Two Guaranteed Ways to have Thousands of Twitter Followers

(This is an excerpt from the Social Media Guide for Filipino Entrepreneurs eBook. If you haven’t signed up yet, please do so at the form on the sidebar to the right of this post)

A lot of people measure your “success” in Twitter by the total number of followers that you have on your account. Mainly because they can use Twitter as a tool to drive traffic to their website or blog. Here are two guaranteed ways to do that in the Philippines.

The first is to literally follow everyone that you find on Twitter. There’s a chance that they’ll follow you back. After following maybe 30,000 people, around 10,000 will follow you back. In fact, there are automated scripts available on the internet which will let you do this, hassle free. However, I strongly disagree with this method because it literally gimps and destroys your Twitter experience. Here’s why:

The reason why you want thousands of followers quickly is because you just want to spam them with links to your site. You get what you give in social media. Either users will un-follow you or you’ll also just get spammed. Once you follow too many people that you don’t know your Twitter stream will be filled with useless, impersonal, and irrelevant updates from all over the world.

What’s the second way to get thousands of followers? Be a famous celebrity, sports superstar, or politician! The top Filipinos with the most number of followers are celebrities. You have ABS-CBN host and former PBB housemate Bianca Gonzales at 120k followers. Then there’s Angel Locsin with more than 86,000. Former VJ Iya Villania also has around 96,000 followers. Note that I’m not saying that it’s bad to be a celebrity and have thousands of followers — it just comes with the territory.

Most of the other people in the list are the type that I talked about earlier. It’s pretty easy to spot. Check how many are following them and ratio it to the people they are following. Take a look as well as what they’re posting on Twitter. There’s a big chance that they’re just spamming links to their sites.

So… what am I trying to say?

People become so obsessed with bringing up their follower numbers that they sometimes miss the point of Twitter. Twitter, like other forms of social media, is not a one-night stand. It’s a long term engagement which is built on the foundation of trust. Get only the people that matter to follow you: your customers, partners, the media, etc. Forget about everyone else because it’s useless to have them in your stream (unless you really just want to use Twitter as a traffic generator). Don’t get discouraged when you only have 100 or 200 followers. As long as those are the people that have a direct impact on your life then there’s nothing wrong with just having them follow you.

(Author’s Note: The eBook will talk about ways on how to build a real follower base on Twitter. Sign-up for a copy at the sidebar to the right)