Cynic's Guide to Increasing Follower Count

by Drew Neisser , March 8, 2011

In the more-the-merrier world of Twitter, follower count is an obsession for some brands, whether personal or corporate. Rightly or wrongly, increasing this count has become an industry in itself, with tools and gurus whistling new promises like the Pied Piper of olde. There's even a ranking of the most-followed CMOs that has become a coveted bio item, bestowing instant credibility in the new social order.

A recent study among Twitter users reinforces the urgency behind the growing obsession with follower counts. Conducted by yours truly and the Business Development Institute, the study identified a huge gap between the haves and have nots, finding that over 85% of Twitter users have fewer than 5,000 followers. While a whopping 75% expressed a desire to substantially increase their follower counts, less than half actually had a strategy in place to do just that.

Troubled by this situation especially in light of Charlie Sheen's highly publicized Guinness Book of World Record-setting achievement last week, it seems to me that we tweeters need to find new character in 140 characters and we need to have all those wonderful twits out there find us. So, yes indeedy, now is the perfect time for this cynic's guide to increasing your follower count.

Be a celebrity
Honestly, there really is no easier way to increase your follower count than to be famous and already have lots of obsessive fans. Whether you're Justin Beiber or Lady Gaga, Shaquille O'Neal or Ashton Kutcher, your minions will simply fall all over your every tweet. Say something nearly clever or almost worth reading and millions more will find you in a click of a mouse. Not famous, yet? Well, keep reading.

Be a notorious celebrity
When Charlie Sheen added 1.3 million followers in just over 24 hours, this was big news, and he suddenly had another place to share his miraculously self-destructive behavior that he describes as "winning." Lest you think he's totally insane, with endorsement deals from Broguiere's Dairy and Naked Juice hanging on his every tweet, Sheen indeed may end up having the last laugh on Twitter.

Buy your followers
If celebrity is out of the question, then maybe it is time to get out the cash and simply buy your friends. The remarkably reputable GetMorePopular.com guarantees it can get you or your brand more followers in no time. Want 10,000 more followers? This enterprising start-up will get them for you in up to four weeks for only $999.99. And for just another 25%, they'll even find you followers you would consider in your target!

Bribe them with prizes
Joel Comm, in his best-selling book Twitter Power, recommends among many other techniques offering prizes or gifts to attract new followers. For example, one of his apostles, @fitbizwoman, gave away an ebook with 120 smoothie recipes to help increase her follower count from a few hundred to several thousand. While this may seem a bit crass, worry not, if the shoe fitbizwoman, wear it!

Follow to be followed
If bribing seems a bit too primitive, then perhaps an aggressive follower campaign is in order. Using power tools like TweetAdder and TweetBig, the idea is to identify like-minded tweeters who just might follow you back. Searching their tweets, profiles and follow-to-follower ratios, you can suddenly follow hundreds of potential followers in a matter of minutes. While testing TweetBig, without breaking a sweat, I myself added over 300 followers, some of whom might actually care about what I have to say.

Unfollow the unfollowers
After you've aggressively followed hundreds if not thousands, you'll then want to clean house, removing the ingrates who had the nerve not to reciprocate your follow. Again, by using tools like TweetAdder and TweetBig, unfollowing is as easy as following. In fact, TweetBig even has something called a "time bomb" that will auto-unfollow in a specified number of days. Since 75% of the surveyed Twitter users in our study said the follow/follower ratio was important to monitor, the "time bomb" feature should be an explosive hit!

Follow your new followers
During my same test of TweetBig, while adding 300 new followers, I also lost 70 old ones. Turns out, some of my old followers took it personally when I didn't follow them back. This led me to a tool called UnfollowMe, which helps assess why your sheep might leave the flock and, one hopes, fix the problem. One thing is for certain, if you don't want to take a follower for granted, follow them back post haste or risk their stealthy exit.

When all else fails, be interested and interesting!
Now comes the really hard part. Like chicks in the nest, your new followers will be hungry and must be fed. A steady diet of highly digestible content should do the trick, although it wouldn't hurt if you actually cared about the conversation at hand. Try listening to relevant tweet streams and adding your POV with panache. Turns out, just as in real life, it is as important to be interested as it is to be interesting in Twitterland.

Final note:
Despite my cynicism, try not to underestimate the value of a strong following on Twitter. Reports Ted Rubin, chief social marketing officer at OpenSky, who has more than 43,000 followers, "Having thousands of followers has given me a broad audience of marketers, bloggers and social media enthusiasts." Rubin adds, "Follower counts are important [for brands] because that is what gives them access to the social graph of others and that is the true power of Twitter, the ability to spread a message." (I'll be speaking at length about this topic at BDI's "The Social Consumer -- Case Studies and Roundtables.")

commentary, twitter

5 comments about "Cynic's Guide to Increasing Follower Count ".

Check to receive email when comments are posted.

Ted Rubin from The Rubin Organization / Return on Relationship, March 8, 2011 at 12:42 p.m.
I believe many are looking at this in too narrow a fashion. Everyone is trying to assign a dollar value to a Facebook fan or Twitter follower instead of addressing the fact that engagement and interaction that takes place in these mediums and are incredibly important to a brand. Building a relationship with existing and future customers is the true value and strength of social media/marketing. ROI is certainly incredibly important whenever investing, but companies have to start looking at ROR, Return on Relationship, when planning, strategizing and most importantly evaluating social marketing.
Reply

Mickey Lonchar from Quisenberry, March 8, 2011 at 1:23 p.m.

Drew, that same study you referenced also revealed a couple of disturbing stats: 1) that only 29% of tweets result in any kind of action (click through, RT or reply) and 2) that 40% of Twitter users never read any of the tweets they receive.

I fear that by emphasizing number of followers as a gauge of success, we're losing out on the social benefits of Twitter. (Do you really think if you DM Ashton Kutcher that he'll reply?) And if you also happen to have a day job, how do you keep up with the tweets of the 10,000 or 20,000 that you have to follow to get your followers?

It is definitely a challenge to determine what the "critical mass" of followers is. They key is in understanding how you want to use Twitter and how large your audience has to be in order for you to achieve that. I suspect in most cases, you can be successful with Twitter with a smaller following that the pundits would have you believe.

http://www.quisenblog.com

Jerry Foster from Energraphics, March 9, 2011 at 3:49 a.m.

I thought the stats were more like: 3% of your followers will ever read any given tweet. The majority of people don't read more than 1% of the tweets in their timeline (it's like dipping into a river). You're lucky if a given follower ever reads one of your tweets.

Now for the interesting stats: Almost nobody ever reads DMs at all. Too many of them are spam (I'd guess 99%). Twitter destroyed its DMs by allowing app developers to create auto-DMs for new followers. Most experts agree with me on this: it was a huge mistake by an almost catatonic management.

Nothing in the modern IT world is more of a waste of time than getting an auto-DM welcome after following someone.

The "sender" should know that he or she is not that important. The follow didn't merit an action, especially automated, and it certainly didn't merit an email (thus DMs are almost always shut off as far as going through to the Twitter user as email).

If any of my 15,000 followers has sent me a deliberately written DM in the past 1.5 years, I did not get it nor will I ever try to find it (how long does Twitter save them? No, wait, don't answer because I don't care anymore).

Twitter also seriously missed the boat by not automatically sending mentions to users by email. Many people don't want apps that hog bandwidth.

Ted Rubin from The Rubin Organization / Return on Relationship, March 9, 2011 at 1:06 p.m.

I actually check all my DM's daily and communicate with a handful via DM regularly, and with various others periodically. In addition, although I agree auto DM's can be annoying, have found when helping brands grow their presence, if we succeed in making it known there is value to be had, have subsequently had great success driving Twitter followers to "like" that brands Facebook pages.

Very few understand the true value of Twitter. Twitter is not a broadcast medium, but a seeding and networking medium. Twitter enables you to reach an extraordinary amount of people, who reach other people in turn, and enables you to take your thinking from the "river" of Twitter and deposit it in more static mediums like blogs and traditional media.

Also read here with regard to the stats of success with Twitter followers and Brands... "Consumers Engaged Via Social Media are More Likely to Buy, Recommend" http://www..cmbinfo.com/news/press-center/social-media-release-3-10-10/

Always remember: If you think nobody is tweeting about your products or services, think again. If you’re not tweeting about your business--someone else is. If you’re not setting your own business message on Twitter--someone else is. But more importantly, if you’re not listening to what your customers (and potential customers) are saying on Twitter --someone else is, and you are missing an incredibly valuable opportunity to engage and interact.

Paula Lynn from Who Else Unlimited, April 4, 2011 at 6:07 p.m.

Once upon a time, there were 3 bears too.