twitter fail blog

Today’s Guest Post was written by @jackassletters. After you read this post, follow him on twitter and then go to his website and laugh your ass off. You’ll also want to check out Puppy Pot Pie. If  you’re a Social Media Marketer, you probably have no sense of humor and would be totally insulted will really appreciate this resource.
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How to Get Fewer Followers on Twitter and Why This is a Good Thing

or: Ignore my advice and skip to the penultimate line for a free and guaranteed system to get 15,000 followers!

You’ve seen the offers. You’ve seen people with a lot of followers. Some of these people aren’t even celebrities and have nothing interesting to say, but still have more followers than that Gandhi guy and you’re jealous. You too want and need more followers!

I’m here to tell you anyone can have tons of followers. Even you! Hell, people will follow a monkey that does nothing but make fun of marketers and hasn’t updated in over a month! There’s no reason you can’t be more popular than an almost dead monkey!

People want followers on twitter. People want lots of followers. The more the better. You can’t follow more than 100 people without having someone promising you a system to get more followers. Somehow people see this arbitrary number as some kind of valuable metric and place part of their self-worth on those digits. It’s like penis envy brought to both sexes. Bigger is better, baby! Right?

It seems as though there may even be people making a living off selling “get more followers” systems to the desperate. Max exposure! I mean who doesn’t want more followers? Who wants to be the 98 pound weakling getting sand kicked in his face? More more more! The logic goes something like: having 100 followers means when I say something up to 100 people can potentially read what I have to say, so having a thousand followers means I have 10 times as many potential readers. Etc. Etc. until I can wave my hand in some hypnotic gesture and send my followers wherever I’d like them to go. With enough followers I can even make money!

It doesn’t work this way. But I’ll get into that in a bit, and if you still disagree, and still need that external validation of 15,000 followers, stick around I will reveal a guaranteed and free method to get at least this many (like it’s hard).

People are concerned with the wrong side of the following/followers ratio. This is because twitter, as a medium, is mostly me me me! “What are you doing?” is the question that you must answer, so you answer again and again, hitting that update button like a mouse stimulating a direct link to the pleasure center of its brain! It’s less about reading what other people are doing (after all they are mice too), and more about that damn empty box begging for an update. But updates are worthless without followers, right? Tree falling in the woods with no one to hear and all that. Sorry to get all deep and philisophical (how’s that spelled again?).

So you go out, following people until twitter won’t let you follow any more, hoping for the reach-around-follow-back. When you smack up against those limits you wait a day, or unfollow those people too stupid to follow back your brilliance, all the while updating people about your latest blog post, bodily functions, and political views. A typical rule-of-thumb is that about a third of people out there will follow you back no matter what. You could be a self-admitted kitten abuser and people will follow you (even cat lovers). They don’t care. These people, like you, are out for followers. They want as many as they can get. One more in the collective is welcome.

Congratulations, you now have your first thousand followers. Wash, rinse, and repeat until you get to 2,000 (and remember, twitter is going to limit this, but this is easy to by-pass using a service like Your Twitter Karma or friendorfollow.com. Just visit every 3 days and bail on anyone that doesn’t follow back). Now that you have your 2,000 you can’t follow more than about 10% over the number of people you are following. It’s confusing, but don’t worry. Follower limits are like locks (they only keep out honest people). These limits don’t inconvenience people who are only out for followers, and that’s what you want, right? Follower limits are for suckers who don’t have a system!

Busting through the first limit isn’t that hard, and once you do it gets easier. Remember, 10% over the number of people following you. So once you are to 3,000 that’s 3,300 you can follow. For every 300 you follow 100 will follow back (remember the rule?). Well, obviously this is annoying when you’re hovering around the 2,000 limit, but once you get to that first 5,000 it becomes pretty hard to smack up against those limits. You’ll get carpal tunnel first.

We’re well underway! You’ll have 15,000 followers in no time! But let’s take a break to look at what people are actually saying in your timeline. You’ve followed a lot of people. There’s going to be some interesting stuff in there, right? What the fuck? That’s nearly unreadable! It’s people selling crap, auto-posting from online services you had no idea existed, and trying to get you to visit some worthless website. And none of these people are interacting with anyone. They are all just shouting into the abyss. Sorry I made you look. But remember, we don’t care about that part of the equation. It’s the followers we want.

So let’s check those out. We’ve worked so hard! Oh my God, they are all forex traders, time shares, get more follower schemes, gold/silver sellers and buyers, life coaches, etsy artists, ad streams, SEO gurus, Social Media Marketers, the skinniest mom with the whitest teeth, and why is that photo of Britney so grainy! Oh the humanity!

Speaking of humanity, some of those people have to be real, right? Probably. But the real people are only going to stick around if you’re worth following, and chances are if all you’ve been doing is concentrating on the numbers, well, then, you probably aren’t. But let’s pretend those people are all really real people who actually care what you have to say (they aren’t and they don’t, but this is the land of make-believe there, King Friday). At any given time the number of people in your followers list who are online can’t be more than 2/3rds (people sleep), many are going to be total bots, and the really real people have lives and jobs so aren’t on as much as you’d like them to be, and a large percentage of people up and quit twitter once they realize they are not going to become millionaires, so even at 15,000 followers you don’t have near the audience you were hoping for.

With this 15,000 followers maybe 1,000 will actually see your update (trust me, even this is improbably high). Let’s say all 1,000 read what you have to say and you say, “Click this link to see adorable kitty pictures!” Well, as hard as it is to believe, not everyone gives a rat’s ass about kittens. In fact, pick any topic and the majority of people won’t care. And let’s be honest here…if you’re focused on followers you’re not there to send people to kitty pictures. But your scam is your scam. I’m only here to tell you how to get more followers the follower game is for chumps!

So what’s the answer? Vet your followers. When someone follows you, check them out. See if they are real and worthwhile. Be picky about who you follow. Block and report spam accounts. Shed inactive accounts. Be wary of people with tons of followers who are also following tons (there is no possible way they can engage that many people). You’ll be much happier with 500 real followers than 50,000 fake ones. I follow about 25% of the people who follow me. I block and report about 25%. And the other 50% I ignore. If they want to follow, that’s great. If they interact I may change my mind. On occasion I’ll go out and follow someone who seems to be interacting with someone I already follow, but again, I’m picky. No ads, interacts, and has something more than an agenda.

If you follow quality people who are actually producing compelling content you don’t need to care if they follow back. They are a pleasure to read. If you reciprocate people will seek you out, the things you have to say will be repeated, and you’ll actually be read a lot more than if you just go for the numbers. And when you post a link people will actually pay attention.

By the way, that monkey I was talking about? September 08, 2009 I stopped updating the monkey. It reached 15,000 followers sometime right around then. My goal was 15,000 followers in 15 days (it took me about twice that long, but in my defense that was a lot of damn clicking!). Today the monkey commits twiticide! It will unfollow all 15,000. We’ll see how many stick around because they actually find the monkey funny (it will tweet again!), and how many just wanted the extra follower.

As far as I can tell the Social Media Monkey hasn’t lost any followers while hibernating. How did it do this?

Easy, it just followed everyone who follows @whatma. Those people will follow anyone (well, at least one third of them will). So as promised:

The free and guaranteed system to get 15,000 followers is to follow everyone who follows @whatma.

But I wouldn’t recommend it. Oh, and my condolences @Matisyahu on reaching 1,000,000 followers.

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Christopher L. Jorgensen is the foremost authority on Social Media Marketing in North America, knows more about SEO than you ever will, and has a highly successful ferret grooming business. He’s also been known to write a letter or two. You can follow him on twitter: @jackassletters, but chances are he won’t follow you back.