This post was originally posted back in September 2014. Many people found it useful, at least those indie authors and others that are serial tweeters and marketers of their words.
I'm reposting because of its usefulness and also as the cliche, idiom or saying goes.
The proof is in the pudding.
When I originally wrote this I talked about how I was hovering around 1800 followers. At the time I kept getting stuck at Twitter's glass ceiling for follows/follower ratios. That's no longer a problem and my best guess is that my account is legitimized not only by quantity of followers but the quality of activity and interaction... That's my guess.
Anyway, I have gone from 1800 followers then to 4400 now (7,750 by 9/8/2015 - 9,020 by 10/31/2015). Call it bragging if you want, it's taken a lot of work and 90% of those followers are good organically grown follows. I feel pretty good about that. If you have any questions get in touch with me and I'd be happy to answer them. I have learned a lot since then, but the basics are the same.
Happy Tweeting and I hope this post helps.
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Yeah! If you thought the title was corny, so did I,, but it's all I got. This is a follow-up to a blog post titled, Tweet Tweet which had a much nicer ring. If you skip over and check it out you'll find it was about my experience gaining Twitter followers. I reread it and it almost seems ridiculous now. The methods are solid and I never changed except for the scale got 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. Good relationships is what it is all about.
In that post I was all excited 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 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 me, my growth is much slower.
Still, I thought I'd share a couple things I learned to make the work less time consuming. I know that I could pay a monthly fee for a company to do all my posting, but somehow that just felt disingenuous. 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 is the Hootsuite platform which allows me to schedule up to 350 Tweets or Facebook posts. I can put all the info in a correctly formatted Excel spreadsheet (simple they even give you an example to copy) and voila I have the next weeks Tweets all set to go. I set all 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 some of those I schedule their book links several times in my bulk uploads. As for my new followers: after the initial nice thank you Tweet and a retweet of something for them, I wait a few days or a week and gang up all the new ones in messages thanking them again. They get a mention and I usually get a retweet with more exposure.
Ganging them up in Tweets got time-consuming when they were 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 do it for 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 can register as an app with Twitter and it will feed 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. Now I run this spreadsheet every few days and give all my new followers a mention.
The Tweets get thrown all around multiple times which is good for everyone. 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 gained a follower @tianyuxu1 who is an Excel Guru Data Cruncher and I DM'd him and asked if he would help me with the formula to add text(the @ symbol before each name) to the contents of a cell. He was only too happy to help. Wango Tango it's now as easy as 1-2-3 to put together the 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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