So one of my fellow anibloggers asked me recently:

How did you get a robust Twitter following? I keep an account but compared to my blog it might as well be a ghost town. Appreciate any advice 🙂

First, allow me to formally register my astonishment at being looked to as an expert on social media of any kind! I have used Facebook and Twitter (and now WordPress—woohoo!), but ask me about SnapChat, Tumblr, Instagram, etc., and it’s all Greek to me.

Actually, I take that back: I took four years of college Greek, so I really know far more about Greek than about these platforms. And if I ever meet someone who also speaks Ancient Greek, we can have a fascinating conversation, as long as the topics under discussion are limited to soldiers and generals dying in rivers. But I digress.

The real social media gurus I look to around here are Karandi, as being darn dedicated and having longer experience than I do; Arthifis, who’s only been blogging about a month longer than I have and yet has ten times the followers on WordPress; and Irina, whose personality and candor shine irresistibly through her writing.

That being said, here’s my approach to blogging and Twitter:

Spend Time On It Frequently

Writing a blog post is a time commitment for me. When I sit down to do a post, I know it may well be an hour or more that I spend on it. Plus I don’t feel right posting without some sort of image, so there’s additional stuff that goes into it. Maybe it’s part of being an academic by training, but I really try to dot my i’s and cross my t’s when blogging. I want it to be quiet and I don’t want to be interrupted, which usually means the rest of the family is in bed. Then I type until I’m too tired to think. Sometimes I finish when I want to, sometimes not.

Tweeting, on the other hand, is something as easy for me as breathing. I can do it during the day when I’m at work (I would never spend office time blogging!), such as on a coffee break; or at home surrounded by noisy children making demands on my time every twenty seconds (I timed it). It doesn’t require the sustained focus for me that a blog post does.

The upshot is that I tweet a lot, compared to posting on the blog. So the first principle is just sheer time spent engaging that medium.

Engage Others

When I taught college writing, I would explain to my students that your writing becomes far more interesting to read when it is a specific response to what someone else has said or written. No one wants to read papers that begin, “Since the beginning of time, blah blah blah,” but they’ll fall over each other to read, “Dr. George says X, and Dr. George is an ass. Here’s why…”

So I try to engage those whose tweets appear in my feed, whether they’re following me or not. If they are, it’s a way of strengthening our connection. If they aren’t, just the fact that I stopped to say something personal and positive can often translate into another follower.

Of course, it doesn’t have to, and that’s fine: I’m not doing this merely to add to the follower bean counter. Which leads me to my next principle:

Relationships and People are Primary

I’m not tweeting to prove a point or promote a business or to do anything except this: have fun, and build relationships with others who enjoy having the same kind of fun. Building relationships takes time, and can be slower than other ways of growing your followers (I think?); but I know that’s what works for me. More relationships translates into more engagement in the feed, more word-of-mouth mentions from those whom others already listen to, and ultimately more followers.

But for me, this all sounds mercenary as heck. I want to emphasize, highlight, and underscore that I’m not building relationships to boost numbers; I’m doing it to have fun, and the numbers are a side bonus. For me, the stats are a measure of how active I’ve been, day by day—and that’s about it! I get a thrill from receiving a new follower, comment, or like because it means the opportunity to engage someone else, not because that’s another feather in my cap. (And that’s one reason why I also hate bots or ‘followers’ just looking to boost their own stats—they really aren’t inclined towards that personal engagement.)

TL;DR

Twitter just ‘works’ for me as a medium, even more than WordPress. So I engage people more on it, and they respond by engaging me in return. And hopefully we all have a lot of fun. Do whatever medium works for you and have a lot of fun, too. 🙂