Social Networking for Dumb People, How to get 1000 followers in 10 days

I know nothing about social networking other then what I have learned over the last 2 weeks! When I started this project it was really out of curiosity. I had been using Facebook for a few years to keep in touch with all of my friends and colleges. The real question that I was looking to answer was “How does social networking really work”, and “was it something that I would be able to do on my own.” The answers to these questions would come to me quite fast after signing up for Twitter. Social networking is a lot like running around a mall and asking people for their phone number so that when you have something important to say you can call them. The only difference is that it’s not as personal and you don’t actually call them. You post something, or Tweet something and everyone that you are friends with can hear it. This can be quit useful in many areas. If you’re a business it’s a great way to increase sales and gain new clients. If you’re into fund-raising, then you could use social networking to try and raise money for a cause. The list is really endless. My point is that if you can create a large enough audience then you really can have a voice on the net, and over time people will listen to what you have to say even if it’s not that important. It’s all a numbers game as far as I am concerned.

Let’s cover some basic rules of social networking. Again, please keep in mind that I am not an expert, but I have managed to build up a total of 400 Facebook friends, 800 twitter followers, and 1000 friends on Foursquare in 12 days. That’s a total of 2300 new connections in less than 2 weeks spending about 45 minutes a day building my network. If I continue doing what I am doing, I will have about 50,000 + connections over the next 12 months. That’s a nice size audience if you have something to say, or something to sell.

So let’s get down to how I accomplished this. I used a feature in Facebook that shows suggested friends. It shows you how many shared connections you have with the people that they are showing. I sent friend request out to everyone that had more those 5 similar connections. Now please keep in mind that I had about 200 friends when I started this. If you don’t have a Facebook account, sign up immediately! Face book will let you send around 1000 request before they stop you. I tend to find that most people will accept you as a friend even if you don’t know them. I also recommend using a picture of a cartoon or a really cute pet if you have one. I find that people let their guard down when they see a cute little dog in the profile picture rather then you ugly mug, unless you a really hot chick, I would use a picture of a pet =).

The next step is signing up for Twitter (www.twitter.com)! Now I originally signed up for twitter when there were only about50 million users a year ago. Twitter is quickly approaching 300 million users now. My point is that it’s a really big network of people that you can plug into. I recommend signing up immediately if you don’t have an account! The first thing that I did was Google the internet and find ways to get a lot of friends fast. I found a few articles that were great but one really stood out from all the others. ( http://bit.ly/ewYCbe ) if you click the link I just provided you will find a list of 1001 Twitter users that will follow you back. Just go through the list every night and follow everyone on it! You can follow me at this link http://bit.ly/euEcbE . Please feel free to go through all of the people that I follow, 99% of them will follow you back. The other tool that I used to get a lot of followers was “TeamFollowback” this is a user that has a presence that tells everyone that if you follow him/her everyone that follow him will follow you as well. I have found this to be the case. Since I started following people from “TeamFollowback”, my phone beeps every few minutes letting me know that someone new is now following me. The way that you find “TeamFollowback” is by typing it into the search field in Twitter and then clicking the tab that says “People’, just go down the list and follow everyone, also try typing different variations of “TeamFollowback” and you will get different results.

The last tool that I recommend is called Foursquare (www.Foursquare.com ). This is a tool that you actually use on your Cell phone. The cool part about this application is that you can send friend request to people that you don’t know in your local community. Please visit their website to better understand how there system works. The key thing to know is that once you become friends with someone on Foursquare, it actually shows you if that person has a Facebook or twitter account, and I would say that somewhere around 50% to 70% of the people that I have come across have both accounts. I really hope that this article is of help to someone that is new online and trying to figure out where to start! I will be righting another article in about a month to update everyone as to how well these tactics have or have not worked!