“Wow, you have a lot of followers on Twitter. Did you buy those?”

Ummm….no.

Funny what people will ask you, but I’m glad you asked.  I haven’t ever bought followers on any platform. I’m not tremendously active, paradoxically, on social media, but I do publish content out on Facebook and Twitter. Those are the ones that I use, primarily. And LinkedIn, which I really like.

I have a pretty large following on all 3 of those platforms, but my largest following–as of this writing over 40,000 people–is on Twitter.

And again, no I didn’t buy them. I am one of those people who feel like if I did something like that, a giant foot would come out of the sky and stomp on me. Yeah, I get it, other people do it. I see lots of other people doing lots of stuff that I just KNOW that if I did it, there’d be terrible consequences. It’s just how I was raised, and my personality, I guess. It does mean that a lot of the things I’ve accomplished in life have been done the hard way–the long haul, blood and sweat and all that, but it also means I can point to all of those accomplishments with pride.

So yes, the Twitter followers are real. Or, according to the audit, 98% of them are real. The other 2%? I don’t know where they come from, but there’s not enough of them for me to be worried about it.

How did I end up with 40,000+ Twitter followers?

I started out on Twitter in 2008, definitely an early adopter.  I got up to about 1700 followers, and there I stayed until December of 2016 when I read an article (can’t remember whose), and this person said that they got a lot of traffic to their website from Twitter.  I hadn’t paid any attention to Twitter in years. And I was curious. If I worked hard at it, could I increase my followers? And if I increased my followers, would they come to my website and read my articles?

The only way to know…

There was only one way to find out so I set myself a 1 year challenge.  For a full year I would interact on Twitter, follow others that I found interesting, make sure to “tweet” several times a day with my articles and quotes and things that I found inspiring and helpful….and see what happened. And in a year’s time I went from 1700 followers to over 25,000 and indeed, Twitter became one of the biggest “referrers” to my website.

I’ve cut back on the time I spend on Twitter since that 1 year challenge, because being on social media Every.Single.Day. is just a pain in the tookus to me. I’m 55 years old and I’m not born to the manor of social media.  I have to REMIND myself to check Facebook, etc.  The level of effort and interaction I engaged in during that challenge year is not sustainable for me.  But I learned a lot, and because of what I learned I’ve been able to keep and GROW my Twitter following since then at a level of interaction that works for me.

So, is my large Twitter following fake? Were they bought? No, thank you, they were EARNED. And I’m thankful for the trust and friendship that all of them have given me and I intend to continue to be worthy of it!

Where’s the proof? Right here.  I paid $14.95 for a month of the pro version of TwitterAudit (the free version only audits up to 2000 followers), and I ran the audit on my Twitter account and here are the results: 98% Real Twitter followers. You can see my audit results here: https://www.twitteraudit.com/Cindy_Locher.  Not sure if it will still show after my subscription runs out. I only paid for 1 month so I could do this post!

What’s the point?

Cindy, why tell us this? Well, in this day of not being sure who you can trust and looking skeptically at the messages on people’s website, I just felt like sharing this would give you a better idea of who I am. When you see my Twitter followers, my testimonials, my reviews on Google, I know some people have to wonder – are they real? Because I wonder myself these days when I’m out on people’s websites. And I know I would also want some reassurance; some proof.

So if this post helps you or someone else feel more comfortable with me and with the information you find here on my site, then … THAT is the point.

And, of course – feel free to follow me on Twitter! Follow @cindy_locher