Virtual Introductions: The Most Simple Way to Get More Followers on Twitter

If you’re like me and have never been in a blockbuster movie, signed a multimillion dollar contract for your talents, nor had any sort of “15 minutes of fame” moment, you probably struggle with building your fan base on Twitter.

As a community manager, I am often posed with the age-old social media question, “How do I get more followers on Twitter?”  While there are various ways to do so, I have found that the simplest way to gain more Twitter followers is to begin “virtually introducing” yourself to others on twitter.

What is a Virtual Introduction?

In order to introduce yourself on Twitter, you need to be pro-active and follow them first

Last year I wrote the blog post How To Properly Mingle In The World’s Largest Cocktail Party Called Twitter which draws some of the parallelisms between Twitter and a very large cocktail party (if you haven’t read it, it might be worth doing so as it will probably help you understand what I’m trying to say here).  Like I explained in that post, you have to treat Twitter as a real-life social function, and if you want to network with people at a party, you cannot sit in your solitary corner and expect to make the connections that you desire.  You must take the initiative, get your hands dirty, and start introducing yourself to others. On Twitter, that virtual introduction is the follow button.

When you create your Twitter account, whether it be for business or personal use, you cannot expect that if you just create your profile (show up to the party), people will come flocking to follow you; this isn’t the Field of Dreams, you need to do more than just build it. You must go on Twitter and, like a cocktail party, start finding your friends & others that you want following you and make the “virtual introduction”, which is following them first.

Without a virtual introduction, it is easy to get lost in the millions of people on Twitter.  When you follow someone, they are notified that they have a new follower either by email, their “followers” list, or maybe a social tool like Tweetdeck or Hootsuite.  Once they see that they have a new follower, they will hopefully like what you have to say and follow you back.

Introduce Yourself to the Masses

Once you understand the concept and value of the virtual introduction, it’s time to go fishing for followers.  Firstly, identify someone on twitter that you want to imitate, or in other words, someone who has the same segment of followers that you would like to have (i.e. possibly a competitor or a strong voice/presence within your industry). Once you have identified those people, go into their “followers” list and start “virtually introducing” yourself to them.

If you do this correctly, you should have a pretty nice uptick in followers. If you haven’t (i.e. you’re an sports company and you just went and followed a bunch of people who follow Cosmopolitan Magazine), you’re doing it wrong.  From all of the times I have done this I have seen that approximately 25%-33% of the people that you follow will follow you back.  Twitter lets you only follow 1,000 people per 24 hours, so if you were to do that every day for a week, theoretically you could expect to gain 1,500 to 2,000 followers.

**Note** Make sure have a good number of tweets before you start introducing yourself to people so that they can see what type of tweets they should expect to see from you.

Keep a Good “Following to Followers” Ratio

The easiest way to spot a spammer on Twitter is to check out their “Following to Followers” ratio

No one likes to follow spammers, and the easiest way to identify one is by checking their “following to followers” ratio.  A spammer is generally following more people than they have followers, and that is because they went fishing for followers, but didn’t throw back the undesirables.

Once you have gone on your “following” binge (and on a side note, i would only follow about 1,000 people per week), wait a couple of days for those followers to trickle in.  You can keep on eye on who is following you back by watching your “followers” list, and if you end up not wanting to see what recent follower John Doe has to say, go ahead and unfollow them.  I justify this because when you made the introduction, they followed you back because they like your tweets.  When I first followed them, it didn’t necessarily mean that I wanted to see their tweets, I just wanted to make the introduction.

Once the large influx of followers has slowed down, I like to use ManageFlitter to manage my “following” to “followers” ratio.  It is a free, online tool that allows you to see who is not following you back and mass unfollow them in the matter of seconds (a whole lot quicker than clicking “unfollow” one by one on your Twitter page).

Once you have cleaned out those who didn’t follow you back, rinse and repeat.