In the last several weeks, I’ve changed my twitter strategy. After nearly a year, I had just under 100 people I followed and followers. Every now and again I’d see someone new I wanted to follow or someone new would find me. Every now and again I’d see someone who was following 50-100 people, yet they had thousands following them. Those people must have pretty important things to day. Then I’d see those people who follow thousands of people and have thousands who follow them. In my mind, I wasn’t as impressed. Any yahoo can go out and click on everyone who breaths. A certain percent of them will always follow them back. So anyone can grow their own follower base, but it seemed artificial to me.
However, one night when I should have been in bed, I looked to see who some of my closest twitter friends were following. About 45 minutes later I was following 100 more people. No junk, just people in ministry I wanted to hear from.I started to notice that the more people I followed, the more people followed me. I’m not talking about people who follow you becasue you’re following them. That happens too. But it seems like the more people you’re connected to, the easier you are to find. I decided to turn on a Social Media site that would make my account automatically follow anyone who first followed me. Within a week, my follow list had grown by 250 people and those who were following me grew in proportion.
Unfortunately, I felt a little overwhelmed. I logged into my account and started unfollowing anyone who wasn’t in ministry or did something I was interested in (I do have a soft spot for tech twitters). I refused to follow junk or follow people simply becasue they followed me. Another thing happened too. When I twittered, way more people responded. People I didn’t really know and people I wanted to get to know were replying. The more people I followed, the more people followed me and the more people who joined into my conversations.
As a result, I’ve made two new friends who are experts with Fellowship One. It just happened to be during a week where I was making major changes to the way Fellowship One was set up at our church. Every time I ran into a snag, I’d post it on twitter. Often within minutes I would get a solution or a phone number to call to work out the problem. There are many amazing connections I’ve made by expanding my twitter network.
I’ve read the strategies of how to generate 10,000 followers in 100 days. It consists of following as many people as you can and within a day, unfollow everyone who doesn’t follow you back… then do this over and over and over and over. I’ve got plenty of people who I follow who will probably never follow me back, but I still want to hear what they’re saying.
So, I encourage you to expand your network. Follow those who you follow and you’ll make some great connections.
I love following people who are like minded and can point me to interesting articles and information, but I don’t want to follow those who don’t. It’s not a numbers contest for me, but a value and quality are highly important.
I’m also finding that more than half of the people I follow, never twitter.
It must be Blog on Twitter week….great post and insight Kenny. It is great to see how you’ve brought value into your world through Twitter. @jasoncurlee
I agree with you… up to a point. I’ve found some great, interesting people to engage with on twitter. Then again, I’ve found a few people who twitter far too much and use nothing but @ replies all day long. Eventually, I unfollow them; they simply take too much energy to read. If you’re taking up too much of my limited time on twitter and not saying things that are relevant to me, I won’t take time to read you. It’s that simple.
I found followcost.com to be an excellent tool to gauge such a thing (although it’s simplistic and doesn’t take into account how much I like the person).
I can’t follow much more than 100 people effectively; it becomes overwhelming to me. I have everyone sorted on TweetDeck, and I read my high priority tweets first (my RL friends, you included) before moving on to others. I find I rarely finish everyone now that I’m well over 100. Sad but true.
Lisa @ put-it-on-the-list’s last blog post..Where Have You Been, Lisa?
Thanks for the comments people. Yeah, to me it’s about the value. Twitter is a risk. I follow just about everyone ministry related. I don’t know how often they’re going to twitter, what they’re going to say or anything like that. I just started using TweetDeck, so I haven’t learned to set up groups. That will probably work very well for me. I’m following over 400 people and I’m not really too overwhelmed. I’m not pouring over it all day, I’m just looking at my DM’s and @ Replies and then I’ll scan the general feed to see what people have been saying. Like I said, I haven’t created groups, so doing that in TweetDeck will probably help a lot. When it comes to the blogs I subscribe too, I feel the pressure to read every post (well almost every post) but I don’t feel this kind of pressure in Twitter at all. I worry more about the hear an now…. not what occurred hours ago.