In the last year or two I have seen numerous programs developed for getting zillions of followers on twitter in no time. I’ve even tried them myself.
The problem with these programs is that some of them actually work. Some of them can get you hundred or thousands of followers with little investment by you.
At first having a ton of followers is a boost to your ego. It makes you feel good and feel important to have so many people following you.
Get Rich not so quick
With so many followers you have this brilliant idea. All you need to do is to tweet one affiliate link and all of your followers are going to click on it and buy whatever crap you are promoting. You believe that you’re going to make enough money to buy a fancy Lamborghini to put in your eight car garage.
You tweet the link to your 5 zillion followers and wait for the money to roll in.
And you wait.
No affiliate sales after one minute. No affiliate sales after an hour.
After a day you’re wondering why you didn’t make any money.
You wonder if you tweeted at the wrong time. You wonder if you the link was broken or if you should have added a short description before the link.
The truth
The sad truth is that you can get thousands of followers very quickly but none of them will be interested in what you have to say. They’re not going to be interested in the products they were promoting via twitter. They couldn’t care less that Poodle Manicures Inc. is having a blowout sale and all poodle shampoo is half off.
All of them will consider your tweets noise and ignore them.
So yes, you can get lots of followers but it won’t help you make money or get traffic to your website.
The right way
The right way to build a following on twitter is to start by tweeting about things that people care about. Provide value to your followers and they will retweet your stuff. This will lead to more people following you.
But more importantly your followers will be interested in your message. They will trust you. When you tweet a link to some new blog post you wrote they will click on it.
It’s easy to get traffic from twitter when you have a group of followers that is interested in what you’re talking about.
Making money
The way to make money with twitter is to not advertise in your tweets. Instead write interesting and engaging blog posts and tweet a link to them. This will send traffic to your blog or website.
Once people get to your blog or website then you should have some advertisements.
The number of followers you have on twitter doesn’t matter. It’s the relationship you have with your followers that matters.
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
Good point. I've been wondering recently how to use twitter and how to engage in conversations rather than just broadcasting my story. Any points would be welcome. My guess is I need to use search to find other's tweets more.
This is also something I have been wondering about. I'm using twitter to get traffic but I don't think I have harnessed its full potential.
If you find some good resources on how to "use" twitter and engage, I'd love to hear about them. At the moment I'm flooded with in-bound tweets and most of which I cannot actually engage with.
I don't have many followers and try where possible to only post things I think will be interesting. What I need is a way to monitor what happens next. Twitter feels like a bit of a one-way conversation and I know others don't see it that way at all.
What they hell… follow me @citrustech
When you say inbound tweets what do you mean exactly?
I made the mistake of auto following people on a Twitter account for one of my blogs. While I had thousands of followers, I was struggling to hold a decent conversation because of how clogged my feed was – and I ended up getting less results from that account than my small 200 follower account that was naturally grown.
.-= Outsourcing Jobs Overseas's last blog ..Find An Ebook Cover Designer For Less Than $10 =-.
Exactly! Relationship is critical when it comes to twitter.
You couldn't be more right! It's so easy to fall into those traps in the beginning, but in a way, the learning experiences we gain as a result really are helpful.
I'd rather have a following of 40 faithful people that hundreds of disinterested mystery people any day.
Thanks for sharing this post that reminded me of my race to build a following in the beginning. I'm glad I can look back and laugh about it now.
.-= Kiesha @ We Blog Better's last blog ..Great Guest Posts =-.
It's always tempting to resort to tactics were you add hundreds of followers a day. But I just can't keep up with all the conversations going on and most of it doesn't relate to my niche.