The Real Strategy to Getting Over 10,000 Followers on Twitter

By Lark A. Miller

This is the second time I have made it to over 10,000 twitter followers. No software, no robots and no payments needed! The first time I made it over 10,000 my account was suspended the very next day. To this day, I'm still unsure why but perhaps I was following and unfollowing people too much over a short period of time. When Twitter suspends your account, you don't really get to ask questions. I sent a few emails but haven't heard back in a few months.

Building up that many followers for the first time took me about 6 months. Having that all taken away in 24 hours sucked big time. But, we marketers need to learn to embrace failure and get back on the horse. I knew how to make it back up to a large number of followers and I even found some faster tricks to get there quicker. Here are my not so secret secrets to getting your twitter following increased! No software or payment required!

Follow to Your Max

In order to be followed you must follow others. If you are popular you will gain followers quicker. If you are just starting out online then it will take you a little while to gain some popularity.

Following people one by one on Twitter is not the most fun activity to be doing. Clicking 'follow' over and over again (sometimes 1000 times per day) will make your wrists hurt and your eyes blurry. You need to do something to make it fun or else you won't want to follow people. Try listening to music, listening to a recorded call or watching a webinar while you are following others.

Who to Follow:

• Start by following your leaders and people who inspire you
• Follow key people and celebrities in your industry that have a large following
• Follow people who follow you (using SocialOomph, you can do this automatically)
• Follow people who have tweeted something in the last 24 hours

I prefer using the old Twitter layout for following others. It is faster for me to browse tweeters and see when the last time someone tweeted was. If you are very particular about who you wish to follow you can use the new Twitter layout. It will show you a brief bio of the person you wish to follow.

You can switch back and forth from the old and new layout by selecting 'switch to new Twitter' at the top of the page or by going to your settings and selecting switch to the old Twitter.

To grow your followers the fastest, follow as many people as you can each day. Twitter will stop you when you have reached your limit. Once this happens you will need to wait until you get more followers or you can go ahead and delete tweeters who are not following you back.

Here are some great Free Twitter tools to help you maximize your followers:

Justunfollow.com

This is an awesome site. It's quick and easy to use and you will be able to unfollow those who do not follow you. You will have a daily limit of 50 tweeters that you can unfollow but if you tweet their promotional message then you will get it bumped up to 100 unfollows per day.

After you do the unfollowing make sure you follow your fans. (The people who are following you but you are not yet following them)

Twitter Karma

This is also another tool to follow and unfollow your twitterers. It does not have a daily follow/unfollw limit but it takes a longer time to load and use.

Search.Twitter

This is a tool for you to search for keywords on Twitter. You can search for a topic in your niche and choose to follow people from it. You can also reply or retweet someone's comment. It's a great way to find like minded individuals.

TweetDeck

I use TweetDeck to manage multiple Twitter accounts and post an update to all of them at the same time. You can also integrate Facebook into TweetDeck.

SocialOomph

This is what I use to automate my tweets. I usually do posts about my blog updates, recent videos I've done and other valuable information. Try not to spam your followers with too many sales links, you will get unfollowed.

TweetWax

Worried about all of those direct messages? TweetWax deletes your direct messages in your inbox. This service lets you delete 20 messages at a time.

I personally do not read all of my direct messages because I get too many to keep up with each day and usually they are spam messages. I'm pretty sure your DM box never gets full or slows down your account so delete your messages as you please.

Make sure you have your @twitter name everywhere you can! At the end of your videos, in your video description, on your Facebook, in your emails and in your blog posts. Make it easy for people to follow you and using the Twitter tools mentioned above, you will get up to 10,000 and more followers in no time. There you have it; my not so secret Twitter follower secrets.

Lark Miller

Thank Lark for giving a very helpful tips of making ourselves known to others in twitter. Everyone who will read this article would really benefit from it.

Have you checked out our new Free Master Marketing Webinars yet? ==> http://www.HonestIncomeOnline.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Lark_A._Miller

Why Your Business Needs Friends

A Guest Post by Johnny B. Truant from The Charlie and Johnny Jam Sessions.

I got an email the other day from a man who was at his wit’s end.

The email explained that in this man’s business, he was doing many of the same basic things that I was doing, but with much less success. He had been building websites for years. He had refined his craft. He felt that the sites he built were better, more complete, and had more features and better support than mine. He had more experience than I had. He even said that he was probably smarter than I was.

Yet I was doing really well and he was not. So what was the problem?

I replied that he was looking at the situation incorrectly. Generating the business I have — over 70 current active leads at last count — has nothing to do with making better websites, or being faster, or being cheaper. And it certainly has nothing to do with being smarter. (Besides, I graduated first in my class, ahem.)

There are a million people out there who do what I do. A million people putting up Wordpress sites and making them sing. Plenty of these people are better, faster, and cheaper than I am.

So I told him: People don’t come to me because I create the best Wordpress websites in the world, because I don’t. The people who come to me do so because we’re friends.
This is the Third Tribe

I’m not going to argue that relationship-based marketing is better than bulk-traffic based marketing, because I know that many incomes have been built on attracting a ton of people who you don’t know and who don’t know you. However, I will say that if you’ve never truly tried to get to know your readers, followers, commenters, and casual online acquaintances, you may really be cutting off your profits at the knees.

In case you missed the memo, Darren is one of the principals of the Third Tribe — a group and a philosophy with its roots in building businesses and audiences based on interpersonal connections. If you’re operating with a Third Tribe mentality, the sheer number of people who visit your site or read your blog matters far less than the number of people you exchange a few words with, or who you help without asking for pay, or who like you enough that they’ll retweet everything you post or buy everything you put out.

A Third Tribe business is about getting as many people to like you as possible. I tell my consulting clients that my job is to teach people to make friends.

And yes, I know how naïve that sounds. But hear me out.

Most people in my shoes, looking to sell Wordpress website setups by leveraging social media, would get on Twitter and announce their service’s features and low prices. They’d blast their specials and sales out to Twitter and Facebook. Maybe they’d create a fan page so that people could be “fans” of their business — because, you know, it’s really natural to be a fan of a business. They’d optimize sales pages and plan careful upsells, and they’d massage prospects through their product funnel.

By contrast, here’s how I use social media:

* On my Facebook profile, I have photos of Robert Goulet Photoshopped into ridiculous scenes from my “travels.” (I used to use Robert Goulet as my avatar.)
* Most of what I put out on Twitter are dumb jokes: “I’ll bet zombie dinner parties are really awkward” or “They say that true beauty is on the inside. The problem is that nobody can see it in there, so you’re still going to look ugly.”
* A lot of my own blog posts have nothing at all to do with my business, like “I want to join Fight Club” and “Why I’m exactly like Morpheus.”

That all looks really backward, until you realize that my goal isn’t to create customers, but instead to make friends.

If you’re funny, people tend to like you. (I’m not saying you should be funny if you’re not, but if you’ve got it, flaunt it.)

If you write and talk about yourself as a whole person, rather than a one-dimensional business drone, people tend to be interested in you.

If you answer tweets and emails in a somewhat chatty, personal way instead of going for the sale when it’s not obviously warranted, people tend to enjoy talking to you.

And when all of those friends — and friends of those friends — one day have a need that you are able to fill, they won’t go to Google and look for the first search result or for the guy with the cheapest price. It’s human nature that they’ll come to you — their friend — first.

This really can be as simple as I’m making it sound. If you have an easily consumable product or service that a lot of people need and can afford, then all you really need to do is to get out there and make online friends. And they don’t even have to be friends-friends, if you know what I’m saying. They can be people who have read what you wrote somewhere and liked it. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard something like, “I read something you wrote on IttyBiz about kung fu, and would like you to build me a website.”

I’m so not kidding.

The beauty of this approach is that it’s easy and natural if you can just unlearn some of the ingrained habits you’ve gotten used to, like a feeling that a businessperson should be “professional,” or that a fashion blogger should, you know, always talk about fashion and nothing else.

The web has magnified our interpersonal connections and the ability to meet new folks in new ways, but it hasn’t changed the fundamental nature of relationships. If we like people, then we want to hang out with them more, and do more with them. It’s that simple.

Now get out there and make some new friends.

Johnny B. Truant writes about Fight Club, tweets about zombies, and is one of the two extremely personable guys behind The Charlie and Johnny Jam Sessions. If you want to build a cool business while being a real person instead of a boring business drone, you should definitely get in on those.