Choosing the optimal networks to source your followers on Twitter

Identifying the source: a guide to building your Twitter network

We all want more followers on Facebook and Twitter. The difference between someone with a big account and someone with a small account is how smart you are at getting new followers, not to mention how hard you try. I started out on Twitter a year ago fumbling around, and trying different strategies, most of which were useless. I tried using various keywords, links, tags, but my results were ineffective. My newer strategies involve tags that actually get results, and following strategies that are amazing.

Steps to grow your Twitter account
(1) Post interesting content
If you can’t think of anything good to say, perhaps you should wait to tweet something until you get something interesting. People will unfollow you if you are boring or not relevant to the theme of your account. Don’t create more Twitter litter.

(2) Retweet amazing content
It is hard to create good content. It has taken me years writing blogs, and still, the majority of my blog articles are not popular. But, to identify great content that other people wrote is easier. You need to compare hundreds of tweets before you pick one tweet to retweet. Amazing photos can go a long way too. If your retweets get retweeted, then you know you picked a winner, and you can use it a few weeks later again!

(3) Who to follow?
This article focuses on who to follow. But, on Twitter, if you want to grow fast, you should not think of following individuals. In reality, you are following individuals, but those individuals are members of groups. To find individuals to follow, you either wait for them to follow you, or you find them following some other account.

The trick is finding the perfect accounts to harvest great followers from. Lonely Planet is my all-time favorite Twitter account. However, they are too easy to find, and individuals who are not related to the travel industry love to follow them simply because they are so cool. The problem is, that less than 5% of their followers are relevant to the travel industry. The next problem is when I follow those select individuals, they follow me back only 10% of the time. These relevant followers appear to be like relevant followers on other accounts, but their follow-back behavior is completely different. On the other hand, if I find accounts with only 10,000 followers as opposed to the one million + which Lonely Planet has, the follow back rate is higher. For the followers to even find these smaller accounts, they had to be more aggressive which is not evident based on how they set up their profile.

The problem with finding followers on accounts with only 10,000 followers is that you run out of people to follow quickly, especially if you visit those accounts daily. Another strategy is to find accounts in the 50,000 to 200,000 member range to find followers on. Although, they might not be optimal in their follow-back rate, there are more of them. To me, it might be more efficient to make a long list of accounts in the 5000 to 30,000 range and visit those accounts daily and follow their newest members who have completely filled out profiles.

(4) One more point
Don’t follow people who followed someone else more than five days ago. They might not be that active on Twitter. They will be less likely to follow you back.

(5) Unfollowing
If someone doesn’t follow me back within two to four days, I have to unfollow them. Twitter allows you 10% more followees than followers once you cross the 2000 member threshold. You simply can’t follow unlimited amounts of people. You are forced to unfollow those who don’t follow you back.

So, the moral of the story here is — find accounts that you can visit to find great followers (people who followed those accounts or are followed by those accounts.) See what percentage of them follow you back. If particular accounts yield followers with a poor follow-back rate, then find a more optimal selection of accounts to harvest followers from.

“Live is cruel, so tweet about it!”

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