5 Sure Ways To Get 10K+ Twitter Followers
February 4th, 2009
Maybe it’s just me, but it feels like Fonzie is warming up the motorcycle where Twitter is concerned.
One sign that the jump ramp is being pushed closer to the shark tank is the plethora of articles about how to increase the number of followers you have on Twitter. Here’s one from Kevin Rose. Here’s one from DoshDosh. Here’s one from TwiTip. I could go on for hundreds of column-inches, but go ahead and fire up Google and see for yourself: The Interweb’s lousy with this sort of advice.
I’ve read my share of these articles, and they all pretty much amount to conventional Twitter wisdom: Tweet links. Add value. Ask for retweets. And so on. Good tips as far as they go, but they’ll only take you so far.
No one’s giving you the real story about how to catapult yourself into the Twittersphere stratosphere, that rarefied air of five-figure followers that is one of the most coveted inhales of today’s geekerati.
Till now.
Pay close attention: If you’re jonesing to break through to the Twitterholic 100, these surefire tips really, really, really work. Promise.
1. Host This Week in Tech. If you can’t convince Leo Laporte (82,424 followers as I write this) to let you take his place as leader of the #1 podcast out there, an alternative is to become a guest on TWiT and pimp your Twitter name whenever possible; many of the 300k+ listeners on Twitter are bound to follow you.
2. Establish an influential global news presence. Like CNN Breaking News (129,833) and The New York Times (59,227), take a multidimensional approach to news dissemination, because you never know: Twitter may still be here long after your network collapses or your newspaper folds.
3. Become a cultural touchstone. Develop a persona that has the paparazzi stalking you 24/7. Win a Grammy. Pose nude on the cover of Harper’s. Hang out with Paris Hilton. Hey, it worked for Britney (59,388).
4. Sell shoes. Okay, I don’t get it, either. But the Zappos.com CEO has 49,242 followers. Go figure.
5. Become President of the United States. As I write this, Barack Obama has 230,551 followers. In your face, Vladimir Putin.
If it all sounds like too much work, you may want to forget about Twitter entirely and wait for the next wave of microblogging and/or hypernetworked instant messaging to take hold. Personally, I think 2 is the next 140.
Takeaway for marketers: If you’re on Twitter, it’s going to take a lot more than whatever it is you do on Twitter to get you some followers on Twitter.
(By the way: That cartoon up top is from Geek and Poke, a great site you need to check out.)
February 10th, 2009 at 12:53 am
We could leave comments in your blog and hope you send us some new Twitter followers. Or we could guest-blog at some blogs that are more famous than our own. Or have pretend conversations with famous Twitter users as so many have recommended. Or just keep on Tweeting – and eventually we’ll get there.
One other thing we can do is add a Twitter field in the comments on our blog so Twitter users can follow each other when they read comments they like. That is on my list of things to add in my own blog, the name of which is also my Twitter and FriendFeed IDs.
February 18th, 2009 at 9:57 pm
Of course, it begs the ineffable question: What will I do with 10,000 followers? The good tweeters are contributing to what feels like a new kind of embed reporting, where you and hundreds of others are posting real-time intelligence about the world we live in; the bad ones are like old time radio towers trying to push their signal out as wide in the spectrum as they can.