Grinding away a real Twitter following

fix8

fix8

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It's the oldest trick in the book but it might be useful for newbies.

Find a popular Twitter account in your niche (Or even less popular ones*), and start to follow all of their followers. Don't get crazy, so a couple hundred a day or so. After following about 800-1000, start to unfollow people - again around 100-300 a day. You've got to do it liberally, take some days off, or you'll trip the wire and end up getting your account suspended.

There's also plenty of sites that will allow you to do this more quickly, ManageFlitter for example. Tweepi is alright too, but be really careful using these sites because I feel like they probably raise flags of their own.

*Sometimes it's good to skip really popular accounts and go for moderate ones, they're less likely to be followed by a bunch of bots.

The targeting is important, and your avatar and user profile are important too because that's what people will see in their email when they get the notification that you've followed them.
 
So what's the point of unfollowing? You didn't say. I'm assuming you want to unfollow the ones that choose NOT to follow you back?
 
Twitter is something I honestly don't bother with except for the one niche that I actually care about. It can be a full-time endeavor to keep up with it and interact enough to get a real follow-ship and use it effectively for traffic and niche authority. It's also the best way to get the social signals you want too. There's just no way to do it for each of your sites, with tons of profiles in tons of niches.
 
This is kind of a BS strategy in my opinion, like you're gonna "grind away" to basically trick people into reciprocating your follow just for the sake of having a higher number of followers? Why not save yourself tons of time, buy a few k fakies, and be done with it?

I mean, unless you're actually putting in work and engaging with these people you're adding and getting familiar to a point where they'll retweet you and share your content, what's the point OP? Following and unfollowing people all day sounds like the type of job you would have in hell if you were an evil person on earth.
 
The only way I could see this working is if they were all interested in your niche. And there'd have to be a TON out there for this shotgun approach to work even remotely. It's better to simply start a real account, start interacting, and build it organically. The results are going to be 1000x better with the same effort. Sometimes there's no way to cheat the system and any attempts are just a waste of time.
 
mrmoneybags said:
So what's the point of unfollowing? You didn't say. I'm assuming you want to unfollow the ones that choose NOT to follow you back?
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Exactly. You can't follow more than X amount of people until you have X amount of followers, so by getting rid of the ones that don't follow you back, you can continue the process.

ConversionKing said:
The only way I could see this working is if they were all interested in your niche. And there'd have to be a TON out there for this shotgun approach to work even remotely. It's better to simply start a real account, start interacting, and build it organically. The results are going to be 1000x better with the same effort. Sometimes there's no way to cheat the system and any attempts are just a waste of time.
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Like I said in the first sentence of my post, you follow people who are following people in your niche. I find that if I get more obscure (Example if I was building a site for rap music fans, I'll get a more targeted audience by following fans of Spice 1, MF Doom, etc compared to a more mainstream artist with more casual fans.)

I can get the criticism, but good luck starting a Twitter account from square one and getting to 1000 followers in a couple of weeks just by 'engaging with people and interacting'. I hop on for 10 minutes a day, follow some, unfollow some, and I've got a solid audience in a couple of days of REAL, ACTIVE users that are interested in my niche.
 
fix8 said:
I can get the criticism, but good luck starting a Twitter account from square one and getting to 1000 followers in a couple of weeks just by 'engaging with people and interacting'. I hop on for 10 minutes a day, follow some, unfollow some, and I've got a solid audience in a couple of days of REAL, ACTIVE users that are interested in my niche.
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Yep. If you're building up a website, this is the fast track to legitly targeted traffic. Hopefully they re-tweet, tell a friend, build you a backlink somewhere, click an ad, etc. Traffic is nothing if it's not targeted... but this is targeted. It's not as good as organic traffic but it's a great place to get started... and it's free.
 
This is kind of oldschool, and it gets harder and harder with Twitter tightening things up, but it works.

1+, good thread overall, even if it misses some of the finer details. Haters gonna hate, so take the traffic if they don't want it lol.
 
Agree.

I tend to just spend maybe 5 minutes a day on follows/unfollows. It doesn't take much, I'm even more conservative in my numbers per day than you suggest. It's a slow build, but I just do it a little every day, and over time it builds up. Then when I'm procrastinating on content I engage on twitter, re-tweets, replies, favorites, blah blah blah... (That can be a rabbit hole time sink though!)
 
It's soooo dulllllllllllllllllllll... even when I build up a bunch of Twitter followers what's the point... how many are actually going to click through and read my content? Is this still worth doing? Aren't there places where that time can be better spent to get traffic instead of spending months to get a decent following so that a dozen people will click a link I post on twitter?
 
Yea @SheIsaBlogger - I've had the odd great engagement on there that's driven someone to become a customer, or been able to quickly reply to a prospects question... so that's good.

Otherwise, you are probably right. Building twitter following is my way of tricking myself into thinking I'm being productive while procrastinating on bigger things. Something about seeing the follower number go up, and the retweets etc. just tickles me.

I also feel, probably with more weight than it deserves, that it makes a brand look good to have a lot of followers and engagement.
 
Seems like Twitter is better for laser targeting specific people rather than groups, and then trying to network with them. Like going for a guest post.
 
mrmoneybags said:
Seems like Twitter is better for laser targeting specific people rather than groups, and then trying to network with them. Like going for a guest post.
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Yeah exactly. It's the best for networking, but among the worst for marketing.
 
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