Twitter Followers - Resource or Numbers Game?

Getting Twitter followers is something that concerns a lot of people. They are hunting as many followers as possible. I have a much better recipe for success on Twitter.

You should be involved with your followers. Build relationships, rather than just seeking more followers to get closer to people all over the world with similar interests as yourself.

Twitter is an amazing resource for good advice, answers to questions you face right now, and maybe even contacts you can use to extend your network both socially and professionally.

Just as an example I have shown screendumps from both of my Twitter profiles. I have both a Danish and an English profile. The reason for making such a division is that most english-speaking people don't speak danish, whereas I can anticipate many Danes do speak english.

So tweets from my english profile can be retweeted, when useful, on my danish profile, but doing it the other way around would clutter my english profile.

The challenge is, however, that I also speak French and German, but I haven't created profiles for those languages yet. Mostly because the niches I deal with aren't based in those language areas. But I could have chosen to create profiles for those languages, and I do commit the error of retweeting a french tweet since I do follow some french friends.

Time will tell whether I will expand into those languages. You will probably make similar considerations that fit your niches.

 The value of good relationships on Twitter is centered around the fact that you can communicate quickly and easily with a lot of people who share similar interests or work in similar niches.

I have, through the years, had very nice conversations with other authors, translators, business associates either through DM (Direct Messages) or in public on topics where discussions could benefit a number of other people.

By sharing those conversations online, you are building your online brand, and branding is highly effective in assuring people associate good translator or SEO-expert with my name.

But, more than mere branding, the Twitter timelines have given people a unique chance to see who I am, and the kind of opinions I have. I hope all have enjoyed that, and that they feel it is of more value that I am an honest person rather than trying to run the trending topics in hash tags (#) in an effort to target subjects that may give a lot of followers, but don't give any active involvement whatsoever.

Success on Twitter is based on building relationships - and being able to say things in a short and timely manner so as to be both timeless and of value at the same time.