The Challenge Is Set!

The Challenge Is Set!

Yesterday my wife, set me the challenge to see if I can gain 20,000 followers on Twitter by the end of 2016.

So not being one to give up on a challenge I decided why not, let's give it a go!

The Twitter Handle and Hashtag

So first things, first let's come up with a twitter handle and for good measure lets decide on a hashtag so that any tweets I send can reference it. 

So @TwentykFollow twitter handle is born along with the hashtag #20kfollow

Starting to gain followers

Yesterday was spent setting up the account, bio and logos etc..  I also started to follow amfew random people who by the profiles looked as though they would follow back, I.e. had a following count similar to that of their follower count. 

I have also plugged the account into my homegrown open-source Twitter API interface program, to allow me to auto-semd thank you for following tweets (with the hashtag #TopFollowers) along with similar ones on a Friday with the hashtags #FF and #FollowFriday

At the to!e of writing this has resulted in a follow count of 15, so still a long way to go!

Follow Rate

There are 359 days left in 2016 (from yesterday) so to gain 20,000 followers in a year I need to gain 56 followers a day, so the current count of 15 on day 1 needs to increase by a large amount to achieve the goal!

Other Plans

Clearly we are going to have to significantly up the follow rate per day if this account is going to achieve its goal.  Manual following of random people is not going to achieve the goal quickly enough.  I therefore think I am going to write me own twitter API that will search out people to follow rather than rely on a manual approach.  I will limit this to a suitable number per day and base it in follower and following counts of user ids.  I think I will also experiment with these figures and monitor the follow back rate so as to come up with the most efficeint scenario.

Using existing tools to gain followers

I can hear all my readers saying, but why don't you use the free/paid for tools online that say they will gain you 10,000 followers in a short space of time, well the reason I don't want to is two fold:

My account, my effort

Firstly, its my account and I want to show I can manage it without outside influence from pre-written tools.  I want to showcase my skills.

Risk of suspension

Without spending a lot of time researching each of the online tools, it is not clear how they gather these followers, particularly if they do it in an aggressive manner, thus bringing the account in front of the eyes of Twitter, resulting in either temporary or permanent suspension.

I am sure most of the tools are OK to use, but our of personal choice I don't want to use them.

So what now

Please keep checking back to this blog on a weekly basis and see how well I am progressing with my quest to gain 20,000 twitter followers in a year!

I intend to post to this blog each Friday evening (GMT timezone).

Don't forget to follow @TwentykFollow on Twitter and tell all your friends to do the same!

Thanks for reading and I hope to see you back here soon!

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