Unless you have been living under the rock for the past couple of years, you would have known the “revolution” called Twitter. It has caught the attention of everyone alike, from normal Joe to political leaders, from street dancer to celebrities. Apart from several goodies it has offered to the Internet community, Internet marketing too has got new dimensions with the advent of Twitter, from finding a job to selling oneself. Thus for any person active online, not necessary to be an Internet marketer or online entrepreneur, it has become the prime concern to get a huge Twitter follower count.
Why do you need more followers on Twitter? Because the follower count is a proof that you are a social person, the more the count the more sociable you are! Further, it is hard to conceal your Twitter follower count, and nobody will be enthused to follow a twitterer with very few followers or no follower at all! All of us have that herd mentality. A fatty follower list is a proof that you are a sociable person. The more the count, the more social and famous you are! (and more the chances for you to make money on Twitter!) Besides that, who won’t need a crowd to hear all that you shout? Won’t you need listening ears for all that you shout into the cyberspace? With your follower count increasing day by day, you get a great audience to listen to your tweets. That is why people are crazy inflating their follower count by even spending a few hundred bucks!
When it took 2-1/2 years for this blog to get an RSS subscriber count of 1500, it took barely a few weeks for this blogger to get a five figure follower count on Twitter with some techniques. So you can get immediate exposure and reach to a bigger audience easily on the microblogging platform Twitter than on your regular blog.
However, having more followers on Twitter has its own pros and cons too. Before getting into how to get more followers on Twitter, let’s look at the pros and cons of having a huge follower/following list.
Pros of having more Twitter followers:
- You have the chances to reach a huge audience worldwide in a short span, a great advantage for Internet marketing.
- You can easily get caught in the eyes of advertisers on Twitter if you have a good number of followers, a mean to make a few bucks by accepting sponsored tweets.
Cons of having more followers on Twitter:
- With more and more followers that you have on Twitter, the amount of direct spam messages in your Twitter inbox and replies/mentions increase proportionately.
- The more the followers you have, the more the chances are for your Twitter account to get hacked.
- If there isn’t any real conversation happening with so much of followers, it is obvious to feel that tweets are getting thinned in Twitter world’s noise.
How to get more followers on Twitter without following back for free?
We have seen the pros and cons of having more and more Twitter followers. Now let us see “How to get more followers on Twitter for free, fast and easy?” Unless you are a celebrity or a renowned personality, nobody is going to follow you except your close friends and relatives, howsoever interesting your tweets might be. I too had this problem. Though I joined Twitter, made almost 950 tweets, and tried to socialize for almost nine months, I had only around 162 loyal followers! However, when famous bloggers like Darren Rowse, Chris Brogan, and Maki shared their experience on how to get more Twitter followers for free, they all had one thing in common – to make interesting, useful tweets and engage in building a community around you, but I was badly unsuccessful on that! Now I have only a simple technique left to get more followers. How? Manipulate! But how?
To manipulate your Twitter follower list, there are two options. They are:
- Impersonation! Replace your profile picture with that of a cute female and alter the username to match a female name. For eg., Paul to Paula. Once ample follower count has been accomplished as wished, revert the changes. However, note that the first rule itself of Twitter is against impersonation.
- Mutual following. Follow back anyone who follows you. Initiate following from your end by following every twitterer who is socializing well on Twitter.
If the first method is tried, the results would be terrific, guaranteed. All the droolers on Twitter would line up to become your followers and are ought to definitely follow you. Your Twitter handle may even get hacked! At any point in time, if the cat is out of the bag, it would be trouble invited with a possible ban and loss of all work until that time.
I felt it as an insult to my ego to impersonate. Hence I decided to experiment the second option on my personal Twitter account with the following assumptions.
- Twitterers with the following count more than the follower count will be ardent followers and will definitely follow back once you follow them.
- Twitterers with an even follower/following count will also follow back.
- Once the numbers start moving up rapidly, there are chances of getting yourself caught in the radar of Twitter applications searching for people who follow back.
With minimal socialization and tweets, my aim was to get more followers by manipulation, and the technique employed to get more followers was pretty much simple: Follow back every twitterer who followed me as well as initiate a follow with any other twitterer with good numbers and interaction. For other twitterers to locate me easily as a sociable person willing to follow back, I kept my following/follower count equal or the following count slightly more. By doing so, signals are sent to the Twitter world that here is a nice person willing to network with anybody who follows him!
There are a lot of tools available on the Internet for mass following/unfollowing which one can make use of. However, note that there is a follower limit. Else, you may get banned for not complying with the rules.
The results of the assumptions and experimentation were encouraging. I reached a point close to 56,000 followers on my Twitter account. Now the interesting part! If you want to act smart and project yourself as a celebrity with mass follower count, cheat all who followed you! Ditch them! Start unfollowing all your followers! At last, you will not be following anyone but will be having a tremendous follower count. So that is how you get more followers on Twitter without following back for free! You got huge Twitter follower count without spending a dime! The same technique holds good even for Facebook!
Very useful information indeed. Thanks a lot. But how come, we are now NOT discussing much about MT affairs. Are we drying up or what ? Anyway, something is better than nothing and Raj & Co is always up-to-date. Keep it up.
Regds.
SRR.
I have started feeling boredom with MT and feel dried up with the subject; hence looking at other avenues of interest which I am sharing here. Further, I feel MT as a sunset industry with the pace at which it is transforming. If I come across any interesting aspect in MT, I will definitely share it on this blog. Until then, thanks for bearing my blog posts that deviate from the core subject.