The northlondonhippy

Archive for March 12th, 2009

I’ve been try­ing to get my head around the steady, con­stant stream of fol­low­ers who come and go like the tides. It seems I’m just about gain­ing and los­ing them in equal num­bers and its all rather random.

I’ve been look­ing at the data com­piled at TweetEffect.Com, which cross-references your tweets with the gains and loses in your fol­low­ers. In look­ing at my data, it seems the same tweets attract and repel at the same time.

Con­fus­ing!

It got me to think­ing about the best ways to instantly attract a fol­low­ing on Twit­ter. I came up with ten ideas that I thought I would share:

1) Be famous already — If you are already famous, you have an estab­lished fan base and an instant fol­low­ing. Of course, if you’re already famous you don’t need my help.

2) Imi­tate a celebrity — This is sur­pris­ingly effec­tive, but can be short lived. Oh and point­less, now that @Valebrity and @CelebsWhoTwitter are mak­ing efforts to ver­ify them. That said, a fake Tina Fey has over 100,000 fol­low­ers, you could just change the account name and sell it on eBay for heaps of cash.

3) Get endorsed by @wossy or @stephenfry — Your Twit­ter name men­tioned or rec­om­mended by either of them, or any other celebrity with a large fol­low­ing will attract scores of new fol­low­ers. Whether or not they remain loyal to you is another question.

4) Take a photo of a com­mer­cial air­liner in the Hud­son River or of one crash­ing near Ams­ter­dam — If fate puts you some­place where some­thing sig­nif­i­cant is hap­pen­ing, doc­u­ment it as best you can. Take pho­tos if you have a cam­er­a­phone and tweet them, tweet about what you see. If it is impor­tant enough and you are there soon enough, every­one will want to see what you cap­ture next.

5) Fol­low every­one and hope a large per­cent­age fol­low u back — This is the equiv­a­lent of throw­ing as much shit as you can at a wall and hop­ing some of it sticks. And like shit and des­per­a­tion, this one smells bad too, don’t bother.

6) Swear pro­fusely — Thanks to CurseBird.Com, the more you use bad lan­guage, the higher your rank on that web­site. I like it.

7) Require a res­cue — This one would be good as long as you sur­vive, but if you don’t, its a bit point­less. Hope you’re never in a posi­tion to find out!

8) Offer peo­ple a free lap­top — I don’t know if this works, but I do seem to get fol­lowed by a lot of peo­ple who want to give me a free Mac­Book Air.

9) Offer to tweet your credit cards num­bers if u hit 1,000 fol­low­ers — Guilty! Yes this one’s from me. I’ve still got a long way to go.

10) Be refresh­ingly orig­i­nal & enter­tain­ing — it couldn’t hurt!