While I personally use Hummingbird Software to build my followers fast, there are a number of free tools that will do so, albeit not quite as well or possibly not as targeted.  Because I tweet with lots of peeps that are interested in Hummingbird Software, but are not yet ready to invest the $’s I have come up with a series of things you can do to increase your following more easily and efficiently than totally manually.

But before you start more aggressively following people, the first thing to do is to enhance your current Twitter Profile so people that go their to decide whether to follow you, will have a personal and compelling story as to why they should bother!

And the coolest, easiest way to do that is with this fairly new Twitter Background creator, “Free Twitter Designer.”  This site allows you to either pick a primary background image or leave that blank and use your own image as your main background image.

You then can create shapes, text with shading and other nice effects.  And what is really cool is that it even overlays exactly where the Twitter content will be so you can position your image based content where people will be able to see it~very cool.

I will be providing a quick video on it soon, just wanted to get this post up quickly for a couple of people first!  And that is you Jacqueline, for one!

Another really cool way to enhance your profile, if you have the ability to video yourself, is Bubble Tweet.  If you have a webcam, you can record up to a 30 sec video right at the site or you can upload a 30 sec video.  Then Bubble Tweet automatically places the content overlayed on your Profile when someone visits your twitter site.  Haven’t a clue how they do it, but very cool again.

Ok, we have tweaked our profile so someone would have to be crazy NOT to follow us.  So how do we get more people to follow us?

One way is with Twollo.  Here is a quick video that explains how it works.  I don’t personally use this service but have a number of peeps that I know that do and they like it.

The key to aggressively building followers is a process that first has you follow a bunch of people.  Then a percentage of those peeps will follow you back.  The rest won’t.  So the next step is 2-3 days after you follow a large group of peeps is to unfollow the ones that are not currently following you.

To do that, go to Twitter Karma.  Once you provide Twitter Karma your twitter info it will locate all your followers, everyone you are following that isn’t following you, everyone that you are following that is following you.  You merely set the filter to only show the people that you are following that are NOT following you back, click check all and bulk unfollow.

**Note: I also do not use this service.  I assume it will never remove mutual followers (people you are following that follow you back) but just to be safe, make sure you set the filter correctly!

Now you only have followers that you are following and can now go out follow some more people.  For a more in depth discussion on the follow-unfollow process go here and review the follow-unfollow process described there.  In fact, you probably want to watch the entire set of training videos but thats up to you.

Now we are getting lots of new followers.  And some of those, maybe quite a few, are using automation to send “Thank You for Following” messages via DMs.  And your DM inbox is getting buried in DMs so you can’t find the real, personal DMs people are.

The solution is a little script bookmarker called DM Whacker.  Go Here to install it into your browser.  Once you have it installed, go to your twitter home page, click on DMs and then click on the bookmarker you just installed.  It will change the right side of your Twitter profile so you can us DM Whacker to delete all or some of your DMs.  If you click on the advanced URL you will see where you can only delete DMs with specific keywords.  I use “follow”.

Easy peasey!  All those nasty autofollows are gone and you can find your real DMs again!

Finally, to further address the DM auto follow issue, TweetLater is one of the services that many peeps use for auto DMs.  If you go here and follow the instructions, it will unsubscribe your from “its” auto follow DMs.  It won’t eliminate all the auto DMs but probably quite a few.

Ok, that is enough homework for now.  Come back later and I will have videos on everything that doesn’t already have video training.  And I will tweet this out when its done so watch for that too.

@TweetTex