I’ve just seen yet another tweet proclaiming that by following some system or registering on some website you can get 1,000′s of new followers in a week. Although some of these sites may work, you’ll probably only get spammy followers, looking to bury you under a sea of DM’s. As I’ve blogged before, I created a Twitter account for one of my projects. Basically what happens is I collect news stories from most South African news sites into a Digg-like site. I then tweet all these headlines to a Twitter account. When I created the account I manually followed about 200 South Africans, just to get the ball rolling. I then signed the account up to TweetLater, and checked the setting to automatically follow any people following me. That was about two months ago, and the account now has more than 1,500 followers. People just naturally started following the account.

So what does this mean to the average Twitterer? Just post regular, value-adding content and the rest will happen automatically. In addition to this, you’ll find people who actually want to listen to what you have to say, not people just looking to increase their follower count. Actually, saying (typing?) it now makes it seem incredibly obvious. Remember people, there’s no such thing as a free lunch (or 1,000 genuine Twitter followers).