Why Get More Twitter Followers?

There’s still much debate about whether follower growth is a worthwhile pursuit on twitter. Many argue that twitter is a tool for communicating with friends. Others argue that it has worthwhile business application.

Below is a list of reasons why having a large following on twitter may be something to pursue. There are of course also reasons perhaps not to pursue a large following, but in this article we’ll just focus on the positives.

1) Search Engine Rankings: Pagerank is often put forward as the main reason for influencing your position in Google search results. At a high level this is true, but more importantly it’s the number of links to your site, and their relevance and trust that matters even more. Unfortunately twitter uses “nofollow” attributes in their links, so any links to your site on twitter do not directly contribute to this process. But this is not the whole story.

The real story is a little more complicated. Tweets aren’t only presented on twitter. They also get pulled via the API into widgets, blogs, and other websites. The API doesn’t insert “nofollow” attributes, and so it’s quite possible that some of these other sites present the links unmodified. There will therefore be some indirect influence on your rank via these other sources. Some other search engines like Ask.com ignore the “nofollow” tag, so tweeted links can affect their rankings directly.

2) Social Proof: The truth is that human behaviour is very much influenced by social proof. People will always be more willing to listen to what someone has to say if they see others listening or endorsing that person. This fact influences every part of our society, and twitter is no different. You are more likely to be followed (and be listened to) if you have a large following already. It’s the same reason testimonials are so important.

3) Driving Traffic: The more people you have following you, the more traffic you can drive somewhere. People will click your links when you tweet them. If you have your own website or blog, then this can become a quick and affordable way to create page views for your content. They might not all read that content, but it will at least give you an opportunity to win them over.

4) Viral Effect: As you grow your followers, so will the number of retweets you get. As the number of retweets grows, so do the clicks from those retweets. It’s the viral effect, and the greater your following the more you will experience it’s effects.

5) Branding: Spam your followers with low-quality updates and you’re likely to alienate them. Add value and you’re likely to get a lot of benefit from having your profile scrolling across their screen regularly.

6) Expert Power: Due to the broadcast nature of twitter, when you help people out you create visibility for your skill set. By being active in your area of expertise you’re likely to build relevance as the expert. You will get referrals, and these broadcasted referrals will be seen by others too.

7) Conformity: It’s human nature to try to conform. This permeates every part of society – we’re programmed this way. Sure, we may try to rebel at times, we may feel the urge to be individuals, but deep down we always tend to conform. Experiments have proven this over and over again. Having a large twitter following can help to exploit this trait. If you have thousands of people following you, you can be sure that many more will follow you first out of curiosity, but will then continue to out of conformity. After all, if thousands of others have found you interesting, then maybe so should they.

All of this assumes we are talking about followers that actually read their tweets. Some followers obviously do not, and many only follow you in the hope that you will follow them back. Regardless of this, a large percentage do participate, and it’s this segment that is most affected by the points above. Hopefully this has given you a few things to think about when it comes to choosing your follower size.

Dave Sumter is the creator of FastFollowers, a site that helps people get twitter followers. He also writes about internet entrepreneur topics on his blog.

Related posts:

1. My Twitter Slap Took me by Surprise
2. Using Twitter to Drive Traffic to Your Sales Website
3. If You Like Twitter, You’ll Love These Ways to Make it Better!
4. 5 Things to Consider In Affiliate Marketing
5. How to build a responsive list fast