Apparently, a lot of people made it their News Year's Resolution to gain a huge Twitter following. After all, influencers have a lot of people following them, right? On Twitter. Not on Facebook.

For many marketers, the 'game' is to find a person of influence and have that person hold up your 'widget' and tell everyone that follows them that your widget is cool and everyone should have one.

How to Become an Influence Marketer

There's a new game ... or at least there should be. The new game is to learn how to become the person of influence that people are reaching out to.

That's right. Don't be the person looking for somebody to tell their somebodies that you are somebody. Be the somebody that everyone is looking for.

There's a pretty simple strategy for growing a huge Twitter following to at least have the appearance of having some influence to wield in the marketplace. The hard part is to execute the strategy long enough for it to work. This, of course, is where it breaks down. Too many people give up before they reach their goal.

Losing weight. Gaining followers. Up. Down. People give up too soon.

There are plugins available that will allow you to

  • follow and unfollow people in Twitter.
  • follow by topic
  • follow by keyword
  • hunt out other people and follow the people that follow them.

A rule of thumb is that for every 100 people you randomly follow, about 30-40% will follow you back. Those that don't follow you back, give it a week or so, unfollow them. Voila! Your twitter following has increased by 300 people. You can do this daily, weekly or at whatever pace you desire to reach whatever goal you set for yourself. Three hundred people/day x 365 days = 100K followers in a year gained.

Problems with Huge Twitter Following

There's a problem, however.  Actually several problems.

You end up with huge list of people you are following that you in all honesty don't really care about. Your Twitter feed, in turn, will fill up with tweets from Tweeps that you don't care about. Can you say trolls?

You will end up with a huge following of people who also have a huge following. Sounds good, but the more people you have that have more people following them, the LESS people really see of you. A big number of followers results in less engagement. Go figure.

Seems to me that a better way is to:

1. follow people you care about

2. get followed by people who care about you

3.only follow back those you want to engage in.

It's slower but you will have better engagement and better long-term results.