Twitter Users - Beware Of Advice About How To Get Followers

Thanks for posting this. I don't use tools to follow or unfollow people in twitter.

I'm glad twitter is doing such a thing. Twitter is not full fledged marketing tool. It is for connecting with people. If you are interesting, people will follow you. If you are helpful, people will follow you. And if you are good enough keep them interested in you, they'll visit your blog/site and take a look at what you have got to offer. But then, this is just my opinion on using twitter.

Thanks for this valuable information.

I have seen that information but have not used it. I like to read the bio of must of the people I follow. I know it takes time but I find out about people and different valuable information that I may not have come across using an automated program.

Well, people can say it's gaming the system but I think differently. I think it's the natural progression more than anything. The fact it that Twitter would be MUCH less than it is now of people we not trying to use it for their own gain.

ANYTIME somebody develops something as large and viral as Twitter, other will try to fill in the gaps and capitalize on it, that's natural. It's also natural that the same service will 1. Try to stop others from doing so, and 2. Try to fill in those gaps themselves at some level . . . especially if they are trying to monetize.

So anyway, I don't know that I would be getting down on those who have been trying to capitalize on the success of Twitter. Like all of us, they are trying to use their God given abilities and talent to create an income. IMO as long as it's not against the stated rules at the time I don't see any issues.

Twitter are not correct about all this stuff.

They should clearly allow or ban the tools for accessing their system.

To let somebody do an action, allow him through your system, and then ban him will FIRST OF ALL decrease any believability in your own system (TWITTER in this case)

Well, I'm clearly biased on this subject, but I see nothing wrong with unfollowing people who don't follow me back. And as for the advice on how to build up Twitter followers - I have almost 19,000 followers now, so I'm fairly confident my advice is good.

I ALSO advise that people use Twitter to interact with others, and that people never use Twitter to just post link after link to their products, or someone else's products. Part of the beauty of Twitter is it's incredibly easy to unfollow people if you dislike what they have to say, if they fill up the Tweetstream with garbage , or for any reason at all.

As for this statement from the Twitter guy, I'm still not completely clear on the implications - "There is no limit to the number of unfollows. Using software to constantly churn followers in a repeated pattern of following and unfollowing will however risk suspension."

Is he referring to dumping EVERYONE that follows you the second that they have followed you, in an effort to make yourself look important by showing that thousands of people are following you and you're too cool to follow more than a few dozen back? Or is he saying that if you use software to unfollow those who don't follow you back, your account risks suspension? Hard to tell exactly from what he said.

And p.s. I know that a lot of people use Twitter to be spammy and annoying. I know that a lot of people mis-use it. I know that a lot of people use Twitter in a way that makes people dislike internet marketers.

For that matter, I'm sure that some people use my Twitter ebook just to build up lots of followers, and then go on to ignore my advice that they contribute value to Twitter, that they give away free good information on Twitter, that they regularly enter into conversations on Twitter.

BUT - that's the same for ALL internet marketers. You've got your ethical marketers who promote good products (either theirs or other peoples) and who don't promise things they can't deliver, and who only communicate with people who want to hear from them - and then you've got all levels of bad internet marketers, selling garbage and using every kind of system they can find to reach people, including unsolicited spam emails - and Twitter.

The fact that SOME people build up a big Twitter following just to flood Twitter with affiliate links, doesn't mean that building up a big Twitter following is bad, or harmful. It's all in how you use the system.

Yeah, I don't see the problem in unfollowing people, if you do it correctly...

Give them some time to follow you, if they don't, then you should unfollow them (unless you really like what they are tweeting about)

I think the best way to get follows is not directly through Twitter.
It's through traditional means, of navigating people to you directly.

Just adding people & following them ends up having non-targeted people on your group.
So, if you end up tweeting them or re-tweeting people not interested in your stuff, you could end up being spammed.
Make people come to you, vs. you going out & getting people is the real way.

I have been on twitter since 2006...

I have tweeted about a dozen times...

I have no clue how many followers I have... maybe a couple hundred.

I follow only people I am interested in. I won't follow anyone who follows me because they are following me.

I guess being a sucky tweeter and not following the popular IM trends (which is how I approach everything in IM) has its benefits ;-)

Though my affiliates do make me some nice cash sending traffic from twitter...

One of my affiliates who produces the most sales from twitter has tens of thousands of followers. It appears he follows more people than are following him so I guess the key to his success is that he is not unfollowing people.

I've been telling people this for awhile now.

i've been hearing about this, a few weeks back, that's why i've slowed down on my tweeting lately. they might think im a robot, with the amount of people i follow online. I just cant stop, if i see a tweet, thats interesting , i follow him/her right away.. i havent started with unfollowing yet.

I have an autoDM when people follow me, and it is interesting to see who the people are who gets them. In the last month, I had dozens of followers who have followed, unfollowed, followed, unfollowed, and yesterday sent them the same message for the 3rd time in one month.

That is crazy, people are using bots to follow/unfollow and they assume you want to follow them, and do so in their time scale.

If I haven't followed you once, twice what makes you think I will follow you when you follow me the third time?

Try talking rather than follow/unfollow using bots.

Again, imo, Twitter is over-rated. I grew tired of people following me only to send some crap. Direct twitter is even worst.

probably twitter will soon not allow to be links posted anymore through its system. then they will cut out all the spam that was taking over twitter

I do not use any mass follow tools or anything... Matter fact my twitter account is only on 2 twitter directories. I use no auto tools at all, all DM's are sent by me, All post are made by me, all RT are made by me...

I do not get the auto follow thing, what ever happen to finding interesting people that share a common interest in something and building a relationship ????

Sure I only have 400 some followers but I have only had twitter for a few weeks and as stated I do everything manually...

James

As long as you're not violating Twitter terms or risking your account as per the article Andy linked to--there is no one way to use Twitter. Use it how it works for you. Maybe the way you use Twitter will lose you followers but it will also gain others so who cares. You can't please everyone. Do what works for you even if it pisses or annoys others. Now if all you do is tweet affiliate links you're not going to get far but that's your journey.

Most automation website promising thousands of twitter followers automatically are most likely a phishing scam in an attempt to hijack your account information.

I manually follow people, and only unfollow those that try to auto DM spam me and/or do massive update spamming.

Twitter has no problems changing the rules "as they go" and caught everybody by surprise. I would be careful. Any strategy that as a potential to become a nuisance to users is certainly going to put down by them.

Marketers are pretty much universally disliked, and sometimes we forget that and get too comfortable with what we do, expecting that nothing bad would ever happen. Mainstream views on what we do are definitely different from what we think.

Tyrus

If you're using desktop tools like Seesmic DESKTOP or TweetDeck then it's extremely easy to keep on top of posts, by creating groups. I use Seesmic to manage 3 accounts and love how configurable it is.

As for people reading your Tweets, there will always be people who are interested in what you have to say, as long as your Tweets don't consist of 'just had a coffee' or 'just walked the dog'. You can check things like clickthrough rates on links you post using tools like tr.im your URLs

Hope this helps,

Mark

When people follow me, I MANUALLY look over their account and decide to follow back or not.

-Nothing but quotes from famous people + occasional sales links: NO FOLLOW
-Nothing but links to your blog posts: NO FOLLOW
-Repeated "I got XXXX followers in YYYY days and you can too": NO FOLLOW
-Profile that reads: You can make 10,000,000 in 3 hours click here! : NO FOLLOW

I'm looking for people that actually interact on Twitter. If I don't see you talking back and forth with people, discussing what they said or responding to their comments, I'm not very interested in following you.