Listening to a the audible book – Mastering Story, Community and Influence, it is mentioned that following everyone who follows you, will increase your followers dramatically. I have always been really conservative about following people, so as to not flood my feed, but I wondered if it had anything to do with why I generally don’t see a rapid increase in followers. Admittedly, I don’t tweet very often, and don’t usually have too much information to share. However, I decided to give this a try to see how quickly I could increase my followers and I was surprised at some of the results.
I started by following everyone who followed me at the time. Unfortunately I could not follow everyone, Twitter actually stops you from following more than 1000 people per 24 hour period, as explained on the Twitter help center page. I had read after following their alert, that they also don’t allow you to follow more than 2000 people. So while watching my followers rapidly increase, I was going to be restrained by the 2001 accounts I followed. But it kinda worked, within a couple of days I had an additional 100 followers and counting.
Some of the new accounts almost instantly followed me, like they’re using apps that some how associate themselves with accounts I’ve recently followed. As I never had 2000 followers to begin with, I did use the recommended Who to follow accounts as I thought they would be relative to the people I had followed. It really took no time and very little effort to add and increase followers. There are a lot of dodgy followers now though and I’m surprised that Twitter has not banned them. I question whether my following those accounts gives them some sort of validation that they are legit. Who knows.
I have oddly discovered some really interesting accounts which I will continue to subscribe to, but for the most part I will be axing at least three-quarters of them as it’s almost impossible to keep up with the ever refreshing feed. I will still leave it for a couple of days, just to see how many new followers I get, but I do expect those numbers to drop just as quickly as they increased the moment I start chipping away at bring my total account more toward the 400 – 500 follower mark.
In conclusion though, if you want more followers fast, start following more people, but remember Twitter has set a limit.