Many experts will agree that success on Twitter is not dependent on the number of followers you have or the number of people you follow. I've heard talk about follower ratios and what the ideal ratio should be, but that's not what I want to focus on today. Today, I would like to share with you my philosophy on the Twitter follow. For someone new to Twitter, followers are a big deal. They are spending a good amount of time tweeting to an audience of five or ten and they feel a little lost in the noise. To those of you feeling this way - I offer hope. I was there too. And while I'm no Ashton Kutcher, I've gained followers slowly over the course of the last year. Would I have wanted this progress to happen faster? Absolutely not and I'll tell you why.
There are ways to boost the number of people following you such as commenting on a celebrity's tweet or finding a way to be mentioned by them. Or, you can mass follow a ton of people and hope that they automatically follow you back. The problem with these tricks is that you are likely to get a lot of people following you who you don't really know and with whom you may not professionally connect. You might tweet a need for resources for an event you have coming up only to find that your followers don't have a clue what type of help to offer.
So, my philosophy on following is:
Stress about who you follow, not who follows you.
Stress about Who You Follow
When you decide to follow someone, you need to make sure that they are engaging and tweet information related to your interests and brand. You want to follow people that you can connect with. The more people you follow, the harder it is to keep connected with each of them so try to organize them into lists (which we'll talk about tomorrow) to keep track of all their activity. You also need to watch out for tweetaholics who will clog up your entire feed with information about themselves, preventing you from keeping up with all your other valued followers. It's not a good idea to mass follow on Twitter because you end up following a bunch of people that you would never like to keep in touch with. General guidelines on who to follow include:
- Stay in touch with people who seem to know more than you in the industry. These are people you can learn from. You might even come to see them as your virtual mentors.
- Stay in touch with people who seem to know a little less than you in the industry. This is where you can contribute what you know to help others in the industry.
- Stay in touch with people who share your interests, even if it's not entirely related to your day job. You are a well rounded person and Twitter can convey that.
- Don't worry about how often a person tweets, as long as it's valuable. Unless, of course, it's so often you can't enjoy other's tweets.
- Keep in mind that those who respect you will likely look at who you follow. Monitor your account so it doesn't look like you follow spammers and other inappropriate tweeters.
Don't Stress About Who Follows You
What I would like to convey about this point is that worrying about your follower count isn't the best use of your important (and very busy) time. I do look at my followers once in a while and block the spammers and I try to take a look at new people to see what they are tweeting about. I find a good number of interesting people by searching this group. You do want to keep an eye on the numbers because it's a good gauge of how you are connecting with the twitterverse. If you are tweeting engaging content, your Twitter following should go up automatically. Please note that many people will automatically refrain from following you if you don't have your profile filled out, especially if you don't have a picture. There are a lot of spammers out there who typically don't have profile pics so you need to be careful about this one.
All in all, I don't believe there is a golden ratio for Twitter, but I do think you need to be aware that you aren't following 1,000 people and being followed by 100. That means something about your quality. If you are following 100 and 1,000 are following you, it says something about your engagement. Other than these vast disparities, relax about your quantity and focus on the quality of your tweets. If you do this, you will find that your brand will spread over time and will be appreciated and known for what it really is!
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Tags: 30 Days of Branding, Personal Branding, Social Media/Technology, Twitter
