How to Follow Churn Effectively

The best way to get friends/subs/followers on any social media or content sharing platform when you're new to the game is to do something called "follower churning."  This is a term coined by Twitter, and has strict rules associated with it.  But hey, we all gotta start somewhere!  And unless you're gorgeous and you sing like a fucking angel gliding down a rainbow (Justin Bieber) you will have to put in some footwork to get started.

Fester is here to help you out.  I'll discuss the best ways to follower churn on the various social networks and explain the differences.

1.  Twitter -
Twitter is the o.g. when it comes to follower churning and if you do it too aggressively you can get suspended very quickly.

Using Twitter, you will want to follow users in your niche.  So if you have a Call of Duty MW3 blog or YouTube channel, you will want to follow users who have video games listed as an interest.  You may also want to follow users who follow a power user in the video game niche, like Nintendo or Machinima, etc.

Easy follow backs come from following anyone who follows accounts like @TeamFollowWacky or have the hashtag #TeamFollowBack in their profile.  There will also be generated messages to retweet which include these hashtags and attract follow4followers.


2.  Facebook -
Facebook is quite different, and the strategy to develop friends in a niche is a little more precarious.  Facebook uses the oldschool "friend" type of networking rather than "following" for personal accounts.  What this means is that when you friend request someone it has to have a resolution.  On Twitter or Google+ a user will see that you followed them and can choose to follow back or simply do nothing, but you will still be following them.  On Facebook though, a friend request is an ultimatum, they either accept or reject it.  And if too many people reject that request, you will face a penalty of not being able to friend request anyone for a time period.  The penalties keep increasing with each new infraction.  The longest penalty I've ever gotten was a 30 day suspension from being able to friend request anyone.  If you try, Facebook let's you know you're on timeout and tells you to the day how much longer you have left before you can begin friending again.


3.  Google+
Google plus is one of the last places that lets follower churning (called "circle jerking" by G+ affectionados due to the circle based nature of G+'s network).
Many people will circle you back if you circle them. 

Circle4circle guize!?  100% circleback!

It is also possible to share one the circles you've created with G+ publicly so that anyone who wants can add that entire circle.  This means it's possible to follow hundreds of new users at once.  Very efficient way to circle churn.  Many of these premade circles however follow users who are already very popular and are unlikely to follow you back.  I.e. Lady Gaga, Pitbull, etc.

Any questions please leave a comment or get at me on Twitter!
@SpecialFester

How to Get More Subscribers on YouTube

I used to have a channel with over 40,000 subscribers before it was taken down back when YouTube used to be real strict about copyright.  It was great.  I was having a lot of fun, making awesome content, and the interaction with users was rewarding (with the exception of the ever present tr0lls of course).

The most frequent question I would get from users was "how did I do it?"  How did I get 40,000 subs (which was A LOT at that time.  The most subscribed at that time was Smosh and they were just under a million.  Compare that to RayWilliam today who has FIVE MILLION.

The answer to that question at the time was simple.  Just make videos, and make them on a consistent basis (i.e. every Wednesday, once every other week, etc.).  Now that there is more competition it is much more difficult to do, and changes made by YouTube in how their search works as well as the subscriber manipulation (er... i mean subscriber "adjustment" policy)  have complicated things much more.

Today, it is extremely unlikely to be able to attract views purely from organic search (someone finding your video by typing keywords into the search engine and seeing your video in the results).  This is because of those changes to the search algorithm I mentioned.  Basically, no matter how hot a topic you choose for your video and how well you tag it, it won't be seen by many users because it won't appear in searches for a little bit and by the time it does, other larger users will have vlogged about the same thing and will gobble up all the views for that topic.  The new search algorithm highly favors power users (i.e. the ones with many subscribers.)  Thus the ones with a lot of subs can easily get more views whereas the little guy can't even get his foot in the door.

So does that mean it's hopeless?

No.  Not by a long shot.  But the methods to claw your way to the top are different now then in the early years of YouTube.  I will be covering these in my next post.

Feel free to contact me on Twitter at any time:-)
@SpecialFester