Adam Kornfield @adamkornfield: Any good methods for building twitter followers and interacting with people? Loving the live q&a!
ANSWER:
I look at my twitter follower count (and related to that: my facebook subscribers, quora followers, klout score, comments on my blog posts, facebook likes on my blog posts, etc) and I feel regret. Regret that I care. But I do care. I want people to like me. I want people to think that my words have some impact. I want to have friends that even in this very ephemeral way, stay in touch with me.
So I like to have more twitter followers even though I dislike that I want that. And that’s social media in a nutshell. We all want to connect. We want to be loved even when other parts of our lives don’t provide all the cravings we need. The cure for that is to just be quiet. To understand that all the tweets in the world, all the Facebook updates, add up to so much of nothing. They exist in 1s and 0s for a few seconds, and then they disappear into some magical ether among the quadrillions of bytes of information shared every day.
So while I hate myself for doing it: I do have an answer for your question. The best way for building twitter followers is to give someone a gift. Somewhere, somehow (a blog, a facebook post, engaging in a conversation in twitter, answering a question on quora, etc deliver something of great quality – help someone out, provide someone unique. And in that gift, include a card. The “card” says, “please follow me on Twitter”.
That’s the answer to your question. Ask people to follow you. Ask and you will receive. Don’t ask, and like most things in life, nobody is going to do you any favors.