Ok this does sound like a bit of a strange title…… but I do want to make friends but most importantly I want to excrete some influence!

For the last few weeks (actaully since the start of March) I decided to change a few habits in the way I use Twitter.

It wasn’t about introducing automation or anything like that….. in fact I wanted to do something that is very manual and needed a real human to do it.

That said, someone will probably send me a link to an application which will do all this for me.

This was my March Twitter campaign

(if you want to call it that)

Here’s where I started the month

Klout score

My goal for this campaing was to find as many photographers or photography people as possible. I already follow a great number of photographers and to be honest with you that’s all I really follow.

I started the month with about 800 of the people I follow listed as Photography people. The goal was to find more!

I’ve never been one to follow hundreds of people at a time which is why I spaced this out over a month.

I started off by going to WeFollow and searching for photographers there. We follow is very handy inasmuch as it shows you the most influential people for different areas. At the end of the day it only makes sense to follow these folks.

So I started working my way through this list following a few people everyday.

At the same time I also started paying attention to the Similar to You section. I did the same sort of thing and followed a handful of new people each day.

Then I looked in the Who to Follow section and made a few keyword searches.

And finally I took advantage of some of the other tools in Who to Follow like Find Friends on LinkedIn.

Here’s where I ended the month

After all that here’s what my Twitter profile and Klout score looked like:

Results

Over the whole month I followed and extra 244 people which is about 8 a day. 145 people followed me back which works out at nearly 5 new followers a day.

Over the past month I have increased the number of people I am following by about 11%

About 92% of the people I follow, follow me back.

I was listed an extra 17 times which was a 11% increase.

It’s interesting to see that the increase of followers followed the same percentage of increase of list membership.

It was encouraging to see that my Klout score had increased as I was worried that by following a much larger amount of people would result in it dropping.

Analysis

Considering all the different things I did required no automation finding and following about 8 new people a day is a nice target to aim for.

It’s interesting to see that the increase of followers followed the same percentage of increase of list membership.

The percentage of followers who list me did however drop by nearly 2% to 7%. But that’s not too bad….. 1.9% of Barack Obama’s followers list him. Life.com has an even lower list rate of 0.8%.

For for photographers like @chasejarvis (Klout score -70), @ScottBourne (Klout score 65) and @strobist (Klout score - 65) who top the influence (not follower) lists at WeFollow they all have a 8%-10% follower list rate.

If you want to test the quality of your followers then that figure of a 10% follower/list ratio seems to be something to aim for.

Conclusion

There are many ways to make friends and influence people on Twitter but what is important is building a quality following. It doesn’t matter if you have 100 or 1 million followers if most of them are robots.

To build a steady following whilst still keeping your Follower/Follow ratio somewhere near even I think aiming for 5 new followers a day is a nice target.

Using the listings at WeFollow is certainly a good place to start to find the right kind of people to follow but after a while Twitter’s Who To Follow really kicks in and offers up loads of relevant people.