As promised in The Twitter Experiment: First Stages, I started following people on my Twitter account today, after screening a “source person” for appropriateness, using the method I outlined in that post.
I started out slowly because I’m just getting a feel for this. How long would it take me, for instance, to add 100 people a day? How long for 200?
I started by accessing my account on Tweepi.com, clicking on “Follow Tweeps”/”User’s Followers.” After inputting the source person’s @name, I clicked “Start Following” and the window with all this person’s followers came up.
My husband and I had talked in-depth about how to ascertain who on this list would be my target audience. I am writing a New Adult (NA) novelette with a female protagonist. The source person writes Young Adult and is female. Her followers should like YA or they wouldn’t be following her, and most people who like/read YA also like/read NA (the clean stuff, anyway).
Because my protagonist is female and I intend to continue writing female main characters, I targeted all the females on the list. Hubby suggested this. I could have stopped to read how long it’s been since they’ve tweeted or read their bio, but I just clicked, clicked, clicked, female, female, female.
What will happen with the ones who haven’t tweeted in a while or ones who aren’t good matches is this: the non-tweeters will be flushed later through Tweepi. Tweepi shows you the non-tweeters in one window and you can unfollow them all, click, click, click.
The ones who aren’t good matches won’t follow me back. I will unfollow them through Tweepi in about 2 days.
This person (a writer) had a following of about 350, and I followed 146 females from her followers list. It took me less than fifteen minutes to add them all. At the time of this writing, 6 hours later, 30 have followed me back.
Check back to this post and I will give you the latest statistics on followbacks. [The next day, Tuesday, by noon I had 20 more followbacks, for a total of 50. This is a third of the amount I added the day before.]
There is one issue I ran into that I’m not sure how to handle. Some say to publicly tweet “thank yous” to everyone who follows back. I did that today. Everyone who followed me back I tweeted something like this:
TY @samanthareads @tanyaolsen @samlikescola for following me!
This is cool, but time-consuming. My quandary is–will this practice have a huge payoff for us all, or is it a waste of time?
What I’ve noticed is that many of those I shouted out to publicly thanked me in return, retweeted my shout out, or favorited the tweet. All positive responses which spread my name and their names to many like-minded followers.
So…I will have to wait and see. If it is productive to thank publicly, then I will have to keep the amount I add daily to a certain manageable amount time-wise. I’ll let you know what I decide and what I find works.
Okay, that’s it for today. I will be writing more on this either later in the week or next week. I’ll keep you updated!
If you want to start this series from the beginning and get the list of books I’m using for this method, go here to The Twitter Experiment: Can I Increase My Following on Twitter and Sell More Books Than I’ve Imagined?
(The John Locke book doesn’t cover this method, but does talk about how you handle your followers once you get them. Good!)
Follow me, Denise Miller Holmes, on Twitter!
Follow Words for the Journey Christian Writers Guild on Twitter!
The Twitter Experiment 1; The Twitter Experiment 2; The Twitter Experiment 4;
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