a tweet. The influencer is followed by a targeted list of other taste-makers.
The core of influence will spiral outwards based on the initial endorsement. This is more powerful than a link sent out to an auto-follow audience. Sure, you can easily get traffic but your tweets are not as effective as a voice that is respected by your target market.
So who should you network with? Not just end-users with your keyword in their bio. But bloggers, webmasters, publishers, journalists and business owners. People who work in your field and own web sites that can send you links and traffic. You can focus on networking with the superstars in your field but don’t ever forget about less famous people. This article by Brett Borders offers a good explanation of why you shouldn’t ignore the average Twitter user.
So in essence, you should use Twitter as a relationship building tool to extract benefits from a core group of influencers who are relevant to your business/website. Network actively with the right Twitter users, talk to them, spread their links, give them feedback, support their content. Be a participant in their Twitter experience.
If you do this long enough, you will eventually make them comfortable with helping you or promoting your stuff either on Twitter or away from it.
If someone talks to me very often on Twitter, shares my content or points me to good resources, I’m more than willing to retweet their stuff. Especially if its great content. I wouldn’t think twice about it. The desire to reciprocate is a very powerful instinct.
Image Credit: Erica_Marshall
And if you want to talk about ‘going viral’, just a few retweets from several users with responsive audiences and your link will get all the momentum it needs. You don’t need to build up an account with tens of thousands of users only to send your message out to people who aren’t even half-interested in your content.
You will gradually grow your business or website by getting more readers, clients or buyers through the help of that core group. And after you’ve achieved some success, people will naturally start to follow you on Twitter. And these are the best kinds of Twitter followers to have, people who opt-in because they are interested in you or your work.
Then you can concentrate on these new batch of followers and by interacting with them, turn them into people who will actively support your content or initiatives. Many of them might be site owners or bloggers as well so this is a great way to network and learn if you’re looking for some help to improve your core business offerings.
In terms of making money indirectly or directly through Twitter, I’ve realized that the no. of Twitter followers you have is not always proportional to the income you’ll make.
It’s not necessary to inflate your Twitter follow count through an automated game of mass following. But I understand why people do it. It’s the same old strategy used on Myspace, Facebook and pretty much any social site where people can ‘friend’ each other and capture attention. The mentality is go for maximum volume and hook the few that will listen.
You can go down that route if you want but I think you can easily achieve the same results and more by cultivating a high quality list of followers and networking smartly with the right people. Marketing on Twitter does not just involve getting as many followers as you can.
Think beyond that. If you want followers, you should get them to come to you. You don’t have to chase after them. It’s devastatingly easy once you learn how to leverage other users with established audiences and create bait that entices people to opt-in because of interest.
What do you think? Feel free to leave a comment below or talk to me on Twitter!
When I read about hundred of thousands in context of Twitter my mind crashes. That’s just numbers game. I found it hard to follow and read every tweet when I went over hundred people in the start (I mostly reciprocated).
I can’t imagine even trying to read and reply to thousands.
If you want to get qualified Twitter follower, let them follow you after they land at you website, read your stuffs, like them, and then click on the follow me on Twitter link. That means you’ve got to build your brand anyway. I constantly have people follow me in the hope I will follow them back. But I do not follow them back becaus e they are not interesting for me. After a while they end up following me because I do not follow back haha!. Unfortunately I dont have time to build my brand yet due to lack of time, butI will in the near future.
Great article Maki,
I pretty much agree with your strategy.
As with anything on the internet, you have to choose between doing things the harder, but most valuable way, or doing it the lazy way.
Very good post. Targeted marketing over spammy, unfocused, mass marketing makes tons of sense.
I’d much rather have a low number of responsive followers who are engaged with me than tons of people who pay no attention.
“A carefully cultivated list of 1000 followers can beat a list of 10,000 twitter followers anytime when it comes to spreading content or getting traffic/sales. ”
In fact…
“A carefully cultivated list of a single top follower (let’s say Oprah) can beat a list of 10,000 spambot twitter followers anytime when it comes to spreading content or getting traffic/sales.”
I am taking your point to the extreme, just to demonstrate its validity. I like my 666 followers (as of today) and I would not trade them for a random list of 10,000.
I remember what @MCHammer said on @hubspot : Forget the Number!
I am agree with you Maki. I know what feel when people following me using BOT. I will happy to following another people, but it is weird when you must following people using BOT.
your posting really remembering me to @MCHammer video. make a conversation, spread some useful information, talk about what you interesting, so people that have similar interest will following you. then you see that they ‘real human’ you following back.
Here is the clue when you want to following back people who following you. they following-follower ratio is reasonable. what number is reasonable? of course people follow 1500 and followed by 150 and make 1 update is not reasonable. kick them, block! simple.
There is no viral, no sales, no RT from people who not really interesting on you. nope.
absolutely right, the number effect is like the way to proof that they have influence. the one and only is they want to fool us.
Even if you make a contest! ‘hi, i will give you $5 by re-tweet this word (no change)’ bla..bla..bla.. Ok, then i will follow you for giving me $5. when you want to sale something to me in another day via twitter. Ups.. why you want me to buy something? are you not rich enough like when you making giveaway or contest? maybe follower will silent and hide from him.
Or another option is they try to get 20.000 follower, then someday they can sale internet marketing kit about ‘how to promote your product via twitter’. we know he lying, cause he make $$$ by asking people for buying their eBook about how to get 20.000 follower on twitter. weirdo. they want to using social media by not socialize. Yaiks! Is not about the number.
I am not following you because your follower number. I dont care! you always making great content. and i like it, like everybody that always come here.
Sorry about my grammar Maki, my english s so Bad
lol
I 100% agree with you. I see no value in follower/following in 5 digits. It’s just like a wide spread sea without any harbor. I was reticent at first to join the Twitter train, but I love it now. That affection only came after understanding and that understanding only after I realized what I wanted out of it. Genuine exchange and value. That is all. Follower count matters not in either direction. Thanks, as always, for such fantastic and insightful writing.
I agree with much of what you say, Maki, BUT you say you prefer to network with influencers who can promote your business interests. That strikes me as somewhat cynical.
I prefer to follow the people who strike me as interesting, whether that’s based on their bio, a tweet or a post. And if they then become uninteresting I unfollow them.
At the end of the day it’s a SOCIAL medium.
Is follower count in EITHER direction really irrelevant, Sean? Really? Isn’t that the same as saying we don’t care how many people read our blogs. Show me a blogger who says that, and I’ll show you a liar.
At least, i won’t unfollow you
Thank’s for all your great and very interesting posts. I often read them but if i remember well that’s my first comment here.
New to Twitter, thank you for your well thought out article. I am trying to find my way in this new Twitter world.
Marie
I really resonate with your own personal Twitter strategy for finding relevant and”ultra responsive” users… I have turned off auto-follow and am going to trying building my account — from now on out — with only people who share stuff I am interested in or the people who follow me and converse with an @ reply. No connection or conversation = no follow – in most cases.
This is yet great article chock full of insights. Stumble, RT’ed and all that… keep up the inspiration flowing and thanks, as always.
This is all assuming that these strategies are either/or.
Once you get a targeted list, what is the harm of spreading the net wider? Sure you might be some untargeted people following you, but so so what? If you can get 10% of the new followers to discover your site, you are still ahead in the game.
There is no downside to having people follow you. Even if they don’t care about you, there is no cost in having them as followers. It isn’t as if these people are dragging your account down, nor can you really stop someone who isn’t interested in you from following you anyhow.
I have no set Twitter strategy except to find people that I find interesting and would like to talk too. Other then that nothing really applies. Totally agree with the points raised here Maki. I hate auto follow and try and just engage people that I deem “cool” in my extremely non-linear manner.
@Mike CJ – That all depends why you are on Twitter. I am very strategic in my use of Twitter.
My first priority is to gather information. I can spend all day visiting blogs and news sites, and get half of what I get out of an hour of Twitter – if I follow the right people, who tweet the right information. I don’t call that cynical; I call that effective use of a tool. And it is very pleasant, because I love absorbing new information.
My second priority is to interact with people who I might like to work with at some point down the road, to build a relationship that may or may not prove useful in the future. In any business setting, relationships are based on mutual professional interest, the ability to help one another, a sense of credibility and trustworthiness, and a sense of ease with that person. This also is very pleasant, because I like interacting with my Twitter friends.
My third priority is to get information out when I want it. Just for this, Twitter would not be worth my time, but it does come in handy when you want people to look at your blog post or a submission somewhere, or when you want to help out a friend.
Do I also follow some people just for fun? You bet – including former colleagues and friends who have nothing to do with my business interests and never will. Do I have fun with the people I choose to follow? Of course.
Do I also use Twitter to sell my services? No, I just don’t see it that way. The closest I came was when I needed a partner, with a specific skillset that I lacked, to jointly bid on a project…and I knew just the person on Twitter.
Ask another person, and you’ll get another answer. Not because one person is more or less cynical than another, but because people have different reasons for using Twitter. And most of them are legit.
Just my 2 cents.
I’ve just been at this 5 or 6 weeks now and choose to follow a follower based on the simple idea that he or she is producing tweets that are of interest to me — for me, primarily financial and media/web content. If it’s good I follow; if it’s not, I don’t, even if they are temporarily following and may unfollow if I don’t reciprocate. Quality over quantity, in other words.
http://www.twitter.com/jonchevreau
Spot-on article. Additionally, Twitter killed off auto-follow for VIP members, so I wonder how long it will be before Twitter does the same for 3rd party auto-follow programs. I don’t really see a use for auto-follow, considering it is entirely disingenuous to follow people whose commentary you don’t care about.
Personally I’ve followed ~120 people (I have ~200 followers), and frankly that’s at the edge of my limitations in terms of being able to actually pay attention to what people have to say. I’ve set up my own TweetDeck group for the people whose updates I REALLY care about (i.e. not retailers or people who mass-RT).
Case in point: I have a friend who’s followed over 1,000 people and has over 1,000 followers, yet when he and I post the same link, he gets fewer clicks than I do.
Though my 100 followers may be small, a large percentage of them read my updates, and when I post an update to my blog, I trust that they’ll read it.
@ Rarst
It is quite difficult, even with the right tools because they tend to hang up and become hard to use when you follow people in the thousands.
@ Yvonh
Those type of followers are probably the most valuable you can get.
@ David Leonhardt
Good example!
The difference in the value of traffic is a big factor when it comes to conversions. People following someone they are interested in trust the tweets or recommendations they receive.
This is difficult to replicate with an auto-follower account… and even if you achieve a good level of responsiveness, you still only have one set of audience.
If you’re going the networking route, you can easily get promoted by many people with responsive audiences, this is something that is very difficult to replicate even if you open multiple accounts and start auto-following people.
Auto-following doesn’t take much time (just a few clicks) but actually interacting with people beyond link blasts is more difficult since your attention is completely one-way, you don’t read them but they read you.
@sayasatria
Your english is fine, I totally understand what you’re saying
Great points. And that’s exactly how people are making money… create inflated follower counts with auto following tools and then tell people how to make money by getting thousands of followers.
The problem is most of these people don’t talk about the quality of followers only always the quantity. And quality matters a good deal when it comes to real income generation, not the occasional Clickbank conversion.
@ Writer Dad
You’re welcome. Twitter is a great marketing tool but when you strip it down, its just people interacting with people so the extraction of benefits can best achieved after you’ve given something in exchange, like the value of your conversation or tweets.
@ Mike CJ
Actually I agree with you, which is why I said the average user is equally important as an influencer and linked to Brett’s post in support of that.
As a Twitter user, I like to follow interesting people as well.. but when I’m not just using Twitter for leisure, but as a marketing tool… it makes sense to reach out to people with greater influence. That’s not being cynical, its being practical and business-minded.
It’s not about ‘using’ people but understanding that give-and-take relationships with certain people can help.. though of course you shouldn’t only be friendly with influencers but anyone that seeks to interact with you on Twitter.
@ Patrick
First comment? Welcome!
@ Marie Cole
Feel free to msg me anytime on Twitter if you have any questions about how it works or whatever..
@Brett
Thanks. Your article was great as well, I read it while I was almost done with mine and thought it was a perfect fit to what I’m talking about.
@ G
I see your point. I was actually thinking the same exact thing when I was writing the post. It’s not mutually exclusive for someone to do auto mass following and hardcore networking.. I do agree that its not entirely either/or.
But from what I’ve seen so far…. It’s always either/or in practice. Many in the IM niche are propagating the big follower theory: correlating income potential/actual income with the no. of followers. I don’t agree with that at all.
I’ve read just about every IM Twitter traffic/monetization ebook out there and played with all the tools/scripts available. The focus is overwhelming on quantity over quality. No question about that. So marketers or business owners are always operating with this focus.
Of course, I agree that there’s no downside for getting people to follow you.. but like I said, did they follow because you autofollowed them? Or did they opt-in of their own accord because they were 100% interested.
Big difference because the value of your audience differs greatly. One is either not even active or half-interested in whatever you put… the other even put you in a special group in their Tweetdeck set up so they can read and act on your tweets.
I don’t think that the people who don’t care about you are dragging your account down, that’s impossible. If they want to follow… let them go ahead, I don’t mind.
But the focus of my post was all about what you are going to do with YOUR attention. You gonna take out your auto-following tool, go to a profile and clone the followers for 30 days until you follow tens of thousands and your twitter stream is completely cluttered with junk?
Or are you going to pay attention, network and learn to bait influencers into pimping your stuff so you get natural high quality followers from that. Honestly, that’s the either/or that most people don’t even think about.
I love to experiment with social media marketing. I have had many Twitter profiles, each of them of tens of thousands of followers. The retweet ratio of all of them is far lesser than @doshdosh on an active day, @doshdosh being the one account where I didn’t play the game of following to get follows back. Not only the retweet ratio but clicks per link and the amount of traffic sent, because influencers follow me.
Anyway, that’s what I think. Good question. Theoretically no, its not an either/no situation. But in reality, most people can’t even see the two sides because they’re over-focusing on one.
@ Stuart Foster
Non-linear is good, its mellow and relaxed… just the state of mind you want to put your audience in.. so they get comfortable with you and don’t see you as someone who’s out to get something from the start.
@Jaremy
That’s what I’m talkin about.. it’s not the size of your list, its the responsiveness. Every good email marketer knows that… and Twitter is no different.
@ Everyone else
Thanks for your comments!
Fantastic post.
First off… thanks for sharing your viewpoint on this topic!
As someone who is relatively new to Twitter (2 months), I’ve just recently gone through the confusing obstacle course of how to work with the program. In the beginning, everything seemed to be about getting a mass following. I think I even went so far as ReTweeting some strange program that I later regretted. Fortunately, the impact was minimal. The lesson, however, was important.
I get the whole idea about monetizing efforts… and naturally, as a business owner, this is an important thing to keep in mind. However, I do trust in the law of attraction (especially when it comes to Twitter). Over time, it’s very likely that people who share something in common join up on Twitter. Be it for a hashtag mention, a solid article RT… who knows, perhaps a comment on a blog. As in “real life” (perhaps face-to-face life) , we gravitate to people with similar interests.
The most important lesson I’ve learned in the past two months is that engaging with the people on Twitter is a lot of fun! I’ve been impacted both professionally and personally by some of the wonderful people that I’ve gotten to know. If you are willing to completely be yourself and (of course) provide some value to your group, you have a great chance of developing a healthy audience. With that said, mistakes are natural in the learning process… I make them all the time! If you can come to terms with that, the experience just gets better.
Your post was very valuable and insightful. Thank you for taking the time to explain your viewpoint.
Looking forward,
Michael Long
The Red Recruiter
Nothing I can add here. I’ve said the same thing in a more abbreviated form many times to people over the last several months. I’ve met one after another person joining Twitter as a biz and want to know how to get mass followers. They still believe volume will triumph in the end.
So few people realize that only a small percentage of those are worth having as followers. So much better to get the right followers. I’m not saying remove followers, but I’d definitely say don’t auto follow back. If the person following you isn’t saying things you’re interested in, don’t follow them back.
Also, stop worrying about folks that stop following. Once I divorced myself from that, it’s been a much better time for me on Twitter. I’d got more than enough great followers already; people I swim in the same circles with, and some I don’t. Honestly though, I could lose a few thousand and not miss them one bit. Only a handful actually follow my links or retweet them. They are mostly great folks but hey, I’m not saying anything they care to share.
One piece of advice, track your links that you share. See which ones get the most traffic, retweets, etc. That’s your main audience.
Enough said on my part. Dosh, great job as usual.
Good article, thanks for posting it.
Maki – This is by far one of the best and most comprehensive article on twiiter that I’ve read.
Good Post !
Nice to see the tide turning against the practice of mass following. It was really only desperate internet marketers and the clueless doing it, but nice nonetheless.
Jeremy
Your words are timely for me. The last couple of days I have been thinking about the growth in my twitter account. I am fairly new, and I’ve stepped back to get a handle on what I’m really doing here. And what others are doing. Thanks for your insight. I already feel a lot clearer on the direction I will take going forward because you shared.
thanks for the info… i little long
Jorge
Thanks for sharing this valuable information, if only all Twitter spammers would read this…
Absolutely spot-on article! I was thinking about the twitters numbers game a lot myself last week and wrote a blog post on what the whole Ashton Kutcher vs CNN race could mean for twitter (you can read it at http://tinyurl.com/cmwqvo slightly different take but it may interest you.)
I myself have a relatively small twitter following, and I don’t follow many either, but I get so much out of my network.
I don’t think anyone can effectively use twitter to their advantage if they’re just mass following and follower collecting.
As a PR/journalist I don’t think there’s anything wrong with using twitter for PR& Marketing purposes, but you can’t just apply traditional push messaging to it, you have to accept it as a new platform with new rules.
So many people who join up to twitter to publicise themselves, their brand or product, miss the important invite that’s extended to them when they register ‘join the conversation’.
I’d definately rather have 50 followers who speak to me, follow my links, RT my posts, visit my blog, tell me when I’m talking balls and let me know when I’ve raised a good point by joining in the debate than 50,000 randoms, half of who are also mass followers without any real interest in me, and half of who are people who have got bored of listening to continuous promotion, marketing blub and sell, sell, sell and just left their accounts inactive!
Thanks again for the informative post!
Nikki
Great post, Maki.
The energy expended over follower numbers is best invested in participating in conversations that generate new ideas and expand your sphere of relevant influence. That and not new follower numbers, is what leads to long term business success.
Unfortunately for me, I signed up for an aut0-follow service whe I first started using Twitter and I can’t figure out how to turn it off because I can’t recall how I turned it on. Now, I’m stuck having to unfollow people manually just because they follow me.
The people in my Twitter circle seem genuinely interested in the things I share. They retweet things and comment back to me both publicly and privately. I enjoy the genuine sharing and collaboration that results from this, and I prefer it to massive numbers of followers.
I love following your Tweets and I am always excited to read your thought provoking posts here at your blog.
Great job, once again!
There are some bad Internet marketers who are selling a $50 a month Twitter spam automated software that will automatically follow a certain number of twitters users each day.
You can set up a dozen or more Twitter accounts and the software will do the rest.
You load up the Twittter accounts with news headlines in one section, then you load a bunch of links to your website or blog in another section. The software will randomly pick a headine, then randomly pick a “deep link” and pair them up in a Tweet.
Don’t be a sucker and buy this software!
Twitter will ban your accounts for: 1) posting content that is misleading in that a headline might say, “Blogger Nabs Big Bucks!”– but then the link to your website or blog has nothing to do with this headline, and 2) your follow to followers ratio is too whacked.
When looking to make money online with Twitter, it’s just like any other form of marketing. First you need to make a connection with your followers. You do that by talking with them, not at them. If a Twitter wanted to read a never ending mass of headline after headline, they have only to look for an RSS reader or even a traditional search engine listing. That’s not what Twitters want.
Twitters want to make connections, to be a part of something bigger. Respect your followers. Talk with your followers. Point your followers to a killer coupon you found online that is directly in-line with your niche and the reason they followed you.
Interesting and thought provoking article with implications for measuring the value of social media traffic. I see the possibility of developing a schema for measuring qualitative variables such as:
Relevance
Responsiveness
Reciprocation
Participation
Reputation
Influence
Relationship
There are others, I’m sure, maybe even more R’s (:
Thanks!
This post really says what needs to be said about inane twitter followers. I’ve been getting so many spam followers lately, alot of whom aren’t even real people. I can’t understand what good they think that will do them, the people they’re following, or twitter.
I’m also getting tired of positive thinking quotes. If you don’t have more to add to the conversation than looking up a quote for the day, I will un-follow you. I want real people with real thoughts about real issues. And yes, I’m in marketing, I sell but people work with me because they trust me, they know that I’m smart and study and critically analyze and have fun! Aren’t those the things we should all be looking for with business partners, friends, and community? And, if those aren’t the qualities a twitter follower is looking for, I don’t want them.
I just cleaned out my “following” box yesterday and I’m going to continue to eliminate the boring, mundane, and redundant. A well-qualified, engaged following, now that’s worth it’s weight in gold!
I’ve been waiting for an article like this for some time! I’m so tired of getting DM’s on Twitter from people telling me they know how to get 10000s of followers! Quality is far better than quantity relationshipwise.
Awesome post. Puts a level headed perspective right out there.
Just as with anything else, it’s mostly a trial and error thing. The more you explore
the more you get an idea – the more you understand.
Thanks again for putting things in perspective, although that’s what I have been thinking all along.
Have a wonderful day!
Woowwwwwwwww you have gone into a lot of depth to explain this. However I think Twitter needs to improve their API, its too slow at times as the users are growing.
Well-written. My 2 cents:
1) I think it is OK for a starting Twitter user to do “some mass following” to get a critical mass of Tweeps. (* blush *) I started that way.
2) I am now experimenting with hash tags to organize, find followers interested in the same subject. My #ppt (everything related to presentations) and #wine are the columns I really read in Tweetdeck.
This is so long but it’s worth it.
I love your strategy
Thanks Maki. This came just at the right time for me. I’ve been blogging now for just a few months and using Twitter for an even shorter period. The focus of my site is writing and communication strategies for the communication-challenged, especially at nonprofits and small businesses since they frequently lack the resources to hire a full-time communications professional.
I was a little befuddled when people started following me on Twitter who hadn’t visited my site and who haven’t made any effort to even say hi. Much of what you wrote about follow spam is news to me.
My Twitter stream is specifically to share my expertise in developing communication strategies and copywriting, and to point people to others who have great insights and resources to share on the same subjects. Frankly, I’d rather have 100 followers putting what I write to use and share back their experiences than 10,000 people who have no real interest or use for what I’m talking about.
This post gives me a lot to consider as I rethink my Twitter strategy. Thanks!
Wow, at the time of this comment you had exactly 25,000 RSS subscribers. Just thought I would point that out. Now on to the Twitter subject…
You obviously are correct about using the techniques to mass as many followers as possible is not the best strategy to use.
From personal experience I hate it when I get followed by automated profiles, strictly there to pr0mote in a spammy kind of way. Those type of profiles make me dislike using Twitter. Whenever someone follows me I try to respond by asking them why they followed me.
#1 it helps me see what promotion strategies are working and #2 it makes for real conversation between people. As opposed to just saying “Thanks for following” and that is where it ends.
Another thing that sucks is people who just promote link after link of either their stuff or all kinds of other links over and over to get praise from others or whatever.
Anyway, this is a very through and informative post. Thank you.
A crashing applause from sunny Rome.
We love you when you find the time to say how much bullshit is being thrown around as if it was caviar.
Great article.
This makes so much sense now. You really helped me open my eyes and understand the true use of twitter.
I always unfollow people that flushes out with twitts up to 5-10 after each other with different links to click on. I feel it’s just wrong and it spams up page.
I will get more active on building relationships now and then the masses of followers will come if need it at all
One of the best pieces I’ve read on the subject yet. Great piece to turn series
Good post, although a bit long winded. I despise auto-follow software and wish Twitter would ban the use of it. Perhaps their recent 1000 follow limit per day is a step in that direction. I have written articles about how much I hate auto-follow and auto-dm software, and I will block followers who wind up following me by using that useless piece of junk for software. Thanks for your post here.
Twitter and tweeting was fun till about a couple of months back. All of a sudden there was this surge of free tools and softwares and twitter became a spamming machine. People would not tweet even once but would still have thousands of followers. What is the relevance of these followers? The irony is that these people who had no tweets but thousands of followers did not even have a website on their profile page. I wonder what their popularity was, that they got so many followers.
Twitter is now not a very handy or, useful tool for me. I only use twitter so that I get a few re-tweets to my post and can get a few loyal readers. And for that I have never felt the need of an automated software.
Just recently I signed up for twitter, so will try out these suggestions starting…now!
? DiamondPalace
That is some excellent advice. Very thought out and well written, and true on top of that!
Thanks so much, It’s very appreciated. Keep it up!
I thought you could only follow 10% more than followed you anyway (so the 1000 per day would only be for those who already had 10k followers?)
You’re spot on with this article. When I started using Twitter I madly followed everyone in sight. And a bunch followed back, mostly because of automatic follow tools. I quickly realised that a large number of the people I followed were just low rent marketers who only ever twitter get rich quick scheme links.
So in recent times I’ve started to aggressively unfollow these people. They contribute nothing to the community.
I do use Twitter with a commercial imperative, I have an eBook we’re about to launch, and obviously Twitter provides a valuable way of reaching an audience. However, it’s not the only marketing strategy, and we view Twitter as a long term activity, building up a profile around my area of expertise and interest.
Now I actively chase down people who I think make a contribution in my particular area (subscription content), if they follow back, then great, but that’s not my overriding objective.
I’ve been having a bit of fun with this in recent weeks. As part of my research into some of the lower forms of internet marketing I set up a couple of autoblogs – blogs that just grab content from other sources, and display related Google Ads. One of those ’secret’ ways of making money online propagated by some internet marketing merchants. Of course, the income is miniscule, a dollar a day if you are lucky.
As part of the exercise I hooked up Twitter accounts, and using services like Twollow, it automatically follows people based on the key words I’ve selected for my autoblogs. Lo and behold, a bunch follow back. One of my autoblogs has picked up a couple of hundred followers in the last week. The complete joke is that many of them are autoblogs themseleves. It’s robots following robots. Completely worthless.
Keep up the good work.
David Eedle
“Mass following can get you followers. But it doesn’t drastically improve your reputation, no matter how attractive a high follower count looks. A mass follower tweeting out a link is very different from an authority in the field endorsing a link by putting it in a tweet. The influencer is followed by a targeted list of other taste-makers. ”
This goes to the argument of targeting the A list vs targeting the B list. In my experience, the A list only pays attention once the B list said you’re worth dealing with. Therefore, getting mass-followers, part of whom may retweet your stuff, can help build momentum towards getting the A list to pay attention.
I’m not saying the A list (eg the influencers you refer to) never finds stuff / makes stuff popular on its own, but the circles of influence they listen to are often a better way of approaching them, imho.
Have you had success where you joined a community you were a stranger to and went straight for the bigshot influencers, Maki? I’d be interested in your experience.
All of your points about Twitter are excellent. Your responce rate is only as good as the people following you!
@Michael Long
You’re welcome. If you’re new to Twitter, it must have been a little tempting to chase after followers by mass following people but I think you’re on the right track. You seem to have a good understanding that interactions and relationships matter.
@ Todd Jordan
You have a great connection with your followers, I’ve been seeing the conversations and it’s been fun to see the rapport you have with them
@ Colleen
You’re welcome. If you have any questions, feel free to shoot them over to @doshdosh!
@Nikki Girvan
Read your article, yes I agree. The focus for Twitter marketing has been overwhelmed by volume. By quantity, not quality. Mass following gives you a fake audience, marketers know that but they keep it quiet and instead trumpet the size of their audience.
It’s pathetic really.
@Donna marie
What service did you use? There should be a checkbox or something which allows you to turn it off… alternatively you can try emailing the site owner or changing your Twitter password.
Thanks for reading my tweets!
@ Lance Jepsen
I agree… those are the worse Twitter spammers.
I’ve seen it all. Pumping RSS feeds to generate legit links, using a bot to repeat rotating tweets every 1 hour, future scheduling mundane comments (‘going out for work now’) and setting it on recurring to make it look natural.
Silly really. What’s the ROI for that? Maybe a clickbank sale or fulfilled CPA offer once in a while. Marketers should really think big. They missing the real profit potential for Twitter.
@ Collin Canright
That’s a lot of ‘R’s… I’ve seen some tools which try to measure quality… since they don’t really reveal their algorithm its hard to tell what the final score means.
In any case, any measurement needs to take into account the follow ratio… many only focus on the no. of followers and not on how many people one person is following. Because mass following can skew qualitative variables like influence.
@Kristina
Hahaha. I’m with you on the quotes thing. It’s annoying. You know that they’re doing? They pick a bunch of quotes and future schedule them so it looks like they’re always saying something meaningful.
A closer at them and you’ll see that these are vapid Twitter users devoid of any personality. Good work on cleaning up your list!
@ Jan Schultink
I think its fine for some mass following in the start when you’re new as long as your focus is on building relationships. In fact following new people is the only way to go for a new user… Twitter itself created the suggested followers list because they don’t want people to start with an empty timeline.
But if you’re just mass following in order to get users, you’ll unfollow some of the GOOD people who don’t follow you back and you’ll keep the junk users who auto-follow you. That does not make sense to me.
#hashtags are great. And so is Twitter keyword search. Both worthy additions to your following base.
@ Dana Hutson
You’re welcome. I think most new Twitter users don’t know that they’re being ‘follow spammed’ by people who don’t care about them, people who just follow in order to get your attention for a second… so you’ll either 1) follow them back 2) See their profile or tweet and then click over and hopefully buy something/opt-in so they can make money.
Ignore these users. Don’t follow them back. Now if they really read your tweets and interact with you actively, that’s a different story. It shows that they’re interested in you.
@ Ben Moreno
I noticed the 25K too.. sweet
Yeah, try asking them why they follow you. 90% of the time you won’t even get a response. They are THAT automated. Stick to the real people, they’re more fun anyway!
@ Robin Good
I try my best… Thanks for the nice words!
@ Thomas Skavhellen
The mass of followers will come when you have a good reputation in whatever niche you’re in, people will follow because they’re interested in you or what you do. So if you are fretting about not getting enough followers, don’t sweat it.
@ R Kumar
Twitter is hot with marketers now because its growing at an alarming rate, lots of new users = lots of new opportunities to spam and make money. Nothing much we can do about it on the macro-level but we can manage who interacts with us and what we see, which is a good start.
@antje wilsch
Before they set up the 1K daily limit, there was already a follow ratio of approximately 10%.
The 1K limit does not just apply for those with already more than 10K followers. A new account can follow up to 1000 users even if it has ZERO followers from the start. The 1K limit is a DAILY limit and it applies to every user out there (what Twitter said).
The follow limit which is based on a ratio (10% more than your followers – give or take) is another restriction but its not a daily limit. This means that even if you follow 90K users but only have 78K users following you back, you cannot follow any more EVEN if you haven’t exceeded the 1K daily limit.
That’s the part when these mass-followers start to drop everyone who is not non-mutual so they can follow more. It’s all just a numbers game to them.
@ David
Absolutely nothing wrong with using Twitter with commercial intent but it just has to be done with the right amount of respect and care for the people who are listening. Even if the people who are in your specific field don’t follow you back…. just follow them anyway and @reply them… sometimes that’s good enough to develop good relationships.
I think most people are obsessed with the follower count, as if it instantly translates to higher income or more influence. It’s a delusion. You’re not getting opt-in follows based on interest, you’re getting auto-follows from spammy accounts.
Now if an internet marketer does NOT want his/her email list to be full of junk users who don’t act on offers, why would he/she want a list of crappy Twitter followers? Applying the same logic would help.
Going for volume in social marketing will get you some quick hits but the conversions are terrible. So much more potential in Twitter than just using it mass-follow style.
@ Gab
That paragraph you quoted was written to mainly demonstrate that there is a quality difference when it comes to link pushing on Twitter. A recommendation is quite different from simply putting out a link yourself and saying ‘Please RT!’.
I’m not suggesting that you only focus on the ‘A list’… which is why I mentioned that non-famous users are equally important and you shouldn’t ignore them (linked to Brett’s blog post for more on that).
But I’ve mentioned following influencers because, lets face it.. we are trying to promote ourselves or our product/service/brand after all…it makes sense to go after people with clout and the ability to get you a bigger audience. Now the question is… do you need the help of the ‘B-list’ or other people to get their attention? No I don’t think so.
I do see your point though. It’s like using the Digg frontpage to get links from ‘A-list’ blogs who would have never written about you anyway unless you were first ‘vetted’ by mass opinion.
But Twitter is different. It’s like meeting someone at a cocktail party or conference and striking up a conversation. If you meet them often enough, familiarity itself will lead to comfort and then on, its not difficult to enlist their help. A lot depends on your networking skills. You can’t be sporadic.
I certainly believe that you don’t need any ‘B list’ to boost your reputation if you are doing networking right and have a good piece of content or an offer that is PERFECT for the other party.
I never see influence in a rigid way.. some people being ‘A listers’ and others being ‘B listers’ or ‘Z listers’ etc.. I only know that some people are more open to new content/ideas while some are only interested in something that benefits them or their business.
Look at the people you are networking with and see how they behave. Go chat with the ones that don’t seem to be closed off in their little world (In Twitter terms, only tweeting promotional stuff or random updates with little to no replies).
And yes, I’ve had success in any niche with Twitter. It’s all really very simple. You just DO NOT pitch from the start and focus on building rapport. Twitter is excellent for that.
I have a lot of other networking related tips but I think I’ll save them for another post. Don’t feel like rambling on here.
@ Everyone else
Thanks for the comments!
Excellent article. Thanks for the read!
Great article. Ive using twitter since its inception. I noticed a huge increase of celebs and politicians promoting themselves over the last few months. This bug the crap out of me. Come on Larry King & whats his name trying to get a million followers. These people are destroying twitter by turning it into a pop culture site. I hate celebs and how people think that their important. Twitter should be marked as spam now that these folks have entered the game.
Great post – should be part of the manual for Twitter.
Here is a tip for Tweetdeck users to prove the above points I use this. Create 2 groups on Tweetdeck. People who you have interacted with and people that have RTed your Tweets. Watch how busy it actually gets. Unless you are Oprah the odds are that the interact group will not grow above say 40-80. But the RT group will grow substantially if the 40-80 you interact have a good twitter relationship with you.
I have over 3K followers and only interact with about 40 of them. Iget RTS from about 80 of them. I watch my analytics and when I post a link to my sites it usually does not peak above 60-80 per post. What does that tell me – my followers list is weak and I need to develop it better.
@marie cole –
I am new to Twitter too and I found this article very interesting. I have actually been wondering just who everyone is talking to, because no one seems to respond to any of the comments.
This post was awesome. I completely agree that quantity is not always the answer. But I am grateful that you have clarified many things about twitter marketing strategy. Will keep these points in mind when I do my tweeting.
thanks
Jackie
You had a lot to say in this article and it is practically a twitter guide to twitter marketing. However, you’re just not telling us how to get a lot of followers. I think what you want to do on twitter is to get followers that actually are interested in your blog.
@Maki I think I’d like to just spend a day or two working alongside you and seeing how you work! Your ideas make a lot of sense, even if sometimes I don’t know that I’m understanding the specific details. Kinda like a recipe that says ’stir well’ without going any further into what that means. (Not that you’re unclear, just that I struggle with this somewhat.)
Anyways, thanks a bunch for the response. I’m going to check out your twitter feed later tday or this week n see what I can learn
.
p.s. Nice to see you blogging more regularly!
Glad to see you, and many others, come around on this “follow all” issue. I have *never* understood the mass following except for a business like @Zappos who saw it for customer service through DMs. Even marketers need to understand that Twitter is about conversation and relationships and not a 2% response rate following. Peace!
Thanks for sharing this article. Your insights about Twitter Marketing are spot-on. When I started my Twitter account, I thought in order to be polite I should follow back everyone who followed me. And I briefly looked into trying to gain as many followers as possible. But the more followers I gained that way, the more I saw the lack of added value. I would much rather follow and be followed by individuals whose tweets are relevant to my life. I don’t want to have to filter the twitter stream to pull those few relevant tweets out of the mess. Being popular is valuable, maybe. But organically growing your following is much more important in my book.
I really enjoyed reading this, because it’s exactly what I was thinking about. Why have 1000 followers who are robots or uninterested in my tweets? And I think offering a good product and/or service and being kind and engaging on a personal level is a must.
Another excellent post Maki, you always amaze me.
Twitter is still a conundrum to me and I am still trying to see the value of following hundreds of people that generate hundreds of tweets a day, that I CANNOT hope to read. If I can’t read all the tweets I get (even from friends, etc.) how can I hope to get my tweets read by others.
I did fall in to the trap of following a bunch of tweeters so I could get their twitter “tools” to auto follow me.
With all the computer generated follow and followers there seems to be little room for real human interaction anymore. It just seems to me that Twitter has turned into one giant pool of SPAM.
I haven’t measured it, but my hunch is that 90% of the messages on Twitter contain links to some type of marketing/sales message.
Great post. Now I don’t feel so bad about being unpopular
But what does the picture of the cartoon girl at the top have to do with twittering?
I fully agree with Neil Newmann, it takes consistent effort and time combined with value for whomever is viewing what you have to offer which produces longterm results, the more you honestly authentically give, the more comes back to you.
The fatal flaw with your position is the fact that it’s FREE to tweet regardless of the number of followers. Tweeting a message to 30,000 junk followers AND 100 hyper-responsive is better than tweeting only to 100 hyper-responsive followers (because there’s bound to be some unknown interest hiding in the list of 30,000). And it costs the same to do both. Not to mention, tweeting frequently to a large number of people will cause your messages to be seen frequently by a large number of people. If your tweets are valuable then some number of the 30,000 will gravitate to you…these people would likely never have known you otherwise.
Twitter is both a medium to communicate with existing contacts and a medium to make new contacts. The more people you speak to, the more contacts you will make. And your tweet appears the same to every follower, regardless of how many followers you have.
Sure, purists will claim that this violates the spirit of Twitter. It’s not what it was designed for. But it wasn’t designed for how it’s being used these days at all. And, who cares? The ends justify the means. Bottom line is you WILL get better results tweeting to a large mass of untargeted and not-necessarily interested followers PLUS a good list of followers than to just the good list alone, and there’s no penalty for doing so. Additionally, you will impress some people, deservedly or not.
Look at it this way. Someone hands you a microphone at the superbowl and says, “You can choose to give a presentation to 100 of your best fans after the game is over and the stadium clears out, or you can speak to them at half-time when everyone else is still here.” Can’t hurt to have the extra 80,000 listening in, could it? Could it be possible that a handful of those folks might find value in what you’re saying? Of course…
Organic may be good in breakfast cereal, but it’s a pipe-dream in social media. Waiting for people to recognize you because of your value is a failure strategy. Doesn’t matter how great your info is if nobody hears it. It’s a lovely premise put forth by people who either loathe self-promotion (personal problem) or already have a loyal following. But it’s worth zero for the average business person who is trying to leverage Twitter (or any media) as a tool to grow their business. Chances are you will NOT be noticed if you leave it up to chance!
Come to think of it, this is like saying American Idol is a bad way to launch a singing career. May as well just keep singing in karaoke bars until you get noticed, right? Hell no. Get out there, shake it up, make an impression, CAUSE people to notice you. Then sing your butt off and deserve the attention. But I’m certain that our best talent still lies undiscovered in garages and small bars around the world. Should that talent wait for someone to notice them?
Ultimately, reader, it’s your life, your business. Are you content with waiting for what’s FAIR or are you the type who will take the bull by the tail and face the situation and do the sometimes ugly work that may be necessary to succeed? Now enough with this nonsense. Let’s go sell something.
Great stuff! As you say, it’s a social fact that many followers send out signals of respect, much like the “As seen on TV” argument in printed ads.
My strategy is to follow people I respect, people who writes good articles (yes I’m following you) or runs good blogs. I’m on twitter to lean not to do marketing. Quality will always outrule quantity, at least in my tworld.
So, what’s the deal? Are you guys not moderating dissenting comments? At the very least email my comment to me so I can post it on my own blog as a trackback.
This is the best description of how to use Twitter I’ve read so far. I love it. It shows you the benefits of different approaches and will *hopefully* get readers to thoughtfully consider what type of network they want to build and that they have a CHOICE of what type of network they want to build.
Quality beats out quantity…who would have thought?
Hey Maki, thanks for your very insightful twitter post. I have been following to be followed especially when I first jumped on Twiiter. More recently I have been following those that have similar interests as me. Doing this has completely changed my experience on Twitter. I find more relevant information when viewing the tweets of my followers and those I’m following. Twitter is still a todler so we will see how it matures. Thanks again, Zack
@Zack Powell
Great to hear that you’re getting a better signal to noise ratio for Twitter. It not only helps for marketing but makes it far more enjoyable as well. You don’t want some automated account tweeting out rubbish in your timeline, you want the tweets of real people.
@ Christian
Indeed. But there are still people who claim quantity is a worthy substitute for quality…. I guess its up to them to decide, I’m just offering a different opinion. Sometimes its good to read a differing POV so you get a deeper view of a topic.
@ Ulstrup
Thanks. I appreciate the follow!
@ Mark Schwartz
And its only going to get worse as Twitter grows. Right now Twitter is a spammers paradise but there are a lot of good and real people out there. In my opinion, the best to filter out all the rubbish users and get only quality is to get them to follow you out of interest.. instead of following to get a follow in return. If you look at some smart people, they often create Twitter tools or twitter related content to attract twitter users who will follow them after reading it, these are usually genuine people looking to connect.
@ Betsy
I’ve been hearing a lot of the same complaints as well. People who get frustrated with Twitter because it gets messy. I think a good way is to restart and follow people organically from the ground up.. of course you can mass-follow but its best used on real people, not going over to someone’s follow page and using a script to auto-follow 1000 random people everyday. That doesn’t help.
@Travis Miller
Fatal flaw? Maybe a bit of an exaggeration.
Yes, it’s free to tweet, nobody is operating under the assumption that there is a monetary cost involved for sending out tweets, even though in reality there IS actually an attention/time cost which does affect your social marketing ROI.
Important point: Tweets are free, your time and attention are not. You don’t necessarily have to target everyone out there to get maximum profits. Why do more work when you can do less for the same amount of money or more?
Let me clarify the premise of the article: it does NOT claim that mass following and targeted networking cannot co-exist. They are not mutually exclusive. Sure, I agree that its good to always meet new people and interact with them, after all everyone is a potential customer.
But do you really need to use mass following to achieve that? All you get are junk followers that clog up your tweet stream. There are far better ways of attracting attention, attracting followers and getting people to know you exist. Mass following ain’t the only solution and it ain’t the best, which is the point I’m trying to make in this article.
This is true even when you’re purely using Twitter for marketing/selling. Its very important to note that what matters is conversion and ROI. Not feel-good commentary on following everyone and meeting people. I’ve done tests in the field and tracked results on many Twitter profiles. I’ve kept a close eye on response rates.
Metrics like incoming traffic, link clicks, retweet ratios, username mentions, appearances on aggregator sites etc. Eventually I noticed these are factors that are not necessarily boosted by mass following. Which means that mass following itself is not essential. Which means you don’t need to play that game to get the results you want. Create and build several new accounts in the same niche and run some tests. You might notice the same thing. Or not.
In my opinion, just targeting everyone by mass following new people everyday is an inadequate marketing strategy. It’s like ‘hey lets just follow a lot of people and see who happens to fall into our honeypot‘. The assertion that targeting everyone gives you the best results is only an assumption. I tested it and have found that it isn’t valid. As least not for me. In the end its not just the follower count but ROI, you don’t want to invest your time fooling with junk accounts and fake people because even if tweets are free, your attention and time is not. Opportunity costs abound.
In the first place, this was never an either/or situation. Of course, you can target both 30K junk followers and 100 responsive followers. You probably didn’t read the comment I left early in the thread. I reposted it below:
“It’s not mutually exclusive for someone to do auto mass following and hardcore networking.. I do agree that its not entirely either/or.
But from what I’ve seen so far…. It’s always either/or in practice. Many in the IM niche are propagating the big follower theory: correlating income potential/actual income with the no. of followers. I don’t agree with that at all.
I’ve read just about every IM Twitter traffic/monetization ebook out there and played with all the tools/scripts available. The focus is overwhelming on quantity over quality. No question about that. So marketers or business owners are always operating with this focus. In theory, it isn’t a quality list or big junky list argument but in practice.. people overfocus on building a crappy list thinking volume compensates for lack of targeted interest.
The focus of my post was all about what you are going to do with YOUR attention. You gonna take out your auto-following tool, go to a profile and clone the followers for 30 days until you follow tens of thousands and your twitter stream is completely cluttered with junk?
Or are you going to pay attention, network and learn to bait influencers into pimping your stuff so you get natural high quality followers from that. Honestly, that’s the either/or that most people don’t even think about.
I love to experiment with social media marketing. I have had many of Twitter profiles, each of them with tens of thousands of followers. Their retweet ratio is sometimes lesser than @doshdosh on an active day, @doshdosh being the one account where I didn’t play the game of following to get follows back. Not only the retweet ratio but clicks per link and the amount of traffic sent, because influencers follow me.
Theoretically no, its not an either/no situation. But in reality, most people can’t even see the two sides because they’re over-focusing on one.”
Honestly, I think there’s nothing but an assumption. The argument you’re making is difficult to validate because you’re including everything and throwing in the kitchen sink. Of course, its easy to claim that by targeting EVERYONE (which is essentially what you are saying), you will have a better results. That’s certainly logical cuz you’re hitting all your bases but we all know that marketing ain’t just a game of theory.
The process matters: how you market on twitter, what you do, how you plan etc. So targeting everyone doesn’t necessarily result in better results. Even in theory, we know that high volume or mass does not always trump smaller numbers when both are used as means towards an end.
You’re also not taking into account the different capacities or inclinations of specific users. People might do better networking with influences because they’re more suitable for that or because they don’t have the time to network and chit-chat with 70K.
Twitter is not just link-blasting, it includes relationship-development in a bid to presell the customer. All this engagement takes time and effort. When someone makes a conscientous decision to pursue a form of marketing that gives him/her greatest ROI after studying all the methods and trying out mass following, how can that be wrong?
Of course it can’t hurt. No marketer will deny that there are prospects with latent interest. This article doesn’t deny that at all as well. But read the post carefully and you’ll see that I’m zeroing in on low-value followers. Super inactive followers. Semi-automated followers. Fully automated followers. Spammer followers. Self-promoter followers.
The potential for them to be interested in your message and then even act on it is little to zero. That’s a big part of the 80,000. Sure, you’ll get some people who will listen… I already mentioned that in my article. But it helps to have a realistic view of your marketing reach and not just focus on volume (which itself does not always convert well into sales).
This paragraph you’ve written above is a strawman argument. My article never suggested that you should wait for people to recognize you because of your value. It never suggested that self-promotion is bad. Of course, you won’t be noticed if you leave it to chance. But this article never told you to leave anything to chance. And if you think that what I’ve written is worth zero, well…you’re certainly entitled to your opinion.
First of all, a lot of the targeted Twitter marketing I’m talking about is action-based. It’s not passive. Noticed how I talked about baiting influencers and networking so I can get them to recommend me? Noticed how I talked about creating opportunities/offers to get people to opt-in out of interest?
These are all active marketing tactics to get them to come to you by first getting in front of their face with a bait. This is not the crappy method of following to get an AUTO-FOLLOW in return. This focuses on creating a bait or proposition which motivates them to OPT-IN OUT OF INTEREST.
What you’re suggesting as an alternative is to simply mass-follow users to get followers who automatically follow in return or take notice. It’s no different in principle to what I’m suggesting, the method of networking and actively creating bait to get people to follow.
Both are active methods of seeking to first attract attention (make them know you exist) and then capture it (make them follow you).
Hahaha. I really don’t know how to respond to this analogy. American Idol = mass following = bad? Come on. American Idol is a broadcast stage providing publicity to a guaranteed mass audience who is interested (they wouldn’t watch if they weren’t). Mass following is simply following with the HOPE that some people with interest will follow back (or be interested). Big difference.
Also a big assumption to say that mass following will eventually get you MORE traffic, buyers or subscribers to your websites. Not true at all. You can certainly follow less people, don’t mass-follow and get equal or better results.
Karaoke bars = targeted list of follwers = bad? Because you’re ‘undiscovered’ in a garage? Um no, you’re not discovered or waiting to be found. You’re pro-actively networking and reaching out to people who actually know your value and opt-in because of that. Once again all the jazz about both strategies being not mutually exclusive applies. So there’s no real argument here.
Interesting to see how you seem to suggest that what I’m promoting is goody goody two shoes white-hat idealist social media theory while what you’re describing the ‘practical’ way of getting down to work that leads to real results. This is a false dichotomy. What I’m writing about is no less dirty and ‘real work’ if you really apply it as a way to do Twitter marketing.
In the end its best for everyone to experiment and learn what works. Like I said, if anyone likes mass-following users and think that works, go ahead and do it. I’m not going to judge anyone for doing it. I’m just sharing my POV on why it ain’t all that important. It’s nothing personal, not a hit on any mass-following marketer out there… just a criticism on tactics and results.
P.S Your comment was caught in the spam filter dude. Relax.
@Everyone else
Thanks for your comments!
@Maki – great article referred by christian. i joined twitter to follow some of the cycling info and to try and find help to take a “handbike to the “giro d’italia and tdf”. getting no where fast as far as help is concerned!!
perhaps after looking at my profile you may be able to offer advice on “skippi@ausi.com”.
any worthwhile advice welcome.
each year since 1998 i ride the route of these cycle tours so as to talk to athletes,sponsors and media about giving “sponsorship to “challenged athletes”. some that know me are helpful others scorn my efforts but at 63 i can sit on the beach or try and make myself useful..
during these tours i have to find internet cafes as carrying a laptop on the bike is somewhat risky and i need the “wifi” also!
once again great article ,thankyou!.
oups! a very long article
In my opinion, social networking has been created with an unique goal: advertising. I’m not gonna believe that it’s created for people to get friends, is just the marketing conquest new territories, from TV & newspapers to www.
@Christian –
I agree with you Christian, “This is the best description of how to use Twitter…”
Another great article to share ;~)
Being slow to jump on the Twitter bandwagon and therefore lacking in experience in how to benefit from it for traffic to my site, it’s excellent to find this article.
Great insight which should help me with my Twittering. Many thanks!
Yeah dosh, true. You don’t need a massive list of followers because they are not targeted.
just like people are signing up your free gifts and disappear. What;s important is getting a
list of interested buyers and the place will be a top forum in your niche say.
Dosh your articles are always good and I learned a great deal from it.
You hit things right on the nail MAKman..
The way we see it, and the way it’s been working for us in our living without google campaign is this:
1 week on twitter
191 updates
39 followers
One might wonder what’s the big deal in these numbers?
Well for one it has singularly yielded over 120 votes on our site, which is our primary goal of using Twitter anyway.
The other important points – none of these 39 followers (there were a few more, but they’re blocked now – spammers) followed us because we followed them.. they are all organic or in this posts’ words Targeted High Value followers. The 191 updates – maybe around 10 or 20 might be retweets, around another 20 to 30 might be status updates.. the other 150 odd are conversations – replies to other users (most self initiated).. it ended with a few of them retweeting further, and many more telling us that they have taken the poll… And all this without mass following at all.. and I am sure by the time we finish we will have a lot more votes on our site without needing to randomly follow people…
And of course, I hope anyone who reads this comes and takes the vote as well now hehe
btw, Maki we tweeted you as well but you didn’t reply.. busy man we understand
I began to notice that I was auto-following spammers, and immediately changed that option.
The only thing I don’t get is, unless you’re really popular, why bother spending so MUCH time on Twitter. Soon enough, there are going to be some major side effects associated with Twitter ..lol
–”May cause boring conversations over nothing…”
Thank you! Finally I have found someone who is talking a language I can understand. My reasons for joining twitter were mainly as a new way of keeping intouch with some overseas friends. The more I got to use it the more I realized some people were on it purely for “follower numbers” whilst others actually wanted to engage with like minded people. I have a few random followers but most are people I have cultivated and share similar interests. So I aim to try and grow my followers organically and not just follow any one. My follower to following ratio is about 1:1. Keep it simple, focused and real. That’s what I say!
Thanks for great ideas on how to use twitter for marketing.
Am new to Twitter. On the learning curve. Thank you for your lucid guidance.
For my two cents, I have become disenchanted with the number of people who follow me because they believe that I would be interested in what they have to say and will not engage me in a conversation. Also, the number of twitads seems to be increasing, along with spam. More to the point of your article though, I came to a similar conclusion after a month on Twitter based upon an idea from social scientists. It has been discovered that the human brain has the capacity to remember/associate 150 people consistently. A group of 150 involved users can be quite effective. I thought about the construct of social media sites, and came to the conclusion that the 150 users that I interact with well does not need to be the same 150 that other users have. This would create an effective net of spreading an idea or post or whatever quickly among a larger group. This leads me to concentrate on the people that I am following, not those who are following me.
very interesting post, thankyou for the great article. will be visiting here more often!
This is a great post!! One of my pet peeves is … I get a bunch of people following me so I go to check out their profile and make sure there is something of interest, no disgusting stuff and if they are new, I may follow them anyway to give them a break.
My twitter is http://twitter.com/dianeclancy
But then perhaps it has been 1 1/2 days since they followed me, I follow them, and 2 hours later they refollow me because they have already ditched me because they didn’t follow me immediately!! I sure feel like ditching them since they obviously aren’t interested in me or what I do.
Thanks for this!
~ Diane Clancy
I was waiting for a blog post like this. Here’s what I think. Twitter Micro-blogging like sites or clones will carve their own niche to cater to people who want more targeted followers. It has happened to a lot of social media sites that were very popular in the begining. It just seems like the next progression of things to happen post twitter frenzy.
This has to be one of the best posts about Twitter marketing for all time.
When i started twitter, I was reciprocating the follows… only to find that my twitter streams moves faster than I can catch it, with much junk. So one day I mass unfollowed the people I thought werent’
“real relationships”. Now at least I can make some sense in my twitter stream
I guess the mentality of the social media marketer needs to be correct – to participate, engage, listen and respond. Not to broadcast and think that people will listen.
Great post!
Hi Maki,
I just skimmed through the post, but will read it after having a snack
I won’t add much to what has been said, since I only want to share a simple opinion.
Following 1000 people per day is in my opinion too much.
As to improve quality I would propose the following :
One could have as many followers as one could get since this can be related to one’s marketing capabilities and quality/relevan content.
But one could only follow 1000 people. Not per day, week or whatever, but forever.
This would force people to be selective.
Have a great weekend,
José
Followers are generally for building an audience to talk and communicate with them and not to just build more and more numbers. You either do it the most effective way which takes work, or do it the lazy way where it has little to no progression.
FOLLOW ME~!
http://www.twitter.com/_T00TSIE
With two zero’s not O’s
This one of the clearest and most honest posts on Twitter I have read. I am not a Twitter and have been wondering what the noise is all about. This post and the comments have clarified a lot of things for me.
as a new blogger, the Twitter following has been a could source of traffic to my posts. As my following has gone up, so has the number of daily hits from twitter (that I can see atleast from Google stats).
Twitter is getting uber populated, it’s supposed to lead you not to pollute your phone/twitter deck.
I used twitter so i can follow my friends since we update on our thoughts were we are but now its just uber populated, annoying.
just my two cents.
–
This is great article and I am a total interactive social butterfly, which is why Twitter appeals to me. I also am a biz person so the marketing also draws. On my personal ID I think I’ve only unfollowed about 20 -50 people for various reasons. I have a total of about 1500 so that is not bad. I early on came to the conclusion that EVERY follower has value and you never know when something you tweet will spark their interest.
Now on this ID I am trying to build a list FAST for my new startup biz (see url in name link) So I am going against my own thoughts and trying a fast list build and then see what happens. Someone earlier mentioned MC Hammer and I have to agree, it is great to see someone with that many followers able to interact and give some LIFE to their twit ID.
Here’s hoping that I can with mypartners utilize this ID for BIZ AND provide value to folowers.
THANKS for the thought provoking article. VERY WELL DONE
Mio is moee!!
Sorry had to say that haha.
Great article, lots of great points made. I don’t think it has occurred to a lot of people yet that many of their “followers” are worthless.
Very interesting take on gaining followers on Twitter! We just started using Twitter about a month ago and started reading other blog posts about getting as many followers as you can so they will follow you back. There are so many auto-follow programs out there we actually thought about purchasing one, but after reading your post, it makes a lot of sense to have a targeted list rather than a large list!
Our company is trying to put the word out about our loan modification services…any advice on how to do that using twitter or other social networks would be appreciated!
Cheers,
AML
Now there is a reason to mass follow: Twitter search may use number of followers as a metric to see how valuable your tweet is.
See this SAI for more http://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-getting-serious-about-search-2009-5
This is really well written, Maki. Thanks for the tip off on Twitter. I am new to Twitter and still learning the ropes. It’s great to learn more about it from you.
@Cool Wag
Sounds great. Good to hear that its working for you!
@MitchTwiz, Chris Chong, Tubabo, ehowexperts, cherrybombpie
You’re welcome!
@Frank Schultz
I’ve read about the Dunbar number as well and since each of the 150 users have other people following them, messages can spread through them and so on and so forth… you don’t need to artificially ‘engage’ a larger audience by following to get their attention. You can selectively interact with a smaller audience and let things spread onwards from there on. What matters is who is listening and how engaged they are with you.
@ Diane Clancy
Yes, they weren’t interested in you or what you do. They only wanted to broadcast and get you to click on their links. If someone unfollows you 24 hours after following you just because you didn’t follow back, it just shows you what they were after in the first place… and it sure as hell ain’t about reading your tweets or interacting with you! Some mass-followers lie and say its all about ‘meeting people’ but we all know what they want in the end.
@tankianann
Yes, I agree. The bottomline is that broadcasting via mass-following didn’t produce considerably better results than targeted engagement with a smaller audience and getting people to follow out of interest. So I see no purpose in using it for Twitter marketing.
@Jose
That would certainly encourage people to be a lot more selective in their following!
@Diwant Vaidya
I don’t think that really changes anything. Why?
1. You still have a crappy list and you’re still giving your attention to junk in your twitter stream. The quality and responsiveness of your list isn’t improved. That’s the core of your marketing efforts, Twitter search is just icing on the cake.
2. I don’t think Twitter will simply judge and rank tweets in their search index by the absolute number of followers. Twitter is well aware of follow spam and you can tell that from their actions (daily follow limits/follow ratios/bans on mass followers). Most likely they will rank tweets according to some specific algorithm, perhaps the retweet/citation ratio or something more complex. These factors are less liable to be gamed by mass-followers with a fake audience.
Will this be a social proof game-changer that validates mass-following? Nah… I don’t think so. In any case, we’re only talking about Twitter search, something many users don’t use on a daily basis. The core of your marketing efforts will still have to deal with building a quality list and spreading your influence outwards through them. Mass-following hasn’t shown me that it can do that better, hence I dib;t think its necessary. I doubt the additional exposure in Twitter search (if any at all) will change much in this area.
But let’s see how things turn out in the future.
@ Everyone else
Thanks for your comments!
Good Post Maki there are rely many difficulty to make Twitter A good source of quality Traffic
In my opinion @Melody make rely good comment that I pretty much agree with
I think we are starting to see Twitter develop into a mass communication tool after all, although I did have my doubts initially. As long as it stays a tool for ‘the people’ then it will remain a vital component but the moment it starts becoming elitist through ranking of Tweets etc then the whole Twitter phenomenon will just wither and die.
Great job! This is one of the best articles I’ve read this year. Wrote a similar article in German and got a lot of feedback from people who are not sure whicht way to go. To have a lot of followers/contacts or not. I think this depends to a large degree on which kind of company one’s doing the marketing for. Anyway any kind of Social Media Marketing should be based on a strategy and should fit in the company’s philosophy.
From Thailand,
Markus
Finally, an interesting take on the Mass-Follow spam.
I agree with you 100%! Twitter is filled with posers, wannabe and self-indulgent ‘online business owners.’ Truth is, they saturate the community with their ‘get-rich-quick-i’ll-pay-your-way-in’ fluffs which are not in fact true. So, are you tweeting like them? Or are you networking? I prefer the latter.
I’ve always wondered how many people on Twitter were really “genuine.” I don’t use use Twitter and have no intention of doing so. It seems like an activity to pass the time for bored people, and now we have “follow spam?” OMG.
Great article and excellent summary on, how to use and NOT to use Twitter.
mass flow visitor also like what you are selling but the conversion will be definately poor.
so, affiliate dont like mass flow…they want conversion….and hence leads.
A very good post. I think 95% of tweeters should read this so I won’t get spammy tweets and DMs.
Mass following will make other followers feel unappreciated as well. Surely most people will think: “Oh, they’re following me just to increase their number of followers”. But people like Darren Rowse and Andy Murnahan will thank people when you follow them. This will make followers feel appreciated in some way.
Wow, for a post about a service that lets you send out 140 character messages that was really long
Thanks a lot for the good insights though, I’m planning on starting the promotion of my first non-personal twitter account this week and this will definitely help in ‘getting it right’.
100% Agree with you on this one, Maki. High quality Twitter followers > high quantity of followers. And I also prefer to follow those with small number of followers, just feel they have more chance to actually read my tweets.
You sure hit the nail on the head with that post. Having mass followers only serves to make you look like an important resource but having quality followers will take you much farther. I like your strategy, as with any business you can’t just cast out a net and hope something good will come back. There needs to be a strategy in place to maximize profits and not waste time and energy. Great post and blog by the way!
Boy, am I ever happy I read this post. After reading this : ““A carefully cultivated list of a single top follower (let’s say Oprah) can beat a list of 10,000 spambot twitter followers anytime when it comes to spreading content or getting traffic/sales.” … I feel much better because I was stressing out over the fact that I didn’t have thousands and thousand of Twitter followers. I guess on Twiter just like in readl life … less is best!
Miss Gisele B.
Awesome article Maki!
And thank you all for commenting and sharing your points of view! It’s great to see people actually “digging” deeper into Twitter to find out what makes it ‘work”
There’s no doubt in my mind that Twitter IS a genuine social networking place and no matter how many mass-follow tools there are or will be released in the near future, the social networking factor WILL beat them all to the ground.
I totally agree with you Maki, you have to build your reputation far away from Twitter before you even think on creating a Twitter profile.
And this is something that, I think, most of the people using Twitter don’t understand. They are probably newbies trying to use “another marketing tool” (AKA Twitter) and ultimately build a business around it and make money, without realizing that they don’t have a brand and people are not interested in them.
The one problem that remains is this: Let suppose I’m totally newbie in marketing, I don’t have a brand, I don’t have followers, I don’t have a list of friends, basically I have nothing to start with, but I’m thinking on using Twitter as a starting point. (it does seem to be more easy because Twitter let’s you interact with big-name celebrities from various areas, something you can’t do anywhere else – remember, I’m a newbie!)
How do I “attract” followers? What do I tweet about? How do I tweet? How do I create a ‘burning desire’ in people’s minds to get them to follow me?
I know this is a bit away from the topic, but I would love to see someone do a research on copywriting and the responsiveness of particular tweets, to find out what exactly makes people take action on a particular tweet. (BTW, I was searching on Google for a study on responsive rates for tweets and that’s how I found this article)
Again, thank you for this article and also for other interesting thoughts
Remi Vladuceanu
http://www.remivladuceanu.com
Mass following is become necessary here and I think it is possible (and desirable) for companies to build relationships on Twitter by following people, so long as they are sensitive as to how the person is using Twitter. Just like when reaching out to bloggers, I think you should familiarize yourself with a person before you try to engage them on Twitter.
Thank God! I hate twitter spam! I unfollow anyone that posts too many links and doesn’t have a personality.
Twitter can be a great networking tool if you can find followers are want to communicate back and forth. Those who just want to advertise their own business will not be of any benefit. I look for people who have similar interests, who post things I want to read and can respond to. Otherwise, I would be talking, but no one would be listening.
There’s also the far more annoying method of mass-following, getting say 13,000 followers, and then blanking out all 14,000 who you follow to make yourself look like a shepard. Shel Isreal, his nemesis Loren Feldman, Loic Lemeur, and many other A-listers have done/are doing this. This strategy is incredibly stupid because all you’ll do is piss people off, especially when you repeat the cycle.
I don’t know why you can’t find a happy medium between mass following and building genuine relationships with people though. I think you can do both simultaneously.
But I’ve grown quite tired of people with a 15,000 follower/15,000 following ratio going “Hmmm…well I’ve suddenly realized that my account is unmanageable because I’m following 15,000 people. For whatever reason, following 12,000 people was fine, but now that I’m at the 15,000 mark, I just can’t take it anymore.” These people should be forced to live in a lunar colony.
Great post, and I will point to it when helping new Twitter users.
However the discussion of “which is better” in the comments made me smile… like one has to make a choice between many followers and close relationships.
I have both, and know it’s possible.
It’s very natural that someone known by hundreds of millions on TV would get a million followers on Twitter. I would expect that the relationship with each of them would be at least as close as the relationship they have through TV, magazines, etc… at least there is some chance of 2 ways communication.
Of course, if I had to choose, I’d got for close friends over numbers. But with Twitter, you don’t have to choose.. There is no right way for follow ratios, how often you tweet or how you use Twitter.
NO RULES
I hear tweeps say “I can’t imagine how you have a relationship with thousands” They are right. Before I had thousands of connections, I couldn’t imagine it either. This is all brand new.
I do not expect 50,000 people to read a tweet. I DO read ALL my @ messages, all the tweets with my handle and hundreds of threads a day. It’s become a natural part of what I do.
Does it take a of time?
Nope, it SAVES a lot of time. I have loose relationship through email, phone, teleconference and media with subscribers, clients, prospects, friends and business assoicates. There is no way I could reach out to them in any way other than Twitter.
Twitter alone does not make for a full relationship.. but it sure helps.
Warren Whitlock
@WarrenWhitlock
Author “Twitter Revolution: How Social Media and Mobile Marketing is Changing the Way We Do Business & Market Online”
I actually think its funny when I see American people follow my in Dutch written Twitter, just in the hope I follow them back. But I actually use the feature where you can see what your friends wrote, to stay updated on my friends news. So in case you dont speak Dutch, there is not a single reason to follow me.
Nice article, and I have been in this same thought about Twitter.com for some time. Better to have a few good followers who will contribute to your website (as you will to theirs) than to follow thousands of people of who you don’t have much interest in anyway. Great article
@Remi Vladuceanu | Internet Marketing Consultancy – I agree with you Remi. For a newbie Twitter is exciting. With nowhere to turn to before jumping in, follow many in the hope that they will follow him seems the only way out.
But then, every social network has this peculiar problem where some users have friends by the thousands and some like me not even by the dozens!
I have not really tried searching for impact of words as tweets, but the more I study about Twitter, the more I tend to agree it really is a game of writing compelling headlines.
Manish Pahuja
Great read – I actually never understood how you could ‘follow 1000’s’ of people – how can you seriously keep track of what over 1000 people are doing, heck, I think more like 30-40 would be tops
Just my .02
– Swansonager
It always comes back to content… either you have something interesting or you are just spamming.
I am a newcomer to Twitter and other social networking sites and this article is extremely valuable for me and my small website business. Your article is well written and easy, even for a novice like me, to understand. “I get it” and thanks to you! Will apply immeditately your business wisdom. I am sharing your article with my husband business team and of course my business team plus my womens’ network. Thank you for taking the time to educate, less unfortunate people like me, who did not grow up online. I look forward to reading more articles written by you. I appreciate your writing style and call it, among other things, “female friendly”.Thank you again. I feel so refreshed about understanding Twitter now.
Well thought out article Maki, twitter is so trendy it’s become awash with spam and overuse. I’ve always been a big supporter of the platform but recently I’ve put together a few thoughts on my blog about why I don’t find it to be useful in most cases as of late.
The twitterverse is so stuffed with useless information, it’s almost hemorrhaging past any sort of usefulness in my opinion.
I think you missed the point entirely.
I hate people who Twitter.
Have you ever seen a bigger group of sheep?
Who cares what Ashton Kucther is doing right now?
Facebook, MySpace, and now Twitter.
Can’t you people see it is just another way for people to try and take your money?
Wake up and smell the capitalism.
Twitter is the next new fad.
Just like every network before it, Twitter will shake itself to pieces.
And I’ll be laughing at it all the way down.
If you don’t mass follow, how else do you increase your followers? What are the alternatives?
I only I think following influential people and making one’s profile more visible will help you gain more followers. But these methods don’t seem to beat the pros of mass following.
Can anyone clarify?
Couldn’t agree more, responsiveness over follower list size in my experience
@Hater – Wake up and smell the capitalism? Would you prefer that capitalism be eradicated?
@Rarst – I agree. I don’t see the point in mindlessing following people.
I have to say I agree with their policy change. I mean who wants to follow more than 1,000 people a day and what do they hope to achieve by doing it, it’s not related at all.
Awesome post and very accurate. I agree that it is the quality,not quantity of your followers. I do NOT auto follow, so I go through each request and decide whether to follow back or not. It’s time consuming, but worth it. I have made some really good friends and business connections on twitter, but it didn’t happen overnight. It takes time to engage in conversation with them. As your followers get more and more, it becomes increasingly difficult to find the tweets that you would most like to respond to. Sometimes even necessary to have another account just for your VIP people. LOL
Excellent article! As always, your articles are some of the most consistently thought out, longest, content packed articles around.
I also appreciate how you followup with your commenters regularly.
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