Occam’s Razor of Building Your Twitter Network

I’ll be back on track Thursday with my regular Video’s and tips. But for now I wanted to take a moment and talk about growing your network on Twitter. Lately I have been hearing of some really great tall tale stores of how to grow your network, twitter secrets to it, even some talk about lists and auto following.  But it’s all bunk and the result of fanciful imaginations.  I really like Occam’s Razor theory to explain it best:

“one should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything”
OR
“The simplest answer, is usually the correct answer”

So here’s the truth.

If you want to grow your Twitter network you simply need to ask people to be your friend.  That’s it and here’s an example:

You like Corvettes (they are a really cool car) and you want to meet and friend other people on Twitter who like Corvettes.  So what should you do?  Easy, type in ‘Corvettes” at search.twitter.com and see who else likes Corvettes. Chances are that the majority of people that you find will follow or have followers who also like Corvettes.  So then you can extend your handshake and follow them. That’s it.  A few people might automatically respond to your request (a very few amount of users on Twitter do this), and follow you right back, but the vast majority of people on Twitter will look at this new person who is following them, and then make a decision to follow them back or not. They will make their own decision if they want to follow you back or not.  It’s your call then if you want to DM or auto DM thanking them to be your friend.  Any message is your choice. Then if after some time a person does not want to follow you back so that you can have a conversation with them, it is ok you unfollow them.  It is your choice what to do with your valuable friend request.

That’s it.  No list, no big story, no complex equations, just simply extending your hand of friendship just like you do in person.