Day 7 | May 17, 2011 | 36 Twitter Followers
Two more Followers added since yesterday on my quest to gain 1,000 relevant twitter followers. Seems like every time I tweet, I get more followers. This is good.
But how do you decide who to Follow back?
At the moment, I’m following only 57 people on Twitter. Yet sometimes it’s difficult to stay on top of my Twitter account given that many of the folks I follow are far more active that I am. Yet, when I check out my new followers, most are very relevant to my space. And you should follow them back, out of courtesy, right? I’m sure that Ms. Manners probably has an opinion on this, but I’ve always been one to try to figure it out myself, so here goes …
Must Follows
First, let’s talk about who you should follow – the “Must Follows” in your world. I did a little research and found some good articles that cover this. Here’s one called, Who Should You Follow on Twitter? written by @LisaBarone. The basic premise of this piece is that you want to follow five types of people: Customers, Competitors, Local Media, Trendsetters and People that amuse you. I agree – especially with the last one, “people that amuse you”. I’ve found that “all work and no play” certainly makes Twitter “a dull boy”. In fact, I recently started using Twitter Lists to help me deal with this.
Twitter Lists Are My New Best Friend
Twitter Lists are fantastic. They let you group the people you follow into lists. You can click on any list and get only the tweets from those people on that list. I have a few lists now that help me organize the Tweets from people I am following. One list is for “Social Media News”, another for “Competitors” and a third list is for “Friends” and people that I find really interesting. You can even make these lists Private, if you don’t won’t others to see who you have listed. If you’re not familiar with how to setup these lists, check out this article, How to Setup Twitter Lists.
Should I Follow Back?
Now, on to follow backs … Should you follow back everyone that follows you? When I started on Twitter, my initial approach was to automatically follow everyone that followed me – just out of courtesy. I quickly realized that this was a train wreck strategy. So many people seem to have the spam mentality of simply following everyone and anyone, in hopes of getting a follow back. I had zero interest in the content that most of these folks were sending out there – telling me about their breakfast, where they were going and how tired they had become of their boyfriend. Really? And, I seriously doubt that they cared too much about my Tweets.
My Follow Back Strategy
So my approach is pretty simple. As I get new followers, I click on their Twitter profile. I checkout what they’re all about. If they’re involved with something to do with Technology, Social Media or face to face marketing, I keep reading. Of course, to keep it interesting, if they have something to do with the UFC or some other personal interest of mine, I’ll probably follow them as well – gotta keep it interesting.
Sounds pretty basic, right? But just writing this down made me take the time to review my own personal Twitter profile. I realized that the types of folks I am targeting as followers probably would have dismissed me if they followed this approach. Here was my old Twitter profile:
My Old Twitter Bio Profile: Outer Banks (OBX) based technology guy, occasional surfer, and full time Dad
Although personal and genuine, it really doesn’t spark much interest for those that are looking to follow people that are serious about using social media tools. So I changed it to:
My New Twitter Bio Profile: Social networking guy that has helped others win with Twitter but ignored his own account for the past two years. Now blogging about my journey to 1K followers
Next, I check out their last 10 Tweets. If there isn’t at least one interesting Tweet in their timeline, I’m bailing. If they do have something interesting to say, it’s likely that I’ll follow back. And, if they are real interesting, I’ll add them to one of my Twitter lists, based on what they’re tweeting. So again, looking at my own account, I try to make sure that I have a good mix of relevant Tweets that are going to be of value to those that are following me. I guess this keeps me on track and helps me stay focused on Twitter.
So I was curious to see how I measured up against the people that I follow on Twitter. I wondered if the folks that I followed, followed me back. I figured that there is probably a tool out there somewhere that would help me do this, and, sure enough, here’s what I found:
This cool site will analyze your Twitter account and tell you how many of the folks that you follow, follow you back. In addition, it will also tell you who follows you, that you don’t follow back. And, to put icing on the cake, they’ll then show you who you follow that has followed you back. This is nice – an easy way to periodically check in with your account and see what’s going on … (I’d ask for a Follow from @FriendOrFollow for this nice plug of their product, but I notice that they have over 5K followers and only follow 7 at the moment!).
Here Are Some Links That I Found Helpful:
Who Should You Follow on Twitter?
How to Setup Twitter Lists
FriendOrFollow.com
Thanks for reading. Please comment here and follow me on Twitter @cavoom
