Mike Butcher – The UK & Ireland Editor for Techcrunch, sent me a couple of tweets today and also an email. By the time Mike emailed me, he thought I had to be using a robot or something, to have developed such a great twitter network so quickly! We spoke and by the end of our phone call, everything was fine – but the story is excellent and well worth sharing with you!
Here’s Mike’s initial tweet to me (he’s actually a really nice man when you speak with him – honest!)
Mike tweeted:
You have 22k followers, a big UK Tweeter. Your tweets are rather dull. Your blogs slow/derivative. What gives?
Although Mike had read my blog and was following me on twitter, he was amazed that other people were doing the same.
I gave Mike a very friendly reply:
I’m guessing you are asking the wrong person – Thanks for the compliment though ; )
Shortly after, Mike sent a far more friendly tweet to me:
No probs, just trying to keep you on your toes. I’m pretty dull too, but then I don’t have 22k expecting Socratic insight.
A problem with Twitter & a Journalists instinct!
Twitter is experiencing a problem as I write this; where certain people (me included) with large follower / following numbers are unable to follow people back. My follower count has froze and anyone I follow is getting notification, but twitter isn’t allowing me to follow them.
I told Mike I would follow him, so he could send me a DM (direct message) and I did – but the Twitter problem meant he never got followed!
This, apparently, is why Mike assumed I was using a robot, to follow people and then immediately unfollow them. It’s odd really, as I’m actually following over TWENTY THOUSAND PEOPLE back. So, he emailed me to say he thought I might be tricking Twitter.
In fairness to Mike, he’s not using twitter the way I do. He currently has over 6,000 followers (because he’s a famous editor), but only follows less than 1,000 of them back. That’s fine, but the complete opposite of the kind of ‘community building’ I focus my Twitter efforts on.
Twitter mystery solved!
I called Mike this afternoon, to let him know about the Twitter follow problem. He’s actually a very nice person to speak with. I also sent him a few links, to show how this blog and my twitter account act as two ‘outposts’ for the same, large network.
Twitter and community building
Mike’s right, it is unusual to have 22,000 followers on Twitter (and so quickly), but then it’s ALSO unusual for this blog, which was only launched in the middle of October, to already have posts with hundreds of comments.
Building your twitter network
One post here has 550 comments, all from Twitter users and all containing their twitter user names, so you can follow them! It’s called Building your twitter network and you can add your twitter details and find great new people to follow too!
It’s not as high tech as using a robot, but a network is all about people – right?
No related posts.
This is very interesting to me, a Twitter newbie. But how do you follow 22,000 people without automating the process — or delegating to VA’s or others?
I do enjoy the blog!
Bruce,
Glad you enjoy the blog.
I do all my own tweets and I’m pretty sure those with twice the followers I have, do the same.
Sounds like twitter follower envy to me Jim. wondering if he used a robot to delete the 5000 people he’s not following back
Jim,
A lot of us lesser mortals look at people like you — who have huge follower lists — and ask, “How did that happen?” So, the journalist’s view is not surprising.
I’ve read the “8,000 follower’s” post and others, and I’m still somewhat mystified. I’ve been on since November and have a paltry 1,600.
While my initial tweets were more providing links to articles all across the Web, for a while it has been more than half replies, DMs, and RTs.
I also try to focus as closely as possible within three niches that fold into my field. Not always possible. Lots of people in other niches follow.
So, I’m still confused at how you can get to 22K without doing any more than regular tweets. You’ve never actively gone out and punched a few “follow” buttons to get people to join you?
Further, how do you find time to view profiles and Web sites, then craft a personal DM to each follow — as you’ve said — when you’re getting 200 to 300 new adds each day, seven days a week? Are you independently wealthy and don’t have to run your business yourself, so you can tweet all day long?
Handling that many individual transactions would take what, at least a couple of hours daily if not more, right?
Inquiring minds want to know. Uhh sorry, that’s enquiring minds in your parts.
I’m happy for your success and it provides inspiration to me and countless others. Still, a little more in depth analysis of how you got there would be appreciated.
Best regards,
Jerry
Jerry,
Good to hear from you again Jerry!
As you might recall, I don’t send a DM to everyone I follow. That’s why I don’t use an automated service. I don’t personally see the need; especially as I’m usually the one following back and assume they already know who I am. Equally, people often tell me they HATE automated messages.
I also often follow people first – Most are people who send me a tweet about something interesting. Others are people who leave a message here on the blog. If the use my blog, I like to follow them – it’s all part of developing a community.
As you have just seen, and used yourself, everyone who comments here can leave their twitter username and be followed in just 2 clicks. The blog gets a lot of traffic each day, with many coming (as you just have) from twitter. It’s easy for me to find new people AND for them to find me.
Okay, Jim, that solves part of the mystery.
I think activity is also a huge chunk of it. You have to be visible. You’ve been on, what, a month more than I have? You have over 10X the tweets (updates) that I do — 5,000 to 500. You also have more than 10X the followers.
Coincidence?
In some 70 days on Twitter I have averaged about seven tweets daily. You’ve been on a bit longer so maybe your average is 60?
To be honest, I think of that and wonder how my followers would react if I sent 60 a day. I also wonder where I’d find the time.
So, I’m still sorting it out.
No question that there’s a payoff for doing this diligently.
Thanks for the reply.
Jerry
Jerry,
You make an EXCELLENT point!
Because I run a marketing / social media company – Twitter is a regular part of my working day.
It’s far, far easier for me (or Chris Brogan, Guy Kawasaki, Darren Rowse) to build a large network, because we work full time in the ‘community building’ business.
I actually do FAR MORE updates each day; with the vast majority sent as Direct Messages. I have DM’d you many times – especially when you were setting your new blog up; remember?
Excellent insights. Reading the comments, I am frankly jealous of the folks that are jealous of you! — I have 200 followers and I have been tweeting since October! Still, I am doing it for fun, learning and research, and not actively trying to build my network for marketing purposes… and so it makes sense that my twitter footprint is smaller.
Jim,
Good article … just diving in to social media, Twitter has me twittered. My philosophy on it so far is to follow folks who follow me with the caveat that I check their page as well as their web site. I will not follow if all they are out there for is an affiliate market hard sell and that is all their tweets are about. Right now I am approaching 200 friends and have been actively following people in general interest areas. I did start out by DM’ing folks, who followed back, but quite a few thought that it was and auto DM and immediately stopped following me even though I tried to make it personal with a comment about their site. So may be I’m doing it wrong. Will have to wait and see.
Thanks will keep following
p.s. Do have another site
http://ceseco.blogspot.com/
I do remember that, and you’re right.
The rest of us who want to grow a community will never have your kind of success unless we put in the time.
In my case, I’d have to choose between running a brick and mortar company and my family, to squeeze out more than the hour or two I can muster these days.
I suppose my results are to be expected. I think I’ll get to 22K, but Obama could be ending his second term by then!
Jerry
The part that I don’t really understand with 1,000′s of follows, is how you manage to sort through all the tweets. I’m having trouble keeping up with the 89 people I follow.
I tried setting my Notices to all replies today and I saw a lot more tweets but it was overwhelming. How do you manage that and reading the comments on your blogs and other blogs?
I agree with LoneWolf. Several times a day, I jump on my twitter page and just within the last hour there might be 100 tweets most of which are silly things like “I’m going to bed” and “i’m feeling lazy today”. These are all out of context. Sometimes, the tweets look interesting but it is difficult to determine if they are related to earlier thoughts in the timeline or are they just random one liners. I could follow 10,000 people but it would be fruitless to engage in a conversation with all the useless messages cluttering my page. Please explain how to use this tool effectively? It’s very frustrating.
Some excellent comments here, “Thank You!”
Lonewolf,
Once you pass around 5,000 followers, the tweets you see are mainly those sent to you and those dm’d to you.
I remember asking Veronica Belmont (@veronica) the exact same question and was amazed when she replied to me in less than a minute.
Tweetdeck makes life a LOT easier too; where I can see tweets sent to me in realtime; rather than having a stack all arrive at once.
David,
I think I answered some of your question in my previous reply.
The way you use twitter changes, according to the number of people in your network. Before I launched this blog, I had around 160 followers. The blog was then launched and within weeks I had 3,000.
The key is to stop using the twitter webpage alone, and start using an App like Tweetdeck; which is designed to make it easy to follow people.
I have tweetdeck running on a dedicated monitor all the time I am working.
An example of how to do this can be seen on twitter almost every day, from Chris Brogan – @chrisbrogan. Chris has almost twice as many followers as me and has no real problem keeping in touch. Like me, he also follows as many people back as possible.
Jim,
Am I missing the point here? You are a marketer, even a social media marketer, correct?
Your skill is reaching out to people and engaging with them – which is what good marketing is all about, correct?
So what you have done is simply demonstrate on Twitter what you do so well – using the channel and your skills to do just that and reach out 22k people! By not using bots, and doing it yourself, surely just shows that!
I guess the biggest surprise, is the speed that it occurred. But then is it?
Philip Schofield (@schofe) reached 6000 followers in about 3 days, so it can happen. Admittedly you are not a TV star (that I know of), but the people of the Twittersphere know what they like, and have no fear or hesitation in showing that by following people.
Keep up the good work Jim, and I do hope that Twitter ammend their rules to allow you to show your true following.
Andy
Andy,
Thank you – You are spot on!
You have to understand though, the reason the chap from techcrunch didn’t like this blog is the same reason he couldn’t understand how I grew my followers – he’s not a marketer; he’s a tech editor.
I can’t believe you wrote a whole blog post about me and didn’t even link to my site. Great blogging dude. Listen, the reason I follow less than 1,000 people is because I ACTUALLY READ their tweets and use Twitter in my research for articles. You cannot possibly read the tweets of 20,000+ people so your feed is gibberish. You use Tweetdeck to build a group of people you actually do read. It’s really that simple. I’ll reply with the rest of what I want to say on TechCrunch UK
Mike,
It’s not like Techcrunch really needed a link – come on
What’s wrong with using tweetdeck to communicate with the people who tweet to me – I notice you use it too; as do most of the well followed people on twitter.
Do you think that the feeds of Scoble, Calacanis etc are ALSO gibberish – they follow way more than me; as do others.
Yesterday you wrongly accused me of using a ‘robot’ to follow then unfollow people; since then you have seen that your experience was caused by a twitter problem.
You tweeted this to me, just a few moments ago.
Today you are annoyed because I didn’t give techcrunch a link and because I use tweetdeck?
Is it a coincidence that I blogged negatively about techcrunch on my tech news blog a few days ago? I had never heard from you until then – since then, nothing but unfounded attacks!
I look forward to your post Mike.
Thats classy. Threatening you on your own blog.
Hes baiting you for hits and followers.
hahahaha!
Grant: Agreed!
I do think that much gets lost in the garble of what goes on with Twitter. I do however consider Twitter a fantastic source of news and info. So often someone will tweet a link with a short description that I know that I just have to follow. Mostly I just look out for these links… Jim I pretty much always follow yours
Twitter is so much more descriptive than a feedreader.
Robert,
Thanks for the comment.
Twitter is extremely useful for links, because you know the person sending the link, so you can verify its source.
Far less likely to be spam.
I also agree with Grant. This guy’s link baiting and twitter baiting you.
Jim you seem to think Mike Butchers from techcrunch.com and he’s not. His tiny UK techcrunch traffic is responsible for only 0.9% of techcrunch.coms traffic.
I also see from your post he’s got less than a third as many followers on twitter as you have.
He’s attacking you for traffic and followers. He needs people like you talking and writing about him.
Go figure.
If you only look for tweets that are replies to you, you miss a great part of what Twitter is about. There are lots of tweets that are not replies to anyone that I find very interesting and/or fun. Some are just boring.
But if you’re only looking for people who reply to you then why follow them in the first place? If they’re following you that’s all you’re looking for. You’ll still get anything they send direct to you.
I guess some people will not follow you unless you follow them back. It shouldn’t be that way but it seems to be.
I follow people who I find interesting and I don’t mind if they don’t follow back. I think that is how it should be.
Lonewolf,
You make a great point, and there’s just one thing I would like to add.
I don’t ‘only’ tweet with people who tweet to me. It’s mainly what I do, like everyone else with more than around 1,000 followers.
However, I have the twitter home stream running in twitter all day, whilst I am at my computer.
I find stacks of interesting people and brilliant stuff this way.
Twitter does change, depending on how many people you follow. So long as you can still give and receive value – surely that’s what we all want.
The problem with twitter right now is it is being used as the new spam machine. Good stories will be lost in the million and one self promoting marketers and business owners. I am one of them…but I have to ask what is the point? Won’t we suffer from method saturization? I never read tweats anymore. I can’t imagine most people with 100 or more active followers do.
Oh well I guess I will have to find a new way to reach people….
Hi Jim,
Thanks for taking the time to clarify all the questions on this thread. It’s been very informative for me, and the tip about Tweetdeck definitely worth the price of admission.
Also it’s (you) are a darn good show! Best!