BaSH PR0MPT

Five Tips to Get Followers

I’ve gotten 2,363 friends on social networks and broke 1kpday hits on my blog without using gimmick sites that spam your list, I tried one and all it did was spam my feed once every 24 hours and scored me 3 followers in a week. Those things are about as lame as truetwit, although truetwit falls into another entire category of rude, while it doesn’t spam your feed it uses the byline ‘stop wasting your time with spammers’, the downside is you start wasting your followers time with lame captcha codes. Spammers aren’t that prolific on twitter, you can tell their accounts in a glance, they usually have some scantly clad wench or no icon for starters. And you want them on your list as much as you want bowel cancer, mirite?

Alas, I digress. Is it really that inconceivable that expressing yourself and commenting on interesting things throughout your day will encourage people to follow you? I follow HEAPS of people who blog and tweet about their boring every day lives, because it’s interesting to share the human experience with others, it even helps you understand yourself a bit more when you begin to realise we’re all not that dissimilar (although we all never manage to get along!) but really, there’s no gimmick that seems to work if you ask me.

Two days ago I broke 100 followers on Twitter and almost shat my pants in excitement because I remember what a big deal my mates made of achieving such, I’d never dabbled with social media until I decided to give it a run for it’s money a fortnight ago. Two days later I’m approaching 400 followers. How? By using spammy networks? By spamming my userlist with get rich quick schemes, trump network, acai berry magic voodoo drinks? Fuck no. By spouting the same old crap everyone else I’m following is spouting, except in my particular shade of brown. Honestly, I’m as flawed as every other person, I have my boring moments, I have my witty one liners, to quote Depeche Mode, people are people.

Five tips to getting users: -

1) Put yourself out there, talk to people, read randoms, meet and greet, try and ‘touch’ every user you add, by touch I mean it in a marketing sense of engaging them directly, if you have too many people and can’t engage every one of them directly then why do you want more people?

2) Be consistent. Be true to your ideas and objectives. If you have a specific interest, talk about it. Got nothing to say but feel like shooting the breeze? Do it. Don’t sell yourself out and start talking about celebrity panties collections just to gain more viewers. Perez may have got big, but he sure as hell sold his soul for it. How much are you going to pay for a few random internet prats loving your prose?

3) Cross-network, if you use facebook, myspace, etc, like I do, always remind your users to add you on other networks. Crossing networks is a great way to keep in touch in different formats, where twitter is 140 text flickr is purely images, facebook is a median, myspace is … okay, well myspace is for 18 year old emo sluts and dirty old men like me who add them just to have 18 year old emo sluts on their friends list somewhere. But you get my point. Join every network you can.

4) Syndicate your content. I have a profile on almost every social networking site, and they all feed from one another. I post this blog here, twitter automatically tweets that I posted it, my tumblr syndicates it, myspace and facebook source my twitter feed and post that, etc. It means every site you’re on has the same level of content as every other, so you should get even growth depending on demographic cross over and the like.

5) Be patient. Sure, you can pay someone $50 to get you 1,000 twitter users, but why? You’re selling something? You want to spam them with your crap? That 1,000 will shrink damn fast, if they’re even legit users. If you want to spam, social networks aren’t the right place anymore, no one gives a crap. If you want your ego stroked, it’d be stroked more if you achieved followers through being interesting rather than buying them. Just relax, in time you’ll reach big numbers, it’s inevitable.