I have discovered Twitter in July, when I launched this blog. I was a bit dazzled at first and didn’t understand many things, like how to get my tweets noticed when everything was going so fast and there were so many people out there.
What I grabbed first, was that if I wanted people to read my tweets, I needed them to follow me. And that I should be returning the favor, or even better, following them first, in hope that they would follow back. After a week of adding people that were relevant in the field of personal finance, and nomadic lifestyle, I realized two things:
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Many established bloggers will not follow you back. Which makes perfect sense, but will not help me achieve my goal.
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Other people will put you in a ”don’t read those tweets” list, so while they follow you, they do it as a courtesy, and then file you under a list they will never open or read. I found out about that when I received a notification from someone who hadn’t made her list private…
My approach was then to follow people who tweeted about personal finance, and among my followers, always follow back people who were PF bloggers or readers, from what their description said. I didn’t look at the exact numbers, but I estimate that around 20% followed me back.
My Twitter Account
I also started using Qwitter, an application that will tell you every week who stopped following you. I am quite happy to report that people who are leaving are mainly fake profiles offering adult services. But a few PF people would drop out. Why was that? Could they be looking for a follow back, and then unfollow me because I wouldn’t follow them?
To prove my point, I followed back five of my unfollowers. Four didn’t re-follow me, and one did. I will call her X. I started thinking ”if X has 500 followers, those people must all be following back, because if they don’t, X would unfollow them like she did with me. It would be fun to see how many would follow me too if I added them”. I had a quick look at her followers’ descriptions and many were interested in personal finance, so I would at least have followers in my niche. Some even had a #followback on their description.
I had just started using Tweepi at the time, and one of the features of Tweepi is that you can see who follows X and start following X’s 500 followers. By the end of the week, I had twice more followers, from 179 to 410. The growth rate was incredible.
So why wouldn’t I keep doing that?
Simply because I am trying to grow a community. And by having followers who are just here because I follow them back, and will never say hi, or comment on anything, I am not going to grow my website. The funny thing is many people seem to be adding me since, looking for the same benefits! I am proud to have built my following group from scratch, my mum, my friends and my acquaintances were not invited, and none of them are following me. And of course I would like to have one zillion followers tomorrow, but I would rather have 100 active people reading, commenting and enjoying my blog.
Nice article… You will notice that I have a lot of followers… >25k. While a lot of them are ‘real’ I have used similar techniques to you to get some follow backs. I quickly identified the technique that you used to determine a person whose followers would all refollow (given that they dropped me too) but realised that they would be as good as a statistic and nothing more. I immediately stopped using this technique and was more active on twitter. Built up a few good friends, retweeted quality posts and followed some others followers. It’s a slow game…
It is slower but more real, and a great feeling to know people are actually there for your and not content and not (only) for your follow back.
Great points! I wrote a post about how I got my twitter account to over 50k followers, and honestly I like the method I’m using. I will follow back anyone, but I don’t use my main feed (I haven’t in three years!) instead I break up my followers into lists that make it easier to browse by topic/location/etc.
People want to be followed back, so why not follow them? You don’t have to read their tweets. If someone interacts with me I immediately list them to lists that I read.
I do understand your point tho: TWITTER IS NOT JUST ABOUT NUMBERS. It’s about building relationships and community.
For now I like the idea of trying to build something with a smaller number of people, but having 50K has its perks too, and there has to be a few of those that will actually end up on your blog and read you.
We just started using Twitter this summer when we started the blog, as well – and it’s still somewhat of a weird concept for me. I’m curious, though – if someone has 50K followers, how much interaction/traffic to their site does it really generate?
Twitter is not my biggest referrer, but people who come from Twitter stay longer on my site, so I guess they are only the genuine followers and the extra follow-me-follow-you’s aren’t bringing that much.
Great article Pauline. I’ve seen similar things myself as I’ve tried to grow my Twitter following. It’s a hard balance, because I too want to create a community in which I can interact with others, but on the other hand I know many people look at the number of Twitter followers you have. If someone takes the time to follow me I will generally follow them back, unless there’s something I find objectionable.
It is hard to get people to pay attention when your account screams newbie. I find that I have more organic growth now, does it have to do with having a higher number of followers or my being more active on Twitter and the blogosphere, I can’t really tell.
Pauline, looks like a great plan. I’m still learning the twitter thing myself… Thanks for the great tips.
You’re welcome Jason, in the end it just comes down to where you want to take your blog and what matters to you, numbers or quality.
Thanks, that was helpful. I’m still clueless about twitter and lists are completely new to me. I really don’t think many people read all the tweets. When I was working on a project for work, I had a blog post tweeted at several different accounts by people who enjoyed it (totally about 10,000 followers). I’d even venture to say they were loyal followers based on reputation of the blogs they were following. From those tweets, my article got 0 comments, and 8 other retweets. I don’t think anyone cared to read it even though it was pretty good.
It is a strange world I am having a hard time understanding too. For sure no one reads all the tweets on his feed, but you can have a list of favorites including a small number of people to follow more closely. Thanks for the experience, confirming what I thought about bigger stats not necessarily being better.
Your current strategy is awesome and something I don’t think a lot of people care or think about. My mentor calls it the Power Ratio and as a social media expert, she recommends people use the strategy you’re using.
Plain old organic follows and building a community. That’s the strategy I’ve adopted and it works great. I’ve built a really solid community, or tribe as I call it and I love it! Who cares that I don’t have 10,000 followers? Keep up the good work Pauline!
Thank you Carrie, for your feedback and your kind words. It does make more sense to have people that will value your blog and your work.
At the beginning of the summer, I set a goal to double my facebook likes, subscribers, followers and daily page views. I think I’ve hit them all except for FB but I tend to use twitter a lot more to connect with other bloggers and share articles, etc. Anyways, I appreciate you following me, hopefully we can connect and have some meaningful exchanges. good luck 🙂
Thanks for stopping by Harry, and congrats on your goals! I don’t use Facebook much either, my goal is not even to have subscribers, just to make my page look decent and attractive!
I love case studies like this Pauline, good work! I too use Tweepi, and like DC, I really only use it to create a statistic to impress advertisers. My main audience and community already visits my blog and comments often, but I do hope to gain some new attention from this strategy. I will admit I still have quite a bit to learn about leveraging Twitter and social media in general.
Thanks MMD, I know I can use it someday but right now as long as I don’t really understand the benefits I’ll let it grow on itself.
I used to think Twitter was annoying until I had a blog and now I see the value of it. I am building everything slowly, so this is good advice. There is so much I don’t understand and need to study. If there were only more hours in the day!
Slowly but surely is the way to go, you’ll learn on the way! I find Jeremy’s posts at Modest Money to be really useful re blog building.
Qwitter…that’s hilarious. I am still new to Twitter. It is my only social media fix, since I have been facebook free for over 2 years now. I usually only follow people based on their blog. I, too appreciate the people who read my blog and leave comments. I have a few who just constantly like posts, so I don’t even know if they’ve actually read them.
I am 32 and using Twitter is one of the first times I started feeling old regarding social medias and the internet, it goes so fast! I don’t know how much effect it has on readership, so I try to limit the time I invest!
Increasing twitter follower is easy if you follow them back. As you said you need active follower who will read your tweets that is what very important.
Only active and genuine followers will come to your blog and this is important.
That is why I stopped the aggressive follow back. Thanks for stopping by Ravi!
I’m with you Pauline, I think Twitter was legitimately the first time I felt old when trying out a new technology. It’s fairly confusing to start with. I’ve got to admit to following a few people recently hoping they’d follow me back – I don’t regret getting my first 50 or so follows because my blog is so new, but I’m going to let it grow organically like you suggest.
wise move. You can obviously make a bit of both, and try to really connect with a handful of people. I even saw followers for sale!
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