Looking at your number of followers like these people as an indication of your coolness or social media prowess is a lot like picking a large stack of 500 one dollar bills over a “small” stack of 10 one hundred dollar bills. Each dollar has a different value in the same way that each twitter follower has their own value. See Kevin Rose's recent post on how to get additional Twitter followers.
Every time you mention "I need one more follower to get to X followers" you should lose followers not gain them.
That kind of neediness shows that you know nothing about social media (if that is what it is being called this week)! Don't fall into the trap of looking at the number of followers you have as some kind of validation that you are good at what you do / know what you are doing. Stop it. OK. Just stop it. We all get followed by fake profiles, right? Will that follower ever be able to help you? NO! Then who care that they are following you, even though they add to your numbers, right!
Who you follow, and who follows you, should be more of a function of your propensity to HELP people and their propensity to help you. Until I can ask a question and get inundated by quality answers I do not have the right followers.
The number of people who find you interesting is not nearly as important as the number of people who are willing to help you when you tweet a problem you are having.
I for one don't just follow people who follow me, I tend to follow people who are into HELPING people, very often helping others comes in the form of a DM which I can't see, but my litmus test is simple - links in your Twitter stream (especially in replies) shows me that you are trying to get answers out to other people or post things that your followers might find helpful.
As I mentioned in my presentation at the Affiliate Summit in Vegas (recap here), one of the easiest ways to build links is seek out people you can help, in real life, in charities, on twitter, you name it. I talked about this not groundbreaking idea in my blog post titled the three link building tactics NO one talks about the first one is just simply helping people.
Twitter can be your water cooler, heck its mine too, but I do try to cheer friends up that are having bad days, and answer questions for people who are seeking to answers on things I may know. That is how you build quality Twitter followers, stop tweeting about your number of followers and GO HELP someone.
I recently got followed by someone â yes +1 followers on my tally. You know how I got followed by him.
I did a search one day when I was bored on an area where I might know a thing or two, SEO:
Sometimes I do searches for terms like: Google penalty SEO Help Looking tool
And many other searches will show you tons of people like this tweet here from @brandonburke
Its only 140 characters people, so it isn't a MAJOR time commitment to help, as a result of this tweet I got one follower and its OK to me to build my followers one at a time by helping rather than gimmicks.
