By most people’s standards, I’m doing very well on Twitter. TwitterGrader currently gives me a score of 100% and has me ranked #265 out of nearly 2 million users it has analyzed.
I’m adding an average of a little over 30 followers per day, and have had days where I’ve added almost 100 new followers (#FollowFriday has been very good to me lately – thanks to all have included me in their lists).
I could toss up a bunch of other metrics here to convince you, but let’s just suffice it to say that, more or less, I’m “doing everything right” (I’m sure a few people will argue one or two points with me, but whatever).
But I want more followers. LOTS more followers. And so do you…and here’s why:
1. Only a handful of your followers are actually paying attention.
Some of your followers are heavy Twitter users. Guess what? They’re following a ton of people, and the odds of them actually picking any one of your tweets out of the noise of the thousands of people they’re following is very slim. Others are light Twitter users, and the odds of them actually being online and seeing your tweets in a timely manner is fairly slim also.
Even with nearly 4,500 “true” followers, I typically find that any one given tweet of mine generates less than 10 reactions – a reply, a retweet, a click-through to my blog, etc. [Point of clarification: I’m talking about first-order reactions, i.e., from my immediate followers. The network effect is typically much higher – anywhere from 20 to as many as 300-400 actions in the extended network after the retweets.]
That’s 0.2%!
That is a worse response rate than Google AdWords. It’s a worse response rate than cold calling. Heck, it’s a worse response rate than junk mail!!!
I’m not saying that means it’s ineffective for the time/effort you put into it, because it’s a) free and b) not terribly time-consuming. Still, point is, the response rate sucks. You need larger numbers if you want significant action in response to your Twitter activity.
2. More followers = more visibility = more “true” followers.
I couldn’t care less about my follower count for its own sake. It’s not a “badge of honor”. But there’s a basic truth about social media that Clay Shirky wrote about way back in 2003 in Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality: the sources who get more attention tend to get way more attention.
There are several reasons for this:
For one thing, psychologically, those with more followers are perceived by many to be more authoritative.
For another, there are dozens of tools out there that rank sources based on follower count (or at least that’s one of the metrics). So tools like TwitterGrader, TwitterCounter’s Top 100 lists, Twitterholic and others give more visibility to those with more followers. More visibility = still more followers.
And finally, if you have more followers, there are more people re-tweeting your posts, replying to you, etc. So their networks are exposed to you and more likely to add you.
Does it actually work? Anecdotally, yes it does. I had something I had posted about several times, even asking people for re-tweets. I got several – almost 20, in fact, but it took like 5 posts to get those 20 re-tweets. I then asked my friend @PerryBelcher to re-tweet it for me. At the time, Perry had a little over 10x as many followers as I did. Perry got 10 re-tweets off his one post. Now that’s obviously not proportional, i.e., he doesn’t have as much average attention per user as I do, but that just proves my point as to why you need larger numbers.
3. Even if you’re currently B2B or in a narrow niche, you don’t know what the future holds.
For the past six years, I’ve worked social media almost entirely from a B2B perspective myself. Some of my clients have been B2C, and I’ve advised them on strategies that I never implemented myself because I didn’t see them as a fit. My latest project, however, is a B2C play to a very broad potential market. Simply put, I can serve that project much better the farther my reach/influence is. Certainly, stronger relationships create all kinds of opportunities, but I also just simply need to raise awareness.
And relative to my goals, I’m practically starting from scratch. I want to have 10-15 times my current follower count on my personal account, and I’m starting from square one on the account I set up for that project, @AmerGuitarAcad.
Regardless of what your current job or business is, what does the future hold for you? And when suddenly you do find yourself in a position of needing a much larger network, do you want to be starting from scratch? Or already have a head start?
As Harvey Mackay says, “Dig your well before you’re thirsty.”
4. The celebrities are coming! The celebrities are coming!
Take a look at the Twitterholic Top 100. Everyone on there is a celebrity. Even if you don’t recognize their name, trust me, they are. They’re either a blogging celebrity, an author, a TV personality, a technology CEO or something. These people already have huge other platforms from which to announce their Twitter presence and rapidly grow their follower count. For example, my uncle, David Allen (@GTDGuy), has been on Twitter barely six weeks and already has about 175,000 followers.
The more celebrities show up on Twitter, the harder and harder it will get for you to reap the benefits described in #2 above. Three months ago, the Twitterholic list looked completely different. I mean, consider this: @GuyKawasaki and @Scobleizer don’t even make the cut any more.
The window of opportunity is narrowing rapidly. If you want to be on the high side of that power curve, you need to get there NOW!
5. It doesn’t cost anything to have followers.
The incremental cost of adding one more follower is $0.00. Not only that, there’s zero (or near-zero) time cost. You can rapidly grow your follower count in just 15-20 minutes a day. Now sure, you may have to follow more people to grow your follower count rapidly, and they may create more noise in your Twitter stream, but there are tools like TweetDeck that will help you manage that (just create a “high attention” group of people whose tweets you absolutely don’t want to miss).
There’s simply no downside, that I can see. By all means, if you think there is, say so in the comments below.
So how do I get LOTS of followers?
I wish I already knew. If I did, I’d already have them.
But I know who does!
Richard Bryda, aka @BigRichB.
Let me tell you a little about Rich…
Rich has over 75,000 followers. That makes him unequivocally the most-followed non-celebrity on Twitter. And he built that following all since last November, entirely on Twitter, i.e., no blog, no YouTube videos, no TV/radio show, etc. He is the best person in the world at getting Twitter followers.
This weekend, Rich opened his kimono, with the launch of Brute Force Twitter, which spells out over a dozen tactics he has developed for rapidly growing your follower count.
I can tell you I personally won’t use every single one of these, but only one of them is a technique I’ve ever used myself, and even then, not to full effect. The rest of them, I never would have thought of.
I could spill the beans and tell you these techniques, but hey – that would be enormously disrespectful of the intellectual property Rich has spent countless hours developing over the past few months. And besides, if everybody had access to these techniques, you (and I) couldn’t use them to get on the steep side of that curve, right? 😉
Rich knows that too, which is why he said:
I’m going to limit this offer to the first 300 people who order. Why?
Because I’ve decided that’s in my best interests. I have an idea that will make all of us in this tight group a lot of money. It involves forming an elite “Secret Society” on Twitter where we benefit each other.
Look, I want to dominate Twitter. So I’m going to use these 300 people to help me. And they’re going to use me, and each other, to help themselves also. Simple. That’s all I’m going to reveal about that idea here.
IMPORTANT: This is NOT a “how to get rich on Twitter” scheme! This is about helping you get more followers to support your business model on Twitter, whatever it may be.
Rich is offering his system for just $97.
Worth every penny. If you don’t think you can immediately monetize a few thousand extra followers to get a return of $97, you’re really not thinking of Twitter as a business tool, in which case I don’t even know why you read this far. 🙂
But if you’re ready (or almost ready), you can get more information or order now.
Still not sure?
How about I show you how you can make back the cost of the program almost instantly?
See, Rich had the good sense to set up an affiliate program through PayDotCom, and he’s paying out 50% commissions! Yup, that’s right – just get two other people to buy the program and it pays for itself.
Personally, I found PayDotCom just a little confusing, so let me walk you through the steps:
- Sign up at PayDotCom.
- Set up your account details, confirm your email, etc. That part’s straightforward.
- Click on Promote Products.
- On the “Create A New Campaign” line, click on From Marketplace.
- In the Keywords box, enter “brute force twitter”.
- Under Brute Force Twitter, click on the Promote link at the bottom.
- Under “Just the link”, copy that link and use it for promoting Brute Force Twitter.
And, of course, you can also use PayDotCom to promote your own info-products via affiliates, as well as to find info-products from others to promote to your friends, readers and followers.
By the way, one little note: you can’t earn commissions by buying the product through your own affiliate link, so don’t bother trying. I’d greatly appreciate it if you’d use my links in this post, but if you don’t want to, you can go directly to BruteForceTwitter.com. I don’t do affiliate stuff very often and hope you won’t begrudge me a few dollars for telling you about this great resource. But I’m more concerned that you have access to this valuable information.
STILL not sure?
Well, you can wait a few days and watch and see if my follower count explodes like I expect it to as I start applying these techniques. But remember, those 300 slots will go fast, considering Rich has 75,000 followers. Is it really worth waiting?
I’d love to hear your comments. Tell me I’m nuts, if you must, but if so, tell me why. Or if you decide to try this too, let me know – I’ll be interested to see how it works for you, as well.
Loads of Twitter ‘Spam’ is what you get when you have hundreds and thousands of people following you! I had to create a separate email account for Twitter because the amount of messages I was receiving from Twitter was staggering! I tried an experiment with Twitter by creating another protected profile and still I received spam, this time, it was some marketing company picking up my email address from the background image of my new Twitter profile. I had a dedicated email account to experiment with Twitter and the only place where this email account was mentioned on the web was the background image on my Twitter profile. My mail spam filters could not detect it either, it was personally addressed to me.
I am posting this story on the Web Coherence soon – which is the mother of all experiments the community does to understand odd phenomena on the web!
True – your main tweetstream becomes unreadable. I think I’ve bought into the argument that you should still follow most people who follow you, because it allows direct messaging. But then you create a “high attention” group in TweetDeck of the people who you truly want to read most of what they write (for me that’s maybe 200-300 people). You can occasionally take a dip in the river, but there are tools for managing selective attention.
Regarding posting on Web Coherence — I don’t think I say it on here anywhere officially, but everything here is under the CC Attribution license, so feel free to use what you like.
Hi Scott,
In today’s information age we cannot neglect phenomena such as Twitter and sitting back just to avoid noise is not the solution. Web Coherence is here just to keep users alert about things that can happen with them. Our aim is to educate users on how to safely use the Internet.
The reason why we see noise on Twitter is clash of intentions between general users and businesses/celebrities. Businesses/celebrities would wish to be heard loud – a large community following them. As a result we see new Twitter followers everyday. People we dont even know and one starts following them back, the twitter home page becomes unreadable. General users become the victim here, businesses have little to lose as Twitter is a free marketing channel for them. Twitter itself as a phenomenon is extremely fascinating as it has created a new set of opportunities and threats. I have been reading about new tools such as Twitter filters, Twitter follower groups which have sprung up to protect the users and help them extracting the requisite information. This is a classic example where you first bring in technology to improve things and then you bring in more technology to manage technology and the vicious cycle continues. Result, more technology jobs.
Thanks for the permission grant. I shall surely attribute if we use any of your material. I look forward for mutual participation between our sites. It is always good to reciprocate between two extreme ends to cover the complete area.
People have got to stop talking about Twitter as the press is on overload. Check out my blog post on why Twitter should be avoided:
bit.ly/5tx2
John
www.wordpress.com
You’re absolutely right, John. Think I’ll stop talking about Twitter and go…sleep!
I agree, the more Twitter followers you have, the better. Nice article.
Pingback: Twitter Traffic Machine Promises 16,000 Followers in 90 Days. Really? | Scott "Social Media" Allen
Hey Scott; nice post. Truthfully, I don’t follow my Twitter counts on a regular basis, and yet I can say that I’m getting close to passing the 1,000 barrier.
I’ll take it or not; truthfully, many parts of your article fit me to a tee. Lots of folks aren’t writing anything, which means they’re not reading. Some of what I post gets retweeted, and some of my retweets get retweeted also.
Still, at the end of the day, what I’m doing is checking the stats for my website and my blogs to see if they’re growing, and I can’t say that there’s a reciprocal response. There is a trickle here and there from Twitter, but nothing overwhelming.
So, it begs the question as to whether I shoot for more people, or just continue on my own way and let it accumulate naturally, thinking those people really care about anything I have to say. It can be an ego booster, but those auto DM’s really do get on my nerve.
However, I don’t have email set up to send me any announcements, so at least that’s not a problem I have.
I understand the numbers game as with any marketing. But with so many followers — if you just keep pushing products— and those products are not in your followers area of exact interest– the more people with tune out.
When I first started Twittering— I have a group of about 30 tech oriented realtors discussing tech solutions. I am a realtor — I was not selling anything to this group. Then the group was good. The posts were relevant and we all contributed. But then as the group expanded— it got to the point where it is just noise.
And I would imagine that my post are noise to a lot of my followers.
I would think that the more diverse the group of followers you have the more difficult it is to make relevant contributions to their interests.
Pingback: Grabbing For More Twitter Followers? | I'm Just Sharing
I don’t get how people can charge about anything when it comes to a free website like Twitter. I prefer to have 100 own made followers than to pay $100 to have 70.000.
Just because a site/service is free doesn’t mean that everything that everyone else does around it has to be free. I mean, someone has to make money somewhere, right? I mean, there’s Twitter For Dummies, which some people will buy.
The question is really simple – is there business value in it? And if there’s business value in it, how much? What’s the “expected value” of a follower? If it’s greater than $100/70,000 (about 1/8 of a cent), then it’s simply foolish NOT to pay for it.
If the return on free is $0 – who cares? If there’s an ROI in a reasonable time frame on any investment, then it makes sense.
I am starting a twitter business that is locally focused. Promoting it as advertising for small and medium sized businesses. Over the past 3 months I have worked on three accounts to create a following that is interested in their message. Thus for each of these companies I have setup an account. In the world of Twitter for the most part Following begets Followers. So for each I am searching for people who have posted in the past 2 weeks with one of my buzz words and then following them. But just getting followers is not enough. Each company needs to have a strategy to market to them and it can’t allways be buy my product, it needs to also include education about something of interest to them.
One of my clients is @hotlabrescue. They Rescue Labradors in Central Texas. Our goal is to use twitter to get adopters/vollunteers/Foster Families. So just putting out a plea for those items on a daily basis would turn people off. So instead we post Happy Tails and Dogs that just Got adopted and what to do when your dog gets skunked. And then once or twice a week something is inserted that asks for one of our goals. The result is that in the 3 months on Twitter we have 1700 quality followers of which about 1100 are in Central Texas (our target market). 4 adopters have come from Twitter, 3 new Volunteers and 2 new Foster Families (Fosters save us $450 a month in boarding charges).
What I want to do is take what I have learned from @hotlabrescue and translate it into success.
So follow my 2 new clients @savinglabs and shortly (in the next week I will take control) @skillfulpaws. With Savinglabs our goal is to market Labrador paintings to Labrador lovers. With skillfulpaws our goal is to market k9 Massage to dogs who are recovering from injuries in the Austin area. Once I have these up and running and successful then I will expand out to other companies that want to market to followers in their local areas.
Ray