Welcome to the seventh day of Tweet Week. Today, we’ll take a look at maintaining your flock of followers.

Earlier in the week, we covered how to gain Twitter followers. Today, we’ll look at how to keep them.

Interact!

The first–and perhaps most important–thing you need to do is to interact with your followers. Unless you’re a celebrity, or really really funny, you probably won’t hold on to your followers if you never tweet with anyone and just share personal tidbits like you’re clipping your toenails or biting your toenails or that you had to get out your Dremel to trim your big toenail.

Also, you don’t need to interact with all of your followers. But, you need to show a pattern of interaction.

For one thing, I don’t think it’s necessary to reply to every @reply sent to you. Sometimes, you’ll see a tweet that’s useful or funny, and you’ll reply with a thanks or a “that was hilarious!” tweet. You’re not typically expecting a reply; you just want to let the person know that you enjoyed it, right? So, when you’re the recipient of such a reply, it’s not necessary to reply to each on individually because people (generally) aren’t expecting a response. You might want to send out a “thanks all” type tweet if you get many such replies just as a form of acknowledgment, but I don’t think it’s necessary to respond to each one individually.

I think the same is true for rhetorical questions. Of course, you have to use your own best judgment to determine whether or not a question is rhetorical!

In general, tweets that are questions and such should be answered. And, don’t be afraid to engage in conversations either! If you receive a tweet that is not rhetorical or does not necessitate a reply (such as a thanks, a “that was great!”, etc.), then you should reply to it, in most cases. Something that is clearly mean-spirited may not merit a reply. You could, but often it’s just best to ignore it so as not to give the sender any more attention.

Also, if you ask a question of your followers, and you receive dozens of replies, it may not be practical to reply to each individually. You could reply with a general “thanks all” or you might thank them by listing them in one or two tweets. You could also just link to them in your blog.

Provide Something of Value

Naturally, you’re not going to be able to give all of your followers a hundred bucks everyday (but if you do, let me know so I can follow you!), but you still need to provide something of value.

But, that value doesn’t need to be expensive. It is usually simple (and inexpensive!) stuff like sharing links or videos to useful and/or entertaining content. Just make sure that you don’t tweet your own links too often. Some people use Twitter as an RSS feed for their blogs, but if I wanted to sign up for your blog’s RSS feed, I’d do it through my feed reader, not Twitter!

Always remember that Twitter is a social network. Mind you, I realize the mantra of “People use Twitter for different things!” but realize that most people are using Twitter for socializing. (Of course, that may change as more and more people join Twitter simply to stalk follow their favorite celebrities.)

As an example, I tweet at least one quote on a near-daily basis. I try to find quotes that are inspiring, useful, motivational or sometimes just funny. If I miss a day, I’ll hear about it!

So, providing value is not something that needs to be hard or expensive, but it is something that you need to do if you want to retain your following.

Crazy Followers?

Let’s say you saw me tweet something like this:

@ijustine Thanks for referring David to me. I’ll be sure to make him a great Twitter background!

You’re probably thinking, Wow! iJustine referred someone to him. He must make great backgrounds! (And, if you don’t know who iJustine is, substitute some big name you do know.)

Meanwhile, iJustine is thinking, what the frak is he talking about?

And that’s because iJustine never referred anyone to me. Heck, iJustine probably doesn’t even know who I am.

All that is is a little trick: tweeting to famous or popular people on Twitter as if you have a relationship with them.

Now, if I were to tweet this:

@oprah Thanks for referring David to me. I’ll be sure to make him a great Twitter background!

Then you might have second thoughts! But, if I pick someone perhaps not quite as famous but still recognizable:

@guykawasaki Thanks for referring David to me. I’ll be sure to make him a great Twitter background!

Then you might be more inclined to believe it.

As you build your own following and either have a large following or become a recognized authority in your niche, the same will happen to you. And, when it does, you’re bound to be wondering what kind of crazy people are following you! (And, of course, they don’t even have to be following you to use this technique.)

You may be tempted to tweet back to them:

What the frak are you talking about? I’d never refer you to anyone! Not anyone I liked anyway!

But, that may not be a good idea. For one, it may just be a waste of your time. For another, if the person really is crazy, you’re going to be stuck in a conversation with them that never freakin’ ends. So, don’t go there.

Of course, if it begins to damage your reputation, then you might have to do some damage control.

That concludes Tweet Week! I hope you have found this week’s posts to be useful for your own Twitter goals!

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 30th, 2009 at 7:08 pm and is filed under Twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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