Twitter Following

[enivid]

So my main Twitter account has about 20k followers. This account is only following 4 other accounts of my own (all with about 18-20k followers), which in turn only follow each other. Am I missing a lot from not following other Twitter accounts in my niche or doing some automatic follow/unfollow routine? Is there some disadvantage to that?

 

[juliantrueflynn]

To answer quickly:

• You should most likely be doing some following/engaging with people on Twitter.
• Only disadvantage is not dominating a traffic channel and leaving it to competitors.

A bit of a longer answer, but this is how I target social media marketing and how it would handle this:

1. Use tools like URL Profiler, Topsy, Hashtagify, ex to build a list of the top direct and non-direct competitors and their social media.
2. In the competitor document above break out all their social media metrics (ex. amount of followers, tweets, etc.).
3. Take note of where everyone is present, who's popular, and where there are patterns. From there actually take a look at how they're using the platforms for those kind of results (i.e. reverse engineering).
4. From the data above you can start planning a marketing strategy on how to improve on what competitors are doing and how to coordinate with your branding.

It's setup this way so I can do what I said above, dominate a traffic channel and take it away from competitors. Even though social media isn't as zero-sum as SEO it is hard to gain someones attention and keep it. I wouldn't want competitors to be more ingrained to the community and more people talking to them.

 

[enivid]

Thanks for your insights. So let's say I start following some of the top influencers in the niche, which are not my direct competitors. What measurable effect will it have? More followers to my account? My account becomes more interesting? How do I understand that the following strategy worked?

 

[juliantrueflynn]

I was thinking more along the lines of following people who are interacting with you. I personally build a Twitter list called 'Friends' (or whatever) and then use IFTTT for anyone that engages with me shows up in the Twitter list. While on the subject, I do this for competitors too so I build a list of everyone engaging with them (also with IFTTT).

For following non-direct competitors that would be more for building relevance and networking. For example: if you followed ProfileA and they follow back, then I followed ProfileA you would most likely show up under 'Similar', but if you tried to follow me after it would say 'ProfileA also follows them' which will help get a follow back.

And just to make clear, the strategy 'works' when you're clearly the most engaged with/popular account for that channel. If you see your competitors on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, and you systematically 'beat them' in popularity in each channel that puts you in a dominating position.