THE EASY PATH
Prefer the easy path? Just follow these four basic steps.
- Follow somebody at random – literally anyone will do
- Wait 24-48 hours to see if they follow you back
- If they don’t, unfollow them
- Repeat
This is known as churning. And while it’s supposed to be a breach of Twitter’s TOS, they rarely do anything about it. It’s a simple and highly-effective way to build a lot of followers in a short period of time. In three months you can easily pick up ten thousand people. And if you’re really into it, a lot more.
There’s just one (relatively minor) drawback to finding followers using this system: almost none of these profiles (1-2 per cent maximum) will pay you any attention whatsoever. This is because most of the people who automatically follow you back are employing the exact same system as you. With very, very few exceptions, the actual value of a network built this way is at or close to zero. Want proof? Just check out the bit.ly data of anyone who built a Twitter network using these practices.
Take a look around Twitter and you’ll see lots of folks, many of whom come bearing titles such as guru, maven and internet marketer – and so many of them are enthusiasts, too, which is always nice to see – who have built huge followings using this very system. They’re easy to spot, as they’re nearly always following a few hundred more people than the tens (and sometimes hundreds) of thousands of people who are following them. Although a few are sneaky, and later mass-unfollow almost everyone to make it look like they recruited their audience simply by being awesome. They didn’t. And they’re not.
THE HARD PATH
Unfortunately, the hard path is literally that: hard. It takes time, it takes effort, and it requires all of this to work.
- Learn the Twitter basics (and continue to educate yourself)
- Write perfect tweets
- Be yourself
- Put in the hours
- Be useful, helpful or interesting
- Be nice (until it’s time to not be nice)
- Have a proper avatar
- Pay attention
- Don’t be a jerk
