Twitter 101 Question

Although James has a lot of followers, there seems to be a high mix of mostly IMers exchanging and building each other up that way. I don't buy into that, and largely ignore IMers on my Twitter.

You are searching for people interested in a specific niche, so if you follow everyone who follows someone, you are just falling into an "automated" trap which will get you a lot of IMers, but not a lot of quality followers who actually respond.

I suggest you download seesmic or tweetdeck and have some auto-searches for terms in your niche. For example, I have a saved terms like "learn poker", but that doesn't mean I follow anyone who tweets that term.

If I like their tweet, and I think I can help them I follow and respond to them directly with some help, a link, a question etc. Watch how high the %age of followers YOU approach first will respond back. I get from 75-90% follow me back. I am esp interested in them if they DO NOT have a lot of followers because they are really socializing in Twitter, not swapping clickbank links with other IMers.

Try some of these tactics before going automated >

http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...ml#post1531309

Get Hummingbird and use it. Turn it on before you go to sleep at night, voila.

Thanks Marty S...I'm gonna try that.

@theemperor - Marty offers excellent advice in his post. Instead of trying to use the latest automated software, check up on what these people are tweeting about before actually following them. In my experience, it is very easy to spot the IMers and 'bots, so this is how you avoid following them. It is more time consuming, for sure, but your chances of getting targeted followers are increased greatly by doing things manually like this.

Paulie, James, Jah, Andrew, Marty,

So I see here a camp that is advocating looking closely at what the people are tweeting before following rather than bulk following. And another camp who are saying to use automated tools.

I have to admit I seem to have landed many IM or self-promoting followers using the list building techniques so far, based on automatically following and I guess this means I get less air-time from "real people" i.e. those who use twitter socially.

I think I need to test both approached - huge automated lists, v.s. smaller but more personal ones and see what works better for me.

Thanks all for giving me new ideas, twitter is certainly a different animal to anything I have worked with before.