Twitterology - Twitter, How to choose people to Follow and attract Quality Followers

So you have a twitter page, and you have tweeted your first tweet, but who is reading it?


One of the most common twitter questions is "How do I get followers?"

There are a few ways, your first step is to follow people, now, how do you choose who to follow and how many people do you choose to follow?

Some people out there follow everyone. They will add, add, add and add people. So they are following like 10,000 or 20,000 people. They do this in hopes that those 10,000 or 20,000 people will follow them back.
There is a major flaw in this.

1. If you are following 10,000 people, you simply do not have enough time in the day to correspond and participate in the tweet conversations that are happening.

The point of twitter is to take part in the tweet conversations that are in your message feed. If you are there simply to harvest twitter people in hopes of them seeing your spam message, your time on twitter will be short lived because you will either A) get kicked off of twitter from the tweet powers that be OR B) you will find you are having zero success and leave twitter.

This is what I do, and it has worked amazingly! I only follow 50 to 60 people at a time, and I choose whom I follow carefully. I follow people that are local to me, within my zip code or a 50 mile radius. I follow public figures. I also follow people of mass interest, Network Marketing gurus, political figures, famous figures, top news stories and more. I follow people that I am genuinely interested in like people providing valuable content to my life.

For instance these are people I have followed for months because I simply enjoy what they have to contribute:

• @yehudaberg Yehuda offers important and valuable messages that I enjoy as a positive, spiritual being.
• @joebruzzese Joe is an author of a book relating to tween and teens entering the Middle School Years. As a parent of a tween middle school er, his tips are valuable to me.
• @jenlovelady Jen is a fun Mom who really resonates with me and how I am as a Mom and a home business owner. She's the type of gal I'd love to be local friends with!
• @google As a webmaster and SEO expert, I like to stay in tune with the current www trends.

Whenever I choose a new person/thing to follow, I get new followers! How? People are always looking at people's follower list, and if you are showing there, odds are, people will see you on the list and start following you!

Now do not feel obligated to follow people just because they follow you, major twitter faux paux. Many people follow solely in hopes of getting the follow back. If you follow them, they stay your follower, if you don't follow-back, they bong you from their list within 24 hours.

NOTE: Be prepared to see your followers go UP and DOWN constantly, as many are playing the twitter-game of just getting followers!

I ONLY want followers who are really interested in what I have to say. If someone follows me and leaves, that's OK by me as evidently I did not hold their interest. What is important to me are those who chose to follow me and stay following me.

As of the date I wrote this I am hovering around 500 followers and this fluctuates between about 490 and 520 daily.

Also, I am only following 55 people and once a week I go through the list of people I am following and delete people whom are not actively tweeting. I want my 50-60 people I follow to be active on twitter like me.

I also shift people too, I'll hop on a Verified Account Celebrity page like @Oprah for a couple days, to see if I gain some new followers, then I'll unfollow. Honestly, most celebrities are not that 'active' and they hide all the tweets from their followers so their pages are not that fun to watch. In many cases it is a publicist tweeting and not the celebrity them self. The odds of getting a response or a re-tweet are slim to none! (if you choose to follow a celebrity, make sure it is a verified account as there are many posers out there!)

Finally, the most effective way to gain new followers is to POST! The more active you are, the more people will see you, the more people will re-tweet (RT)* your posts. Your goal is to be SEEN on people's pages and in the main feeds.

Make it a point to utilize the Trending Topics key words to contribute too. BUT only contribute valuable posts to the trending topics, don't spam your ad with a Trending Topic key word!
The more you participate on twitter, the more you'll learn. Remember, no one will bite you and yes there is a learning curve.

The question is, are you ready and willing to take a technological step towards advancing your online marketing techniques?

Alethea Anderson
Home Business Twitter Tweeter

*Re-tweet RT is when someone takes your post and shares it with everyone that follows them giving you the credit creating potential new comments and followers.

Social Networking : Before the 'Blog', the 'Book' and the 'Tweet'...

Before the Blog, the Book and the Tweet...

A little Web 101 here... Personally, I've been entwined in computers for nearly 3 decades. (holy cow I did not realize that until I wrote it) I was blessed to have a Father who was enthralled with computers and I grew up with a variety of computers in my home. My first computer a Dos Based Commedor, black screen, orange letters. I was one of the only kids who were able to type up and bring in a printed book report! There was no internet as we know it back then, you could 'dial in' to text based 'chat' rooms but that was about the extent of utilizing cyber land.

In Elementary School 'computer class' was using DOS coding to 'program' movement of a little triangular 'turtle' across the screen...In High School, typing class was still on typewriters! (actually, in college too for me)

I remember when Prodigy came out, there was a quiet buzz among techie people and this newly found 'internet'. (did I hear Al Gore invented it? lol j/k) Anywho...they were able to log into a 'web' of information. Like cyber-encyclopedia-britannica. Not readily obtainable by everyone, still most of us used computers for typing up text and printing on dot matrix printers (remember the zingggg, zingggg, zinggggg of those printers?)

I had my first experience of 'the web' in 1998, the year my daughter was born. Just 10.5 years ago, which seems like an eternity. I simply cannot imagine life without the internet. Back then I had a computer with Windows 95 that I got for free and aol dial up. It was so exciting to hear the whirrr-zing-bong-bong of the modem and then 'you've got mail'. Those of us with internet felt like the bee's knees. When you'd say 'I was on the internet' people would *gasp* and say 'you have a computer, WITH internet?'

It was still so new back then in 1998. Every other week you'd get an AOL CD via mail, you would see free AOL CDs at Target, WalMart, the grocery store. Everyone was getting on AOL. Web pages loaded slow back then, but we knew no different, it was so exciting.

No one knew what they were looking for, we were just looking to see what we could see and what we saw was so amazing. We could type in any word and find any thing!

Then entered smut and pop ups, ack, remember? You'd make one innocent click only to have 1000 pop ups attack your computer then, remember, the 'blue screen of death'. LOL

Wow I got a little sidetracked there thinking of how it was in those days. Look at me now, I'm BLOGGING about it. Anyone on the planet who has internet can read this post. Isn't that something?

I got started with 'social networking' back in 1999. I was selling stuff on ebay, and discovered online websites for Moms. That's where it all began for me. Just a couple years later I launched my own company and used the web to market. This was before MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Blogger and the like. With fewer people actually 'on' the web marketing was much more difficult back then!

However I successfully built a strong company which was 100% web based! In 2004 I mingled my 'old school' web marketing tactics with MLM and since have sold my company and focus 100% on my MLM career building my MLM business 99% via the web.

From the 'old school' to the Blog, the Book and the Tweet... WOW things have changed. Now one can simply log on to one of hundreds of social networking sites and present information to oodles of people just like you and me. Below I'll share 3 of my favorite Social Networking Places...

Blogger. What IS a Blog? I hear this all the time. *gasp* Yes, it's true, there are people who have no idea what a Blog is. Then again there are many that know 'what' a blog is, they just don't know what 'blog' actually means!

Blog means Web-Log and was shortened over time. A Blog is a type of online journal of sorts you could say. You can find blogs on any and all topics imaginable.

In this new era of online marketing, more and more people are shifting to Blogging for marketing practices to aid in branding themselves and their businesses.




Facebook, growing at huge proportions propelling us into the future. Once Main Stream was MySpace which seems to have fallen slight to the mass quantity of users hopping on board with Facebook. Simple to use navigation quickly connects us to family, friends, and long lost acquaintances and high school buddies.

Those of use who use the web for marketing, places like Facebook open doors across the United States and around the planet. We can now reach hundreds if not thousands with a mere flick and click.

I have used Facebook to connect with long lost high school friends, former work associates, my parents, family members cross country and more. It's a media platform that enables you to share who you are, what you do, and to aid you in keeping in contact.


Twitter. This one by far is still the most confusing to people. They hear someone 'tweeted' me, or that someone 'twittered' and when you explain it as 'it's a micro blog' they just don't get it.

Twitter allows people to post mini updates in 140 characters or less. Some tweet about their day, some about their business, some totally random facts, some totally helpful facts, some a potpourri of all of the above.

No matter how you look at it twitter is indeed a very useful tool for networking and growing a business online. Having gotten a lot of media attention lately, the growth is simply unmeasurable to other sites right now!

As an 'old school'/PRE-social networking website web marketer and a web 2.0 web marketer, I coach my team to utilize these methods to top ranking websites and grow successful online businesses.

Find Alethea Anderson on...

Blogger http://www.blogger.com/profile/16233834784190128945

Facebook http://www.tinyurl.com/alethea-anderson-facebook

Twitter http://www.twitter.com/aletheaanderson

as well as many other social networking websites, simply seach me by name Alethea Anderson!

I'm a work at home Mom with a successful online MLM Business.

Alethea Anderson