How to Get 5000 Twitter Followers by Next Monday

The single best social networking advice that I’ve ever heard and that’s been corroborated by many was to concentrate on quality, not quantity.  Quality meaning, of course, if you keep producing quality content and interact with others in a personal and un-spammy way, you will end up with a high-value, if possibly kind of smallish, network.  

But what if you really REALLY need to have a lot of followers for some big announcement or product launch that’s going to take place … oh, how about 1 week from today?

Here’s a plan – search for your keywords and hashtags in Twitter Search, Twitterfall, Twellow, WeFollow and such and follow everyone who comes up in the search. 20-30% will follow you back and by doing some simple math you can figure out how many you have to follow each day to reach the goal of 5000 Followers in one week.

The reality is it just won’t work. Not by itself anyway. Here’s why:

Aggressive Following

If you start following hundreds of users each day, Twitter might suspend your account for aggresive following. So even though you can follow as many as 2000 people before you hit your first limit (see below), it’s not a good idea to follow them all in one day.

Solution – The only work-around I can suggest for this one is to slow down a bit with following new people, which by the way will give you time to spend some time on communicating via your tweets.  By slowing down you’ll be able to zero in on exactly the people you are trying to reach, building targeted Following. Besides, you’ll have a bit more time to check out their profiles for the latest tweets (so you don’t follow someone who last tweeted 3 months ago), their Following-to-Followers ratio (which is a good indicator of the likelihood of them following you back) and their Network to Updates ratio (a good indicator of how likely they are to actually have a conversation with you, which implies active listening).

Speaking of tweets… Please, do not get on a mass following rampage if you’ve only EVER posted a couple of those or if they are all RTs or Twitterfeed udpates or quotes from famous people, you get the picture. You might as well replace your profile photo (you do have one, right?) with the big red “SPAMMER”.  

Twitter Limits

You’ll have to deal with not one, but two kinds of Twitter limits. Both are established by Twitter to combat spammers and bots. Both are systemic, meaning that there’s really no way you can get around them (not without contacting Twitter first and pleading your case).

First limit ensures that unless an account has 2000 or more followers, it won’t be able to follow more than 2000 other profiles. It’s a simple and straightforward limit.

The second limit comes into play for accounts with more than 2000 followers. Its purpose is to prevent one from having an unbalanced account where number of people you Follow greatly exceeds the number of your Followers. The tricky part about it is that, according to Twitter Support, “this limit is different for every user and is based on your ratio of followers to following.”

Solution – while there’s nothing radical you can do about the limits, you can work around them to some extent. For example, once you reach one of the limits, continue searching for relevant profiles. But instead of following them (which you won’t be able to do), add them to your Twitter Lists. Chances are, they’ll follow you back. 

Unfollowing and Re-following Problems

So let’s say you hit the limit and decide to unfollow a bunch of people and follow some others. Watch out for unfollowing too many people too often. Twitter calls this behavior an “aggressive follow churn” and penalizes with suspensions.

But even if you unfollow on a smaller scale and only ever so often, there’s another problem with this tactics. Just like you can count on some people auto-following you, some will auto-unfollow you.

Solution

Try reaching out to those who haven’t followed you back yet. Read through their feeds, check out their websites and blogs. Then RT or @mention them in your feed, asking a question or promoting their content. It’s no magic bullet. It’s time-consuming and not everyone will follow you back (from my experience, only 10-15% of those mentioned will start following you after the first attempt).

If you have to unfollow, unfollow strategically. Start with the profiles that haven’t been active for a couple of weeks AND who don’t follow you (I use Refollow for this). But even before you do that, go through your Following list and unfollow those irrelevant to your niche or your goals. If these are people you enjoy following, follow them from a different Twitter account.

With all these limits and CAN’Ts, here’s something you CAN do:

• Tweet more often – ok, this goes both ways, actually since some might not follow you (or decide to unfollow you) if you tweet too often. So work out a balance where you tweet more than before, but not every hour on the hour (or more often than that).
• Layoff automation – humanize your profile (start with replacing your logo with your picture), get rid of auto-DMs and please-please suspend or severely limit your Twitterfeed usage.
• Promote others, heavily – retweet (manually, when possible, so that you can make it more personal), mention others, reply to questions and announcements, tweet about their blog posts, etc.
• Use hashtags – build a list of hashtags in your niche and include them in your tweets, just as long as you don’t turn each word of your update into a hashtag.
• Use Lists – add your followers and those who don’t yet follow you to your public lists. Also, keep track of which lists you are on and thank list authors for adding you to their lists.
• Think outside of Twitter – here’s a really good (and short) explanation of how to get a lot of Followers fast.

Getting 5000 Twitter followers in one week is not impossible. But given Twitter limits and increased weariness by folks of Twitter spammers, Internet marketers of the worst kind and various fly-by-nighters, it is unlikely unless you are ready to work hard and think creatively.

Related posts:

1. Whom to Follow on Twitter
2. Twitter – What Can I Say (that would help my business)?
3. 5 Time-Saving Twitter Tools For Busy Business Owners