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!

Despite running into issues from time to time, I am a big fan of Ubuntu Linux!

I started out with Ubuntu version 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) and made my way up to Hardy Heron (8.04). Then I stuck with Hardy Heron until after Intrepid Ibex (8.10) and Jaunty Jackalope (9.04) were released. Hardy Heron was a LTS (long term support) release and I liked that it was so stable.

Then Ubuntu Karmic Koala was released on Oct 29, 2009 and I decided it was time to upgrade.

Since Hardy Heron was a LTS edition, Ubuntu’s update manager never notified me when Intrepid Ibex or Jaunty Jackalope was released, and it also would not have done so for Karmic Koala. So I had to force the update manager to give me the update option.

I did this by pressing Alt-F2 and entering:

update-manager -d

Then the update button appeared in the update manager and the process could begin…

Upgrading

You cannot upgrade directly from Hardy Heron to Karmic Koala, but have to go through the versions between the two. The first upgrade was from Hardy Heron to Intrepid Ibex, and that went off without a hitch!

Part 2 of the upgrade was from Intrepid Ibex to Jaunty Jackalope. The upgrade itself went off fine, but when I started up Jaunty, I could not get the networking going! I needed to get connected to the internet because without that, the next part of the upgrade would be impossible!

Since I wasn’t planning to be a Jaunty user for very long, I didn’t really want to spend too much time trying to solve the network connection issue. So I simply booted into the previous version of the Linux kernel that was installed with Intrepid (2.6.27) and the networking was fine.

I could now do part 3 of the upgrade, which was upgrading from Jaunty Jackalope to Karmic Koala. The upgrade itself went fine, but then the fun started…

Problems

When I tried to boot into Karmic and the Caps Lock light started flashing and I had a blank screen, that was a sure sign that something was wrong! My laptop was locked up hard, and from what I could see, my only choice out of there was via the power button.

Since I had success with booting into version 2.6.27 of the kernel, I gave that another shot. That worked… sort of… The GUI started up, but then crashed after a few seconds and threw me out to the command prompt.

Long story short, and many frustrations in between, I figured out that either Karmic or Karmic’s version of the kernel, 2.6.31, did not like the proprietary driver (fglrx) of my ATI video card.

Then I found this great article on how to remove the fglrx proprietary ATI driver and instead use the open source driver. After this, the Karmic GUI started up.

In the process I uninstalled Compiz / Emerald that I had running under Hardy Heron. I’m assuming that the uninstall process did not restore the default windows manager settings. With no windows manager starting up, none of the windows I opened had a border or title bar, and the windows were unmovably attached to the top lefthand side of the screen.

The solution, I figured out, was to make sure that the metacity windows manager was starting up.

I did this by doing the following two steps:

1. Pressed Alt-F2 and entered gconf-editor in the box. Then I navigated to desktop->gnome->applications->windows-manager and entered /usr/bin/metacity for the current and default keys.
2. On the desktop menu I went to System->Preferences->Startup Applications and added an entry for metacity to start up during startup as well.

These two steps did the trick for me.

At this point, everything seems to be fine and I am really enjoying Ubuntu Karmic Koala!

After running Make-A-Website-With-Traffic.com on a different platform for all of its existence, I decided to switch it over to run on Wordpress instead. Here’s why I did it, and what it took to get the job done…

It’s not that I was unhappy with the previous platform. In fact, I’m still running one of my other websites, Fun-Things-Texas.com, on Site Build It. Because this site is more a “labor of love” than anything else, I decided to find a way to cut down on hosting expenses.

My choice of using Wordpress as the new platform also gave me the chance to experiment with Wordpress and learn how to use it as a CMS, i.e. use it not only as blog (its traditional use), but also to recreate a traditional website.

Why Wordpress?

I had previous experience with Wordpress because I used it to set up a self-hosted blog. So I knew it was easy to install and set up.

The other attraction was all the “extras” that are freely available for Wordpress thanks to so many people out there who develop these “extras” for the pleasure that it brings them.

Wordpress Themes

There are a boat-load of very nice-looking Wordpress themes available that will satify a wide variety of  website “look & feel” needs. The themes are all easy to install and extend, and when you want to change themes for a new “look & feel“, it is easy to do too.

Wordpress Plugins

Wordpress plugins are used to extend the basic Wordpress template to add all the extra functionality you need. Here you also have lots to choose from, and the plugins are mostly installable by the simple click of a button. Occasionally a plugin will require that you make some manual changes to one of your Wordpress source pages, but there is usually clear instructions on what to do.

As you can see here, I was able to recreate the previous version of the website in Wordpress (see the Menu on the right), and gain a blog in the process. The fact that my visitors can comment on most of the content on the website, is a big bonus to me. I think that the conversations that develop in this way add value to the original post, and everybody gains from that.

Coming soon… In the future I plan to write an article outling all the steps that I had to take to recreate my website in Wordpress to use Wordpress like a CMS.