One of the most important tweets is a networking tweet. There are two main types of networking tweets. I would classify them as nurturing your followers and providing value to those you follow.

Many people tweet for years and wonder why their follower counts flounder, while others seem to be gaming the system, gaining followers with ease.

The be blunt, you can treat Twitter as a game. Getting followers is a key component of the game.

Sales people like to think of sales pipelines. (I know technical people tend to be wary of anything "salesy" and it is your choice if you want to play the game or not. However, the value of a network is related to the size of your network. Due to networking effects it is not a linear relationship. The network of someone with 2,000 followers is more than two times more valuable than a network of 1,000 followers. The more followers you have, the more chances you have to capture the lightning in a bottle echo chamber effects of Twitter.)

A sales pipeline uses marketing to spread the message to as many as possible. Then "qualify" the leads. Finally, you court the qualified leads to land the deal.

A flow of potential followers begins with viewing a tweet. A viewer might click on the profile and read what it says. Finally, they might check out the pinned tweet or media posted and determine if the signal in the stream is sufficient to click the "Follow" button. This is why one of the first steps of this course was to setup your profile and pinned tweet. (You might want to revisit your profile and pinned tweet now that you have spent over two weeks being intentional with Twitter. You will likely want to change them after what you have learned about Twitter.)

What if I told you that it is possible to short circuit the pipeline? That with a single tweet, you could get hundreds or even thousands of followers? You might think I'm joking, but I have done just that multiple times and have seen many of my followers do it as well.

The secret has two parts. The first part is a tweet that explains why someone should follow you. You might think "isn't that what most tweets are?" Yes, but it is missing the second part, which is the secret ingredient.

The second part is to ask. A call to action (or CTA as sales people say). And it goes like this "Follow me if you want to learn about ...." or "Hi, I talk about [FILL IN]. Follow me to learn more".

Your task today is to compose a networking tweet. Make sure you include the hashtag "#twitter4devs" so the course participants can help with your tweet.