Assuming you have already filled in your profile. All of the details! You have made it interesting and added either a picture of yourself or an avatar that represents you. Me, I edit my profile often as it strikes me to do so. To be honest I think that I may change it too often. I don’t really change my picture “the floating head” as my followers call it. I’ll make it face right or left, maybe appear upside down for a day, but the picture is the same.

So you have the profile done, a nice picture and you have started tweeting. You are posting interesting tweets, you are replying to people and getting some replies – but not as many followers as you would like.

Hopefully, you have already figured out how to get people to reply to you on Twitter.You have already added (I hope) the 51 Twitter Users That Will (probably) Follow You Back and I hope they did follow you back.

Now you have to follow people, by choice it will be people that are in your niche, or people that you are interested in. Your call on what kind of people to follow of course, but I prefer people that follow me back. If you want to follow THE_REAL_SHAQ but he won’t follow you back. He may reply to one tweet, but he does not follow back.

So now we get to the funny image on the right. There are a lot (A LOT) of MLM and spammy Twitter accounts. You can tell these people are being auto-followed because, like the accounts listed to the right, the person who set up the account just adds 2000 followers, then a couple of hours later unfollows anyone who has not followed back. The account for Tavia Yeung – all 11 listed plus a dozen or so more that I didn’t want to make screen shots of – each had at least 400 followers. Some of the accounts had over 1000 followers. There was one tweet, something like “I’m going to the movies” on every account. One Tweet, an account one day old and 400 to 1000 followers on over 20 accounts.

When you are followed by one of these accounts the first thing you do is to hit that little block button to keep Twitter free from people that are just sending junk tweets. At the same time, think about those 400 to 1000 people that have already followed these accounts. Do you really think that they all decided to follow a brand new account with one essentially useless tweet? Nope, they are using a tool to automatically follow people back. Since all these people automatically followed these junk accounts, they will follow you back, probably. Probably, nothing is sure in this life except that it ends.

Of course, once you have these new followers you have to interact with them, go back to the basics of following good people that are in your niche, post interesting tweets, re-tweet things that interest you and avoid posting “too many” self-serving tweets. Follow this little practice and you will at least have a larger group of followers to be interacting with.

Now for the naysayers. I know a lot of people will say that having a lot of followers is not the most important thing in the world. People ask why have a lot of followers if you don’t know each and every one of them personally. Simple answer, Twitter in micro-blogging. Do you know everyone that reads your blog? Have you personally met every single person that wrote a blog post that you read? Unless you can answer yes to both questions, please don’t rant.

If you like this post, hit that little button that retweets it. Help someone else get a step ahead.

A lot of people are trying to figure out the best way to get people to follow them back, having a massive amount of followers seems to be what people want.

There are at least a dozen books that I’ve seen on sale that tell you how to get loads of followers – one guy promises 20,000 in 30 days (but he fails to mention that his idea is basically a pyramid scheme and it’s only him that is really getting the followers.

If you are really a #newbie and really want followers, I can only recommend following people like these. Their stats show that they pretty much follow everyone back, so this is a safe 51 people to follow.

100,000+ Followers (alphabetically)

1. Astronautics
2. Brad Howard
3. DowningStreet
4. ESPN Headlines
5. Nansen Malin
6. TheOnion
7. Twitter_Tips

50,000-100,000 Followers (alphabetically)

1. Alister Cameron (alicam)
2. AlohaArleen
3. Arnold Aranez (mr_gadget)
4. Bear fan Ron Show (bearfanron)
5. Benjamin Teo (upicks)
6. Bill Austin
7. Brooks Bayne
8. CaseyWright
9. Carrie Wilkerson (barefoot_exec)
10. Dash Chang (djc8080)
11. DiyanaAlcheva
12. eleesha
13. Gemstars
14. GuyKawasaki
15. hashtags
16. Jason_Pollock
17. Jeanette Fisher (jeanettejoy)
18. KevinRuddPM
19. Ludwik C. Siadlak (ludwikc)
20. MartinZwilling (StartupPro)
21. MichaeMillman
22. Mike Klingler
23. Mike Wesely
24. Nansen
25. PerryBelcher
26. PragueBob
27. Radioblogger
28. Reg Saddler (zaibatsu)
29. Rex7
30. RobMcNealy
31. Robert Clay (marketingwizdom)
32. ronniewilson
33. Sam Jones
34. Samuel Lemieux (wakooz)
35. Scobleizer
36. ScotMcKay
37. shannonseek
38. Starbucks
39. stephenkruiser
40. TheBusyBrain
41. ThinkReferrals
42. Teddy Shabba
43. TysontheQuick

0 to 50,000 Followers

1. _McLaughlin
2. I’m sure there are a lot more, but these 51 are a good start.