Remember when you first signed up for Twitter and started following people? Eventually you realize that one method to build a following is to follow as many people as possible hoping that they’ll follow you back. In theory, that works but it doesn’t last forever.

Twitter stops you at 2000

Once you hit 2000 followers, you can’t follow anymore unless you have an actual following. So on day one, if you somehow found 2000 to follow, you can still have 0 followers. But in order to follow the 2001st person, you’ll need 1820 followers.

Why? That’s because once you reach the magic 2000, there’s a 10% rule to prevent mitigate spamming. So if you have 2000 followers, you can following up to 2200 people. If you have 4000 followers, you can follow up to 4400 people. Get it? The more followers you have, the more of a “buffer” Twitter will give you.

You can have as many sheep as you wantflock-of-sheep

Although there is a limitation on how many people you follow, Twitter lets you have as many followers as you want. You can follow nobody but have 50,000 followers. That’s how celebs like Ashton Kutcher, Britney Spears, and Ellen DeGeneres all have over 3 million followers as of this writing.

Use tools to mass follow and mass unfollow

Unless you are a celebrity or have some type of real following, you obviously will have to play the follow-me-and-I’ll-follow-you-back game. Doing it manually will only take you so far. Therefore, people use tools like TwitterFollower and Buzzom and TweetDeck and GreaseMonkey, just to name a few. (I’ll do a Twitter tool review at a later date.)

When I say “mass follow” I don’t mean you have to follow everyone. I’m simply saying that you’ll have the ability to access others in a network and you can be still be selective.

Building your followers has benefits

There are many reasons to increase your following but if you’re a blogger, that should be reason enough. Ever since I actually made the effort to build a following, my traffic has increased. In fact, Twitter is now my top referral, with only direct traffic and organic searches exceeding it as overall traffic sources.

Additionally, you can get paid! As I mentioned in a previous article about Sponsored Tweets, you can get paid for sending out tweets! How long do you think it takes to fire off a tweet? There’s nothing like making a few bucks by just making a single click. If you’re going to sign up, please don’t forget who sent you there (<— not so subtle self-plug).

Long-term Twitter decision

You’ll quickly realize that following several thousand people will create a lot of noise. It’ll be non-stop shouting.

What you can do at that point is start unfollowing. You can just look through the names and pictures and you can pretty much tell which followers add no real value to you at all, other than boosting your Twitter stats.

If your ego allows it, feel free to unfollow everyone. Sure, you’ll lose some followers in the process but your ratio (one of the things that some sponsors look at) will be much better. That’s when you know you’ve really made it as a shepherd!

Related Posts on Free Blog Help Related Posts around the web