Twitip

How many people do you follow on Twitter? 50? 100? 1000? More? I currently follow 85 people and let me tell you, it’s quite exhausting. Keeping up with everyone’s latest tweets sometimes feels like trying to treat patients in two hospitals located on opposite sides of a city. No one ever told me how stressful it would be when I signed up for Twitter.

Of these X number of people you follow, how many of them provide valuable content on a consistent basis? Are there people you follow so memorable and entertaining that you hit retweet before you even read their newest tweet? I know I have. (more…)

Most people on twitter want to increase the number of people that follow them.

I currently only have about 170 followers and so gaining 1,000 new followers may seem a little ambitious.

But I am up to the challenge!

Here’s my 10 point plan to get 1,000 new followers this year. (This works out to about 85 new followers per month.) (more…)

By Maija Haavisto, author of an upcoming Twitter book due out later this year (the first Twitter book in Finnish). Follow her@DiamonDie.

#followfriday is a great idea, at least on paper. You recommend your favorite tweeps for others to follow. It’s all about sharing, right?

In practice, it doesn’t really work like that. Most people just mindlessly flood long lists of Twitter usernames every Friday, forgetting that Twitter is a social media, not a broadcast media.

Twitter users have started skipping the recommendations just like they skip blatant marketing tweets. One Friday I received seven #followfriday mentions – and not a single new follower. (more…)

by Neal Wiser. Follow him @nealwiser

Could a solution to the FollowFriday conundrum finally be at hand? I’m not sure, but @PhilBaumann has a great idea.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you may have read my April post, Follow Friday, too Much of a Good Thing? In that post, I discussed some of the many Pros and Cons of #FollowFriday, especially why so many people are becoming disenchanted with the meme, and offered some recommendations that I feel would improve the FollowFriday experience. Unfortunately, while many people do seem to be making better recommendations recently, my personal FollowFriday experience still leaves me frustrated. (more…)

By Jade Craven – Follow her @jadecraven.

I regularly attend tweetupmellers. At first I assumed that all tweetups and get togethers have the same sense of community, but I soon learnt that there was something different. I quickly learnt that this was due to the organizers efforts to ensure people felt like they were part of a larger community.

10 Ways To Create A Community Around Your Tweetup

1. Have a twitterwall

One of the great features of the last few tweetups has been the twitter wall. It is simply a search on Twitterfall which is then projected onto a screen in the back corner of The Social. It is a huge talking point and really added to the fun of the evening.

There were some people who tweeted simply to bump someone else’s name from the top. There were also times when the whole room went silent as there was a mass update of tweets. (more…)

By Rebecca Maxwell of My Adventures in History – Follow her @rmaxwell142.

Call me old fashioned, but I am one of those people that value community and relationships with people. As a child of the 90’s, I’ve learned to adapt to our technological age where we can keep up-to-date with people without ever seeing them in person. While this is not my preferred method of contact, the last couple of years I have seen myself rely more and more on online interaction than face-to-face. Recently though, I’ve been frustrated with the alienation of social networking sites to the point of taking some extreme measures, especially regarding Twitter.

I originally signed up for Twitter as a way to keep in touch with those interested in my history blog and network with those who have blogs similar to mine. As more and more of my friends on Twitter found me, I found myself following and being followed by people I knew in real life. While this wasn’t bad at first, I soon found myself “unfollowed” by those I was following. People I knew in real life wouldn’t follow me. Then, of course, people who knew nothing about me or my blog began to follow me out of the blue. (more…)

by Corbett Barr of Free Pursuits – Follow him @freepursuits

Many people use brute force techniques to grow their twitter followers only to be disappointed by the quality of relationships they form. I’ll show you how to grow a community of followers who are genuinely interested in what you have to offer using simple tools and techniques.

If your goal for using Twitter is simply to acquire as many followers as possible, there are plenty of common techniques you can use to accomplish your goal. For most people though, the quality of relationships made on Twitter is much more important than the quantity.

Maybe you’re trying to attract people to your blog, or sell a product, or find some freelancing work or just meet some new like-minded friends. Whatever the case, you can use the techniques here to build a high-quality Twitter following.
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by Fredrickus Williford of CalendarTweet – Follow him @BlackMediaProp

With all the “Gain 20 Trillion Followers” or “Twitter Follower Secrets Revealed” ads or tweets themselves all over the net these days I think its only fair to bring light to a more humorous, but true side of how most Twitter users gain followers. Without further suspense here are the 6 REAL reasons why Followers Follow:

1. Because they’re a follow whore! Meaning they follow anybody in the hopes they will get a follow back.

2. You just might actually have something interesting to say…that’s a big might!

3. You either have Internet fame or you’re some form of celebrity outside of Twitter.com

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by Skellie from Skelliewag. Follow her @skellie.

How often have you heard the argument that not following back everyone who follows you is ’snobby’ and ‘arrogant’?

(It’s not, and you shouldn’t listen to anyone who tells you so. You have a right to choose who you follow and don’t follow.)

Following everyone back has other benefits, though – and this is coming from someone who used to be a die-hard proponent of only following a smaller group of people who you know and admire.

Following everyone back helps you to create stronger relationships with the people who care about what you do online. Any marketer will tell you that relationships are the key to success. Even if you’re just using Twitter for the fun of it, relationships and getting to know fantastic people are what makes it rewarding.

But what if you don’t want to miss out on tweets from your favorite Twitter users?

In this post, I’m going to show you how to have your cake and eat it too. You can follow everyone while still keeping close tabs on your favorite Twitter users.

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by Sue Bailey, who blogs at Blog Mum and tamebay. Follow her @biddy.

No, I’m not completely crazy. I just don’t like the word “follow”. Follow says “listen to my message, be passive, I’m broadcasting”; Follow is all about me. Suppose instead you sent out a message that said, “Engage with me, talk to me, let’s have a conversation.” If you’re a business trying to build a presence on Twitter, or even an individual trying to get beyond “what I had for lunch”, wouldn’t that be a good thing?

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