But, the principles are solid only the scale grew larger and I had to figure a way to cut down the time it took to keep up good relationships with an ever increasing crowd. After all, good relationships is what it is about.
In that previous post, I was all worked up and dancing on tabletops about gaining a hundred followers in ten days, good stuff. Since then I've seen steady gains of up to 50 a day. Like I said, same method. I'm now hovering around at 1800 followers (9,020 on 10/31/15 which proves my points) and most of these are good home-grown followers (real people). The reason I'm hovering: Twitter has a rule that if you follow 2000 people they won't let you follow any more till you get a lot more followers and that number seems mysterious and arbitrary. Without being able to follow everyone who follows you, growth is much slower. Update on 11/1/2015 I've discovered that once you clear that glass ceiling and can prove that you don't put out junk and real people want to engage with you, that mystery ratio goes away and you can follow as many as you want without regards to how many follow you.
Still, I thought I'd share a couple things I learned to make the work less time-consuming. I'm aware that I could pay a monthly fee for a company to do all my posting, but somehow that felt disingenuous, and I couldn't bring myself to do it. For a while, I let JustUnFollow send auto DM messages thanking new followers but after getting a bunch from other people, I couldn't stomach it any longer.
My biggest help so far is the Hootsuite SMMS short for Social Media Managing System; which allows me to schedule up to 350 Tweets or Facebook posts at one time to one account. If I put all the info for my message in a correctly formatted Excel spreadsheet (it's simple. They even give you a template) voila I have the next few weeks Tweets all set to go.
I set my posts at half past the hour so if I want to post anything else, I insert it at the hour or fifteen or forty-five after so it won't get crowded.
I value all my followers old and new and I schedule some of their book links in my bulk uploads so they come up regularly as retweets. As for my new followers: after the initial nice thank you Tweet and a courteous retweet of one or two of their messages, I wait a few days or a week and gang up all the new followers in a message thanking them again. They get a mention and I usually get a retweet with more exposure.
Ganging up 'Thank You for Following' Tweets gets time-consuming when the follows are coming in hot and heavy 100-220 in a three to four-day span.
Thank you Mighty Google! I went searching for a program that might help me... I didn't find one that would do it all for me without relinquishing my sovereignty, but I did find an excel spreadsheet that you register as an app with Twitter and it feeds you all your followers in a neat little list, newest at top. Martin Hawksey, God bless him, has made it fairly easy for the average Joe to accomplish this. Now, I run this spreadsheet every few days and give all my new followers a mention.
All I had to do was paste that list into a notepad and put little @ symbols in front of each screen name. Way better than before but tedious. So, I DM'd a follower @tianyuxu who is an Excel Guru Data Cruncher and asked if he would help me with the formula to add the @ symbol before each name. He was only too happy to help. Wango Tango it's now as easy as 1-2-3 to put together the bulk thank you tweets.
I could go on, but it's getting late. If anyone has something to add or comment please do. I'm no expert, but I am good at learning.
Peace All,
Mike
If you'd like to leave a comment and find the form tedious you can comment on my twitter feed @mikeyznsacto or Facebook/M. Matheson
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