Your Friends, My Friends, Our Friends

When starting out on the social networking sites, it can take a while to accumulate friends, fans or Twitter followers. Even if you do have a lot of fans, friends or followers, it would still be nice to be able to access more.

You can achieve a lot more in any scenario if there are a number of people working together as opposed to one person working by himself. Let’s say that you have 1,000 twitter followers and you have a friend with 1,000 followers as well. Now let’s say that you would like to have access to his followers, just as he would like to have access to yours. Well, a simple agreement could be struck. You could retweet his tweets in exchange for him retweeting yours.

The thing is that you have to agree on the number of tweets you plan on retweeting for each other. You have to remember that if you tweet too much, you will annoy some people to the point where they won’t want to follow you anymore. Make sure the other party is aware of that fact. You have to remember that your tweets and the retweets you plan on doing for the other person will increase the total number of tweets that you will be sending out.

Another matter for consideration is making sure that the other person’s tweets are somewhat related in subject matter to what you will be tweeting yourself. In other words, he should have a similar demographic to you. Remember too, that I’m obviously referring to doing these things in a business related capacity.

Now you can add maybe one or two more people. Let’s say two. We’ll also use the same example of 1,000 followers each. So that will now be a total of 4,000 people you will have access to. You tweet out to 1,000 of your followers and the other three retweet to their cumulative number of followers, which is 3,000 more people. You have effectively reached a total of 4,000 people. Not too bad, huh?

You can also do these sort of collaborations on other social networks. You can do a Myspace bulletin to your 5,000 Myspace friends and have your collaborator send out the same bulletin to his 5,000 friends. You have just effectively reached 10,000 people. You can do this on Facebook too. Facebook has a 5,000 friend limit anyway. The only way you can reach more is if you have a fan page. Unfortunately, it is hard to try to get your friends to go over to your fan page. Usually, you might get around 10 percent of them to do so on the first time you ask. If you ask too many times, you just might be annoying the hell out of people.

You can have the same problem with Myspace bulletins as you would Twitter tweets. So you don’t want to do too many of those Myspace bulletins either. Again, you would also want to try to reach the same type of people. Make sure the other person’s demographic is similar to yours.

The Facebook format is really simple for sharing things. You could post something on your profile page and the people that you are collaborating with could click on the share link. It’s really easy. This works with any link too. Links to articles you may write, the videos you upload on YouTube, your websites or pretty much anything you want to share.

Before you start working with someone in the above mentioned capacity, everything should be clear. If you don’t intend to tweet or post anything political, religious or pornographic, you need to make sure that those you are working with don’t either. The last thing you need is for the other guy to expect you to retweet a link to his porn site. So be careful who you team up with and make sure that anyone you team up with is aware of what type of tweets or posts you are not willing to make. You could avoid a lot of misunderstandings if every detail has been clarified prior to even starting. The best scenario is one where the partnership is mutually beneficial. Those sort of business relations usually end up being long term and successful as well. You can achieve so much more when you work together with others to achieve an objective. As for myself: I get by with a little help from my friends, your friends and our friends.