The Evolving Internet Marketer

It’s a commonly known way to build followers quickly on Twitter. Find people with large numbers of followers and follow them regardless if there’s a potential relationship there or not. The payoff from this strategy comes when you find so called ‘open networkers’ who automatically follow back anyone who follows them.

Since I’m more in the Quality over Quantity crowd, I don’t ascribe to this formula. I want there to at least be the potential that

• I have something of value to offer a potential follower and
• A potential follower has something of value to offer me.

What a novel concept, eh? But isn’t this what puts the social in social networking?

Tom’s Quick Twitter Tip on Who I Won’t Follow

Having said this, here’s a new follower I picked up this morning who I won’t be following back. (By the way, I use a service called Twimailer to receive a more complete view of who a follower is than the built in alert service offered by Twitter – this allows me to make a more informed follow back decision without leaving my email inbox.)

This, in my view, is little more than Twitter Spam. This person shares nothing but a name (probably fake) which doesn’t match the picture (probably fake) which is complemented by…

• No location
• No web address
• No Bio
• No Tweets (Twitter Posts or Updates)
• And a disproportionate number of Following to Followers

In other words, there’s nothing of value here. In fact, this follower has done an exceptional job of providing no value whatsoever to the extent that I’m wondering if it’s just an exercise in Follower getting.

Now if all you want is followers with no regard to who they are, what they do, where they’re located and what mutually beneficial interest you might cultivate then you can pursue the above strategy or any of the number of schemes to gain followers quickly floating around Twitter at any given time.

5 Steps to Twitter Value

However, if you want to pursue, as I do, a Twitter follow/follower strategy based on value … value received from those you follow and value offered to those who follow you then it’s really very simple…

1. Follow the leaders in your hometown, your market, your industry. Your criteria here is to learn. They may not have the most to say but they afford the best value in the information they offer in their Twitter Stream. Retweet their tweets and reply as appropriate when they offer exceptional value that should be passed on or you can add value to a conversation they’ve started.

2. Follow your customers, prospects, and vendors. Invite them to follow you. Listen to their conversations in Twitter and other social media. Reply to them, retweet the good stuff they offer and offer them information and insight, not necessarily yours, that provides them real value not just the features and benefits of buying this or that from you.

3. Be relational rather than promotional. When they get to know you, trust you and like you is when they’ll want to do business with you … not when your tweets constantly link them to a squeeze page offering a 27 lesson e-course on mastering the law of attraction for the special twitter discount of $97.

4. Be generous rather than narcissistic. What does this mean? It means every tweet shouldn’t be about you. It should be about (re)distributing value – with appropriate links or attribution – from wherever you find it. Don’t just be the expert on your products and your services but be the expert on your industry so that you become known as a valuable resource and not an irritant. Finally …

5. Be yourself. It’s okay to have a personality, have an opinion, have a life and show it in your tweets. Just remember WWYMT … What Would Your Mother Think … and offer your tweets with respect and good taste.

Believe me, if you put the above strategy into place you will find your twitter following growing more quickly than you can imagine and with a much higher and more satisfying return on the investment in value that you make.