twitter

Last November, Guy Kawasaki posted an article on how to get more followers on Twitter. Guy’s article is better written than most, but there are hundreds out there. Most of the articles out there provide similar advice: Suck up to the influentials (even if they don’t respond), auto-follow everyone, sign up for a service that auto-spams everyone with direct messages should they choose to follow you, post lots of links, and pick a pretty picture.

I’m sure I missed a few in that list, but I think I made my point. To an extent, these articles are right. If you follow their advice, you will get more followers. I’m not going to argue that it doesn’t work—instead, I suggest that it’s hard to keep up this strategy over the long term for a number of reasons.

First, it’s not a particularly honest endeavor. If you’re going to engage in this kind of behavior, don’t kid yourself—you’re doing it solely to watch that count of your current followers on the upper-right of your Twitter page go up.

Secondly, the return is not nearly high enough for the effort you need to put in mindlessly posting links you ripped from Digg. You need to make a decision: When it comes to followers, are you interested in quality or quantity. If you’re just posting anything and everything that pops up, then you’re probably not concerned with who these people are or if they’re interested in what you’re doing; you just want some warm bodies in the room. You’re running a college frat party.

To quote Bill Cosby: “I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.”

Here’s my secret recipe for amassing an obscene number of qualified followers on Twitter: Be interesting or do something exciting.

Oprah didn’t need to auto-follow everyone who came within twenty feet of her. For that matter, Guy Kawasaki didn’t either—the man has sold countless books and is no small part of the reason half the people working in the coffee shop down the street are sitting in front of Macs. John Roderick, singer for the Long Winters, is another great example. John shot up to about 1,000 followers within the first week of having a Twitter account and—as of this writing—is sitting pretty at over 4,300 followers. Merlin Mann discovered more people followed him when he took breaks from Twitter.

Here’s my advice: It’s beautiful day out. Instead of mindlessly posting other people’s work or retweeting posts about other people’s work, go outside and figure out what you can add to the picture. Resolve to create something awesome or become the guru of some niche passion of yours. Start building, start a blog, take whatever that first step you need to take to make something exciting and make sure you take it today.

(Image via moleitau)