Do you really need a large number of followers to promote yourself successfully on Twitter? The answer is no. Not at all. But many people still persist in mass following users. Let’s look at some of the reasons why you don’t need to use this marketing tactic.
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Not trying to be an ass, but if memory serves, @doshdosh used to follow every single person who followed him back providing they tweeted him... and now he follows less than 100 which leads me to believe he unfollowed en mass after gaining a lot of followers with the follow everyone technique, which the article seems to advise against. But maybe the point of the article is that he learned from his experience? Twittercounter shows him losing an average of sixty followers per day? http://twittercounter.com/doshdosh/all - so a bit confused.
@SugarraeI respect you a lot and I’m actually following you on Twitter because I find you very interesting but...you should probably do a more thorough investigation if you’re trying to accuse me doing something I didn’t do. Here are the facts: 1. I never followed everyone who followed me. Go to Twitterholic and look at my history, I always followed less than I followed. The way I follow is not mass-following, it’s just turning on auto-follow to reciprocate people who followed me. There is a big difference there. A mass follower follows more than the no. of followers he/she has and always has a ratio that is similar. Go check out the folks in the Top 200 list on Twitterholic, you’ll see a bunch of ordinary people (non-celebs) with upwards of 70K+ followers. Go see their follow ratio history, that’s what a mass-follower looks like. I have a blog with over 24K subscribers.In the past I did turn auto-follow on because I wanted to reciprocate people who follow me.. because a big number of them were readers of the blog. I’m also ranking in the top 3 for multiple heavy traffic twitter keywords like ’get twitter followers’, ’ways to use twitter’, ’how to use twitter’ etc... and I’m getting new followers everyday from those articles, which accounts for the constant growth. This is on top of the fact that I’m not a noob (despite what you think) and actually have a decent reputation in my field. To imply that I faked my follower count by manipulating it with mass-follows is quite honestly, insulting. 2. Trust me, if I really were into mass-following in order to get followers, I would have been doing it since April 2007... and I would have upwards of 200,000+ followers now instead of the 13K I have. I’m not joking.Why stop at 13K when I can get more? Right now if I start an account and use some automated tools to do mass-following, I could get 10K in 15 days. Easy. And the graph will look as if I’m following 1K a day and then dropping and following again to accumulate followers. THAT’s what mass following looks like. So yeah, I didn’t ’learn from my experience’ because I didn’t play that game on @doshdosh. I have had multiple twitter accounts and I have experimented with this strategy prior to writing about it but never on @doshdosh. So why did I unfollow people? Because I couldn’t keep up with the updates and was sick of all the clutter in the timeline. Believe it or not, when you follow a few thousand people... things get messy, even when you can use groups or filters. And I just didn’t see the point of giving people fake attention. I wanted to reboot and start again from the bottom up, slowly adding people that I find interesting or people who I have a relationship with.Mass-following was never my focus from day one and since you haven’t been following me at all or keeping a close eye on my profile, I’m sure you must have missed that.
>>>and I’m getting new followers everyday from those articles, which accounts for the constant growth. All I did was quote Twittercounter’s estimate. If you have a problem with their math/trending (which shows you losing 60 followers a day), you might want to chat with them.>>>This is on top of the fact that I’m not a noob (despite what you think) and actually have a decent reputation in my field. I never said, or implied, either of those comments so please let’s not go playing defense when no one was on offense.>>>To imply that I faked my follower count by manipulating it with mass-follows is quite honestly, insulting.I didn’t. I asked a question because I vividly remembered you tweeting something along the lines of "if you’re following me and I’m not following you, tweet me and I’ll follow you". If I’d accused you of something, you’d better believe I’d have flat out accused you and not done it in a "round about" way by asking a question for clarification. If you follow me, then you know I say what I mean. And when I have a question, I ask it.>>>I could get 10K in 15 days. Easy.Actually, with the Twitter limitations of 2K and 10%, it wouldn’t be "easy" to do that in 15 days in a niche arena. Not saying it would be impossible, but it wouldn’t be autopilot. I know the greasemonkey scripts, the follower limits and the risk that you’d bust the account trying to do it that fast/hard.>>>So why did I unfollow people? I didn’t ask that. I follow under 100 people and always have because of that very reason. >>>since you haven’t been following me at allActually, I used to follow you. Back when you were mass following in return (but in the earlier days of it). I unfollowed because I follow very few people who follow an amount of people I’d gather is impossible to keep up with (therefore the follow back is more token then interest). I guess you must have missed that.
>>>All I did was quote Twittercounter’s estimate. If you have a problem with their math/trending (which shows you losing 60 followers a day), you might want to chat with them.I actually don’t have a problem with Twittercounter at all. I know I’m losing followers. So you’re right there.The point I made about the articles and my blog is to show that I’m accumulating Twitter follows organically as opposed to manually inflating it by following other users (as you believed). I think the problem partially lies in terminology.. since you do know how the mass-following strategy works, its pretty clear that what I’m doing doesn’t fall in that category. Just following people who tweets you is not mass-following, after all I’m just following the people who already follow me. That’s what I did. I followed people who already followed me. That’s not what I call mass-following. As you should know, the mass-following we seem to be talking about is the act of following users who don’t follow you in order to get them to follow back. I didn’t do anything of that sort so I just wanted to clarify that. >>>>I never said, or implied, either of those comments so please let’s not go playing defense when no one was on offense. Fair enough. My bad for being defensive. >>>I didn’t. I asked a question because I vividly remembered you tweeting something along the lines of "if you’re following me and I’m not following you, tweet me and I’ll follow you"I said you implied that I faked my follower count because of this sentence of yours: "after gaining a lot of followers with the follow everyone technique, which the article seems to advise against."My article did advise against mass-following.. and I did say that people who do it are faking their follower count. So when you say that sentence above, I took it to mean that you believed I was faking my follower count by mass following. Anyway its no biggie. Maybe I’m just over sensitive.I did ask for people to tweet so I could follow because I wanted to know who was out there actually reading, so I could follow and check that out. This was a spur of the moment thing just for interaction. And completely nothing like the follow-everybody tactic I mentioned in the article... that’s why I felt as if I was misrepresented. You should know very well then just following people who already follow you doesn’t increase your follow count, it is maintains it because of mutuality. I mean, these people are already following me ANYWAY. It shouldn’t really be called a mass-following tactic, which as stated in my article, has slightly negative connotations because it would imply that I followed people simply to get a return follow.That’s not what I did at all. >>>>I didn’t ask that. I follow under 100 people and always have because of that very reason. You didn’t ask but the reasons I offered an answer was because you said that "he unfollowed en mass after gaining a lot of followers.." .... so I just wanted to clarify that my unfollowing en mass didn’t happen because I achieved my goal of getting ’a lot of followers’. I would have done it anyway. >>>Actually, I used to follow you. Back when you were mass following in return (but in the earlier days of it). I unfollowed because I follow very few people who follow an amount of people I’d gather is impossible to keep up with (therefore the follow back is more token then interest). I guess you must have missed that.I know you followed me. But didn’t know why you unfollowed. Thanks for letting me know. Anyway, just for the record... it was always more interest than token (even though yes, I admit I didn’t read every tweet)...I mainly followed you because I’ve been reading your blog for a while and enjoy the way you think/write/tweet. Very candid.I hope there’s no bad feelings over this. Apologies if I seemed rude but I just hate to seen as a person who earned his audience by fake-following everybody on masse. I’m proud of the people who follow me and grateful for them so had to offer a clarification. Thanks for taking the time to reply, Rae.
Personally @doshdosh, I still think it’s phony to make the statement that if you follow me and tweet me, I’ll follow you back, only to go ahead and mass unfollow for whatever reason you chose to do so. Certainly it’s your prerogative, but you misled the vast amount of your followers.
Dude. I’m tired. Not interested in another long fight. Twitter is not a marriage. It’s not till death do us apart. Just because I said I’ll follow you doesn’t mean I can’t change my mind afterwards. To say that I’m ’misleading’ my Twitter followers is absurd. You’re really suggesting that once you say you’ll follow someone, you can’t ever drop them from your follow list?People unfollow each other everyday on Twitter. People unfollow me everyday. It’s nothing personal and it doesn’t have to be. It’s not devious, manipulative or deceptive. In any case, on the day before I unfollowed everyone, I spent the entire day tweeting about what I was about to do... personally apologizing because I could not read so many updates anymore. Many people replied saying that they understood and I debated the issue with some other users. It was a wholesome experience. And there was no grudges or whatever.Although there are some people like you who think that I’m cunning or dishonest for doing so, but hey.. I can’t control what people think. I can only offer explanations, apologies and do what I think is best for me. There’s certainly nothing deceptive about what I did. I even followed people for more than a year before I decided that I really couldn’t manage. If someone followed me for a while, found that he/she lost interest in me or would prefer to have a less cluttered timeline... and he/she made tweets explaining/apologizing for what he/she is going to do... I would totally understand. Heck, an apology is not even needed for me. It’s just Twitter. Why make this a big issue? Sheesh.
I’ve definitely unfollowed more people on twitter than I’m currently following - quite a few that I’ve had extended discussions with. Someone can always @ reply me - people I’m following are for my benefit - either they entertain me, provide good information or they are my friends/collegues. The point that resonated with me from the post is to focus on building quality followers - I feel like a great many people following me are "collectors" they want a collection of people from different industries and the vast majority are not really listening.
Grader has an interesting historical feature I just found out about that shows your follower and following history... example: http://twitter.grader.com/history/doshdosh