If you’re active on Twitter (or social media in general for that matter) you’ve probably seen the tweets, messages and marketing for ploys to “Get 1,000 Twitter followers in a week!” “For only $5 you can get 10,000 more Twitter followers” and other crap like that. Sometimes they’re scams, sometimes they’re legitimate tactics focusing on the numbers.

UGH.

Even when it’s a “real” offer for a system or an ebook the person or company offering is off target. It’s NOT about the numbers.   Let me say that again:

IT’S NOT ABOUT THE NUMBERS!

WOULD YOU DO THIS?

Let’s assume you want more business, awareness or attention. Fair enough. Would you pay someone to open the white pages (I’m going old school here intentionally to show how stupid this is) and type the names, phone numbers and addresses of random people into a spreadsheet and then upload those names to your database of business contacts? And then run around to networking events bragging “I got 1,000 new business contacts yesterday and only had to pay someone $45 to get them!”

Hopefully NOT.

THEN WHY DO THIS?

Read above again. That’s exactly what you’re doing (online) when you pay one of those random people or companies to give you 1,000 followers for $5 (or any amount). How helpful is it to talk to people that don’t know you or aren’t in your target market (and could even NOT be people at all but fake Twitter accounts created by the same company that just scammed your money)?

Ok, what about the legitimate strategies and tactics (sold via information products) that focus primarily on numbers? If your business world is all about the numbers (get 20 business cards at every event so you can get 10 coffee meetings to make 3 pitches to get 1 sale) then go for it. If your business world is all about the relationships you probably don’t need a bunch of random business cards (i.e. Twitter followers) to add to your database anyways just so you can brag about how many people are in your database.

Right?

WHEN YOU COULD DO THIS?

Enough of the rant. There are a LOT of ways to build a following on Twitter; let’s look at one that isn’t talked about much and closely mirrors the way you might already be building relationships offline. With that in mind – how DO you build relationships offline?

Chances are you when you meet someone you get to know them by finding out what they’re passionate about (from mentoring to exercise to their profession), what projects they’re working on and how you might be able to help each other out based on that. So do the same thing the Twitter way.

First: Follow people you already know, like and trust. These could be offline relationships, bloggers and experts you follow online or any other number of people. The key factor is that you have familiarity with them.

Second: Look at who THEY are following (not who’s following them, but who THEY are following). Check out those people and follow them. Check out = make sure they’re actually talking to people (not just broadcasting information, but talking to and replying to people) and that they are active on Twitter (not just tweeting once a week or worse yet once a month – that’s the online version of joining a professional organization or gym then showing up twice a year; they’re not really part of the conversation or community).

Third: TALK to the active people (directly say hi, mention them in a tweet, share something they wrote or otherwise get their attention). Create Twitter lists for different niches you are interested in, cities you visit/do business in and such. Then use a tool like Hootsuite to keep an eye on the conversations going on in those lists.

There you go. Find people that the people you respect like and build your online network from there. Makes sense, right?

WHAT’S NEXT?

Check out Twitter through the new lens we just talked about – who will YOU connect with today?