I set about getting more followers, my realistic aim was to follow two people for every person that followed me... I would go to that a new followers account and manually follow two of their followers... (having read quickly a small amount about them)... This believe it on not work well... by February I had 700 followers, it was exponential, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 and so on... it was working...
I would also say that during this time I signed up for every Twitter program I could find from the brilliant www.manageflitter.com to the less impressive www.hubspot.com. You can see the remnants of this work on my LinkedIn Group 'Twitter Tools' and to be fair much of this group remains valid today.
When I reached about 900 followers I stopped my strategy of adding two for one follower... I was inundated and indeed I have today 2356 new Twitter followers that I have not responded to. So I stopped... In the course of April, May, June, I let things flow and they did I was gaining lots of followers and through using a site like www.twittercounter.com I was able to monitor my growth... by July I was about 1600 up.
Then I went through a period of 'what's it all for' - call it my mid-life Twitter crisis, I certainly wasn't gaining any new business and looking at my stream just bored me to tears... it seemed Twitter consisted of millions of stall holders in a giant marketplace with no customers. I tweeted 'Twitter - one giant marketing place where everyones a stall holder and there are no customers'. Zero response was naturally achieved.
And now for the crux of the matter, I of course was not really alone and plenty of my customers experienced the same sort of thing. Very little response. The ROI on using something like Twitter and Social Media seems further away then ever, I wrote about how you might measure ROI, but all to no response, from anyone, my clients or my followers.
Then along came www.klout.com (Don't worry I'm not going to say anything nice about them), and the whole web marketing community suddenly had a measuring stick. A Yard stick that you could say x was doing better than Y... there was/is still not the remotest concept of an actual ROI within all this, but people were now able to say I moved your scrore from 11 out of 100 to 32... result...
But, it's not the case is it... it means nothing, being influential does not equal sales, plenty of companies get by just fine without any influence and in this case the measuring tools can only be described flaky at the very best... But I'm going off subject here, what we need is a Twitter Strategy.
I strongly believe I had the right basics in place. Follow your followers followers. It's easy, if manual, but you can vet every person you follow and through the exponential rule of 2, 4, 8, 16 you will quickly form a following of about 1000 people...
The next 1000 people will be slower, but more naturally, people will follow you largely for the sake of it and not because they are interested... However when you have around 2000 people you need to start (or rather for that ROI in question) you can start to take Twitter a little bit more seriously. it starts becoming worth you effort to make something out of it.
So one year on and now that I have been on Twitter for FIVE years - my next strategy is to improve the quality of my Twitter Following... I need to remove the trash and beef up the quality people that are useful to me... whereas I started following news and media Twitters and minor celebs I need to move on and follow people that effect me... largely that is suppliers, journalists, people I read about, website designers, clients, and people that I think will have a positive contribution to make to my day and my Twitter Stream.
Things have changed and 2012 will see an even greater take up of Twitter in general, it's going to grow, so my recommendation now is - get a decent sized account, 2000, or even 4000, followers should be about right, and then go for quality... remove the blatant marketeers and spammers and make sure when ever you read a news story, or articles, or blog or website - add that person to Twitter... Because they will be very likely to follow you back and then their 'followers' will see you news.
Sound good? Comments welcome!
