Twitter Experiment: How to Gain Followers Without Following Anyone

Have you ever wondered how some Twitter users only follow a couple of people but have 100,000+ followers? I spent the last week simply analyzing different profiles, the content they tweet, the wording of their bio and I was surprised with some of the results. This is what sparked this experiment. Before I get into that, I was to discuss some of the reasons the above scenario takes place:

• The individual is outright famous (it’s really as simple as that). Without trying, they are bound to have a dedicated tribe of followers. Therefore, this point doesn’t apply to my experiment. I am NOT famous. I am a lifehacker.
• If they’re not famous, they are a founder/CEO of a relatively successful start-up and people want to learn from them.
• Business/life coaches also do particularly well on Twitter. They guide others, 140 characters at a time.

There is one idea that runs through each of these items: Guidance. People like to follow those who can guide them down the right path to success, love, etc…So with my Twitter experiment, I MUST include guidance. Wait, but who do I guide if no one knows who I am, and no one is following me yet?

The Experiment

I will start a fresh, brand new Twitter account (hopefully today, if I get responses from some of you) and will attempt to gain a mass following. The catch is, I am not allowed to do any of the following:

• Follow anyone
• Buy followers (that would just be silly and defeats the purpose of the experiment)

Pretty simple right? Just a normal person, with a new account, trying to gain a following. Ok great! So, what am I going to do differently? After going through various popular accounts (not only famous people), in fact famous people are not going to help me with my experiement. The fact that they’re famous has already done the job for them. I need to use what’s available to me on Twitter, which is:

• A profile picture
• A bio
• A background banner
• A main background
• Hashtags

So a good combination of the above 5 items should in theory get me going. Here’s where I’d like to open up the comment section to you guys for your opinions. I would like you to let me know your thoughts on what you believe would be the most effective combination of the above 5 items.

I will post the NEW Twitter account here, once we have decided which direction we’re going in. I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Update:

Ok, so the experiment has begun! I have created a new Twitter account: @Arabianist as promised, I will not follow ANYONE. I started this account on November 6th, 2012 and so far so good. In a couple of hours, 81 people have followed. Of course if I’d followed people, I’d be hitting a couple hundred by now. I’ll keep everyone updated in a couple of days. Is it cheating if I ask you guys to follow? I don’t think it is. The point is, this needs to be done in a way where I don’t follow anyone (until the experiment is over).

Outcome:

I was reminded today that I never told everyone the outcome of this experiment. Basically, without using any special sites or following anyone at all, I managed to raise awareness of my @Arabianist Twitter account to 500+ followers using smart #hashtags. Would I ever do this again? NEVER! It was a waste of time. Required way too much effort to get a return of 500+ untargeted followers which I hated so much that I shut the account down immediately. Was the experiment a success? Yes! You can certainly raise numbers on your social media accounts by using tags and that’s what I did with that account.

In any case, I’m on a new Twitter & Facebook experiment which you can find (here) and that one was a straight out success because I allowed myself to use special sites to gain followers. The goal however was NOT to follow anyone in the process or buy any followers. At one point the account reached 2,300 followers and has now dropped to 1,8xx. Which is not bad at all. I have stopped doing anything on that account and am no longer using it, but I didn’t delete it yet. You can visit it and check out that the majority of the followers are real, not targeted, but if I kept on going, I would have had an authoritative jewelry account.

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