About 2 months ago, I was sitting at my desk happily watching my twitter feed go by when I decided to admire some of the 500+ followers I had “attracted”. As I scanned through the list of names and pictures I realized some things: I don’t know any of these people, most of them are not even real, and none of them are actually listening to me.

When was the last time you took a long hard look at who was following you on twitter? If it’s been a while, I’ll stop here for a second so you can browse through your list of adoring fans...

Now raise your hand if you have, in any way, directly communicated with your 10 most recent followers? What about the last 20 or even 50 people who are following you? If you’ve @ most of those people, read their blogs, left comments, re-tweeted them, or called them on the phone, then you can stop reading now. However, if you’re like me, then maybe the rest of this post can help.

The first thing to know is many of the people who follow you are not “real”. As Twitter has become more and more popular, people have begun using bots to find followers and blast a message at them. Don’t follow bots. In fact, you should probably block these accounts.

Second, look at your followers’ feeds. If they never re-tweet, @ people, or all the posts come from an API, they’re not listening to you or anybody else.

Now that our ego and Twitter status has been deflated, we can get to work. Here are 3 tips to get the most out of your followers:

1. Listen to what your followers are saying. Read the blog posts they link to and leave comments. Re-tweet their posts and answer their questions. Everyday, before you post something of your own, promote what others are doing.
2. Only follow your “real” followers back. When you do, thank them for following and mention something specific to their feed. This way they know you’re listening to them, and they’ll listen to you in return.
3. Measure your success in Twitter by the amount of conversations you have, not by the amount of followers. Set a goal to interact with at least one person every week or everyday. It’s not as hard as it might sound. You can look for others in your industry to bounce ideas off of. Find a mid level celebrity who doesn’t have a million followers and try to talk with them. If all else fails, just send a message to @joshdward. I’m sure he’ll respond.

Don’t drink the kool-aid.
-@joshdward