Alright guys, well I’ve made up this guide to help you get more followers. Now I can’t say that what worked for me will necessarily work for you but if you take the basic concepts I’m about to lay out and apply them to your individual situation then you should make out just fine. So let’s begin:
TWITTERI’m sure by now you don’t need an explanation about what Twitter is but I need to tell you what it is to make a point. Twitter is a real-time micro-blogging service. Think of blogs you like to read and imagine getting that same information in 140 characters or less, that’s Twitter. Now some bloggers would rather keep their blogs to themselves and live at home in desolation with their 40 million cats. THAT IS NOT WHAT TWITTER IS ABOUT. Twitter is for extremely vain (but extremely cool) people who actually think and want other people to think as well that their lives are worth reading about. You want people to follow you and hang on to your every word and wait with eager anticipation of your next tweet. I know at least, that’s what I want. Do you? Yes? Let’s continue then:
REALITY BLOWSIf you’re reading this then there’s a pretty good chance (100%) that you’re not famous. Otherwise you wouldn’t need help getting followers because you should already have thousands upon thousands of adoring fans already following you! If no one knows you and you have no followers then you’re basically just having conversations with yourself on Twitter and depending on how detailed these “conversations” are with yourself people may think you’re weird and NEVER follow you! So how do you get followers then if you’re not famous?
WHO ARE YOU?Well I’ve found that you have to be one or more of 3 things: 1. Extremely funny 2. Extremely informative or 3. Extremely hot. The word extremely is a bit much but what I really want to say is that you have to be appealing to the audience you want to capture. What are you going to offer to people that no one else can but you? Why should they follow you? What will you share with this audience? These are all things you have to think about if you really want your audience to grow. Thought about it? Got it? Great. So now you’re either funny, informative or hot but you still have no followers, what gives?
BECOME A STALKERNot literally ( I should put a disclaimer on this thing). What I mean is FOLLOW, FOLLOW, FOLLOW...
ON TWITTER ONLY! I recommend following people you know. Now with Twitter just now seeming to really take off, you’re probably not going to find as much of your friends on there as say your MySpace or Facebook. So what’s the next best thing? Celebs! Follow your favorite celebs to get your base going and your information feed rolling. At least this way you’ll be able to keep up on the latest happenings of some of your favorite stars. Now chances are these celebs are not going to follow you back. If they followed all of their fans they would be overwhelmed with direct messages and would probably swear off Twitter forever. I’m sure they deal with plenty enough @replies as it is! Well now you may be asking yourself “why am I doing all this and I still have no followers of my own?” I’ll tell you why. Who follows celebs? FANS! PEOPLE JUST LIKE YOU, REGULAR PEOPLE WHO ARE MORE WILLING TO FOLLOW YOU BACK.Get it? Just look at the list of your fave celeb’s followers and now you’ve got yourself a list of like-minded fans that are probably into the same stuff you are! And if they’re into the same stuff you are then I’m sure they wouldn’t mind following you right?! So go crazy with that follow button! Now you can only do 1000 requests a day and until you get more than 2000 followers you can only follow up to 2001 people so you can only get but so crazy with that button. Don’t limit yourself to one celeb’s followers. Try to follow different batches to get yourself a well rounded list of people who are into your different interests. Don't limit yourself to just celebs either! You may come across a fellow regular "twitterer" who intrigues you in a way that you might want to pick up some of their followers as well. GO FOR IT! The more people you follow, the more tweets that will come across your way, giving you more opportunities to reply to people who say something that catches your attention! Now after you get carpal tunnel from clicking the follow button 1000 times guess what? YOU STILL HAVE NO FOLLOWERS!!! But be happy with the fact that at this point you have done everything in your power (with the exception of bribing, begging, prostitution, etc.) to get more followers. Now what?
SIT BACK AND WAITYea you heard me. SIT BACK AND WAIT. With all those people knowing that you’re following them you’re bound to get what I call the “pity fuck” followers. The pity fuck follower is the follower who notices themself or gets a notification that they have a new follower and says to themselves “I guess it’s only right to follow them back seeing as how they’re following me”. So they click follow on your profile and BOOM! You got your first followers! Congrats! There are sure to be more pity fucks along the way and pretty soon you’ll be a pity fuck stud! So you’ve got all these one-night stands under your belt but you don’t want that. You want long term. You look at your number of followers and it’s steady declining. Why? Because you weren’t a good lay! Your pity fuck became just a pity fuck with no potential for second dibs! So now what?
BECOME DESIRABLEMost pity fucks will stick around a few weeks just to see what you’re about and if the interest isn’t there they’ll just unfollow you and move on to the next. Some pity fucks might even stick around forever because they don’t really care who they follow and you were just another notch on their bed post. While it’s nice to have these people add to your follower count, they don’t really do you much good because they don’t take Twitter serious enough to reply back or provide any good tweets for you to reply back yourself. So they’re pretty much all for show and nothing else. What you want are people who are going to respond to your tweets and who you can engage in conversations. Why? Because these are the people who can recommend you to their followers and who their followers can recommend to their followers and so on and so on! Get it? People are constantly looking for cool and interesting people to follow and isn’t the whole point to become someone that other people want to follow? Of course it is! You want to say interesting things that people are going to want to RT (retweet) with your username so that your name gets spread across Twitter and you get that recognition. I can’t tell you how to be interesting to other people because everybody is different. My only suggestion is just be yourself and even though it can seem like a popularity contest at times don’t be discouraged if you lose followers along the way.Those people weren’t in it for the long haul and you’d rather have people who accept you for who you are instead of having to try to be someone else just to appease them. The more interesting you are the more people that are going to want to stick around and the more they are going to recommend you to their followers. It basically becomes a pyramid scheme at the point where you’ll be generating followers from the followers of your followers! (did you get that?) Don’t just wait for them to respond to you either! Twitter allows you to @reply anybody regardless of if you’re following them and vice versa (unless their updates are locked/private) The name of the game is to put your page out there as much as possible!
MORE TIPS-Pay attention to your timeline: see who’s regularly tweeting and who’s not. The same way that followers who do nothing are dead weight is the same way that people who you follow who do nothing can be dead weight as well. Unfollow the dead weight to allow room for more people for you to follow, especially if you’ve already reached your max allowable. Give people you follow a week or two for you to decide if you want to keep following them or not.
-You don’t have to follow everyone who follows you (pity fuck) Some people become genuinely interested in your tweets and may not necessarily need for you to follow them back. If you find them interesting as well then follow them back of course. The more people you follow however, the less likely you’ll be able to catch everything that comes across your feed anyways so once you establish your solid base of followers it’s ok to be selective about who you do or don’t follow.Besides, true followers will always be paying attention to what you say and wanting to respond so that will give you your chance to interact with them!
-Have a pic! It doesn't necessarily have to be you. It could be a logo or a funny pic (no impersonating celebs!) but at least have something! Unless your face really looks like 0_o
-Tweet as often as possible. Let people know you're alive. If your last tweet was over a week ago people may think you've ditched Twitter and unfollow you.
-Last but not least, ALWAYS RESPOND TO TWEETS AND DIRECT MESSAGES!! Unless someone just gets real annoying then it’s ok to ignore them but you always want to make sure to respond to people. Thie will make you seem more approachable and most people would rather follow someone they can actually get feedback from. Celebs may feel like they can just ignore anyone because they get tons of messages all the time but us regular people have to be better than that! Respond and let your followers know that you’re for real and not some stuck up bastard or spam bot!
FINAL WORDS...I think this pretty much sums up an easy and most importantly MEANINGFUL way to get more followers because there’s really no point in having a ton of followers if no one is paying attention to what you say. EVERY TWEET COUNTS!
Happy Tweetin’,
Steph
twitter.com/stephiscrazy
