Do You Have Over A Million Twitter Followers Yet? What does it take to get a million Twitter followers? (Assuming you’re not cheating with some lame following program) We all know it helps to be very famous like Oprah Winfrey (over 3 million followers) or very popular like Twitter it’s self (2.9 million). You could provide a valuable service like CNN Breaking News (2.8 million) but according to TwitterHolic.com only 219 Twitter accounts currently have over a million followers.

There are probably a million articles about getting a ton of followers and just as many people tripping over themselves trying to get there but the real folks that Tweet work hard to keep the numbers low and the quality high. That’s what I have tried to do with our Twitter account. I’m not a fanatic with it but I am a little selective who I follow and when I have a little free time I start blocking followers that look too spammy.

Ok, with all that said, what does it take to get a million Twitter followers?

My answer is…

Wait for it
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Be very interesting! That’s the only explanation I can see on why a 29 year old guy living with Dad, has no website and doesn’t even have a location on his profile has over a million Twitter followers. His name is Justin Halpern but goes by just ‘Justin‘ on Twitter, follows only one person, never re-tweets, never replies and only Tweets things his Father says. You gotta love it! Check it out, http://twitter.com/shitmydadsays Seriously, It’s hard to stop reading his Tweets.

Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a website out there that looks at how the top brands are using social media and how effective their campaigns are? Let me introduce you to ENGAGEMENTdb. ENGAGEMENTdb is developing the first database measuring online engagement for the top brands.

It would be irresponsible, as marketers, to ignore what the top brands are up to. Even though we can  barely comprehend their marketing budgets we can learn a lot by watching what works and learning why. Are they on Linkedin or Facebook? Do they have a blog or a discussion forum? Do they have a YouTube or Flickr presence? Hey, do they Twitter? If they do ENGAGEMENTdb has will not only let you know but will actually give you they links to each and rate how well they are doing. Now you can track favorite companies online. You can even add add your company to the this comprehensive social media database!

You can download the free 2009 ENGAGEMENTdb report (.pdf) and get details on social media efforts of the top brands. For example, see how Starbucks obtained the highest engagement score with just a six person social media team. See the best practices that build brand engagement.

ENGAGEMENTdb is just starting out yet their content is very impressive. ENGAGEMENTdb has no Google PageRank and an Alexa rank of 289597 and I’m certain we will witness a top ranked site emerge very soon. I know they make my bookmarks.

It is nice to get details like this without buying expensive white papers. What do you think? Can we learn from a site like this?

There’s been a lot of marketing buzz about the recent massive Snickers campaign using distinctive made-up words without any actual mention of the brand itself. Snickers, owned by Mars, Inc., has billboards, bus & taxi ads along with broadcast commercials relying on font and color recognition to promote their brand.

There are many blog posts about the campaign, both good and bad. Personally, I’m impressed. My first thoughts are the actual strategy behind the campaign must be to reinforce the brand. This is obvious since anyone not already familiar with the candy bar would have no idea what they were looking at. Words like Nougatocity and Peanutopolis would be confusing to those that don’t recognize the brand’s distinctive, yet very plain, image.

What impressed me, even though they’ve had millions of dollars and years to do it, is how successful the Snicker’s branding actually is. Just the simple font and colors are enough to generate instant recognition for millions of people. Well, that and I like the candy bar