So many posts out there how to gain followers on Twitter that people don’t really pay attention to the tactics they use for building their Twitter following which are bad practice. So let me shed some light on that! Check out my top 5 tactics which people use to gaining Twitter followers but shouldn’t.
Don’t follow people hoping they will follow back
This is maybe the most common practice many small business owners and social media marketers use. But it is not a good idea to follow someone hoping they will follow back – let me give you an example why not.
Let’s say you are a small business owner who produces leather bags. You will follow some of your competitors, I presume, maybe some fashion magazines, leather distributors and some other type of industry Twitter feeds. You will also follow some blogs (like this one) that gives you tips how to improve your marketing with minim budget, right? Ok – but does this mean I have to follow you back?
I don’t like leather bags, I know nothing about them – and I don’t want to know anything about them. So I most probably won’t follow you back. (Spoiler alert: next week we will speak about the basic principles of whom to follow when and why).
However, this doesn’t mean you should unfollow me only because I have not followed you back. I am of interest for you, I give you practical marketing tips – so you follow me and I help you with the content I share. You are not of interest to me with your leather bags and the related topics you tweet about – so I won’t follow you back. And that is ok. I wills till reply to your questions and tweets 😉
So if you follow people hoping they will follow you back, you might potentially miss great twitter feeds which can help you.
And vise verse – you might follow all the wrong person and attract all the wrong followers who don’t really care who you are and what you have to offer to them.
Don’t use some tool for automatic following or auto follow back
We cleared why the follow-me-I-will-follow-you-back concept isn’t a good practice. But that also includes the automatic follow back feature which many social media tools offer. The reasons why I say not to do that are pretty much the same.
When auto following back people on Twitter, you don’t have the control over the quality of your Twitter friends. And even if the tool for auto following is based on keywords or hashtag used, it still isn’t a good practice.
Here’s the difference. I use #freelance in some of my tweets. But so do hundreds of other people. The fact that someone uses #freelance in their tweets doesn’t make them a good source for freelance related news or articles, does it?! If you read my tweets and content though, you will know I am a credible source of freelance tips (along with tens of other people, I suppose). So don’t follow those hundreds of people who use the hashtag, follow those tens of people who use the hashtag and share useful freelance tips content. See the difference?
Don’t trust automatic SMM tools to choose whom you follow on Twitter.
Don’t beg people to follow you; nor offer to follow them back in return.
I don’t know about you but I often get desperate direct messages or tweets or even emails begging me to follow them on Twitter.
If you come crying to me how hard you are trying to build your Twitter following and how you need new followers fast, sending a message like “please, pretty please, follow me on Twitter and I will follow back” won’t cut it. You will put off more people than gaining new followers, I promise you that. To gain new followers on Twitter, you will have to actually spend some time there – so please, pretty please,
Stop begging people to follow you on Twitter – try networking with them instead 😉
Don’t buy twitter followers
This includes not paying ridiculously low wage to people from low socio-economic countries for thousands of followers for a week – they won’t be good followers. They won’t be real either.
Twitter isn’t a numbers game. Sure, having 1000 followers does look better on your profile than having 100 followers. But in the long run – does this really matter? If you are aiming at many followers cheap and fast, you are on the wrong track. Better aim at targeted followers.
What use would those 1000 followers be if they have no idea who you are or what you offer? How the increase in Twitter followers would matter if it doesn’t convert into increase in traffic to your website, generated leads, brand awareness or whatever else goal you had in mind when you started the campaign for increasing your followers?
Quality is more important than quantity, especially if you are using Twitter for business.
Don’t tweet constantly – more tweets doesn’t necessarily mean more followers
I know tens even maybe hundreds of tweets are published every second but this doesn’t mean half of them should come from your handle, right? If you tweet constantly, chances are – you are stuffing other people’s tweet feeds. So the chances of others unfollowing you increase.
While it’s true that you need to spend more time on Twitter to gain more followers, it doesn’t guarantees that tweeting a lot will bring you these new followers you are aiming at. Sometimes it can even harm you.
Imagine if your profile says you have sent over 5,000 tweets and you have only 500 followers. How do you think others will perceive your account? Nobody would follow you, ever (except maybe spammers). If the numbers are the opposite – 500 tweets and 5K followers – now that’s something. Your twitter feed gotta be very interesting to many people 😉
In my experience, 5 prescheduled tweets in different time of the day plus all the manual interactions you would do on daily basis is a good balance for you to tweet.
Tell me in the comments – what tactics to gain followers on Twitter annoy you?
By the way, now that you know what not to do to gain twitter followers, rest assured I will soon blog about gaining them the right way 😉
I hate it when people buy followers to grow their numbers. Like, c’mon . . . really? You have to buy friends? That’s so lame.
lame or not, it won’t help your business, that;s for sure. 😀 Thanks for stopping by, Lorraine!
I agree with Lorraine. I f you have to buy friends, I don’t want to deal with you, because of your selfish motives. To me, you are not a sincere person, but rather, a user. Blessings.
Hey, while i agree with you – i’d like to point that i don’t think many people “have to” buy friends – they just don’t know better… Hope this posts helps a few who don;t know better 😀
HI Diana
Yes we have totally different philosophies on this subject too.
I don’t disagree with some of your ideas and points, but you are only looking at it from one perspective.
What if I am not reading all the tweets of the people I follow? And let’s face it, anyone with over a few hundred is not.
With a larger following, what you need to do is put the ones you are interested in in lists.
The rest you followed to get you on their radar. Else you are waiting for organic growth, which could take…..a little while.
So you are right, in a purist sense (like with the comments), it should all come your way because you rock and people love your stuff. But the big problem with this is – how are you going to get on people’s radars? Hashtags, sure. Follow like minded people, also. But only the one’s who’s tweets you want to read…not in my opinion.
So for a small business, perhaps it is not a bad idea to know everyone you are connected with on Twitter, but then you will never grow your audience very fast. That could be fine, it depends on your goals.
As a blogger I need a large audience, and 100 followers won’t work. (ok, I might get 1000 visits a month, but I can’t live from that).
Similarly you could also say that we should not build any links for SEO that are not organic, and we should not strive for a better ranking on Google but only hope for it to happen because people will appreciate our great content and link to it. Not gonna happen.
But, on the other side of the coin, I do want to strive for more engagement on my Twitter account than I currently have. It is a fine balance.
My two cents
ashley
wait, what? hahaha, ok, Ash, i know we think differently on this matter (this is primarily because we have totally different twitter-goals :D) but you put some words here in my mouth… let’s make sure we are on the same page 😀
Before that – you know you can put someone on a list without actually following them, right? This way you can keep your follow ratio clean and appealing (more followers/less following) and still see interesting feeds… Lists is a great way to organize your feeds, regardless the number of people you follow or follow you… but i am sure you know that already.
Anyways, something else i wanted to say – because it really bugged me. We agree on the twitter stuff and besides the i follow you because i want you to follow me back part – i am sure we are somewhat in an agreement, provided the same goals are laid before us.
But what was this about the SEO and not building links or not striving for Google traffic? These are things i have never said (and i don’t think they are quite true for that matter) but it appears from your comment that somehow i believe in them.
SEO or Twitter, being proactive is what counts. Putting yourself in front of the people who want to buy from you IS the right way to go. It’s just you go about it by following people to get on their radar – i am going about it by really getting to know those people and answering/addressing their pains, questions, needs, etc..
So, end of the day you have many followers, plenty of traffic and some conversions (because you are a blogger and make your living with your blog, didn’t know that by the way ;-)), while i have XXX followers, some traffic and name associated with certain type of topics and tweets which not always lead to traffic but always lead to networking and referrals. And that is more important for a small business. Not traffic per say – leads and sales is what counts.
But as you said – it’s a bit different for a blogger who relies on attracted traffic to click on ads/affiliate links/buy books/whatever it is they have on their blog that generates money from clicks.
So, about the purist way that i like, as you put it – if you have someone working full time on twitter, i can promise you the purist way will get the numbers your non-purist way gets, and pretty fast too – just the ROI would be greater because of the authority that stands behind that
We can of course agree to disagree 😀
Thanks for your 2 cents – much appreciated (just the part about SEO really bugged me, Google is my best friend, always has been, always will be…:D)
To me Twitter is so noisy. There is no way to keep track of more than a couple hundred people. Anything beyond that is a fun hit and miss grab bag. Lists are a great way to keep track of various people. I’ve followed lots of book bloggers and promoters, but I don’t actively covet their tweets. However, when I want to see what’s up in their neck of the weeks, I’ll go to my list. To me, Twitter is the one social network where I don’t mind following so many people. I’ve read every bio of each person I’ve added. Along the way, a few gems have emerged.
I hear you, Jeri, about Twitter being so noisy – that’s one of the reasons why it is my least favorite network – sometimes robs us from the tailored to myself, personal experience 😀
I’m careful who I let follow me. I always check a person’s Twitter feed — are their comments useful and appropriate? — and check their website. It takes extra work but I will block questionable people. I’m not so vain that I think all my followers are reading my tweets but I want to be sure if they are the tweets have some quality. I will also block people who I see have 80-90,000 tweets. They just clutter my stream. And I do not follow back a lot of people who follow me for the reasons Diana mentions. I use Hoot Suite which I check from time to time to see what the people I’m especially interested in are saying (social media mavens, etc.).
thanks for stopping by, Jeannette! Since you mention Hootsuite AND the way you describe using Twitter, i would recommend SocialBro – it is a super handy tool. Its free version is a bit limited but it will give you the feel to decide if you want to give it a try. 😉
I am by in large pretty careful about who I follow and why. Thus I’m growing my following very slowly. What I do need to do and haven’t is to concentrate on utilizing the list option. This could and would allow to cut through all the buzz to the ones that are regulars and who I greatly enjoy.
I agree with you about asking or buying followers. It never occurred to me to even think about begging someone to follow me much less to buy followers. That simply doesn’t not make any since to me. Both of those actions don’t feel very credible and authentic to say the least. Just my thoughts. 🙂
Oh, Susan, you’d be surprised (no, wait, terrified!!!) if i told you how many people out there buy followers and/or beg you for a follow back (some do both LOL). Utilizing lists is a must if you are serious about using Twitter – no way you could cut through the noise otherwise.
Here is a nice little article on social media today to get you started on the topic. Enjoy! 😀
Well,
I follow people who either in my niche or tweet cools stuff.
I don’t like retarded tweets like :”My toe itches” or tweets that make no sense and mindless.
I hate buy this , buy that tweets and my main one is : Lose weight………!
I’m a vegetarian I need to gain weight …how about that!
sweet
Akos
Thanks for stopping by, Akos, and for sharing your 2 cents. I appreciate it!
And i gotta tell you – probably all women here just got a little jealous about your need to gain weight LOL
I have to tell you, the first time I saw an ad for buying Twitter followers I couldn’t really understand what I was reading. Buying followers seemed like such a pointless exercise that I figured I was misinterpreting or simply not understanding what i was reading. 🙂
Well, Debra, you;d be surprised how many small business owners out there are on Twitter because they have heard it’s good for traffic and for business – and to them, the most natural thing is buying followers because followers is what everyone’s preaching and because the “social media experts” are telling them it’s a good investment and good practice. Sad but true…