RSS Ray's Online Marketing Blog

Angie Swartz, founder of Square Martini Media, discusses why adding massive Twitter followers isn’t always the best idea.

I started out my day today writing a blogpost, Gain 1.1 Million Twitter Followers Here! Tonight! Make Millions! as I watched twitter messages go by on Seesmic offering to add followers for me and make me money.   Adding Twitter Followers quickly seems to be all the rage.  In fact, just in the past month, vendors seem to be popping up everywhere who offer to sell you their services to add followers and to teach you how to make money on Twitter overnight. So many vendors have gotten into this market that the Better Business Bureau has gotten involved.  What does that tell you?  Whenever the Better Business Bureau’s name is popping up, then I start to think somebody’s being taken advantage of.  (Read a more in depth view of this topic at Rieva Lesonsky’s Beware of Get-Rich Scams on Twitter).

So, is there value in adding massive twitter followers quickly? Undoubtedly, yes, and we’ll examine those advantages below.  However, we shouldn’t discount that joining twitter is just like joining any other community.  If our goal is to use twitter for business, we should remind ourselves that part of the importance of taking time to develop a community is in the getting to know, like and trust the people you choose to become friends with and in aligning yourself with people interested in the same things that you’re interested in (and with regards to business, aligning yourself with people who want to buy what you have to sell).

What is Twitter All About Anyway?

Twitter is about the following:

• Two-way conversations
• Meaningful engagement
• Developing relationships
• Transparency and Authenticity
• Creating an environment where people know, like and trust you
• Helping others without regard to what you’ll get in return
• What it’s not: a one-way push marketing tool (aka tv, newspaper or magazine advertising)

The Fast and The Furious or The Steadfast Method of Gaining Twitter Followers

How you choose to grow your twitter follower base is a personal choice.  The following are just a few of the things you might want to consider:

Two Methods of Gaining Twitter Followers: The Fast and The Furious vs. The Steadfast.

The Twitter ecosphere is changing a bit every day.  How you choose to grow your twitter follower tribe is up to you.  So ask yourself how you want to use Twitter as a tool and proceed from there.  As for me, I’ll be the person communicating with my organically grown tribe of approximately 5,000 trying to get to know them as best as I can so that I can clearly understand them and their needs and hoping they’ll understand me and mine.  You can read more articles about social media strategy at http://www.squaremartinimedia.com or tweet me @aaswartz on Twitter and tune into TwitterTalkRadio on Wednesdays at Noon PST on www.wsradio.com.