By Kevin M

Twitter, Facebook, blogs, Digg, Stumbleupon. When we think of the social media, we often think of it as mostly a toy to be used to connect with others and to entertain ourselves, or as a place to peddle income producing wares. But what about using it to drive ideas that are important to us, even if they won’t win us any friends or earn us any money?

For the same reasons the social media is effective in enabling people to connect with others or sell products and services, it’s also an outstanding venue in which to promote ideas. What kind of ideas? How about politics, faith, health, environmental concerns, legal issues, public debates—you name it. If you can tweet, text or blog about your social and private lives, you can do the same about issues with wide public appeal.

The mainstream media have conditioned us to assume that all the great ideas will come from the appropriate “they” or “somebody”—as in “they” should do this, and “someone” should do something about that. The social media has opened up the field, and now WE can participate in the formation and promotion of ideas.

What happened to talking over the fence?

There was a time when people actually knew their neighbors! They spent time “talking over the fence”, an expression that meant sharing the details of your life and community with the people who lived closest to you. Neighbors weren’t simply people who lived in adjacent properties, but people you knew and who knew you and you relied on each other. If you had an idea you wanted to put out there, your neighbors were a natural place to start.

But how do we do that in an increasingly disconnected world? The social media is providing that outlet. We may not be connected directly with our neighbors, but our own little worlds are getting bigger as we connect with people in different communities and even in different countries. An idea put out to a few friends or acquaintances on the social media has the potential to go viral and circle the globe.

The “grass roots media”—21st Century style

There are basically two ways any of us can get noticed by the mainstream media: pay the steep price for ad space or do something so humiliatingly embarrassing (or shocking) that they come to us. Most of us won’t do either.

The traditional or mainstream media seems to be concerned with two things (apart from ad revenue!): getting our attention, and performing some sort of gate keeper function making sure we get some types of information but not others. TV news programs are degenerating into sensationalist tabloid formats while the print media is failing at what ever it attempts. It isn’t just in decline, but a steep decline at that.

The social media is increasingly replacing the traditional media as a source of news and information and it’s growing exponentially while the traditional media sinks. Why?

Some of it is easy, cost free entry. Some of course is related to changes in technology, but I also tend to believe that much of it is because the traditional media has less regard for what the public actually wants. While they focus their formats on an increasingly narrow section of the population, the majority is simply moving on to other sources that are more relevant.

The social media is unedited and largely un-filtered, a place where we can hear and be heard. For the most part, there are no gatekeepers or editorial staff to exclude a story or event or to spin an information flow a certain way. It’s pure information. Perhaps even more important, the social media is the center of open public debate. This is where new ideas largely originate and it’s driven entirely by participation. On the social media we’re not listening politely while we’re lectured, we’re actually putting our thoughts into the media stream for consideration by others.

That’s true grass news media, a media flowing from the ground up. It doesn’t matter if you think of this development as good, bad or somewhere in between, it’s a tidal wave overtaking the world. Each of us has a chance to be a part of it simply by participating. Rest assured that if you’re interested in something, so are many others!

The new face of politics?

Often, we vote then complain about the way things are, stopping short of saying that our vote really didn’t matter, but the implication is clear. And it should be—voting alone really isn’t enough. Voting is an up or down process, not an opportunity to express our thoughts, concerns or even displeasure.

When we go to the voting booth every two or four years we typically have only two choices–TWO out of a country of over 300 million people! Truth be told, a lot of good people and brilliant ideas are buried in that process.

The days of politicians traveling to small towns and holding open debates with the public in the local townsquare are over. Today we have press conferences and staged debates in which a limited number of candidates are asked pre-selected questions by a small panel of noteworthy “experts”—usually journalists and academicians. In truth, that makes today less democratic than times past.

The social media may not enable us to address politicians directly (though sometimes it can) but it is the new place for the exchange of free ideas and a place where the average citizen can come forward with small ideas that may have a chance of becoming big ones in a way that isn’t possible in a voting booth. A brilliant idea or concept put out on the social media or in a blog post or blog comment has the potential to crawl it’s way into national policy. A well written comment can result in an invitation to write an article on a large website read by thousands or even millions of people. Compare that to an up or down vote!

If you have a foothold in the social media, be it Twitter, Facebook or any of the other media—and more so if you also have a website or blog—you have an opportunity to introduce and drive your ideas in a way that would never be possible through TV or the print media—are you taking advantage of it?

Are there ideas you’ve been able to promote on the social media that you’re certain wouldn’t be welcome in more traditional venues?

Related posts:
How Did You Get So Many Followers on Twitter?

What Twitter Can Do For You

You Are What You Tweet on Twitter

TweetDeck vs. Hootsuite – Which Do You Like Better?

By Kevin M

Using a tool to control the flow on the social media

One of the things that can make the social media seem a bit intimidating is the constant flow of messages. How do you get a handle on a flood tide of information, and channel it into a more limited form that will be of practical use? Or more specifically, how do you separate the relevant from the clutter? Doing it manually is beyond comprehension, but fortunately, we’re not without options.

To streamline Twitter or any other social media, there are applications that will simplify the process by separating and organizing incoming messages, as well as enable you to categorize your own messages. And best of all, you can get them for free.

A social media tool can make networking much easier. Hootsuite and TweetDeck are two of the most popular. I have both and use each at different times.

What I’ll describe here will pertain mostly to Twitter, since I’ve chosen to concentrate my efforts on one social media at a time. Both tools can work with multiple social media, including Facebook.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite neatly categorizes your messages by type. Columns include Home Feed (all messages), Mentions (when someone else mentions you in a message), Direct Messages In, Direct Messages Out, Sent Tweets, Pending Tweets (enabling the scheduling of messages ahead of time) and other columns as needed.

Because each category is assigned to a certain, specific column, there’s no guess work as to where a message might be, all you need to do is scroll down a column to search. You can add or delete any column you like.

The Mentions and Pending Tweets columns are especially important. Mentions enables you to see when anyone on Twitter is referencing you so not only can you monitor the network conversations that mention you, but you can also respond.

Pending Tweets allows you to schedule your messages hours or days in advance. This gives you the ability to space your messages over the course of the day keeping you active on the media even though you’re not sitting at your computer typing. You can schedule tweets freeing you to just check in every few hours to see what’s going on.

The Hootsuite application is completely free, and extremely user friendly.

TweetDeck

TweetDeck performs the same functions as Hootsuite, but does so with a different look and feel. It’s also free and very user friendly.

One of the features that can be most attractive to the user on TweetDeck is the fact that it combines both mentions by others, and sent tweets by the user, into one column. That creates a conversational column in which open exchanges with others display in sequential order. It does the same with direct messages. This arrangement means you can get by with two fewer columns than with Hootsuite.

TweetDeck also highlights select messages with a box that opens in the upper right hand corner of your screen at regular intervals. One or more of your messages could appear in the same way on the screens of other TweetDeck users, giving you added exposure.

One of the reasons I use both tools is that I have noticed that each will pick up messages that the other might miss and one thing you want to be aware of is mentions by others. Responding to those mentions is a critical aspect of the social networking experience and the best way to develop mutually beneficial friendships.

My preference: Hootsuite

Both Hootsuite and TweetDeck are effective social media tools, and which would work better in your particular situation would probably depend mostly on personal preference. But if I have to choose one over the other, Hootsuite is the winner.

I tend to like applications to be on the simpler side of the technology curve, and despite the need for more columns Hootsuite is most definitely the simpler of the two. TweetDeck often seems to have a mind of its own. It’s the more active tool, often seeming as if it wants to do some of the thinking for me.

Because it’s more complicated, TweetDeck takes longer to download. The dashboard itself is a bit on the busy side. The highlighted messages it flashes periodically throughout the day come up even when you’re on screens outside the tool. I have to admit that the flash messages are usually good ones, but it can get a bit…annoying.

But perhaps the feature that swings it most in favor of Hootsuite for me is the separation between Mentions/Sent Tweets and incoming and outgoing Direct Messages. While it might be convenient to have sent and received messages appearing in the same column, they’re listed by time, not by conversation, so the mix tends to complicate more than organize. But that’s just me.

As I said, both tools are effective at organizing your social media life, and it may come down to “favorite flavor” more than anything else. If you’re on the social media choose one or the other or a competing tool and the networks will become much more user friendly and beneficial.

Do you use Hootsuite or TweetDeck, or some other media tool? Which do you think works best and why?

Related posts on this topic:
You Are What You Tweet on Twitter
What Twitter Can Do For You

By Kevin M

Last week in What Twitter Can Do For You we discussed how Twitter can be used to generate activity, connections and traffic, as well as enable you to get your ideas out into the world.

Obviously, the more followers you have, the larger the potential market for your messages, or tweets. But equally important is the quality of your tweets. After all once you have a few followers, or a few thousand, the next critical step is generating a stream of tweets that will engage them enough to take the next step, either by responding to your message on the social media itself, or by clicking through to your site.

Despite the thousands of claims of expert status that populate Twitter, the fact that the network is just a few years old and in a constant state of evolution means that there are far more practitioners than experts. With that in mind, I humbly lay claim to the status of practitioner and disclose that I can’t make any guarantees as to your success.

The type of tweets to send out

There’s considerable debate over what type of tweets work best on Twitter. Some say to keep self promotional tweets (messages with direct links to your site) to a minimum, but if you look on your Twitter home feed on any given day it’s clear that the vast majority of networking participants are mostly self promoting. Too many self promotional tweets, say several per hour, 24 hours a day, and you risk being considered a spammer which will turn off and turn away many followers. Too few, and you may defeat the purpose of being on the site at all.

Purely personal messages are the most basic tweets. They’re the type you might send out if you were texting a friend on your cellphone, and may include what you’re doing right now, such as “I’m waiting in line at the grocery store and I’m bored”, or “Having a great meal at Bahama Breeze” or just “I’m tired, I think I’ll go to bed early”.

Personally I shy away from these. I could be wrong, but unless you’re someone famous with a large cast of groupies in tow on your Follower list, it’s unlikely that the typical user you’re trying to attract is going to have much interest in the kind of messages that are usually aimed at an intimate circle of friends.

Tweets that promote other users are a must. This is where the all important practice of reciprocity comes into play. One of the very best ways to make friends on any social media is to promote others. When you do, most will promote you back, and no form of promotion is quite as impressive as a third party endorsement. Here is where the more you give, the more you get.

Content and quotes is another category to emphasize. Here you can send out snippets of news stories, your personal interests (sports, faith, business) or engage messages by others in a more conversational way as opposed to promoting yourself.

Always remember that what you tweet on Twitter stays on Twitter, at least somewhere, and be careful not to send any messages that might compromise you or someone else in the future.

Of course, what type of tweets you send out will depend on what your purpose in using Twitter actually is. But my personal opinion is that you look to work some sort of balance between self promotion, promotion of others, content and quotes and purely personal messages. Since Twitter is still evolving, the best approach may be one of continuous experimentation.

A tool to help you compose your tweets

To help you create compelling tweets, there is a free tool on a site from Advanced Marketing Institute called the Emotional Marketing Value Headline Analyzer, or EMV. It isn’t a Twitter tool per say, but it’s to help you create headlines, which is really what your self promotional tweets are. It grades a headline of up to 20 words—which is about what you get from the 140 character Twitter limitation—based on a range from zero to 100%. The greater the emotional appeal, the higher the score.

The site describes the importance of using emotional words, or EMV’s as follows:

“…reaching your customers in a deep and emotional way is a key to successful copywriting, and your headline is unquestionably the most important piece of copy you use to reach prospects.”

Think of your tweet as your “headline” in this case; in order to get a reader to click through to your website or blog you first have to create compelling content for that message, which usually means some sort of emotional hook.

As an example, I used the EMV tool to create the headline for this post, and received the following result:

“This score indicates that your headline has a total of 71.43% Emotional Marketing Value (EMV) Words. To put that in perspective, the English language contains approximately 20% EMV words. And for comparison, most professional copywriters’ headlines will have 30%-40% EMV Words in their headlines, while the most gifted copywriters will have 50%-75% EMV words in headlines.”

This tool won’t guarantee that a headline, or in our case a tweet, will bring hundreds of visitors to your website or blog, but it will provide a metric for you to measure the potential reach of your messages which hopefully will make you a more skilled tweet writer and contribute toward getting you where you want to go.

 
You truly are what you tweet on Twitter, and learning how to create messages is a critical skill. Developing that skill is one of the most important aspects of using this social media to it’s fullest. I’d like to help you do that more fully in my short e-book, Do You Need 5,000 REAL Twitter Followers?. Not only will it help you build a list of thousands of followers in just a few months, but it will also provide detailed suggestions on what kind messages to send, and when to send them.

By Kevin M

Twitter can seem daunting at times. It’s the preverbal “fire hose of information” coming at you so fast it’s almost incomprehensible–the information superhighway of the information superhighway. To the outside observer, it can seem as if there’s no logical purpose to it, as if everyone is sending out information that no one else is reading.

To a very large degree, that’s even true—but it doesn’t mean that Twitter doesn’t work, or that it won’t work for you. True, not nearly everyone will even pay attention to most of your messages, but you don’t need everyone—you just need a few at a time. Multiply that small response by several efforts each day and you’re beginning to talk about something significant.

The best way I can describe what Twitter can do for you is to tell you what it’s doing for me.

Generating traffic. Twitter is bringing visitors to this blog who wouldn’t otherwise be here. Not all tweets bring visitors all the time, but many bring in several at a time and when you send several per day it begins to add up. This can be especially important for a small or upstart blog or website. It’s an opportunity to “get things going” in your direction and to do it in real time. From a marketing perspective, you can measure results in a matter of minutes rather than days, weeks or even months.

Tweets normally have a short shelf life, being most effective until your next message is tweeted. A strong one however can draw visitors for as long as it remains on your Twitter home page. Some others can draw long past that. I’m an active tweeter, and yet I’ve noticed traffic coming in on messages I’ve sent out days or weeks earlier. Every tweet you send represents an opportunity to draw people your way.

Generating connections. What ever enterprise you’re in or contemplating entering, one thing that greases the wheels is getting connected with others who are already there and doing it. Twitter has put me in contact with other bloggers, and because of its speed it’s enabled me to connect with a large number of them in the shortest space of time.

This blog is my first effort at a presence on the web, and I can say with total confidence that I’ve learned more from other bloggers than I’ve learned on my own. Most of them I “met” on Twitter! In fact, ongoing communication happens mostly through Twitter. The short, quick nature of the messages enables ongoing communication in a world where we’re all too busy for more formal methods of communicating. Often, all you need to do to connect with people is to go to their home page and respond to one or more of their tweets.

Posting my beliefs. As a Christian, I’ve often felt that I’m not doing enough to “get the Word out”. Twitter offers a chance to do that even for the most timid would-be evangelist. Tweeting Bible verses is a way of bringing the Gospel to people I’ll never meet, people perhaps in parts of the world where it isn’t welcome.

Another thing I like to do is to tweet inspiration quotes from famous (and not so famous) people. A Bible verse or inspirational quote may not change thousands of lives, but it may be a real lift at the right moment to a person who’s in a bit of a ditch at the moment. If we can do anything to lift up others we should, even if there’s no direct return to us. Sometimes however I get responses on these and interesting conversations follow.

Use Twitter to broadcast your faith, beliefs, political views—anything you feel passionate about. Most won’t pay any attention, but a few will and that’s often all you need to do to make a difference or get a ball rolling in a desired direction.

Getting noticed. If you’re trying to build a website or blog, or promoting a business or product, one of the most important things is getting noticed. There are many ways to do that, and Twitter is one of them. Tweeting my blog posts has led to some of them being picked up by other sites. Last week two of my posts were linked by Time.com and The Consumerist, both leading to increases in traffic and exposure. My humble little blog has been linked or quoted by newspapers and other blogs that I never solicited directly. That’s the power of Twitter to broadcast simple messages.

Generating activity. An active stream of tweets generates activity, and activity draws people to you for good or for ill, but always with activity comes opportunity. In order to get noticed, you have to find ways to “stir up the pot”—so to speak. In fact, that’s what advertising is all about. Twitter is a way of generating that activity, and because it’s cost free, you can sustain the effort as long as necessary.

Drawing traffic to other social media. One of the cool attributes of Twitter is how it can be used in conjunction with other social media. Twitter makes use of URL shorteners, enabling you to link your tweets to posts on other social media, such as Digg, Tip’d and Stumbleupon. You’re promoting your posts on those media via Twitter, and once visitors go to those sites, they might digg, tip or thumb the post, helping to drive even more traffic your way.

In my experience, Twitter has been on balance the best and most flexible of the various social media.

As a source of news and information. That Twitter feed that seems to blast an endless stream of messages contains some valuable stuff that can lead to interesting discoveries. All kinds of things are coming through on Twitter, and you can scan your home feed periodically and just sample some of what’s coming through.

There’s news, information, ideas and opportunities. Check them out and see what works for you. Usually, when we need an idea or opportunity we go on the web and start searching. With Twitter, you don’t have to search; all you need to do is scan and wait for it all to come to you. People are doing all kinds of things and broadcasting them on Twitter, so you just might find the inspiration you’re looking for.

Every tweet you send out, every person you connect with on Twitter represents a potential opportunity for you to advance your cause, what ever that cause is. The more people you can connect with, the greater the potential for good things to happen. If you’d like to build a larger list of followers but aren’t sure how, check out my short e-book, Do You Need 5,000 REAL Twitter Followers?. It’ll help you add thousands of followers of your choice in just a few months.

By Kevin M

With nearly 8,000 followers on Twitter, this is a question I’m getting pretty regularly these days. Most people assume I’ve signed up with an automated follower system, which isn’t remotely true. No, it’s just a regular routine—what’s now a habit—applied consistently over a period of several months.

Last year, I signed up with Twitter, Facebook, Linked-In and a few other social networks. I know all of the success guru’s say to get set up on all the various networks and start making friends and followers, but it’s equally true if you’re going to do any one of them well, it’ll take time and effort. So rather than spreading myself thin, I decided to pick just one and hit it hard.

After some weighing of options, I chose Twitter as the network to make my start.

Why Twitter?

In a world that’s overdosing on news, information and communication, the instantaneous nature—as well as simplicity—of Twitter feels like blessed relief. The 140 character “tweet” (message) limitation forces us all to make our point in only one or two sentences, which is becoming increasingly important in the midst of the global information blizzard. These days, if you make your message too long no one will read it; there’s too much out there to grab our attention.

Increasingly, I’m using Twitter to get my news. The bullet format enables a large feed of messages that I can scroll through and click on to what I choose to read. Unlike the print media, TV and even the internet itself, there are no dramatic photos or carefully chosen layout priorities set up telling me that one news story is more important than another. I can make that determination based on a short, hard hitting message from the Twitter feed that’s neither manipulated nor edited. That’s how I want my news!

Then there’s the instantaneous connection factor—you can reach any one on the network and it’s the closest thing to sitting on the phone with them all day, which of course none of us have time for.

But the most basic advantage of Twitter is that it’s a free service. Since no one has to pay to belong, millions are on the network and the numbers are growing fast. If you’re trying to build a small business, a website or blog, or trying to get a message out to the largest number of people without having to go through expensive media gatekeepers, Twitter is the place to be. Fast, free and viral, it’s a media network that fits easily into any budget.

The all important question: How do you get followers?

There are three basic ways to get more followers:

1. Attract visitors to follow you on Twitter from your website or blog
2. Sign up with an automated follower system that will get followers for you
3. Building a list from your own social network routine

Each method has it’s own advantages and drawbacks, and we’ll camp a bit on each.

Attract visitors to follow you on Twitter from your website or blog

There are two primary advantages to building your follower list from your website or blog. One is that it requires no effort on your part, the other is that the people who do follow you already know what you’re about, like it and are interested in getting updates on new content, products, offers or ideas. These will likely be the most loyal followers you can get.

My guess is that this works best for well established sites that already have heavy traffic volume. But if you’re a new or small site, you’re most likely counting on Twitter to drive traffic TO your site, not to build a large following on Twitter FROM your site. That’s a Catch-22, and pretty close to worthless if you’re a small fry.

As a side note, I’ve seen some pretty heavily trafficked sites with very small Twitter follower lists, so I’m not sure developing a large list from your site even works in many cases.

Twitter will of course work to bring previous visitors back to your site, but if you have an email capture system or an RSS feed set up on your site, Twitter or any other social media following system is really just competing with those for a prospective follower’s attention. I’m always happy to get followers as a result of people visiting my blog, but my hope and experience is that Twitter will drive visitors to the blog and not the other way around.

Automated follower systems

If you’ve been on Twitter any length of time, you’re already aware of these systems. You might have checked a few out, and maybe even signed up for one.

The two major advantages of automated follower systems are:

• They’ll build a large follower list fast, and
• Once you’ve registered and provided your credit card information, they’ll build your list with no effort on your part.

As attractive as that sounds, especially to a newcomer, it isn’t without a price—several actually.

Cost. The price of these systems looks to be all over the map. I’ve seen them as cheap as $8 for 1000 followers, and as high as you like beyond that. One ad I saw advertised 5,000 followers for $250. In truth the systems aren’t doing anything for you that you can’t do for yourself, but they’re doing it faster.

It’s a game of numbers over everything. Without some kind of direct (if brief) review from you as to a prospective followers profile, you’ll never know with any certainty that the people following you are even close to the ones you want—after all, if you didn’t participate in the selection process, they’re just numbers on a list.

Suspect quality. The systems work in different ways; some allow you to program in certain follower characteristics that they actively pursue in building your list, some are follower exchanges—you get someone else’s followers in exchange for yours—while some are outright list purchases. The problem with all of these is that you get a list with some good followers (real people who are active on the network) and a cornucopia of whatever else is out there (bots, dormant accounts, spammers, etc). One of the follower techniques that I’ve found to be crucial is the integrity of the follower list you’re drawing from. Some large follower lists are filled with quality contacts, but most others are overpopulated with…what ever else.

Turning your Twitter name and password over to the provider. While there are certain variations between the various automated systems, one feature that seems to be an industry standard is the need to give your Twitter name and password over to the provider. This enables the system to operate through your profile to draw others to follow you. However, it also means that someone else—who you don’t know personally—has both access and control over your Twitter account. By granting them access, you’re responsible for what ever they do with the account.

Do they even work? I have no doubt that some automated follower systems work the way we’d hope—to some degree at least—but I recently saw someone advertising “up to 700 new followers per day” being pitched by a user that has fewer than 900 followers. Did he give up on Day 2? This week, I got a tweet from someone advertising “how to get 20,000 followers” in a couple of months—according to her profile she only has a thousand followers herself, which raises the obvious question “is she even using her own system???”

My guess is that if they all worked as promised EVERYONE on Twitter would have tens of thousands of followers, but obviously, that isn’t the case.

Building a list from your own regular social network routine

This won’t build a list as quickly as an automated system will, but it does one thing automated systems can’t do that’s critically important: it guarantees that you decide who your followers will be. In addition, you won’t need to turn your Twitter username and password or credit card information over to a third party application as it will cost you nothing but your own effort.

This was the method I chose, and you can see from my follower count that I’ve had some success with it.

I joined Twitter in June of 2009, but did nothing with it for five months. Then one day in November, I was having lunch in a local bagel shop with my friend and frequent OutOfYourRut contributor, Dave Kelly and we got to talking about Twitter. Though not an expert, Dave was already up and running on Twitter and he helped me with the tactical details.

Only days before Thanksgiving, I started with seven followers (NO idea how they got there!) and zero knowledge of Twitter, but late in May, 2010, just about six months later, my account crossed the 5,000 follower mark! That wasn’t a target I was aiming for, it’s just where my efforts had brought me and much more quickly than I expected.

It wasn’t just the number of followers that was important either. If you check my profile ( @OutOfYourRut ) you’ll see that the great majority of people on both my Follower and Following lists are just that—people—not the nameless, faceless entities set up to blast out marketing messages that populate and often dominate many large lists. If you don’t have at least a name or a face then what value is a follower? Most of the people on my lists are also active participants, not dormant accounts who haven’t sent out a tweet in months.

I’d love to disclose complete details here as to how I did it, but space doesn’t permit. It’s not that it’s so involved, but more that any kind of how-to description is always more complicated on paper than it is in actual practice, and this is no exception.

But consistent with the philosophy of “give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime”, I’m offering a tutorial that will get you as many followers as your own time and efforts will allow.

As it took some time to develop this routine (it really isn’t a “system” in the conventional sense), as well as to record it for all to see in an easy-to-read 35 page e-book, a small fee is charged. Please check out Do You Need 5,000 REAL Twitter Followers? for a concise, detailed program for how to build a large Twitter following with just 30 to 60 minutes a day.

As you can see from the Twitter Counter at the top of the right hand column of this page, you can easily go a lot higher than 5,000 followers. All it takes is some time, a consistently applied routine and of course, a plan. Follow this plan, and I’d be willing to bet that you’ll hit and surpass 5,000 new followers in a good bit less time than the six months it took me.