I setup a few twitter accounts ages ago, most of them with no activity. But on one of the accounts, I occasionally receive notification saying that someone just became a follower. I have little over 300+ followers on this account. I know it's minuscule compared to many of you, but it's a huge number for me (lol). Anyhow, my question is, why are these users becoming a follower, when I rarely twit anything? It's obviously not for my content, so what's their motivation? Is it some type of marketing on their end?
Some people may have searched out you because of your interests or previous Tweets, however, Many (Most) people on Twitter these days are attempting to market something and will follow anything that breathes on Twitter in an attempt to gain followers back. They also realize that many people have some kind of autofollow thing going, so they are playing the odds. After while they will dump people who have not followed back after a certain amount of time, and keep going until they build a large number to spam. It's not a bad thing. If you are reasonably active, you will gain followers at a steady pace if you are offering good info, or entertaining Tweets.
I've recently noticed that one of my Twitter accts. that I rarely update is all of a sudden getting a lot of followers. It's weird - like it got posted somewhere or maybe a tweet I posted recently contained a keyword these autofollow programs are searching for. Hmm...
The benefit is for the self-gratification. What a man, he's got thousands of followers! I estimate the majority of Twitter followers are fake followers...
Not just that. There has begun a marketing service with twitter. You can post ad on twitter and gain money from them. So if you have a lot of followers you have a big chance that somebody will click the ad. Pretty clever idea isn't it?
they are following based either on a keyword from your niche or content or perhaps geographic location in the hopes that you will follow them back.
Some people just follow to follow, but others will wait for something interesting. Try to tweet good stuff on a regular basis if you want to make those most of your followers. They are valuable!
The web is full of spam bots and still there are people who actually run a blog. You have to look at twitter as a minimized version of blogging business (that is why it is called microblogging). If you have an subscriber count of 20K you are going to get more Feed readers more easily than when you do not have any subscriber, so if others follow you already other people are more likely to follow you.
True followers can only be made by giving users quality content. Tweet about quality content and you will surely get a lot of followers. No point in making fake followers by just adding them.... And twitter is getting strict they might ban you, they are monitoring user activities
quality content is god but the whole following a ton of people at once and then gaining followers and dropping the non-followers works as well as the whole doing twitter ads on friend generation networks and such (which is never expensive, VERY cheap). I say put good content out there AND gain a ton of following actions in order to get followes -- That's normal and a good tactic to increase the 300+ mark
That's exactly WHY most people follow in the first place. However, Twitter also helps you connect to people in similar field as yours.
What I do is to follow more people so that they will follow me back. Yah your right, this is pretty normal for an average Twitter user. This is my twitter account - www.twitter.com/nuper17 Follow me and I'll follow you. Thanks
besides the usual spam bots who follow you or the ones using keyword search tools (post something about photography and they will follow you quickly ...): maybe because your tweets are interesting? they may not come often, but they may have real interesting content. note that some people only follow a small amount of people and read everything, others like myself do follow more people and accept that we do not catch everything. i carefully check before I follow back, but nonetheless I do follow when they are interesting.