Not All Followers Are Created Equal

A month ago I decided to further grow my community and expand in Twitter. I started to implement a strategy used by many people, which I started to call “follow the followers”. Quite original, don’t you think? 🙂

At a glance: find an influencer, start following his followers, then unfollow the ones who didn’t follow you back in 3 days. You may find the details here. This method may seem an aggressive one, but it’s perfectly legitimate, and it’s only a form of getting attention to the people. Real people by the way, that are willing to follow you, mostly because they are proven to be interested in your niche.

It works quite well now, but it took me some time to figure out that not every “influencer” is equally good as a target for this job. For some of them with huge following, when I started to follow their followers, only 1-3% of them followed me back. Then I studied a little bit how well their tweets are engaged. You may guess that there was almost no engagement!

From my initial list of 10 influencers, only two of them gave me followers at 20-50% conversion rate, as if they were the only ones with real people in their follower lists!

This is why I keep saying that not all followers are created equal.

For your business it doesn’t really matter if you have 10k or 100k of unresponsive followers. You may buy like 100k followers with only $10, but does it worth? These are only figures with no real value.

What really matters is to have real people with which you can develop a relation and which really interact with your tweets, and are really interested in your content. Among these real followers of yours you’ll get your leads and clients for your business.

I’m currently getting new followers at a rate of about 200 per day and trying not to violate Twitter rules. And right now I’m getting these folowers only from two targeted influencers in my niche: John Thornhill, my mentor, and Torsten Mueller, who developed his business long before he became one of John’s students. These two guys are among the best marketers I’ve ever knew.

Conclusion

If you are serious about your business and decide to grow your Twitter community, listen to my advice and don’t buy followers. I know, it’s very tempting to have 100,000 followers all of a sudden than to wait and work one year for barely one 10th of that amount. Trust me, it worth the effort. Concentrate over quality, not quantity.

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