How to Get 2,000 or More Followers on Twitter and What to Expect when You Get Them

I have been on Twitter since Feb. 13, 2009. Since then I have amassed over 2,000 followers on the social networking site. That may sound like a lot to someone who has been on the site for a while and does not have a lot of followers. But getting that many followers comes at a cost. A lot of people I did have are no longer following me. If you take into account all of the people that were following me since I have been on I could probably put that number closer to 2,100, maybe even 2,200.

There are a number of ways to get up to 2,000 followers. No one method in particular has worked for me. A lot of people on Twitter use a lot of tricks and gimmicks to get followers. If you are on Twitter, you have probably seen ads to help you get 100 followers. There is also a clique on Twitter called #TeamFollowBack. It is a common tactic that is used on Twitter to get followers. One of my followers who never spoke to me before on Twitter said that he was leaving me because of the tactics that TeamFollowBack employs.

That was humorous to me for a number of different reasons. Some people like to keep the number of people that they follow on Twitter rather small. These are typically people that have been with Twitter since the beginning, or people that are not celebrities and marketers that want to develop deep and intimate commitments online. Then there are other individuals that like to meet as many people as possible and like to work a room. I am of the latter persuasion. What you will find on Twitter, is that people who like to get as many people as possible to follow them and people that like a more intimate group of friends typically do not get along very well.

Now I will not say that everyone that I meet on Twitter has as many followers as I do. A lot of my followers have fewer than 100 people following them. A lot of my followers are following a considerable amount of people, but no one is following them. A lot of them have more followers than I have. On Twitter I will befriend anyone regardless of race, color, creed, nationality, origin or views. I like following people that I vehemently disagree with, because it is a learning experience and I can use the humility.

Your identity online is going to mirror your identity in real life. If you meet a lot of people in real life you will meet a lot of people on Twitter. If you prefer to stick with the same group of people in real life you are going to stick with a small group of people in real life. I am not defined by my friendships and relationships that I have with people online or in real life. I keep very loose connections with people and do not spend my spare time with people. Me and my wife have mutual friendships that we may employ but I do not spend time with people outside of my marriage or outside of work. From time to time that changes but for the most part that is a consistent fact of my life.

There are few things I would not recommend doing on Twitter. There is a trend on Twitter called #twitterafterdark where people engage in cybersex. If you are looking for trouble it will find you if you search on that term. The problem with the trend is that your other followers may take offense to your conversation or think of you differently. It is an unproductive trend that will not do anything to help you get more followers. If you want to get followers, you should stick with the top ten trends on Twitter. But you have to know how to use the trends to get extra followers.

There is a clear difference between using trends to get followers and using trends to look for information and news events. For example Twitter often has trends that are "ghetto" in nature and deal with topics of interest that are reflective of life in the neighborhood. When you respond to these trends, remember that the point is not to be yourself and simply find a creative use for the term in your tweet. You are in a spelling bee and you are being asked to use the term in a question or in a sentence. You can't take those trends seriously. People that take those types of trends seriously are missing out on the point.

Respond to other individuals tweets about trends, and you can get an interesting conversation going. Right now #howtogetslapped is one of the trends in the top ten. I don't have any ideas for that trend, but if I did I would use that in a sentence. If I am witty it may get repeated and I might have the top tweet for that trend, which means that it was repeated in excess of 100 times. That type of exposure is akin to being on the top of Google search results. They call it "going in" on the trend when you decide to play that game.

People may like what you say, respond to you and retweet their response so that the conversation is broadcast between to all of their followers. If they disagree with you, it can have the effect of knocking you down because it feels like a public humiliation. Those are not conversations that you want to engage in. You can play that game with them and retweet the conversation back, or you can walk away.

Twitter can definitely feel like high school at times. Another way to get followers is to have interesting things to say on your own. People may or may not respond to you personally, but they will follow you. When I write an article on the web tweets are sent out and when someone responds to one of my articles I will send a tweet out. There are plenty of services that allow you to send out content when you are not on Twitter, and people actually respond to that content.

If you want people to follow you one has to log on everyday and say something. I recommend automating your account for those times that you do not want to visit the site so that you stay current. There are services that will automatically unfollow you if you do not say anything, and there are services that will automatically unfollow you if your tweets are automated and you never physically use the account so you have to put in some effort. You do not need to stay on Twitter for hours at a time, you can jump in for 20 minutes and leave, and you will still get followers if some level of automation is employed.

Friday is the day that you are supposed to tell everyone who is cool and ask your followers to follow someone you find interesting or unique. A lot of people say that it does not work, but that is besides the point. If you use the #FF or #FollowFriday tag followed by those people you like even if other people do not follow them they will return the favor and ask people to follow you.

You have to be transparent about your narcissism on Twitter if you expect to get far. You are not all of that, and people who are clearly about Twitter to see what attention they can get out of it for themselves do not go far unless they are celebrities and have interesting things to say. There are lots of people, mainly narcissists, sociopaths, and the people who love them that I do not get along with on Twitter. I will follow you, and appreciate your following me, but it is not about you or me, it is about the service and utility that Twitter provides and the fact that we are even able to meet up online.

These are the same individuals that are difficult to deal with in real life because they need to be the center of attention. You have to at least make people feel that they are important. Quite honestly a lot of the followers that I have just refuse to follow people back (or follow people to begin with), and that is one of the reasons they do not have a lot of followers. No one wants to follow someone that is boring and egotistical that does not even acknowledge their presence. If you find that you want to follow people but the sheer volume of tweets that all of your followers are putting out there is overwhelming you may want to use the lists feature on Twitter. This allows you to put together a list that you visit as opposed to your main page, and follow them more closely than you could hundreds or thousands of followers.

So there you have it. A lot of people that are following you are going to stop following because you cannot give them the attention you deserve. A lot of your relationships will be low maintenance when you are following thousands of people (or being followed by thousands) and a lot of people will take offense to the mere fact that you have a lot of followers. Twitter is a weird service; people are going to vent, yell, shout, curse, and engage in a lot of questionable behavior on the site that you have to ignore because responding to those tweets can get you in a lot of trouble. People will stop following you and try to humiliate you on the site and can be mean and vicious when you interfere with their rants or random thoughts.

But do not let "Twitter Beef" or "Twitter Jail" (apparently you were on the site entirely too much) deter you. I don't walk on eggs or tiptoe around people in real life and I am not about to do it online. If you take Twitter with a grain of salt, be yourself, and engage with people by responding to them you will be okay. You do not need to buy followers, and quite honestly unless you are using it for marketing purposes I am not sure why you would. Twitter is that odd social network where people meet up and can have conversations but can be uncharacteristically narcissistic and self-absorbed at the same time. It isn't user friendly, and it isn't like Facebook where everything is laid out for you (except the privacy settings). You have to get in there and get your hands dirty, but that is where the fun begins ...