How to follow Twitters users (and get followed)

I first joined Twitter nearly one year ago, but only really started to use it since 3 monthes. the reason : when I first subscribed, Twitter was still a tech novelty aimed at ultra geeks. As i started to get savvy with social medias, I discovered that nearly a the same time, many a-list bloggers gave their twitter usernames to their readership, it was time to jump on the bandwagon.

Twitter is still fresh take advantage of it !

Jump on it while it is still time, many a-listers don't have so many followers so far, so it is easy enough to get their attention, but I'll talk about this later. What to do when you start with Twitter, if you really don't have any friend on Twitter, invite them or I suggest to follow a few A-listers, in order to know who follow them. The A-listers are not going to follow you (at least not now), but some of their followers would ! It is easier to have people like you to follow you. But wait don't follow 100 people too quickly, because the number one rule is:
Twitter will suspend your account for strange activity and will send you their bad omen messenger Mr Owl himself.

Before choosing say five people to follow, just select carefully, there are a lot of scammers here that would be classified as :

• The marketing robot he will follow you to get you follow him, often he'll send you a crappy "thanks for folowing me please visit my (very) crappy site to see what I am up to"
• The one way twitterer, there are two kind, the first kind is the no so savvy marketer, the second is the traditional high authority media that spit their published articles for you to eat. Don't eat too much cause you are going to vomit. You can pick people from their folower list. This is good if you want to find people in a niche.
• People you don't like, seems dumb but you'll realize later after following his tweets.

Some tactics to use to follow valuable users

• Choose people that communicate, nothing is more annoying that people with gigantic ego, that don't even care for your following.
• choose people that update often enough (active users).
• choose people that don't follow a lot of people.

How to get people to follow you

This is the juice of this post, okay there is no miracle solution, these are my recipies.

• After you follow the buddies, some of them will automatically follow you (I don't talk about the crappy users out there), but interesting people.
• For those who are not, watch their tweets, sometime, they ask a question, respond with interesting things or with humour (something I'am not good at), be useful and helpful.
• Even for regular twitter users, you can address them a message and try to engage a conversation.
• Read their blog (I am sure you already do) and leave comments.
• See if they have same interests than you, I am sure there are groups by affinity (mangas, music, photography), yes Twitter is a great place to socialize.

That's it for today, I realize that there were not as many tips as I thought when I decided to write this post. And sorry for the crappy design, I am working on it but won't release anything before next year because I'll be on vacation. I suggest you to read this blog from Darren Rowse to learn more on how to use Twitter.