Twitter Followers Hack

When I started blogging last year I wanted to use every social media platform as best as I could so I could reach as many readers as possible.  I created a Facebook page, an Instagram account, and revived my old twitter account.  I believed, as most people who are invested in building an audience on social media do, that my focus needed to be gaining as many likes and followers as possible to increase my readership and provide as much value to the widest audience as possible.

I’ve since learned that this approach is faulty and the opposite is true.  While we’re all looking for the golden twitter hack to give us the largest audience, the reality is that we need to focus more on creating deep relationships instead of trying to create a lot of relationships.

I had learned a twitter followers hack early on to increase my followers.  My goal was to have 2k followers because I felt this would demonstrate a significant following in light of how short of a time I had been blogging.  So I followed a trick an entrepreneur friend had shown me.  I sought out other twitter accounts that had similar markets to mine.  For example, I would find authors whose books I wrote about and I would add as many of their followers as possible.  I hoped that what I wrote on the blog would appeal to them directly and they would follow me back on twitter and visit my blog.  Once I added as many people as twitter would allow me in a day (approximately 700-800 a day) I would wait for 2-3 days to see who would follow me back.  After those 2-3 days I would us a free app on my iPhone to unfollow everyone who wasn’t following me back.  Reset and repeat regularly.  That’s how I got 2k followers on twitter.

It took me a few months using this method, but I quickly reached 2k followers.  Some people would check out my blog, but the majority of who followed me back were not engaged with me, I didn’t know who they were, and many of them had autofollow software set up so they automatically followed me when I followed them.  In the end, I had 2k followers, but I felt like I wasn’t connected to hardly any of them.  I began to feel what has been called a heightened sense of connection with an extremely low sense of touch with those connections.

I started to wonder if I was helping anyone at all.  I wondered if my approach was manipulative.  And then I heard from my entrepreneur friend again about how his twitter followers actually represented social capital for him recently.  A potential teenage customer came up and bragged that a competing company had more twitter followers than my friends company.  My friend laughed and quoted the competing company as having less and proved it on his phone.  The teenager quickly was impressed and took my friends company more seriously.

So do the number of followers have value or not?!

I questioned myself again.  Do twitter followers represent social capital and a sense of credibility amongst your market that you can’t afford to miss out on?  Or, do I believe what Gary Vaynerchuck argues?  Vaynerchuk says one of the greatest failures people make on social media is to confuse breadth of connections (number of followers) with a depth of connection (how often people will actually listen and do what you say).  Basically, just because you have 2k followers doesn’t mean any of them listen to you or do what you say.  So, he says it’s better to have only a few followers if they buy everything you sell, read everything you write, and share anything you do.  That’s especially valuable if those followers are Obama and Oprah who have enormous audiences.  We are all interconnected, so believing someone with only a few followers is irrelevant is very dangerous.  Here’s a short video where Vaynerchuk explains that in a bit more detail.  http://youtu.be/-MTgxKmX100

All of this lead me to make a choice.  I do my best to no longer care about numbers of followers, but to focus more on the depth of the relationships that I already have.  I went and unfollowed every single person on twitter that I couldn’t immediately identify as a friend, acquaintance, or someone I valued.  If I didn’t know you, you were gone.  That has had three major consequences.

1. A large number of people unfollowed me back, reducing my “social capital and credibility” in the eyes of those who value that and I’m totally okay with that.
2. I actually read my twitter feed now.
3. I interact directly with people who I know more deeply.