TJ Gamble

I don’t use twitter to make myself popular.  It is not my goal to get as many people following me as possible and that is not something I spend time working on. As with most twitter followers, I typically follow people who post on topics I enjoy, link to news I want to read, or are otherwise interesting people.

Because I don’t do any Twitter self-promotion, most of the people who follow me are simply those using John Chow’s advice and follow as many people as possible in the hopes that everyone will follow them back.  However, if you do that make sure your previous tweets come off like you are a human and make them at least mildly interesting.  With most of these types of requests I get, when I check the profile I find that they either have less than two tweets, they are simply retweeting others tweets, or they are just tweeting news from some news sources and every tweet has a link in it (looks like some sort of autotweeter).

If you are a business and are tweeting, make sure I understand that.  If I expect an individual, I am anticipating some tweets about their life outside of work or at least a little more conversation with other tweeters.  If I don’t see this immediately, I quickly close the browser and do not follow back. If your account makes it clear this is a business (through the twitter name or profile or twitter design), I might actually do a little more investigation if all you are posting is news.

For example, the screen capture to the right is the latest person to follow me.  Pulling up their profile they have a grand total of 3 tweets, all of which are self-promotion of some project they are working on.  Had they put up a few useful blog posts, linked to them and tweeted like a normal human being, I might have followed them back.  I don’t want my timeline filled up with useless junk like what projects he is trying to build links to.

When trying to build followers, use common sense.  Look at your profile and ask yourself if you were in another’s shoes, would you follow you based solely on the information you have tweeted thus far?  In the case of SEOBuddy, definitely not.