No one cares if you are sitting @Starbucks. They don't care that you're at the airport either.
But they may still follow you. Why? In this post you will find the answer and learn how to rethink Twitter to make your follower count soar.
People follow you for one of three reasons:
Reason #1 They Care About You
My mom follows me on Twitter because she actually cares what I am doing. She also
diggs my posts on occasion. If your mom follows you, that's why. Not many people care about me like my mom does. I can't build a platform by talking to my mom. Neither can you.
Reason #2 They Want You to Follow Them Back
TweetDeck allows people to follow someone and then ignore their tweets. There are millions of people who mutually ignore each other just to inflate their follower numbers. These people follow you for a while and if you don't follow them back, they leave. You can't build a platform here, either. Although you may be able to impress a publishing house if you have 10,000 followers. No one will know if they listen or not.
Reason #3 They Think You're Interesting
As an author, this third category is the kind of followers that you really want. It's the only way to build a useful platform. These followers read your tweets and may even retweet you.
There are many ways to be interesting, but talking about what you are doing is not one of them.
How to Tell If You Are Interesting:
- Do people follow you even if you don't follow them back?
- Do people retweet your tweets?
- Do people click the links you share on Twitter?
@
JamesScotBell is one of those tweeters. He is funny and informative.
Answering the Wrong Question
When you follow someone on Twitter what question are you asking? You're probably asking "Will this person be interesting?" Your question is not "what are you doing now?"
The real question you should be answering is "What is interesting to me right now?" If something interests you, chances are it will interest other people,
even if they don't know who you are. Stop sharing things on Twitter that are not interesting.
What are you doing now? What is interesting to you now?
If you don't believe me, just look and see what hashtags are popular. People follow hashtags even when all the tweets are from people they don't know. A hashtag is a keyword with a # in front. So the
#Wordpress hashtag is all the buzz about WordPress.
What do you think? Leave a comment and let me know.
I think you’re spot-on. Twitter has quickly evolved from “what are you doing right now?” to “how entertaining and/or informative can you be?”. If you want people to pay attention to you, you need to be interesting – which is why marketers seem to be dropping off Twitter in droves. Average run-of-the-mill marketers can’t make a dime using Twitter because they’re not the least bit interesting and nobody actually pays attention to them. Those that are personable and interesting are the ones that are sticking around and doing well.
There’s going to be a backlash sometime in the next year or two where publishers and employers will realize that a large follower count is completely meaningless. Nobody who follows 10,000 people is paying attention to even a fraction of them, and people with 30,000 followers themselves should realize that unless you’re interesting, they’re all tuning you out.