By now most of you know my ongoing love / hate affair with twitter, in my posting saying I hated it, then my post tell you I planned a amazing Chicago vacation using it, and now I am back to hate, sorry be being a flip flopper!

I have a couple thousand followers on twitter, which is great! As much as I advocate against attaching your ego to your twitter followers, as my followers grow I take that as a vote that I am putting something of value out there, more followers hopefully means I am doing something to attract and retain followers (since I am not one of those people who follows everyone back).

With that said, I recently had an issue with my blog, & I posted it here:

With 2,000+ followers I honestly expected that I would have 4-5 responses of people who I hopefully help out with my posts, jumping to help me out. NOPE. Crickets, except for 1, luckily that 1 was all I needed!

Jaamit thank you so much, hope all is well with you and the SEO team at Freshegg!

For the record, I may have met Jaamit, but we had never corresponded before and really didn’t know each other.

Darn, I gotta get some more programmers following me!

Thank God one person jumped in to help me out!

The hard facts that I have found from this experience are:

1 – How many people follow you means NOTHING if in your time of need some of them don’t / can’t help you.

2 – Sometimes, when you have a real issue you may have to post it 3-4 times (not more than once a day) to ensure that a larger percentage of your followers will see it, we all miss a TON of good tweets, even from our friends (this is what I think happened in my case).

3 – Growing followers is important because you can’t expect everyone you follow to know the answer to your questions, so growing your count is important and follower diversity is important.

4 – Answering people’s questions (especially those with some reach and well ranking blogs) is a GREAT way to build high quality links, they often link out and share the love, heck it worked for Jaamit he’s linked above, and he never asked for a thing, he just was willing to help a link back is my way of saying thanks!

The moral of this story is summed up in point 5.

5 – If you have the time, using search.twitter.com for commonly searched phrases in your industry. Then see if people are having problems with something you can EASILY help them out with. Answer their questions, is a great way to build quality followers and potentially links. I mentioned that way back in my link building with twitter post.

Easy enough, next time you are stumped in your linkbuilding strategy, think about going to Twitter search and seeing who is asking questions you can answer (in a non-salesly way)