Automating Twitter: Follow Interesting People (Part 4)

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Follow Interesting People:

Here is where you start building a list of followers. It is important that you look for people with similar interests to yourself. These people are most likely to be interested in your business. In other words, you would probably follow people who describe themselves as an “entrepreneur” rather than as a “comedian”.

By targeting people that share an interest in the product you want to sell, you will build a twitter following that will be responsive to what you have to offer. For instance, if you sought out people who were talking about football, you would probably find a good market for anything football related. On the other hand, if your tried marketing cosmetics to this group … well you get the point.

Consider this to be the “secret sauce” for your Twitter marketing success, so pay attention.

Method #1

• As you read tweets in the Twitter timeline, follow people with interesting tweets and who’s Bio’s look interesting and are related to your marketing niche. By interesting, I mean people that you might like to meet.
• You can also send them a Tweet to thank them for their tweet.
• This is the social part again.

Method #2

• Use Twitter’s search utility to find interesting people to follow.
• Go to Search.Twitter.com to do a simple real-time search of the timeline.
• For a more advanced search that will allow you to refine your search more, go to Search.Twitter.com/advanced
• Or for yet a different view of the world use Twellow.com a Twitter Yellow Pages service.
• Once you have located interesting people, simply follow them

Method #3

• Find a person using method #2 above who looks to have similar interests to you and who has build a large group of followers.
• Click on this person’s image to go to their Twitter main page. From here, click on their Follower link. You will then get a list of their followers. Look through this list for people that you would like to follow and follow them.

Method #4

• Get a free account on Twollo.com
• This utility allows us to search for fellow Twitters with a keyword and automatically follow them.

Here is the Game Plan:

The most valuable person to your Twitter account is a “friend” a friend is a person who you follow and they are also following you. The least desirable person, is the person who you follow but they don’t follow you back. Got that? I know there were too many “follows” in one sentence.

So here is the plan:

• Follow interesting people
• 40%-60% of these people will follow you back within 2 days.
• Do your housekeeping (see part 5 for this procedure) and clean out all the people you are following but who are not following you back.
• Rinse and repeat. Follow more interesting people.

How Many People do I follow each day?

That is a very good question. The answer is as many as you can … within reason. In this case we are walking a fine line between using Twitter for what it was intended, which is to meet and communicate with friends on one hand. On the other hand, we don’t want to abuse the system by adding too many followers a once. This type of abuse has caused Twitter to put some rules in place to prevent over aggressive marketing people from spamming the system.

Here are some guidelines to keep you flying below the Twitter Spam radar.

• Add between 100 and 200 friends a day. From 40% – 60% of these people will follow you back and become friends.
  
• On a new account (under 2000 followers) you can follow up to 2000 people without having your account suspended, however, it is safer to maintain your “following” count 100 to 200 higher than your “follower” count.
  
• Once you reach 2000 followers you can follow 10% more people than follow you. So if you have 2100 followers you cant follow more than 2310 people.
  

If you will follow new people every day, your Twitter friends will increase at a very rapid rate. Using these techniques, I grew my account from 0 to over 1700 people in the first week. If done properly, these people will be very responsive to your tweets and when we start advertising, they will respond to your ads as well.

In part 5 we will put the last piece in place, House Keeping. As in all areas of our lives, if we do our daily housekeeping chores consistently, our Twitter account will grow to become exactly what we want it to be, an attentive, responsive group of friends. If we don’t, it may grow into an ugly, unpredictable beast that will break your heart. I’m exaggerating, but you understand the principle.

[If you would like to see specific video instructions for setting up a Twitter account and automating it, purchase Twitter Traffic Machine. It will be the best $27 you will spend this week.]

I would appreciate any feedback you can give me regarding the usefulness of this blog post. If there are any omissions or errors, or if you are left with a burning question, please email me. I am also interested to hear about your experiences on Twitter - good or bad. Please leave a comment below. If you have found it useful, then please bookmark it on Digg or your favourite bookmark site.

Dave Perry

Follow Me on Twitter: @DBPerry

Technorati Tags: automate twitter, social media marketing, Twitter

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