I was browsing around articles about Twitter when I found this http://bit.ly/bkgaz6 which tells of the best way to gain followers, all of them are the opposite of what I do on Twitter, and seemed cynical, and moreover I didn’t believe the tactics would work.

I’ve been on Twitter nearly 2 years, have written over 40,000 tweets and have just under 1,300 followers (I’ve not gotten rid of spam in a while though, I ‘d reckon the true figure is nearer 1,000) I have gotten that many by tweeting, by ranting, by posting links and by sometimes making people laugh. I have gotten the followers the proper way, the way non-celebrities do it.Following the tactics in the above article wouldn’t work.

Or would they?

Could I use all of the advice in that article to gain followers? Could I get as many followers as I have now on my main account? How quickly could I do it? Could I do it in a month?

I decided to use an account I had set up months ago for a one tweet joke. I had only sent that one tweet, received a reply and promptly forgot it. When I checked I had one follower so that seemed a good place to start.

I started by searching for lists of people who will follow back, and was amazed by the amount of lists that are out there, lists you can click on and it will follow a couple of hundred people at a time.(There are pro versions of these lists, some that guarantee you 15,000 followers in a month, I am not paying for any of those) I am now following 759 people, none of whom are remotely interesting, but as the article says.. 

“If you’re worried that you won’t be able to keep up with that many people, you’re right. Once you’re following over 100 people, it’ll be pretty much impossible to read all their updates. You’ll become more selective in who/what you read.”

So I don’t need to worry about actually reading anyone. Most of the people I follow are American so, owing to the time difference, the following back is happening slower than I expected but still, at the end of day 1 I have 148 followers. Less than 3% of all Twitter users ever get 100 followers, this bogus, bullshit account has nearly 150 from one day. It took me 6 months to get that many followers.

The one thing that was strange was that about 50 of those followers were people I hadn’t been following, so going on these follow lists obviously works from a numbers point of view. I duly followed all of them too.

I have also, to date, received 60 (presumably auto-generated) DMs thanking me for the follow, these were my first DMs of that nature and yet I received no @replies from people, a reversal of the Twitter etiquette I am used to.Some of the DMs refer to a “Twitter Validation” where you go to a site to prove you’re not a spambot.This ‘service’ is free, but you can pay for the professional version. There is a completely different Twitter experience out there.

There’s no fun to this, turning Twitter into a numbers game, and a numbers game only, is exactly the kind of thing that myspace became, that bebo became. I have no desire to post tweets there, I don’t want to interact with people whose only touiteur raison d’etre is to follow and be followed.

Still, I will continue with it, following more advice tomorrow. Tomorrow I plan to

“Tweet well and tweet often. Selective followers will also glance at your most recent tweets to see if you’re worth following.

Be interesting, transparent and provocative. Share intimate news about your life. If you can spin a good story, you might get readers addicted to the daily dramas of your everyday life.

Post interesting links. Find the man bites dog story. Search the web voraciously for a nugget you can spin into a good tweet. Guy Kawasaki, who has over 100,000 followers, goes as far as paying employees to find buzzworthy stories for him to tweet”

I do not, as yet, plan to pay people to find my buzzworthy stories, I think I will do what other popular tweeters do, steal the tweets from others, and give the credit in a second tweet.

More on my progress (or lack thereof) tomorrow.