Sciencetext Tips & Tricks

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Get More Twitter Followers

January 27th, 2009 · by David Bradley >> 15 Comments

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twitter-bird-logoWant more twitter followers, particularly in your niche? Then here’s a nice simple way to add to your twitterhood – create a list of your current friends/followers in that niche and publish it on your blog.

I hit on this rather neat trick almost by accident. I was using tweetake.com to backup my twitter friends and followers. It produces downloadable spreadsheet-type files (CSV, comma-separated variables) that you can import into Excel. So, I was messing around with those and began trying different sorts and filters when it suddenly occurred to me I could select out all those fellow twitterers interested in science and maybe create a niche within my twitterhood. The obvious next step was to publish the list, embed my twitter friends’ bios in a table, and make their twitter link active so that they’d see it in their trackbacks/dashboard or wherever.

tweeps

I then tweeted the link (of course) and asked for any other science-minded twitterers to come forward and join the list. Of course, if those new friends wanted to retweet (RT using this link, http://bit.ly/scientwists) my list even better. Indeed, I then offered to add anyone who commented, retweeted or otherwise promoted the list, to the top of the table.

Turned out that I gained around 100 new genuine twitter followers and friends within 24 hours all with an interest in science (the main topic of sciencebase.com), bringing my total at the time of writing to well over 800. Now, that’s nowhere near @barackobama, @wossy, or even @stephenfry, but it is more than double my tweetcount at the beginning of December 2008.

What is even more gratifying is that some of my old and new friends have reported back to say that they’re attracting new followers, StumbleUpon stumbles to their site and a general increase in traffic following my initial tweet of the 100 scientific twitterers. So, there you go, it’s not who you know, but who you could know that counts.

15 responses so far ↓

  • Left Brain // Jan 27, 2009 at 4:04 pm

    We “borrowed” this technique from you and got over 50+ new followers in less than 12 hours.

    Great idea!

    I’m going to do it in a couple of other niches I write in.

  • David Bradley // Jan 27, 2009 at 4:27 pm

    I’m impressed, well done. My original post has spread quite virally since January 6 and as you can see my followers have more than doubled since then to close to 1200, moreover, I’ve made a lot of useful new and friendly contacts along the way as well as almost doubling the original list with people asking to be on it ;-)

  • Left Brain // May 30, 2009 at 5:01 pm

    This method only works if you have 1000 Twitter followers or less. Do you know how to extract your list of followers if you have more than 1000?

  • David Bradley // May 31, 2009 at 8:26 am

    Tweetake.com?

  • Left Brain // May 31, 2009 at 2:21 pm

    Yes, Tweetake.com only creates a list of 1000 followers. Any idea how you can create a list if you have more than 1000 followers?

  • David Bradley // May 31, 2009 at 7:50 pm

    Ah, no I hadn’t realised I used it when I was well below the 1000 follower mark…

  • David Bradley // Jun 2, 2009 at 9:19 pm

    FriendorFollow.com seems to have no limit on the number of twitter IDs it will grab, it grabbed all my friends and followers anyway, perhaps worth a try…

  • Alex // Jul 4, 2009 at 8:25 pm

    Hi, I just stumbled across this through Google, in the German translation (http://www.sciencetext.com/get-more-twitter-followers.html/de/). Let me tell you as a native speaker: Don’t do it. It sucks. Babelfish at its worst.

  • David Bradley // Jul 5, 2009 at 9:03 am

    Alex, what is it about the translation that sucks, is there no merit to getting the gist of a post from the machine translation? Aren’t they continually improving those systems? I think our site actually uses Google by default not Babelfish, anyway, but I do understand your point.

  • Alex // Jul 7, 2009 at 1:42 pm

    David,

    it sounds like a Scrabble game that fell down the stairs. You may get the gist, but it does sound really weird. Like a translation robot that blows a fuse in a sci-fi movie. I re-translated one sentence back into english.

    “So I am confused with those around and began to try different ways to filter and, when it suddenly occurred to me I could all those out Gefährtetwitterers select in science and were interested in my niche twitterhood may produce.”

    In German it is worse. And I would add: Most German Twitter users (or any tech savvy readers for that matter) will have at least a functional knowledge of English – and will be highly amused by the “Translation”.

  • Alex // Jul 7, 2009 at 1:44 pm

    Oh, I overlooked the best: “Posts” in “Related Posts” at the bottom of the page is translated “Pfosten”, which is a wooden post, pole, stake … very interesting.

  • David Bradley // Jul 7, 2009 at 1:52 pm

    Yeah, I think you’re right Alex…I’m not going to disable it, but I may talk to the plugin author about tweaking the system. Is Google translation as bad as Babelfish?

  • Alex // Jul 7, 2009 at 2:28 pm

    Babelfish:
    “Thus I entangled around with those and began to try different kind and filters, when it suddenly arose to me I, could all out that Gefährtetwitterers preselect, those to science and one was interested niche within mine twitterhood possibly, to manufacture.”

    Not much of a difference. You would need an engine that really understands syntax, context etc., not just word-by-word translation.

    My guess: human translators won’t go out of business too soon.

    Check http://www.chinglish.de/ …

  • David Bradley // Jul 7, 2009 at 3:51 pm

    Hmmm…it’s garbage either way, isn’t it?

  • Alex // Jul 16, 2009 at 2:11 pm

    Well …. Yes. Sorry.

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