At the time of this writing, I have 54,228 Twitter followers. From time-to-time people have asked me how I have gained so many followers. In all honesty, gaining twitter followers is not that difficult. If you have enough time you can get as many followers as you want.
This is how it works: You follow ~1,000 people, and within a few days a few hundred follow you back. Over a (long) period of time, you will get however many followers you want. It’s really just a matter of time and effort.
Here are the steps:
1) Find an account with similar interests as you. Ideally they would have 1,000+ followers.
2) Go to Tweepi.com and log in.
3) At the top, go to ‘Follow Tweeps’ -> ‘@user’s followers
4) Type in the Twitter Account you found in step 1 and hit ‘Start Following’
5) This will bring up a list of followers. Filter by last tweet.
6) Select all the accounts that have tweeted within the past day and then hit follow.
7) Wait a day (or however long you want – you can follow approximately 1,000 people a day before Twitter stops you) and then in Tweepi go to ‘Manage Twitter’ -> ‘Flush the unfollowers.’ Unfollow everyone that Tweepi shows as not following you back.
Notes:
- You will hit a ceiling once you are following 2,000 people. Twitter will not allow you to follow more than 2,000 people until you have 2,000 people following you back. Once you pass this ceiling, you can follow as many people as you want, regardless of how many people are following you back.
- Twitter isn’t all about followers. The real value in twitter is interactions. An account can have 200,000 followers, but if no one is reading their tweets, the account is worthless.
- If you are going to have lots of followers, you better have lots of tweets to go with it. Nothing looks more spammy than a Twitter account with 40,000 followers and 350 tweets.
- Make use of lists. I haven’t looked at my main Twitter feed in years. I have various lists that I use to organize accounts that I want to read.
One of the main benefits of having a Twitter account with lots of followers is the ability to get paid for sponsored tweets. The money in sponsored tweets isn’t huge, though, and should not be your primary reason for building up a Twitter account. The primary purpose should be to meet new people, share ideas, and to have an online presence.
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Wow very interesting! Congrats on having so many!
@SenseofCents Thank you, not sure if it was worth the time tho ;)
I don’t know that I’d have enough to say. How many tweets do you send a day? You must have a smartphone. I can’t do twitter until after work and my brain is fried by then. You have set the bar pretty high. Challenges me to work on it!
@Eyesonthedollar I’m not sure how many tweets I send a day, but I’ve had it nearly four years and coming up on 39k tweets. I started twitter when I was in college and had a lot of downtime in my on-campus job. You should just shoot for 3 tweets a day or so, and most of my tweets are in response to things other people have tweeted. It’s all about interacting and connecting!
Wow thanks for sharing! I didn’t even know you had a second account.
@Veronica @ Pelican on Money Yeah the Young Adult Money one is relatively new, I’ve had my primary one for almost 4 years now.
Beautiful. I’ll start tonight!
@SupermanIsReal Best of luck man! Remember engaging your followers is 10x more important than having tons of them.
@DC @ Young Adult Money That’s why I made a new twitter. Focusing less on random tweets and more on meaningful ones that’ll spur some conversation!
love this post. especially as a new blogger thanks DC!
@Lbeemoneytree No problem! The biggest benefit to following a lot of people (and in turn them following you back) is that you will find a lot of valuable accounts to engage with. People also are obsessed with follower count (again, I’m not sure why because engagement matters a lot more) so it helps to have a few thousand following you back.
Thanks for the post. Very helpful, especially for a new blogger!
@FrugalRules No problem, glad you enjoyed it!
Wow, David, looks like you’ve done a huge job on your twitter account!;-)
@MariasSelf It’s taken a ton of time, but I think I am using it efficiently now. Focusing less on gaining followers and more on organizing them into usable lists and of course engaging with everyone.
@DC @ Young Adult Money That sounds like a very wise move! we have a lot to learn from you;-)
Have you done this on YAM or just your personal account? I might try this but need to decide if it is something I feel right doing first.
@Money Life and More I did it a couple times with the YAM account mainly to get connected with other pf bloggers and ppl who follow other pf bloggers quickly. I’ve done it hundreds of times with my personal one.
This is some pretty great advice! Thanks DC. I should try this! Maybe I’ll finally get past the 12 or so followers I have now! Ha!
@MyMoneyDesign Haha you could get to a few hundred pretty quick.
Thanks for using my Twitter handle in your demonstration above, maybe I can pick up a few more followers!
Holy Cow, 54,000 followers? That’s a ton. Here I thought I had a lot with 10k+.
Back when I first started I did something similar, but manually. I just found a bunch of other Twitter users who had similar interests, and then I followed all the people that they were following who looked interesting – or in my niche. I got up to 1000+ followers pretty quick. From the time I passed 1500 or so I just let it grow organically, and earlier this year I passed 10k followers, while I only follow about 1500 or so.
As you’ve mentioned, however, having a lot of followers is good, but having ones that are actually engaged with you is even more important – so it’s good to have some sort of an engagement strategy to make sure you’re tweeting stuff regularly, and at times people are actually reading tweets.
@moneymatters I think growing organically is just fine, but it seems like what everyone wants is more followers. I’m definitely willing to follow someone in exchange for a follow, but will always take it a step further by listing them and then engaging them.
I will say it is impressive to see how many followers you have gotten organically. How long did it take to reach the 10k mark?
@DC @ Young Adult Money At the beginning I was more concerned about the numbers, wanting to reach that 1000 number as fast as I could, but then I realized I wasn’t really even engaging much with the followers I was building. So I started engaging them more, putting them in lists like you mention, and actively retweeting content from bigger and more popular users – who would take notice and retweet my stuff in return. By engaging with those other more popular users I was able to build my 10k+ followers in 2-3 years, mainly just by engaging with others, getting placed in niche lists by other people.
Wow this is really helpful! I’m definitely gonna try this out this weekend!!
@aparker1988 Let me know how it goes!
that’s amazing — a TON of followers!
@frugalportland It took a LONG time.
This is awesome advice. Definitely giving it a try now.
Wow that’s a ton of followers! I’ll be happy to break into the low thousands :)
Thanks for sharing these tips
David I love learning about new twitter tools. I just set up a page on my blog that is just for those who follow me from Twitter. The purpose is to invite them to post something about themselves and his/her business link. No pitches or offers just networking. I learned about this from Ana Hoffman and going to see if it works. This is the first time I have set up an auto DM to go out to followers but I figured as an invitation to something that would benefit the follower and not an offer it would be worth a try. Have a great weekend!
@Lydia Brown Cool idea, Lydia, thanks for sharing!
Thank you for the tips. Can I ask how long it took you to work up to 50,000 followers? Also, do you know if Twitter penalizes you for any practice like this? Do you just need to keep followers/following numbers similar?
freemoneyminute Well, I did it off and on for quite some time. Probably a couple years. Again, I did it in spurts. Sometimes I would be really good about it sometimes I wouldn’t do it for a month.
I know multiple people who have had their accounts frozen from doing this practice. You NEED a lot of tweets or they get suspicious quick of you being a spam account. If you have 10,000 followers but only have tweeted 100 times, you are much more likely to get shut down.
I use http://followerfilter.com/ for Searching User- Tweet RT and Favorite listing and deletion – Unfollower finding an deletion. Even the site is new, it works well!
Site also allows you to see any twitter user’s (included yours) unfollowers, followers and followings without login.
Of course it’s free and unlimited!
Wow, That is a LOT of followers! Inspiring! I have not been a real big twitter user. Trying to branch out a bit.
awesome!!
I think you have written about this before and I was so fascinated! You are a twitter machine!
BudgetBlonde : ) Thanks Cat. I haven’t done quite as well with it recently because I have been trying to use other social media and the blog has been taking up more time, but I still love using Twitter and think it’s a great tool!