Why You’re Better Off Following the Little Guy

  Steven Rossi  

Steven Rossi likes ice cream. He also likes blogging, Twitter (follow me!), the Internet, and parsing Greek words. Oh, and ice cream.

Why You’re Better Off Following the Little Guy

I know how you think. Here’s what you tell yourself about Twitter: “If I follow Mr. Celebrity Man and if I get Mr. Celebrity Man to notice and reply to me, I’ll get all sorts of new followers!” You heard the story of the girl whose life changed because Conan followed her, you’ve seen how cool it is when Shaq answers people’s questions, and you’re thinking that you’ve found your ticket to fame.

Well, don’t take this personally, but you haven’t, for three reasons:

Only a select (albeit popular) few celebrities take a significant amount of time to reply to their followers.

While your chances of getting someone famous to respond to you—to be honest—aren’t all that bad, the odds of anyone else seeing their response are not so good.

If you’re getting followed by the random marketer lady who goes around following people who celebrities send @replies to, random marketer lady isn’t exactly the kind of quality follower you’re looking for in the first place.

With that out of the way, let me give you a revised strategy that will build quality followers. Even better, my strategy will boost your ego because you’ll at least feel more popular because of the number of replies you get. So, what do I recommend? Follow the little guy.

I’m telling you, if you follow a guy with 25 followers, you’re much more likely to get his attention than someone like Ashton Kutcher with 25 hundred thousand followers. Not only that, but you’re much more likely to get him to notice you and your tweets more than once, which is your real goal.

Here’s my hunch: lots of people are just using Twitter because everyone else is, not necessarily because they want to be power users. By befriending this type of follower, you’re not only spreading out your influence, you’re really making sure that you build quality relationships. And trust me, lots of quality relationships with people with only a few followers are much more beneficial in the long-term than a fluke @reply from some million-followers-celebrity who’s going to be out of the news tomorrow.

Now for the qualifications. You can’t just follow the little guy, you’ve gotta make an effort to communicate with him. He’s the little guy for a reason, he’s not monitoring every tweet. Choose a Twitter user directory, find some people who look like they use Twitter often but don’t have too many followers, and start a conversation. Oh, and don’t be a creep. Or at least if you’re going to be a creep don’t tell anyone that I gave you the idea.

So give it a shot. Follow five or six people who don’t get too many people to follow them. Start a conversation. I bet you they’ll appreciate it, and I bet you they’ll respond. It’ll be a lot more fun, if nothing else. Let us know in the comments section below how many new friends you’ve made.