There are Twitter experts who have hundreds of thousands of followers who advise others. Should you take advice from these “experts?” Well, they sort of are experts since they have proven their ability to gain followers that engage. However, they don’t know your individual business. Specific knowledge about how to market your particular business is much more valuable than generalized industry knowledge about social media. If the industry standard is that you should tweet at 4pm, but you get better results at 7pm, then post more at 7pm. The key is to know how to do your own analytics and your own quick experiments and get valuable results even if they are not fine-tuned to NASA standards.
How many days do you give?
I was advised to give anywhere from 2-14 days for someone to follow me back on Twitter. Since I am aggressive on Twitter and follow up to 1000 individuals per day, I need to unfollow people so I can follow more people. I don’t have fourteen days for someone to follow me back. What I observed was really interesting. People involved in Marketing follow me back much more quickly on Twitter than those involved in technical trades such as programming, web design, call center, medical billing, etc. I can get excellent results from the Marketing crowd if I give them two or three days. But, the techies need more like three to five days. Of course on Twitter, the law of diminishing marginal return does apply. I tend to get lots of follow backs the first six hours after I follow people. Each hour or day that passes the follow back rate diminishes. It is up to you how to decide how many days to wait!
One trick I use
Rather than unfollow people at the top of my follow list after two or three days, I unfollow the next day in many cases. However, I don’t unfollow from the top. I will scroll 1000 listings down, so I get the folks I followed 48 hours ago and unfollow them if they didn’t follow me back. This technique enables me to follow and unfollow large quantities of people daily which allows me to grow a lot more quickly. You have to have more people following you than you are following to be able to use this technique.
If I follow 8000 and 10000 are following me, then Twitter will allow me to follow up to 10,000 + 10%. So, I’ll follow 1000 per day until I get to 11.000 and then unfollow from 1000 down the list the next day. That way I am always following 2000 new people at any given time.