9 Tips on Finding and Managing Twitter Followers

Piggybacking on this week’s guest post from Adam Hann, I thought I would share a bit of my philosophy on following, which I not only use for myself, but teach to my clients who are using Twitter. If you are tweeting for the sake of business, it behooves you to grow your base of followers.

1. Follow Local – If you are an individual or small, locally focused business, start searching for people in your city or region. If you find a few locals, begin to look at their follower/following lists and fine more locals. This probably won’t make sense if you are a larger corporate entity with more of a national or international focus. If you are here in the Lancaster area, you should check out this list from Daniel Klotz of local Twitter users. It’s a good place to start.

2. Follow by industry/topic – Use the search capabilities of Twitter (I like to use the free Seesmic Desktop app because of it’s highly focused search capabilities) and search for people talking about you, your product, your industry, or any topic related to your industry. These people might be worth following. Take a look at them. See what they add to the conversation. I try to follow a few dozen new people from this category

3. Your followers – Once you get going, people will begin to follow you. This brings up the issue of whether or not you should follow everyone who follows you. The short answer to this is: no. You are under no compulsion to follow people who follow you. However, there are some you may want to follow. Since I use a third-party app for Twitter, I rarely log on to the actual Twitter website. But I try to do that at least once a week, just to see who is newly following me. I will most likely follow you back if you meet the criteria of #1 and/or #2. Look at their tweets. Are they conversing and engaging? I generally won’t follow someone that is merely selling via Twitter or using it as a glorified RSS feed. You’ll also notice a lot of “spammy” followers, so no need to follow them.

4. Be open, not private – a lot of people “protect” their tweets which means that the only way someone can follow them is if they approve. If you are just on Twitter for personal reasons, and not representing a business, this MIGHT make sense for you. But in general, I’m not a fan of protecting your tweets as it adds an extra obstacle from people following you. Sure, it prevents spammers from following you, but I don’t worry about that too much. The spammers can follow me all they want, I just don’t have to follow them back.

5. People who engage you – If someone @ replies you, answer them back. Continue the dialogue, and if you’re not following them, that might be a good sign that you should. People who engage you first might be worth engaging on a regular basis. For some reason they find you worthy of engagement, so reciprocation might be in order.

6. Watch your friends – Look at the people you converse with the most via Twitter. With whom are they conversing? Good chance the people they talk to are people you might be interested in…and they might fit into either the local and/or industry category.

7. Follow Friday – Every Friday a number of folks on Twitter practice what is known as “Follow Friday” and use the #followfriday or #ff hashtags. This is a way for you and others to recommend people for others to follow. Look at the people you are following, particularly those whom you value you the most. Who are they suggesting you to follow? Try a few new people every week.

8. Be relevant and interesting – The best way to get people to follow you…whom you can then follow back, is to be interesting. If you are providing relevant and interesting content, and engaging in regular conversations, people are more likely to follow you.

9. Don’t get swamped – As your Twitter following grows, it might seem as though it becomes unmanageable to read what so many people are tweeting. Tools like Seesmic Desktop and Tweetdeck provide handy columns that allow you to separate the people you are following into groups. On top of that, you’ll begin to have a built in selectivity. As I read through my Twitter stream, I don’t even come close to reading every tweet. I have built in filters that allow me to skim over certain people, while I focus on the people who are most important to me. You can also use Twitter’s list function to help better manage and organize your incoming Twitter stream.

Overall, I try to begin following 50-100 new people every week, knowing that some of them will follow back, and also knowing that I may eventually unfollow some of them.

But remember, it’s not really a numbers game. There is no magic number of followers. You’ve heard it before and you’ll hear it again: It’s much better to have 10 highly engaged followers as opposed to 1,o00 followers who never engage or even read your tweets. And much of that depends on how well YOU engage THEM.

How do you choose whom to follow? And how do you manage your Twitter stream?

Tagged as: Marketing, Social Media, Twitter