Testing out Those ‘So-Called’ Methods on Increasing Twitter Followers

So I noticed my number of Twitter followers have been…abysmal. I guess there are not a lot of people who have the same interests as I do…or my blog is missing some ‘it’ factor to entice users to visit it often and follow my rantings and …err more rantings.

I stumbled on a site that supposedly promises me that I can gain 1000 followers fast. How so? According to them I follow these simple steps and I should gain these 1000 followers.

1) Fill out my bio. – Done

2) Put links on my twitter profile everywhere – link it to my LinkedIn, Facebook, blog – Done only for blog, as for the rest…err I don’t think people care to see what I do when I’m not blogging…

3) Tweet about things I’m passionate about and hash ‘#’ tag, this way other twitters can follow my quality items – Okay will do

4) Bring my twitter to the public – err yeah, sorry I’m no Ashton Kutcher, Kim Kardashian or Bill Gates so this does not help me…

5) Track my retweets and encourage my followers to retweet – ‘dear followers, if you read an articles I tweeted that interests you – kindly retweet and share to all your followers ‘ – Done

6) Take a picture – err okay will do this, gotta find one that does not look like a horse ran over my face – Update 2/21/2010 Done

7) Start a contest, e.g. @jasoncalacanis offered a free macbook air if he reached the #1 most followed spot. That never happened, but Jason added thousands of followers…brilliant idea! – Yeay, I wouldn’t mind winning that free macbook air but giving one away hmm let me think about it …this is going to take a while.

8 ) Follow top twitter users and watch what they tweet, learn from them how they address their audience – hmmm this one is a toughy but okay

9) Follow twitter users who have similar interests and voila the followers will come pouring in… (of course I have to continue my contribution to my blog).

10) Get involved or Reply. Go to search.twitter.com and see what the ‘hot topics’ are on twitter.

11) Track your results on TwitterCounter that will show how many users are following me per day and use Qwitter to email me how many people have stopped following and when…

Here is to the experiment…lets see how fast those numbers climb…

Here is my table showing my daily progress. I will be displaying my followers until I hit the magic number ’1000′.

Day 1 – 40

Day 41 – 50

Notes:

• Once I reached ’100′ followers, it was difficult to get my number higher.
• I was searching for anyone who has similar interests, it was surprising to find soo many twitter users with the same generic bio leading all to the same page. Be warned for users with the following Bio:

‘Recently got married, lost my job, now I make $400/day ..’

‘Recently wedded, lost my job, now I make $XX/day..(the values replace XX vary)

‘Single stay-home mom with two kids and I make $XXX/day’..

‘Blah blah blah, Google Me!’

• If your native language is English, be warned where the bio’s are in English but all their tweets are in some other language
• Reached a huge jump in over 100 followers after I tweeted on Apple sales and added a new blog post (Questioning Success in a Recession Market).
• Jump in Twitter followers when I started tweeting approx 3-4 tweets a day (03/12/2010 onwards)
• After hitting my 600 followers, increasing the number of followers was sluggish. I found I lost a total of 27 followers from 2/18/2010 – 3/24/2010. These 27 followers were following me in hopes I would follow them in return. I only did so if what they tweeted was of interest to me (life, quotes, technology, management tips, leadership insight, mics).
• I will post my 7 Habits for Highly Effective Tweeting (my mix you can say from 7 Habits for Highly Effective People)
• According to TwitterCounter, I should have approximately 1,967 followers in 30 days (today’s date 3/24/2010). This means within 10 days I should hit my 1000 followers…let’s see if this turns out true *tum dum dum dum..duuuumm*

Got any great tips for me? Feel free to comment

Update: 3/30/2010

• Took me 42 days to reach 1000 twitter followers.
• I met some really interesting people while building my followers to 1000 (e.g. @waynewbishop, @ash_786, @Ashutosh_Rai, @mgrimes, @bster, to name a few)

Various Dates as I reach X000, where x is a whole integer (not including 3/30/2010)