Staying in Twitter’s Good Graces While Building Followers Fast

If you are fairly new to Twitter, there are probably some things about it you don’t yet know, but that you need to know. Where Twitter is concerned ignorance is NOT bliss. In fact, break a rule or two and you can get your Twitter account suspended. I have not personally experienced this, but have seen many suspended accounts in a few short months of tweeting. Just from that casual observation I can tell you I don’t want to experience it!

OK… so your Twitter account is open and you have a few followers but you would like to have a lot more. As you look around on Twitter you see people with thousands of followers. In fact, about mid-month April 2009, one Ashton Kutcher became the first member of Twitter to have over one million followers. How did he do that? I haven’t a clue, but how to get one million followers is not what this article is about. I just wanted to point out that having a lot of followers is possible, if you do it right.

There are some guidelines at Twitter that you will need to observe. The first one is to realize that Twitter forces you to start slow. You need to try to balance your followers with those you are following. I’m not talking about the need to follow who is following you, but that the number of followers and those you are following stay fairly close. This is most important while those following you total less than 2000. Until you get to that number you will not normally be able to follow more than 2000 yourself.

Start by following people you know. Follow all of them as they are likely to follow you back. Then start to add others, that you don’t know, but might like to know. You can use Twitter’s search feature to find people with interests similar to yours. Follow them, but don’t follow too many each day. You will probably be ok to follow 50 new each day, or 10% above the number of your followers, whichever is larger. Once you get past the 2000 block imposed by Twitter you will be able to step this up a bit, but in any event you probably won’t want to follow more than 15% above the number of people following you. Twitter has some sort of stop in place, but they don’t let that out. Let’s assume you get to 5000 followers. That means you can follow around 5750. Since about 1/3 of the new people you follow will follow you back, that means of the 750 above 5000 about 250 will follow you back. Having a few over 8000 following me, I am following a little over 9000.

I don’t use any sort of qualifying to select who I will follow, except I follow people following interesting people. I make the assumption there will be common ground. I try and follow all the new people I am going to follow on Friday, and stop following all who are not following me back each Thursday. That way I am covering the weekend users and giving the weekday users several days to follow me back.

OK… time for some personal bias. I don’t follow anyone who does not have a picture posted to their Twitter profile. It does not necessarily have to be a picture of them, but there must be some picture posted. My reasoning here is that if they won’t even take the time to put up a picture, they probably are not serious about Twitter and probably won’t be around very long. Most of the time I won’t follow those who don’t have a person’s name. I like to avoid the strange ones out there. I also won’t follow any one with evidence of any sexual overtones. If I see any profanity in their posts I immediately un-follow. I don’t follow anyone with any sort of title in their name line, especially Dr. or PHD. The reason is simple… my experience has been that they don’t follow back.

All you really need to do is set a regular somewhat conservative routine of following and un-following and you will be into the big numbers before you know it. Happy Tweeting!