How to Get Twitter Followers Free, Fast & with SOME Dignity

By
Amy Vansant

or… How Bloggers Can Get More Twitter Followers without Feeling Like a Needy, Pathetic Loser

Ever notice someone with 100,000 Twitter followers and wondered how they did it? Maybe even suffered a twinge of jealousy, or felt like a social marketing failure? Maybe performed elaborate bird sacrifices to the Twitter Gods in your backyard?

twitter followers

Hey Amy! This girl tweets nothing but Bieber hashtags & heart icons and she has 140,000 followers! You SUCK!

Maybe that last one was just me.

I’m going to keep this short and sweet: Five weeks ago I had 700 Twitter followers. Now, I have close to 6000, and they’re all damn fine people. (well, some of them are apparently Live Sex Chat bots, but that happens.)

I’ve been asked how I did it, and every once in a while I like to post something useful, so here it goes.

How to Gain Twitter Followers Free, Fast & with SOME Dignity

There are many ways to get more Twitter followers, but for me, most made me feel like I needed to take a shower after I tried them.

  1. You can buy twitter followers from services (where you largely buy “eggs” – accounts with no profiles, newbies and bots which I discovered and wrote about here.)
  2. You can become a mad retweeter and shouter-outer of love to curry favor – whether you mean it or not.
  3. You can become a slave to Favstar.fm and feverishly star people you hope will retweet/star you, which can start to feel like a part time job. (FYI: Neal Mayhem, a British humor writer had a great rant about Favstar here.)
All these things can raise your Twitter followers to the 100,000s over time and I do not begrudge anyone any tactic they want to try.  Some of my best “Twitter friends” are very active with Favstar. It’s just that these sometimes expensive, sometimes time consuming tactics made ME ask myself this question:

Why the Hell Do I Want Twitter Followers?

What did Twitter followers really do for me? Did I want Twitter followers so I could say: “Hey, stewardess, give me TWO bags of nuts because I have thousands of Twitter followers?”

Like any blogger, I wanted  more Twitter followers because I wanted more readers. We all know writing in a vacuum gets tiresome, what with all the dust and that creepy Dyson dude always peeking in and trying to improve you. I tried a LOT of tactics, including all of the above at one point or another.  But I realized that even when I made Favstar friends who retweeted my tweets, got me more Twitter followers and made me feel a bit more successful, it didn’t bring me readers and blog post commenters. It only brought me more people who hoped I’d retweet THEM if they retweeted me. A Twitter circle jerk, if you will.

And Then There was Light

Twitter FollowersOne day I noticed a little string of tweets by @TravLeBlanc (bless his odd little heart) describing how HE had gotten more Twitter followers using Tweepi.com. I know I’m late to the party on this, so I apologize if you reached this point and went, “Tweepi? DUH,” but it was news to me. Like *cue angels singing* new.

Here’s what makes the Tweepi method so useful: You can get QUALITY followers. Or, at least, you can get followers with similar interests who are more likely to end up reading your blog or using your service. Best part, the basic Tweepi service is free, though there are some very useful tools if you upgrade. The best part of the upgrade, for example, is a column that keeps track of your activity, so you don’t unwittingly follow and unfollow the same person over and over again, which would make you an asshole.

Gaining Quality Twitter Followers Using Tweepi

  1. Go to  Tweepi.com and sign up for the service.
  2. You’ll see one of the options is Follow New Tweeps – click that
  3. You’ll see you get a choice: you can follow people that other people follow, follow people’s followers, follow people’s lists…
  4. Pick one of those options and use the Tweepi interface to follow a bunch o’ people that you think would make good followers. (NOTE: Twitter only lets you follow 1000 people a day, and I wouldn’t suggest knocking on that ceiling every day, lest you look spammy and anger the Twitter gods.)
  5. The next day or two later, click on the “flush the unfollowers” button and UNFOLLOW the people that didn’t follow you back. They may be perfectly fine people, but you don’t have time to get to know EVERYONE and if you are eventually following 50,000 people and only 2000 are following you, people might not follow you back based on a cursory glance at your pathetic number ratio.
  6. Repeat.

This process makes SENSE to me. You follow the followers of people you think are like you (have similar writing styles, for example.) For instance, Clive Barker might choose to follow Stephen King’s followers. Chances are a lot of King’s followers would like Barker, since they both write horror. All Clive is doing is letting King’s people KNOW HE EXISTS.

People can’t follow you, enjoy your writing or share ideas, if they don’t know you exist. To me, using Tweepi is just letting people know I’m out there. They can choose to follow me or not. They can choose to follow me and then dump me if they don’t like what I tweet. And once you get a few thousand followers under your belt, and work a little at being a charming/funny/useful tweeter, things start to happen organically as people share your tweets.

So, what has gaining 5000+ Twitter followers in five weeks done for me?

  • Well, for one, I’ve gotten a lot more Twitter followers. This means when I announce a new blog post, a lot more people find out about it.
  • Consequently, I’ve doubled my blog’s overall monthly hits.
  • I have many new readers and several that even comment! Wheeee!!!  *ahem* I mean, that’s cool. Whatever.
  • I have found OTHER wonderful new people and bloggers that I would not have  known existed had I not followed them first.

I could get into all sorts of details about my exact methods, if it is worth it,  etc. etc. but there are SO many little nuances and I didn’t want to turn this into a thesis.

If you have questions or you want to know more about what I do specifically, let me know and maybe I’ll do a Part Two or something.

And if you’re new, hellooo! Glad I found you and thanks for following me back!