At the time of this writing I have 3,240 followers, so I make no claims at being an expert on Twitter. In fact, I didn’t join Twitter until early April 2009, just over a month ago. For all I know I will plateau at any second, but as my twittercounter shows, I’ve been increasing my followership by around 100 new tweeples a day.

I have spoken to a number of people about Twitter since joining, both online and off, and the question I keep getting is how in the world did I get over 3,000 followers in my first month on Twitter?  Apparently for some aquiring an audience has been a large challenge and ultimately discouraging. My usual response is, “I don’t know, I just tweet good content.” I didn’t do the usual “tricks” to get followers like following hundreds of people and waiting for the % game of follow backs, in fact most of my twitter friends followed me first! While I did see the large number of “Get Followers Quick”  schemes both in my timeline and crammed into my DM box, I avoided those too (I’m cheap - I’m not going to pay to get followers!)

I’m not a well known internet figurehead nor am I a celebrity (if I was I’d probably have thousands more followers than I do), I’m just your average internet user. So how did I get so many followers and why do they stay? Truthfully you’d have to ask them, but as I think about my usage of Twitter here are some of the twitter practices I believe largely contributed to the my success (so far):

1. I always follow back when followed, and I advertise that on my twitter page. I have no problems unfollowing spammer accounts and I often do unfollow those obviously using twitter to spam all the time.
2. I do my best to publicly thank each and every retweeter, after all they make twitter go ’round and they deserve credit for it.
3. I unfollow people that unfollow me (automatically). I believe twitter is a two way communication medium. There are some occasions when I find such value in a twitter account that I don’t mind if they aren’t following back - but it’s rare. This helps me keep my twitter ratio close, when you follow hundreds more than are following you it looks like you are a spammer.
4. I directly feed my twitter account with a handful of great RSS feeds. They are set to only tweet every 6 to 12 hours so it’s not an over whelming flow of traffic, but utilizing twitterfeed.com allows me to automatically push out great content even when I’m not able to man my twitter account in person. Note this is a balance issue, I’ve also unfollowed accounts that appear to only send out RSS fed tweets.
5. I’m passionate about what I tweet. I typically stick to my favorite topics because I know alot about them. I tweet about my life in general, about my stance on the marijuana legalization issue, about web development and all the various ways I go about doing web development.
6. I retweet often. I regularly dig through my twitterfriend timeline looking for the really interesting tweets and I always visit the links that are sent before sending them back to my followers to ensure it works and is actually something of interest.
7. I actively participate in #FollowFriday. I respect my twitter friend opinions when they recommend those they have connected with. I visit alot of profiles on fridays as I check out who my friends like and try to follow atleast a handful of people I find interesting each week. I also try to get my #FollowFriday recommendations out early in the day. This helps remind folks you may be a good candidate for a #FollowFriday recommendation as well!
8. I subscribe to a ton of RSS feeds to look for good content. I remember the radio days, when I had to subscribe to tons of magazines and watch lots of tv. RSS makes things so much easier! I go to one place and I can almost always find 2 or 3 really interesting articles I want to share with my twitter friends.
9. I try to find the lighter side of life so you will see a number of my tweets have some humor mixed in. When I worked as an OnAir talent back in my youth, I learned if you want to keep listeners you have to give them valuable information, appeal to their funny bone or totally piss them off. On twitter I’ve chosen the path of humor and valuable information in my niche as it fits my personality best.
10. Twitter is more than a soap box and I use it to meet new people and get to know them so I reply to tweeple who’ve tweeted something of interest. Especially when they tweet out an original question - I try to make sure I reply back with my best response. - Get some conversation going.
11. Write every tweet with plenty of room to get retweeted. The more room the better, yes I know the character limit is already only 140 characters. You’ve got to also factor in even the shortest URLs out there are still 17 characters (down to 123), your nickname along with the RT, space & @ symbol (in my case I’m now down to 109) AND leaving room for the RT itself to get retweeted..  Oh boy you can see where I’m going with this. It can be a difficult balance, but the shorter and more profound your tweet is - the more likely it will be retweeted dozens of times.
12. I use tools to be succesful. TweetDeck, twitterfeed, friendorfollow, to name just a few. I’ve evaluated every tool found on this list (that still exists) and I use the best ones that make sense to ease the burdens of maintaining the friend/follow ratio etc. I also track every single URL I send out to see what appeals to my followers and then try to find similar popular content.
13. I occasionally check my active friends profiles to see who they are following, especially my friends I’ve connected with on twitter. My thoughts are if they get along with my friend, they’ll probably get along with me The 70% or so that follow back prove this is a great way to meet new people that have similar interests.

That’s really all I have done to get over 3,000 followers within my first 30 days on twitter. I’ll be very interested to see where I end up plateaing in this crazy twitterverse, 3k? 5k? 20k? who knows.  I don’t mind if I have 3k or 30k followers at the end of the day- I  just came to have fun and so far it’s been a great time!

How has your twitter experience been? What were your key success factors?

Are you one of my followers? What keeps you tuned in?

Leave your comments below.

Tags: Social Media, Twitter Followers, Twitter Success

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 21st, 2009 at 10:22 pm and is filed under Blog, Social Media, Twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.