Ten Top Tips to Increase your Twitter Follower Count - Kutcher edition.

There are many guides out the that promise to increase your follower count on Twitter, but here at Broadsight Towers we have conducted actual fact based research on the subject and quantified the most effective strategies. They are, in order of importance:

Top 5

1. Be Famous Already - nothing succeeds like existing success, how you get it is irrelevant. As all Slebs know, Fame follows the Wildean Law, in that the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.

2. Run for President - works like a charm. Drawback is it can only be done every 4 years or so and requires lots of rubber chicken dinners.

3. Get onto the Twitter Recommended User list - for new joiners, Twitter is a scary place and your name in lights on the onramp is a must have. Rumours that you have to bribe the Twitter founders are cruel and untrue, you only need bribe one of them*

4. If you are not famous, have a famous spouse/significant other/ex - and play that connection to the skies. Alternatively, why not just use someone famous's Twitter name before they do - after all, even Twitter "experts" Twitterpartners didn't claim their own name . And you can even sell it back to them.

5. Buy as much PR as you can - being famous is all very well, but to really hit the million follower numbers you need Big PR pimping you up to the nines - penniless sycophants just don't cut it in the last hard yards to the Oprah Winfrey show.

Bottom 5 - for those not yet Famous

6. Pimp Yo' Self - Never forsake an opportunity to demand/ask/beg people to follow you. No act of self promotion should be beneath you in this quest.

7. Follow Everybody - some of the twerps will follow you back automatically, and the Twitter Social Capital counters don't differentiate between those people with genuine high follow/followed ratios and those who are just Follower Ho's

8. Flatter those more famous than yourself, constantly - the Twitter Social Media Climber strategy really works. Big Egos need a lot of worshipping, and you will get some of the wafer crumbs of their Whuffie

9. Be Right-On every zeitgeist - say everything that everyone else wants to hear, no one listens long enough to see the contradictions anyway.

10. Do Something Charitable - people are suckers for a Socially Responsible enterprising nature, a good #mybleedingheart gig will do wonders and no one really looks too closely at where the money raised all goes.

Case Study of the Day

Witness the Ashton Kutcher war effort for a Perfect Storming of Twitter - as TechCrunch notes:

The hugely popular actor started with just a handful of followers when he signed up a few months ago. But soon, he and his famous actress wife, Demi Moore, were adding thousands of followers a day. They would talk about nothing, like everyone else on Twitter, and sometimes they would talk about each other. It’s a true web success story.

See - Rules 1, 4, and 6 covered, and 10,000 mosquito nets is a nice little throwaway for Rule 10. And they did not neglect the PR (Rule 5) and Recommended User List (Rule 3) either. Rule 2 (Run for Prez) will need to be scheduled for 2013 once St. Obama has taken all the flak for The Crunch and been Hoovered up...... besides, if Ronald can do it, so can anyone!

*God knows what defines who is on the recommended list but a quick scan will drive many a conspiracy theory.