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I had a recent conversation with a friend about Twitter followers, how to gain followers, and how to handle new followers.

Is it important to have lots of followers? How do you go about getting more followers on Twitter? Do you follow back all your new followers?

What Is Twitter About?

I think the answer to these questions lies with looking at what Twitter is all about.

In a nutshell, Twitter is about the conversation. It is about people sharing thoughts and ideas with those who are interested in what they have to say (i.e. their followers). It is about listening to others’ ideas, and if possible, making a valuable contribution to the conversation.

Your Twitter stream, made up of your tweets and the tweets of the people you follow,  is where the conversation takes place and is where the value lies. If someone in your stream tweets junk (spam) or even just stuff that you are not interested in, it diminishes the value of your stream. At that point  you can simply unfollow that person!

You are the guardian of the value that your Twitter stream offers you!

With that in mind, the right approach would be for you to look for people who tweet about things that you have an interest in. Like Elaine in Seinfeld, who judged men to see if they are “sponge-worthy”, you need to ask, “Is this person Twitter-stream-worthy?” Then you will build a stream that offers you value and one that you can contribute to.

Why Would You Want Lots Of Followers?

The basic thought behind having lots of followers is that the more followers you have, the bigger your influence on Twitter (the more people will read your message). This sounds wonderful, but…

What if you have 1,000 followers and 900 of those followers are “twitter bots” or people that aren’t really interested in what you have to say? Then, effectively, you have only 100 followers.

So, having lots of followers is a good thing, but the quality of those followers count a lot towards determining what influence you really have.

Two Philosophies On Getting Followers On Twitter

There are two basic philosophies on how to get more Twitter followers:

1. The Reciprocating Follow: Some people follow a bunch of other people in the hopes that those people, or at least some of them, will follow them back. Some people in this group will actively search for and unfollow the people they followed and who did not reciprocate. Tools like FriendOrFollow make it easy to find out who is not following you back.
2. The Interesting Tweet: Other people merely rely on their own interesting tweets to get followers. Their philosophy is simply, “if they like what I tweet, they will follow me.” This group may look for interesting people to follow, but they aren’t particularly concerned about whether those people follow them back or not.

The Interesting Tweet philosophy should be at the heart of anybody’s efforts to get more Twitter followers. If people find your tweets interesting, they will follow you. Not only will that bring you followers, but your focus on “interesting tweets” ups the overall value of Twitter for everyone.

If you don’t believe me, take a look at this guy (warning: some profanity) who tweets about all the funny stuff his dad says. He follows only one person, but at the time of writing this he has almost 800,000 followers and has tweeted only 74 times!

The Reciprocating Follow philosophy can bring you a lot of followers too, but you may not want to be too set on the “reciprocating” part of it. What if you follow somebody who tweets really interesting stuff, but declines to follow you back? You will lose out on the value they offer if you unfollow them.

The other side of the Reciprocating Follow philosophy is that someone follows you in the hopes that you will follow them back. Don’t ever auto-follow them back (there are tools that will let you do that) or you will end up with a Twitter stream filled with junk. Take a look at each new follower, and if you are interested in their tweets, follow back. Don’t ever feel that you have to follow anybody!

Guidelines For Getting More Twitter Followers

With all this being said, here are my guidelines for following people and getting more followers on Twitter:

1. Add a photo of yourself to your Twitter profile. People like to deal with other people.
2. Complete your profile bio to show people that you are a real person. Give people an idea of who you are and what your interests are.
3. Use Twitter directories like WeFollow or a tool like WhoShouldIFollow to find interesting people to follow. Then follow them without being too worried about whether they follow you back. Some will, some won’t.
4. Take a look at new followers before following them back. Never auto-follow people back!
5. Focus on posting interesting tweets. This will bring you new followers.
6. Retweet other people’s interesting tweets. This will also bring you new followers.

Happy tweeting!