There are a ton of free Twitter based products out there you can utilize to get thousands of Twitter followers pretty easily and at no cost. Yes, some of these are really products you can pay for in order to get more features, but you don’t have to if you don’t want to. Though, I do suggest you buy them if you find value in them. Someone put a lot of time and hard work into them and should be rewarded for their effort if you get value from it.

FOLLOWING PEOPLE ON TWITTER

Now, this is how I have grown my Twitter following to almost 27,000 at the time of this writing by using a software program by the name of Tweet Adder. It is not a subscription based service. You pay for it once and that’s it. Tweet Adder is an excellent tool to get thousands of Twitter followers automatically and fairly quickly. It has a “Tweet Search” feature that allows you to follow people based on which keywords you choose and when they used them in their tweets.

For example, let’s say you want to automatically follow people who have been talking about “basketball” in the past 5 days. So, you enter the keyword “basketball”, select the recency “5 days” and then Tweet Adder will automatically follow anyone who has included “basketball” in their tweets over the past 5 days until you remove that search. You can search for as many keywords as you need and can also search for phrases like “March Madness”.

Once you decide on your search parameters, you can have Tweet Adder do a manual search and then send out the follows in a group or you can set it to automatic where it runs its search, builds the list and then follows a person every few minutes. I prefer having Tweet Adder set to automatic as the follow process looks more “organic” to Twitter.

Because Twitter will only let you follow so many people based on how many people are currently following you, Tweet Adder will also keep your follower to followed ratio to whatever ratio you choose. To keep Twitter from being too concerned with your following habits, I suggest keeping the ratio at about 1.07 (107%). Although, if you are in a rush, with a brand new acount you can probably manually send out 50-100 follows a day for a few days and then set the ratio to 10.0 and work your way down to 1.5 over a few weeks until you have a few hundred followers. Once you hit about 1000 followers, I suggest setting the ratio to 1.07.

UNFOLLOWING PEOPLE ON TWITTER

People may or may not follow you back automatically, but a lot will. Those who don’t? Well, Tweet Adder has this nice feature to automatically unfollow anyone who is not following you. You can manually have Tweet Adder unfollow people in batches, but I recommend setting Tweet Adder on automatic and having it set to unfollow people every 3 to 5 minutes so Twitter doesn’t get too suspicious.

MY TWITTER FOLLOWER HISTORY

As you can see in this screen shot of TwitterCounter, I had 21,031 followers on December 30, 2010. So, I have gained almost 6,000 followers in three months. I have Tweet Adder set fairly conservatively as to not attract Twitter’s attention and according to TwitterCounter, I have had 65 new followers per day on average since they have been tracking me on January 6, 2010 (I started using Tweet Adder on January 4, 2010). Not great growth, but not everyone can be Charlie Sheen. If you didn’t know, he had a few million followers in about a week after joining Twitter recently.

MAKING MONEY WITH TWITTER

If you are planning on using Twitter to make money, I do not suggest following people using random keywords. Stay focused and choose keywords relevant to your business. Also, try not to advertise in any of your tweets for a few months. Building up your follower list takes time and jumping right in to advertising will drive people away faster than you think.

If you really do want to tweet, stick to every day tweets like helpful news items, your favorite quotes, or how you plan on spending your day. I have also found using keywords relevant to your business in your tweets helps others find and follow you.

Don’t want to spend all day tweeting by hand? Tweet Adder can also automatically post pre-written tweets for you. This is a great feature with multiple tweeting options like when to tweet, how many tweets to make in a day and whether or not to have recurring tweets. Write up a bunch of tweets in a text editor (remember, only 140 characters!), import them into Tweet Adder and walk away. It doesn’t get much easier than that.

That’s about it. Most of the techniques I’ve described here will work with other Twitter services and programs, but of all of the ones I have used, Tweet Adder is my favorite. No matter which one you decide to use, remember to be patient and be smart. You really don’t want to get impatient, do something dumb and then get your Twitter account with thousands of followers banned.

Happy Tweeting and best of luck getting thousands of Twitter followers!