On Kawasaki's "How to Pick up Followers on Twitter"

I was recently asked to do a quick summary of this post by Guy Kawasaki, "Looking for Mr GoodTweet: How to Pick Up Followers on Twitter" which has been doing the rounds. It's a long post with a bunch of tips, so here's the short version for those of us with many hats and/or short attention spans and/or not much time in the day, etc. etc. etc. Please note this version includes my own commentary, for which I make no apologies. : )

1) Follow the "smores (social media whores)", those with large numbers of followers who could be considered opinion leaders. Guy says 1) many will "autofollow" you back; 2) you may learn something, 3) you may want to appear that you "have a clue" when people look at your profile. My take? NO. Personally, I call b.s. on this one. Follow people you KNOW are thought leaders because you may learn something, that's it.

2) Send @ messages to the smores - eg it's not who you know, it's who appears to know you. NO. Guy says himself that this is crap. Real thought leaders will reply to you if you say something worth replying to (unless they have 10,000 followers in which case I wouldn't waste my time regardless). Better yet, talk to speakers at conferences, for example, if you like their stuff. Then you actually have a beginning of a relationship.

3) Create an effective avatar. YES. Show your face. be a real person.

4) Follow everyone who follows you. YES - at first. Eventually, this will become too much to deal with and you can choose to follow only people whose Twitter profiles show that they are relevant to you.

5) Always be linking. YES. Don't JUST post random day to day stuff about yourself, post lots of links to interesting sites or blog posts.

Guy then lists a bunch of places you can find stuff to link to (StumbleUpon, CNN, Alltop, Truemors, etc.) NO. Link to more interesting, niche or personally/professionally relevant stuff than the headlines everyone else is linking to. Yuck.

6)Establish yourself as a subject expert. (Step 1 - actually be an expert on something). Express your opinion. YES. We all know how to do this! Either that, or ask questions about something you want to learn about.

7) Incorporate pictures or other media. YES. Mix it up.

8) Use the right tools. Guy has a selection of his favorites, I won't repeat them here, you can go check them out on his post. SORT OF. The "right" tools change all the time. Just try stuff. If you like it, keep using it, if you don't, don't.

9) Repeat your tweets. Take your most interesting tweets and post them again. YES. People check in at different times and unless they follow very few people, were possibly not paying attention the first time you tweeted. Also you'll find those people who are active during the week are not active on weekends or in the evening and vice versa. Or consider the different time zones of your followers.

10) Ask people to follow. YES. Tell people on your blog sidebar and in your blog posts, on your website, in your email signature.

That's it. You can also check out the hundreds of comments to Guy's post, if you have time, but hopefully this little list will help you even if you don't!