Building a Following on Twitter

Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from “Twitter Power: How to Dominate Your Market One Tweet at a Time,” by Joel Comm with Ken Burge.

Web sites have users, Facebook has friends, and Twitter has followers. They follow your messages—and in the process, they follow your life.

Unlike users or Facebook friends, though, followers don't have to make any effort to enjoy your content. The tweets that you write can come to them, even directly to their mobile phone if they want.

But like users and Facebook friends, followers are valuable. The more followers you have, the further your messages will reach and the more influence you'll have.

As always on the Internet, it can take time to build a large community of readers—certainly more time than most impatient publishers like to commit. But it's worth the effort and there are a number of things that you can do to reduce that time and build your list quickly.

The most important is the piece of advice that remains golden whatever you're doing on the Internet: Produce content that's interesting, fun and valuable.

Tweets are supposed to describe what you're doing right now, but they can also include opinions, announcements, and conversations. You can write anything you want. You can even include links in your tweets to send people for further reading. Clearly, that can be very useful!

But if all you do is tell people about your new product or try to send them to some affiliate site, you'll soon find that you have no followers at all.

Don't forget that many of your followers will be receiving your tweets on their mobile phones. That means that they might be paying for them. If they don't think that they're getting value for their money—whether that's entertainment value, advice value, or any other kind of value—they'll stop following.

You might not have to pay money for followers on Twitter. But you do have to pay with good content—in 140 characters or less.

In this chapter, I'm going to explain how to build your followers. As you follow these strategies though bear in mind that the best way to create a long list of followers—the only way to keep them reading and engaged—is always to create great content.

Quantity or Quality: Choosing the Type of Following You Want
If you want masses and masses of followers, there's really nothing to it. It's a breeze. It's simple. It's almost foolproof.

Simply browse Twitter and follow everyone you see.

Some of those people will follow you in return automatically. Others will follow you out of manners.

Most won't follow you at all, so to get, say, 1,000 followers you might have to follow 7,000 or 8,000 Twitterers or more.

It's possible. You can do it. And if you're desperate to have a large Twitter following, it could be an interesting experiment.

But I wouldn't recommend it, and I wouldn't do that for a number of reasons.

The first is that it's going to take you a huge amount of time. It's going to be very tedious, and it's going to stuff the tweets that you see on your home page with messages from people you really don't care to follow.

In effect, you're agreeing to be spammed in return for doing some spamming yourself.
That's going to turn what should be a really fun experience into something that you're really not going to want to do for very long.

But the most important reason for not building your followers by following as many people as you possibly can is that the marketing effect will be about as strong as spam.

When you send out a tweet about your new product, your new blog post, or the release of your new e-book, only a small fraction of your followers will pay attention.

That doesn't mean that you shouldn't want a large Twitter following, though. Obviously, lots of interested followers is always going to be better than a few interested followers. But the price to be paid for having a large number of followers is often a less-targeted market and a lower conversion rate of followers to customers or users of your own site.

On the other hand, you can choose to target only those people with a direct interest in your topic; while you should be able to keep many of them active and engaged, there will be relatively few of them.

And you'll be missing other people who might be interested in what you have to say.
So what should you do? Should you attempt to build as large a following as possible? Or should you try to make it as targeted as possible?

In general, you want a core group of followers who are very interested in your topic, as many people as possible with a mild interest in your topic, and a few people who might be interested in some aspects of your topic if you get lucky.
In practice, level of interest is not easy to measure, and the chances that you'll turn a vaguely interested follower into a loyal customer will depend on your topic. If you're using your Twitter membership to drive people to a Web site and products about fantasy football, for example, you might be able to convert many people who have an interest in sports, even if they don't play fantasy football.

If you tweet about lacrosse, though, you'll probably struggle. A more focused group of followers would then be much more valuable than a large one.

One factor in deciding whether to go for as large a group as possible or focus on a select group is the broadness of your topic's appeal.

*If your topic is very popular—sport or cars, for example—you could do well with a large group of followers.

*If your topic appeals only to a small crowd—polo, for example, or solar-powered cars—then you might do better narrowing down your followers.

Note that the broadness of a topic's appeal isn't the same as the size of its niche. A marketer who had a Web site about Corvettes, for example, would be operating in a small niche. But the topic could be of interest to anyone who likes cars.

When you're considering who to target for your followers, begin with those most interested in your topic. Then expand to bring in people who might be interested in some of the topics you'll cover in your tweets.

Clearly, there's no scientific formula here.

The balance that you create between a highly targeted group of Twitter followers and a more general crowd will usually be down to a feeling that you have about your chances of bringing in people with only a slight interest in your topic.

That feeling comes from experience, and it comes from an understanding of your subject and its audience. But it is important to also understand the difference between those two types of followers and try to include both in your list of followers.

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