HowStuffWorks has recently asked all HSW blogging people to start doing Twitter and Facebook pages. Some folks started several weeks ago. I have been doing it for about a week. I thought it might be interesting to chronicle the progress of BrainStuff’s pages.

So these two pages came into existence last week:

1) twitter.com/BrainStuffHSW
2) facebook.com/BrainStuff

As of yesterday morning they had about 15 followers each. Yesterday (5/20/2010) two things happened that pushed the Facebook account up to 68 followers:

1) Katie at facebook.com/HistoryClassStuff mentioned it in her Facebook feed.

“Bits and pieces: If you’re a Marshall Brain fan, you can now find him on Facebook at BrainStuff! Also, we’re looking for some non-U.S. historical events you’d like to hear about (to balance out the biographies). Suggestions?”

2) HowStuffWorks at facebook.com/HowStuffWorks mentioned it in its Facebook feed.

“Fans of BrainStuff rejoice! The BrainStuff fan page is now live: www.facebook.com/BrainStuff”

On the Twitter side, the number of followers rose to 80 today because Chuck at twitter.com/SYSKPodcast mentioned it in the SYSK Twitter feed:

“Check out the new twitter feed from our company founder – @BrainStuffHSW”

I will post this message on the Brainstuff blog this morning and we will see if that moves the needle at all. If you are a fan of Twitter or Facebook, feel free to follow here:

1) twitter.com/BrainStuffHSW
2) facebook.com/BrainStuff

If you have any ideas for spreading the word, please send them in or drop them in the comments. I’m game for trying just about anything and will document the results here. This should be a fun experiment, and I will keep you posted on how things unfold.

I did a little research on YouTube and found this video:

I have not tried either of these techniques yet. But as soon as I hear about the concept of “automatically following” it makes me wonder how people are able to do that. So I found this article:

How do I auto-follow Twitter followers?

From this I learn that there are two philosophies. In one, you have a small number of people you follow so you can actually see what they are saying. In the other you auto-follow everyone, and I assume that you get thousands of tweets every day from thousands of people you are auto-following, and you have no way of reading everything that comes in.

There’s also something called Twollow:

Twollow: Automatically Follow People on Twitter Based on Keywords

Which would be handy for doing research. Also, presumably some of them would follow you back, and that would increase followers.

In this video, Amy Porterfield talks about the power of retweeting (you learn something new every day) and a simple technique for improving the odds of getting retweeted:

She refers to retweeting as “viral gold”. This seems to relate back to the concept of auto-following. If you auto-follow everyone, then it is going to be harder to retweet because of the river of tweets coming in. If it is a babbling brook of tweets coming in from a small number of people you are following, it might be easier.

See also:
- Top 10 Ways to Get More Followers on Twitter
- How Twitter Works