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

Unfortunately, unless you are already well known, you will probably have to deal with the limits that are set by Twitter.

Here are the follow limits that you need to know about:

First, you cannot follow more than 1,000 new people in a 24 hour period.  This works all the way up until you get to 2,000 followers.  Once you hit that mark, you have hit what we call “the wall”.

Second, you are only allowed to follow a certain number of people after you have followed 2,000 people.  That ratio is 10% of the amount of followers you have.  What that means is that if you are following 2000 people and only 10 are following you, then you are stuck, and you will not be able to follow more until more follow you!  If you are following 2,000 and you have 1,900 followers, then you will be able to increase the people that you follow up to 2,190. If you had 3196 followers then you will be able to increase the people that you follow up to 3516 people.

The main reason that well known people do not have to deal with these limits is that they generally have more followers than people that they are following.  Twitter does not have a limit on how many can follow you.  The percentage of individuals that follow few and have huge numbers of followers is very low.

That leaves the rest of us…

So what happens when you follow 2000 people and only 10 follow you?

You have to lose some followers, and go find some more.  Getting followers on Twitter is all about following and unfollowing and following and unfollowing and on and on.

Now let’s imagine doing all this by hand.  That’s right…  I mean physically unfollowing people that don’t follow you.  Then, following up to 1,000 people a day, one by one.  It’s pretty hard to imagine, but I used to do it.  As a matter of fact, I used to do it with 2 and sometimes 3 different Twitter accounts per day.

In part two of this four part article, I will talk about how to manually find followers to build a massive Twitter account.

Related posts:

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