Author: Bridget Willard

This post was originally written in 2014 and, at the end of 2020, not much has changed. What has changed is clients wanting magic tricks to become instant thought leaders. It doesn’t work that way.

“Leadership is a choice not a rank.”  Simon Sinek 

To follow or not to follow, that is the question and a highly debated topic.

Twitter is, in my opinion, the most public of all of the social networks. Though you can make your account private, unless you do, I feel that you should fully consider why I believe you should follow everyone* back.

It is in your following behavior that you demonstrate true leadership and, dare I say, the best way to grow your following.

*Spam

Yes, there are #TeamFollowBack, #BirthdayClub, and #BuyMoreFollowers spam along with porn sites. Don’t follow them unless that is your industry.

Disclaimer

Yes. It is your Twitter feed. You are able to run it the way you choose. However, if you plan on tweeting for a business or for your professional life, I’d ask you to consider it fully. But if you want to be that guy who has 50,000+ followers and only follows 78, be my guest. If that’s you, you probably won’t like the rest of this article.

Management

Yes, it is way easier to manage tweets from under a hundred people. Did you really think you’d read every single tweet? Just the thought of it makes me stressed out.

One of my favorite parts of Twitter is that reading the tweets is a low-commitment, easy-to-handle task. When I’m waiting at the doctor, or waiting for my boss to sign checks, or have a few moments to spare, I can read Twitter. It’s easy to start and easy to stop.

Generosity

Generosity is a key attribute of leadership. We all respond well to those who give more than they take. And when they ask for favors (retweets, links, store purchases) many of us are happy to oblige. We’re your biggest fans, so why not follow back?

Another form of generosity is spending 5-10 minutes a day in your home feed and responding to those people. Sage advice from Scott Stratten I saw years ago. I do it daily. Guess what? I meet new people. (Imagine that!)

Perception (aka Branding)

Do you want to be viewed as a jerk? I’ve had conversations with people who have hurt feelings (literally) because they were not followed back. Heck, I’ve been that person. We talk about you behind your back. If you’re using Twitter to boost your celebrity, get consulting gigs, or anything even remotely revolved around building your street cred, then following back is a must.

Celebrity

Because we irrationally adore celebrities, we tolerate their jerky behavior (read any tabloids lately?). Verified accounts allow people to skip Twitter’s ratios (see a few sections down). However, most of us are not celebrities but we act as if we do when we don’t return a follow.

Is one of your fans quoting you frequently? Quoting is promoting. Maybe you could follow that person, thank them, and even put them on a list called “frequent quoters,” “big fans,” or “appreciated.” I bet you’d encourage those people to keep promoting you. You’ll make a fan for life.

Personal Growth

“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” ~ Aristotle

Keeping an open mind and allowing yourself to empathize, if not agree, with other people’s experiences, opinions, and perceptions is what makes you grow as a person.

When you’re notified that a person follows you on Twitter, you decide within 10-60 seconds if  you believe they have anything of value to offer you. What does that say about you?

Following Ratios*

*Excerpt from my post “Organize Your Twitter Stream: Use Lists.”

Like your cholesterol’s HDL versus LDL ratio, it’s important to shoot for a “good ratio.”  Carol Stephen

It sucks when you don’t realize you can only follow 2000 people and then you hit a following wall, literally. You can’t follow anyone else unless more people follow you. If you followed no one back and are following 2000, you’ve got a lot of work to do, my friend, both to follow and unfollow.

There are additional glass ceilings that you hit. I have experienced this over the last 13 years of managing accounts. You will hit another wall at 5,000, 9,000, 14,000, and 19,000.  It seems to me that the sweet spot is about 1.1 but Twitter says it depends on the individual account.

This is why I had to start unfollowing people who don’t follow back.  I really like who.unfollowed.me for this.

This is why I follow people back. The few exceptions are porn, how to get more users people, how to make money on the internet people, #TeamFollowBack (spammy, in my opinion), and eggs.

Only verfied accounts get to be non-follow-back-ers. This behavior can be viewed as arrogant, so proceed with caution.  You get back what you give.

As Twitter says,

Once you’ve followed 2000 users, there are limits to the number of additional users you can follow: this limit is different for every user and is based on your ratio of followers to following.

More Info: Twitter Help Center: FAQ about Following

The Secret

No one reads every tweet. It’s impossible. This is why lists are crucial.

Whether you want to be able to promote your clients, keep up on a group of people with common interests, or read about the goings on in Portland, lists are the key.

Do you remember the Twitter handle or name of that painter you wanted to get a bid from? Oh my! This was one of my problems. Putting people on lists by category (changes depending upon your account) really helps if you ever have to find someone. Lord love ya if you ever have to use Twitter’s search, the most frustrating experience next to removing red nail polish, but I digress.

Results

I’m no celebrity yet I have over 16,000 followers. Why? I follow people back. I list them. I read tweets. I respond. I make connections. Whether you spend five minutes twice a day or several hours on Twitter, this strategy works. Why? We are all human and are wired for connection. There is also a dopamine reaction from a notification but that is another blog post.

Updated April 6, 2020

One of the occupational hazards of being opinionated is that people ask you questions. “How do I grow my Twitter followers?” I’ve heard this question hundreds of times. Another one is: “I am having trouble getting followers for a new client.”

The short answer is to do the work.

Ten Ways to Grow Your Twitter Following

1. Make sure you have a completed profile, avatar (logo), header photo, and background. Your Twitter background shouldn’t be clouds. Most of us are choosy and won’t follow eggs. See: “Baby Steps to the Tweet.”
2. Follow back. Unless they are spam, an egg, #TeamFollowBack, or porn, I follow. One thing I’ve learned in this business is that you never know who is behind the account, who they know, or even where they live. All business is word of mouth and social media just multiplies that exponentially. I have friends all over this country who do accounts that aren’t necessarily local and we talk (and recommend each other).
3. Nerds like me have lists by geography and topic. Take advantage of the work we’ve done for you. For example, here is the list my primary personality has for my county. Follow those people. It’s a much better way to find new people than buying followers (which is spammy).
4. Make lists by county, clients, and topic. Spent time “lightly stalking those people.” See “Organize Your Twitter Stream – Use Lists.”
5. Start using a hashtag related to your industry, topic, and / or geographic location. Remember, the purpose of a hashtag is to filter out tweets by that topic. You will see tweets from people you don’t follow. Reply to those tweets and follow those people.
6. Not everyone on Twitter engages. By now you all know I feel about the Retweet Button which passes along a tweet but stops a conversation. So that is just part of it. The less people you have following the more you have to work to engage in your home feed. If you want to have friends, be a friend. It’s up to you.
7. Ask questions. People love to answer questions. If you’re a bakery, you can ask, “What is your favorite cake to bake?” “What cupcake flavor do you wish you could make?” “Chocolate Chip Cookies: Milk or Coffee?”
8. Search on Twitter. Again, presuming you’re a bakery, search for “cakes,” “cookies,” “bread.” Reply to some of those tweets. This is what Gary Vaynerchuk (@GaryVee) did with WineLibrary.com. He sat on Twitter answering people’s questions about wine pairings. Now he’s a total social rockstar.
9. Sometimes you have to prime the pump. While tweeting for Riggins Construction, I met a bunch of ladies who all tweeted for businesses. We supported each other by replying to tweets and retweeting each other’s accounts. It’s not cheating; it’s networking. Surely you have mutual friends who will support you, even if they’re in other industries.
10. Join a Twitter Chat. This one might be tricky and it is more advanced: Twitter301. I get really good, quality followers from the chats I participate in. See: “Want to Meet More People: Join a Twitter Chat.” They’re also more industry specific and/or engaged users. Check ChatSalad.com or Twubs.com to find these communities.

Do you ever find yourself scrolling through the home feed or one of your lists, looking for a little bit of conversation, only to find link after link after link? Sometimes, I just want to be able to reply to a tweet without having to read a blog post first. That got me thinking.

If I, a member of the Twitter audience, don’t always have (or want to take) the time to click on a link and read the article before responding or retweeting, then why should I expect my audience would have a different sentiment?  I came to the conclusion that only tweeting links asks a lot of your audience.

I’m guilty! This post is as much as a confession as an admonition. Including work, I have three Twitter accounts and four blogs. Though I’m not on a regular blogging schedule, I’m producing content and, of course, I want people to read it.

It’s so easy for us news junkies to read an article and tweet it out. The blogger junkies write blogs and tweet it out. And after a while, if you look at your own feed, you may realize that you are, indeed, a linker. Maybe it’s a good time to mix up your content. Carol Stephen discuses it in her blog post, “Tweeting for Engagement: Links Versus Text?” In the comments she brings up a good point:

“I like the idea of having tweets that are complete thoughts, that require very little of your audience as far as clicking and reading~that idea seems considerate.” Carol Stephen 

I know many people don’t think they have anything valuable to say, but I would disagree. You have opinions, opine. This is what Twitter is about. Whether you want to talk about who had the worst dress at the AMA show or who should be the next Ambassador to the U.N., you will have an audience of like-minded people – they may even overlap.

But if you do tweet with links, here are some of the best practices.

1. Check the Link

The fact of the matter is that links get broken. Un-shortened links when copy/pasted into an Old School RT can sometimes lose some of the characters. Remember, in a link, one character missing can make it break. Other times, the web page is taken down or was redesigned. You never know.

Always, always check your links before tweeting. This is especially important for those of us who keep tweets to recycle, either in a text or Excel file or from our liking/favoriting. You could stop reading at this point and still dramatically improve your tweeting.

2. Shorten the link.

For the reason above, shortened links are easier to copy and paste, etc. Also, sites like bitly.com give you statistics for your links if that’s what gets your engine running. There’s some debate about this so I won’t push it too heavily. That said, unless it’s a photo on Twitter, I shorten the link.

Bitly’s analytics show how many times a link was clicked on. For those un-clicked links, I sometimes tweet it again, maybe with a different headline.

3. Rewrite it.

Let’s face it. Not all of us are the best copywriters. If you want to write better headlines, Copyblogger is your go-to source. Check out “How to Write Headlines That Work.” More often than not, I find a sentence in the article that appeals to me and I tweet that as a quote instead. Here’s an example from yesterday:

Tweeting quotes from an article, even if they’re your own, is a good strategy if you want to repeatedly tweet out an article but don’t want your Twitter timeline to look spammy. You’re welcome.

4. Give credit.

If you read it on Facebook from your friend who you know is on Twitter, give them a hat tip at least (h/t @username at the end of the tweet). If you read it from Mashable do the same (via @Mashable). We don’t always find things on our own, giving credit shows you are humble and generous at the same time.

In the spirit of giving credit, this blog post was inspired from discussions and brainstorming with my good friend Carol Stephen. Follow her on Twitter at @Carol_Stephen.

5. The Two-Step or Hop, Skip, and a Jump Link.

Have you ever clicked on a link that takes to you a site with only a teaser paragraph? Then it says “read the story here” with another link, so you have to click again and wait for the page to load, click away pop-ups — all just to read the story. That doesn’t even mention the hoops you have to jump through on your mobile device. It drives me crazy.

After I play link hopscotch a few times, I start ignoring their tweets entirely. I realize there are financial reasons why people do this, but as a user it’s beyond annoying. Are you really making enough money off of the affiliate link to justify the inconvenience and frustration to your audience?

The same goes for paywall sites. I don’t subscribe to Financial Times, yet I see their links tweeted often.  Either check the link to make sure all of the articles can be read by your audience before you tweet or tweet it with #Paywall at the end as a warning. Our local paper went to the paywall model a while back. Not only do I never read it now, but I refuse to retweet any links from them. (I often wonder how many clicks they’ve lost because of the paywall.)

6. [Your Idea Here]

Have you had trouble with links? Do you delete tweets with broken links? Leave your Tip #6 in the comments below.