Following who Influencers Follow on Twitter

January 2, 2009

By Ben Fisher

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Following who Influencers Follow to build a quality stream of Twitter food and a crowd you can influence

So, I have been using Twitter for quite a while. My habits on following have been very “natural” up until a few days ago. Usually I would only follow someone if they emailed me and expressly asked me to follow them, it was on their business card or if I happened to run into it in a interesting post.

I am a LinkedIn addict with business contacts, I FaceBook my friends and Family so I figured, OK time to experiment with Twitter again.

When I started my experiment about 1 week ago, I had roughly 150 people I was following and 50 people following me, not bad considering most people on my list I knew personally and some were very influential people.

Being that, in my social media research, I focus on influential discussions I figured I would experiment with adding influential Twitterees to my feed and seeing if I could beef up my followers with influencers as well.

Here is what I did:

1) Opened a few highly influential peoples Twitter profiles (people that I know personally)
2) Averaged about 3 Tweets a day and made some Reply’s
3) Setup a Auto-Follow reply using SocialToo.com
4) Followed as many people as I could that they were following
5) After adding the influencers of influential poeple, I read through their Tweets and added some more influencers from who they were following
6) Added a spiffy background to my Twitter page

My assumption was that since quite a few people use the auto-follow type tools that I could net myself a decent number of followers that were in my target industry since they were influencers of my influencers. As a by-product I figured I would also get a great Twitter stream going on people whom I knew as acquaintances or from my blog reader.

I was right. After 72 hours at about 1/3 ratio of following/followers (1999 following/640 Followers) and a spiffy Twitter Grade of 97.2. I also ended up generating a great stream of experts to feed my Twitter addiction.