I have 3 accounts with Twitter (one for each of my discrete businesses) and each account has over 10,000 followers so that must make me a success. Well does it?

I started to Tweet about 18 months ago and now it has become a regular part of my daily routing but increasingly it has taken up more and more time because of the number of followers that I have. When I started I asked everyone and anyone that I know who was on Twitter to follow me and dutifully they did – instantly I had 9 followers! As I started to Tweet more regularly I started to get a few more and every time I got a new follower there was a small celebration. My account was building followers and I was hopeful that this was going to accelerate the prospects for my business.

After every small celebration though I started to look around at other people\’s accounts and see that they had thousands of visitors and I wondered how long it had taken to get them. Clearly having a celebrity status was a good start but this didn\’t seem to be the right way for me to go so I did a bit more research.

I found that there are a number of Twitter approved soft-wares available that help you grow your list of followers by automating your following of others. Twitter has a rule that you can only follow a given multiple of those that are following you so you can\’t just go out there, follow everybody and then sit and wait for everybody to follow you back.

Of course you could spend time every day following people and monitoring who follows you back, deleting those that don\’t follow you etc. but that\’s an awful lot of time to spend and these tools can do it all for you.

I\’ve seen a lot of software pitched – “get traffic to your website fast” – you know the stuff, none of it works because the traffic isn\’t targeted, so I was a little wary about trying one of these tools. Some are “pay by the month”, others are a one-off fee so I chose to go with a pay by the month to see what happened.

On the face of it, I was able to set up my account very quickly, I was able to select a number of other people accounts (folks within my niche) who had a lot of followers and target their followers as people who I wanted to engage with. I could also set it up so that if they didn\’t follow me back within 4 days then the software would automatically un-follow them so I felt pretty good that I had a neat way for getting more followers and those followers that wanted to engage in my niche.

For sure my followers steadily grew, maybe 10 in the first week and growing to the current where I now average about 100 new followers a week. Great isn\’t it?

How wrong I was. All I got was general followers with a “follow me and I\’ll follow you back” attitude. Yes I built lots of new followers but none only a few of them were in my niche, it would appear that all my competitors had use the same software (or similar) so all their followers were non targeted too!

Maybe having a large number of followers gives you Twitter credibility but if it does, then I\’m still waiting to see it. I spent hours sifting through all my followers to find those that I really did want to engage with and put them in a list – I can\’t follow my main account because I get about 2 or 3 new tweets every second.

Now after 3 months I\’ve canceled my subscription to this software provider so I don\’t waste any more money but still the followers keep coming. Getting targeted followers on Twitter is harder than I thought, I\’ve found another piece of software (that looks better) and I\’m going to try it out and see if it\’s any better.

Author Bio: Paul Yates offers free Twitter marketing advice. He has researched many Twitter tools to find Twitter friend adder software that works and found only one that works satisfactorily.

Category: Business
Keywords: twitter followers, get targeted followers, twitter friend adder,