How to get quality followers

The easy way is difficult

You have opened your account, you haven't twitted yet, you start to follow your friends or the perfect strangers. You think that in order to do good on Twitter, you must have a lot of followers, because that's a sign of authority. Luckily, you get it wrong.I personally falled into this trap too. Worse some so called social media pundits do play the game of who has the biggest follower crowd (pretty like who has the biggest penis, sorry ladies I only know this comparison).

Simply I wanted to show you that there is a better way to grow your influence besides having a massive flock of followers. The question is not "How much direct influence I have", it is more about "How much global influence I have" on the long term.

Earlier this week @LucasNg twitted this post with this title "How I used Twitter to put a CEO on the street ". At he end of the post, the author said he only had 1500 followers, but those followers helped him retweet, and then the followers of his followers retweeted, ending by colecting 300 dollars to put his boss sleep on the street.

I realised that the most important is the quality crowd of followers that helped him retweet the request. In order for this to happen, you need followers that trusted you, and your followers to be trusted by their followers and so on. Could you imagine those retweets if your followers are crappy bots or perfect stranger that follow you in the hope of you follow them back? I couldn't. You won't go far this way.

So does size still matter? To some extent, but here again, the motto is quality over quantity.

The hard way is easier but takes time

Here is a list of my personal tips for getting quality buddies.

• First don't get obsessed with the number of followers
• Follow the people who interact
• Don't follow people from the list of followers blindly, check their activity first
• Follow people that appear in the replies or retweets, you can be sure they are people who interact or provide useful information.
• Follow people not avatars, I am sure there are several people behind Guy Kawasaki, it tweets like crazy, but I am not interested (too much boring self promotion)
• Let your new followers wait (sandbox) before following back.

This list is for how to get noticed by people you follow and want them follow you back

• The ultra easy way is to retweet their tweets, but don't overdo it. They will feel happy if somebody is interested in them. But don't fake it, you won't pass the test of time.
• Reply to them if you feel you can make an interesting reply.
• Go to their blog to leave interesting comments
• Provide value anytime.
• Answer them when they are broadcasting a question.

I won't guaranty it will work for everybody, you are unlikely to be followed back by @problogger or @ev, well it doesn't matter because there are a lot of cool people on Twitter worth following (and get followed by). I can be followed here @yvonh.