Twittering

Yesterday was a bit of an experiment with Twitter to raise the number of followers that I have from zero up to a higher number; I was not really sure what number of followers I would have been happy with, maybe a dozen would have been considered successful, but certainly I was not keen on having the "0 following, 0 followers".

The starting point for this was a search I had been doing on another matter and learning about how to use Twitter and the search facility on Twitter.  Up until then I had really thought that unless someone was following you then there was no way that any tweets published could be seen, but using search.twitter.com there is no need to follow someone to get a tweet seen.

Now my idea was to use Twitter and tweets to publish keyword rich tweets in the hope that searchers will see these and follow them.  It is certainly much easier than Google to get to the top of the list - you merely have to be the last one to have published, and on the test searches that I did this did not have to be done much more than once a day.

Followers are not needed for this, but I wanted my twitter account to at least look like it was established and had some followers, so Is et out to get some - this proved to be much easier than I had anticipated, and had some surprising results.

Firstly, I started with a list of people who will follow you back; so merely by following them you will gain a follower yourself.  http://socialnewswatch.com/top-twitter-users/

Very easy I thought, I followed 25 people in this way and picked up 12 following me almost instantly.  The surprise was that of these 12 who were following me, only 5 were actually the ones who I had followed, the rest were people who must have seen me on the top of the Following list and have followed me as well.  Mostly, I followed these people as well, and added a few more people to follow, this time using the search on Twitter to find techies to follow, and again, as I followed the most popular techie tweeters I found that others were following me.

I am now standing at 80 people Following and 50 Followers and I shall probably leave it there for the moment; I have added a few more people to follow, but am being more selective over who I do follow and picking only those who have at least some interesting tweets on their profile page.

A final note is that I got my background uploaded today; tweeter is not very good at personalising the homepage, with a selection of background and colours the only option you are allowed; but you can upload your own background bitmap and so many people write out bio's and links onto the background image.  These links wont work, of course, they are just graphics, but the info is there and they can look good.