In my last post, I touched upon how I’ve been using Twitter to meet more people and make more people aware of my writing. As of this posting, I have about 11.2K followers and I’m following 8,500 people. Ouch.
This doesn’t look good, but the reality is that a lot of people doing Twitter marketing actually follow MORE people than are following them. Many of the accounts have never even posted. I didn’t know this when I first started doing Twitter marketing back in my silly YouTube days. I’d follow anyone with a digital pulse, even if it was pretty weak.
Needless to say, I’m still following a lot of these accounts. They don’t post, they don’t speak English, they just follow me hoping I’ll follow them back…
“But Ashley, don’t you do that, too?”
Sure. But I do want to interact. I follow people who have similar interests. No one is just a number to me.
I used to use FriendorFollow to weed out accounts I didn’t want to follow anymore, but once I hit 10K followers, the site cut me off. Now I use ManageFlitter.
It tells me who doesn’t interact in English, the last time someone posted, accounts that are likely to be spam or have bought followers, etc.
It looks shady to have 50K followers but be following 60K. People don’t realize that. The number of followers doesn’t matter if you’re just a number to them and the engagement is weak. The engagement is what makes Twitter valuable. The numbers go up on their own when you are genuine, engaging, informative, and unique - not when you use others to further your own agenda.
If you like to write, tell me about it in a comment or on Twitter. My own account is @peneraserlove.
Updated June 2018
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