In part one of this series on Building Your Twitter Followers, we discussed Twitter limits, and mentioned 2 ways to build your followers: Manually and Auto Engines.

Part 2 is going to outline the manual way of following people so that they will follow you back.  Building followers this way does take time.  Also, it works well up to 5,000 followers.  Once you get up that high, it gets really difficult to drop followers that are not following you.

Here’s how it is done:

• Determine the type of followers that you want to get.
  • First, determine keywords that match your followers.
  • Second, find other people like you and take note of their username.

Both of these steps are important.  Once you complete the first step, go here and do a search: http://twitter.com/invitations/find_on_twitter . Enter the keywords and a list of people will appear.  Go to each of their profiles and follow them.  **Be sure to document their usernames somewhere for later**

When visiting the profiles that you just found, determine the ones that have a lot of followers, and are tweeting regularly.  You will want to model these people and forget about the rest.   Try to compile a list of at least 40 people.  (If you can’t get that high, get as many as you can.

• Open up all the profiles in your browser window (each within its own tab)

(This step absolutely works the fastest and the best with Firefox)  Once you have all of them up, go to each and click “Followers” to see who is following them.

If you really want to streamline this process then go here and download this plugin for Firefox:  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2324 .  Install it and after you have all the profiles open to their first page of followers, save the session.  Make sure that you have your profile open in a tab as well.  After you have the session saved, you will be ready to load that session again and repeat the following process.

• Follow their followers
  Just click on the follow tab of each of their followers.  You can follow as many followers as you like, but I don’t recommend following more than 20-40 followers per profile.

  You will also notice that some Tweeple will get more followers daily than others.  These people generally already have 10,000 plus followers already.  I like to move them towards the left of my tabs and add their followers first.  Make sure if you do that that you resave your session.

That is the manual follow process explained.  Once you get everything set up as discussed above, you will cut your time down dramatically.

In part three of this four part series I will discuss how to get rid of followers so that you can make room for more.

Related posts:

1. Building Your Twitter Followers Part 1: Twitter Follow Limits
2. Building Your Twitter Followers Part 3: Getting Rid Of Non-Followers
3. Building Your Twitter Followers Part 4: Auto Follow/Unfollow Engines