5 days ago, my Twitter followers count crossed the 5,000 milestone. In fact, as of now, my Twitter shows 5,425 followers. At the same time, according to both Twitterholic and TwitterCounter, I am now officially part of the exclusive Top 500 on Twitter

It’s just amazing to see how fast my follower count has been growing… considering just 28 days ago I was at 1,425. It took me 10 months to hit that mark, but I was able to add an additional 4,000 followers in just a tenth of the time – that’s nearly 400% growth in 28 days!

So how did I do it? Here’s the 3 step formula:

1. Follow

Follow Others – Follow as many people as you can, who share the same interest/passion. For example, if you are in the golf market, you want to follow golfers, golf trainers, golf enthusiasts etc. That’s the idea. So how do you find people who are in the same niche as you? There are 3 ways:

1. Friends. Obviously, first follow the people that you personally know. They are probably going to follow you back
2. Find thought-leaders or big-guns in your industry and follow the people who they follow (or the people who follow them). If the people you’re interested are interested in these people, chances are you will be interested in them too.
3. Follower Suggestion Tools. There are plently of websites/scripts out there that will analyze the list of people you follow or following you and give you suggestions on who you should follow. A great one out there is called Who Should I Follow? There are also Twubble & Twitter Grader.

UPDATE (16th Jan 2009) - Twitter has now launched a new suggestion tool that helps you find people to follow – http://twitter.com/invitations/suggestions

I tend to look for people who have a balanced following/followers ratio. These are usually the ones who will follow you back. People who have lots of followers but don’t follow many people usually suggests that they are not into building relationships and making new connections (people use Twitter for different reasons – but in this post I’m talking from a marketer’s perspective). These people are unlikely to follow you back, and probably aren’t worth following (unless they are a thought-leader, guru etc).

It’s going to take a while to build up your network and accumlate your followers. Just keep in mind not to follow 1,000 people in 3 hours otherwise they’ll think you’re a spammer. And NEVER ever use scripts or bots or names that look fishy (e.g. BobSmith4231) as you will simply get banned.

Once you are able to branch out and expand your circle, that’s when you begin to find the TRUE VALUE of Twitter.

Follow People Back – I believe that Twitter is about building MUTUAL relationships. Always follow people back (make sure to check their profile page out first to make sure they are not a spammer trying to get your follow). I mean, if you walked up to somebody in a party and said, “Hi” and that person just turned his back towards you, how would you feel? It’s the same thing with Twitter.

You are seeing more and more gurus (like Loren Feldman, John Reese, Mike Filsaime, Guy Kawasaki, Jason Calacanis) doing just that. Somebody like Kevin Rose would be a bad example. Don’t let your ego get in the way. Remember, it’s about SOCIAL media, not SOLO media.

You might be asking, “What if I can’t keep up with 5,000 people that I’m following?” Well, just go get yourself a second Twitter account (like me) and use that just to specifically follow the people you want to hear more about. Guess how much a Twitter account cost? Alternatively, TweetDeck has this cool feature called “Groups” which literally help organize your followers into groups (although I personally don’t really like this and find it a lot easier to get a second account)

2. Tweet!

Tweet Often – After following people, you need to start tweeting – and OFTEN. You need to invest time into social media. People want to know what you’re up to and what you’re all about. Keep in mind of your noise level though as you don’t want to spam people’s Twitter homepage out with your Tweets. I personally post around 10-20 tweets per day.

Provide Value – Make sure your tweets are TWEET-WORTHY. Tweet stuff that are interesting or useful and people will follow you. If all you do is tweet “at work” or “at home” or “at school”, you probably won’t get too many followers. You need to CONTRIBUTE to the community and add VALUE. Produce and share content that your audience will love. That way people will begin to notice you and start re-tweeting your stuff, thus bringing you new followers.

Engage In Conversations – Be part of conversations on Twitter; start asking and answering questions; bring something to the table. If you reply to other people’s Tweets with interesting stuff, people will find you. For example, let’s say you reply to me, I may reply to you by saying:

@JohnSmith I agree with you. The new movie rocked!

Now all of a sudden, 5,430 of my followers will see John Smith and can follow hm with just one-click! Imagine engaging in dozens of those conversations every day – not only do you get new followers but also build new relationships.

Have Personality – Don’t be another “me-too”. Inject your personality into your Tweets if you want to stand out. These people are all your friends, you don’t want to be boring, you want to be FUN.

3. Promote

Twitter Counter - You’ve probably seen those FeedBurner chicklets that display the current count of your RSS subscribers. Well, do the same thing for Twitter to show the count of your Twitter followers on your blog! Like this:

You can easily create it using TwitterCounter. It’s all about social proof. People are more likely to follow you if they see that everybody else is following you as well. Obviously, I wouldn’t recommend you to display it until you hit at least 1,000 followers.

Signatures - Put your Twitter link in your signatures for your emails, forums etc. If you got a mailing list, blast it out to your subscribers and ask them to follow you. If your subscribers don’t know what Twitter is, you might want to take some time to explain what Twitter is, what to do etc.

In fact, Mike Filsaime recently sent out an email doing exactly that and added over 2,000 followers in just 12 hours! It doesn’t just apply to email subscribers, also to your blog readership. Sometimes, taking the time to EDUCATE your subscribers will help boost your Twitter count.

To sum up, it’s really that simple – Follow, Tweet, Promote.

And I’ll like to end it by saying, Twitter is like a cocktail party. You’re there to make new relationships, not hard selling. I think this quote sums it up:

“Facebook is about people you used to know; Twitter is about people you’d like to know better” – Ivor Tossel

And remember to follow me on Twitter – http://www.twitter.com/stanleytang