Marketing with postcards is something I’m very familiar with. It can be a great sales tool (even if just making one more touch) but only when targeted to people who are already interested in purchasing a product or service. In my opinion, I can’t see this working on Twitter. Like I mentioned above, people join Twitter for social reasons – not to buy products. You also have two other issues to consider; 1. Cost Per Acquisition/Follower which will be extremely high. 2. Getting followers to give you their mailing address. Since a mailing address isn’t included in a Twitter profile, you would need to create a separate landing page just for this purpose. And if you’re going to go to that much effort, I would focus on simply getting them to opt into a email list. It’s faster, easier and cheaper to implement.

Bottom line: social networking is about engagement. And it’s the engagement (conversations with a real person) that breeds loyalty. So if you want to grow a passionate group of followers, then post content worthy of being ReTweeted and engage your followers in honest and helpful conversation. The more you give, the more you’ll receive in return.

Plus when I auto unfollowed I discovered that the unfollow was reciprocated immediately by those I culled – Aye?

So I reasoned that they were following the same strategy I was. Pursuing what I thought were targeted followers ended up being a spam fest with little value exchanged either way.

Thank goodness I’ve STOPPED.

I’m of two minds:

Either I keep my following and follower ratios really low and build strong reciprocal relationships on a small scale…but do it organically

Or I build I really large following using both and automated (20% say) and an organic approach and set myself apart by providing really good content and using offline techniques to build strong relationships with my followers.

Nobody and I mean nobody on Twitter is doing this – Do you think if I had 20k followers and I sent out this stuff to my heavy hitters do you think they would look out for my tweets amongst the clutter – Not enough value is being exchanged.

Ohh follow me here http://www.twitter.com/mattwaterman

I am probably in the minority, but I do not ever plug my blog on twitter, don’t advertise it…don’t even advertise my design business, except on my twitter home page. I use Twitter to cultivate relationships, not for my own personal gain. (And because Twitter is a lot of fun!). This is not to say I won’t ever do so, but it is not my main reason for being on Twitter.

I wouldn’t care if I had only 10 followers, if they were people that I have quality relationships with. However, having a larger following does give me more opportunities to cultivate those relationships. You never know when/where it will come from. I love learning from all of you, but at the same time, it’d make me very happy if you said “Hello, how are you?” (and meant it) once in a while instead of sitting on the sidelines. You all have something unique to add.