Business Insight Zone

Last week I talked about how to find relevant people to follow on Twitter. I promised to follow up with a post on persuading the new people you follow to follow you back. What with one thing and another, I kept posting on other topics.

And then my friend Chris Brogan — one of the top users of Twitter — beat me to the punch:

Get More Twitter Followers TODAY

Chris’s take is delightfully tongue-in-cheek because, like me, he rejects the spammy, automated methods of adding followers on Twitter. (But note that his advice in the post is completely legitimate.) Chris is a model of how to attract more followers, not by any tricks, but by . . . wait for it . . . providing value.

Simple, huh?

Chris has drawn a Twitter audience of more than 90,000 the old-fashioned way, by:

• talking with them,
• talking about things they’re interested in, and
• giving them something to talk about.

Why people think this should be any different than the rest of the business / media / social / human world is beyond me. Which people make lots of friends? Which companies earn lots of customers? Sure, there are outliers, but for the most part it’s those who bring something good to the table, who make it easy for you to communicate with them, and who are interested in knowing more about your needs and interests and desires.

Setting aside those already famous from other media (Ashton Kutcher, Ellen DeGeneres, Shaquille O’Neal), I would summarize the habits of the best, most-followed tweeters thus:

1. They tweet regularly, with a good signal-to-noise ratio. You don’t have to put up with a lot of junk from them while you’re waiting for the good stuff.
2. They’re interactive — i.e. they have conversations via Twitter rather than just broadcasting.
3. They build audiences across media. E.g. lots of good bloggers (Dave Winer, John Scalzi, Erin Kotecki Vest) build Twitter audiences that overlap significantly with their blog audiences, and some writers prominent from books and magazines (Neil Gaiman, Harlan Coben, Peter King) do the same. (Come to think of it, we don’t need to set aside Ashton, Ellen, and Shaq — they just started via broadcast instead of print.)
4. Other users like what these folks tweet enough to recommend them, either explicitly (e.g. via FollowFriday mentions or by recommending something they wrote) or implicitly (e.g. by retweeting their tweets).

That’s what’s worked for others I’ve seen, and in my own humble way, it’s what has worked for me as I’ve steered the @Hoovers Twitter account past 4,000 followers (and my my personal account past 2,600).

Legitimate businesspeople don’t expect to buy a successful business out of a box and then just catch the money that rains from the sky. Why would doing business on Twitter be any different?

~

Photo by Cindy McCravey.

Category: Social media