By Reid Rosefelt
You’re posting interesting content on Twitter every day. You’re blogging. You’re active in other social networks. You’re doing everything that you’ve been told to do. But you’re getting nowhere.
Maybe you have the wrong goal.
Your Goal is Not to Get as Many Followers as Possible
If you want followers, you can buy them. Click here, spend a few bucks and you’re done. Of course it would be meaningless, but there are plenty of other ways for Twitter followers to be meaningless.
A large percentage of the people who follow you on Twitter fit into one or more of the following categories:
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They are mainly interested in getting followers. They use software like BlastFollow to follow people they don’t give a hoot about and then unfollow them if they don’t follow back.
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They are rarely on Twitter or have stopped using Twitter altogether.
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They have very few followers themselves.
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They are following so many people that essentially Twitter is meaningless white noise for them.
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They never retweet, and therefore they won’t help your posts go viral.
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They are only interested in a few people who they list. They can follow you, but they’ll never read you.
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Work in click farms in some poor country. They follow you so that the fake profiles they create look “real.” There’s a lot of money to be made in fake Twitter profiles. If you’re curious about how many fakes you or your friends have, there’s a utility here.
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They are computer algorithms. See above.
Finally, it’s very easy to click “follow” in an instant–and something entirely different to actually be interested in what somebody has to say over the long term.
Your Goal is to Get Active Twitter Users Who Care About What You Have to Say
Imagine that. Quality beats quantity.
If you have a hundred people who care about what you have to say and often retweet you, that is better than having thousands who either never see your posts or couldn’t care less about them if they did.
But how to get quality followers?
First, Decide What Kind of Followers You Want
Personally, I’m interested in
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People in the world of independent film
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People interested in social media
And I want them to have the opposite qualities from the twitterers I list above. I want them to care about me, and retweet me now and then. I want them to be interesting and not follow a gazillion people (which makes following me meaningless).
Deciding what I want is the first step to getting it.
How Do You Find Authentic Followers?
One way is to pick somebody you admire and check out the people they follow.
Follow the ones you’d like to follow you.
You can also search through the people who follow this person you admire.
It’s a very good plan, but there are two problems with it.
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It’s very slow
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You’ll follow too many people.
The solution is to use software that will speed up the process and help you track the people who haven’t followed you back. There are many, including Manage Flitter and UnTweeps. I use Tweepi and pay for a premium plan.
Retweet Others and Gain Millions of Views
When anybody retweets me I put their name on a list. (If you want to get anywhere with Twitter you have to use lists. I regularly look at that list and see if there’s something interesting enough for me to return the favor.)
Let’s say a congenial relationship develops between me and a friendly stranger on Twitter. This person has a thousand followers and retweets me twice a week. What do I get from that one person?
A hundred thousand extra views a year.
How long does it take you to retweet?
How long does it take you to add somebody’s @twittername when they write something you like?
Having Written All This… It Is Good to Have More Followers.
As long as they’re the right kind.
And you’ll get them. When I’m doing a session on Tweepi it’s not unusual for five or ten people to follow me back while I’m in the middle of doing it.
You need to block out some time now and then to work on getting authentic followers, but it will pay off.
Use common sense about social media. There is far too much focus on numbers. You should be using this medium to try to communicate.
Reach out to people you want to communicate with.
Reid Rosefelt is a veteran film press agent who has worked on over 100 films, including “Stranger Than Paradise” and “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.” He blogs at reidrosefelt.com and his Pinterest Board Social Media for Filmmakers was named first on IndieWire’s list of “10 Pinterest Boards Filmmakers Should be Following.”
Twitter: @ReidRosefelt
