Most people are trying to promote some kind of product or service. Some want to be considered thought leaders in the space or drive traffic to a blog or website. Regardless, the idea is to get more followers than you are following .

I’ve also read a lot about different strategies in order to get more users following you than you are following . One way is to request to follow others in order to have them request to follow you out of courtesy. Then after a while you stop following some of those people so that the number of users following you is still higher but the number you are following decreases.

Another article mentioned that one may view Twitter as a kind of cocktail party and behave accordingly. When arriving at a party, you might start talking to people and introduce yourself. The way to do this on Twitter is by sending a direct message to whomever you requested to follow in order to initiate conversation and networking.

Yesterday I received a request to be followed and reciprocated in turn. Then to no surprise, I received a direct message from the individual shortly after thanking me for the return follow. I happened to be in the middle of a number of things and was not available to return the direct message right away. By the time I attempted to reply to his direct message, he had already removed himself from following me.

The funniest part about the whole thing is that the idea of Twitter was to post what you are doing. I would have to say that about 97% of the updates submitted have nothing to do with what that user is doing.

If you’d like to read more, click here to check out my friend The Quixotic Jedi’s blog posting about Twitter for Beginners.