Yes, it's another cool Greasemonkey script from Promote My Site to improve your social media experience. This time it's for Twitter.

If you're new to Twitter, the first thing you find out is that you start off without anyone following you. So posting is like talking to yourself in the forest. Sure, your voice sounds great, but what's the point?

There are two basic strategies for getting people to follow you on Twitter. The first is to be famous. If you are Matt Cutts, Rand Fishkin, Jeremy Schoemaker, or Darren Rowse, all you have to do is hop down to the local pub, scrawl your twitter address on a napkin, and leave it on the bar. In a few days you'll have thousands of followers.

For the rest of us, it's a bit more work. Sure, you can mention the fact that you're now on Twitter on your blog and in various social media circles, but if you really want people to follow you, you need to start off by following other people. The easiest way to get into a conversation with a lot of people that share your interests is to find other people that share your interests, and then start following them and their followers. Eventually some of them will follow you back and you're off and Twittering!

This of course involves a lot of drudgery and mouse clicking, so in typical Promote My Site fashion we've built a Greasemonkey Script to Add and Manage Your Twitter Friends. That link points to the Fireboard Forum thread that will always have the latest news and versions. And of course, we've done a YouTube video on how to use it.

After you've followed a bunch of people, just sit back and watch the follow backs roll in. We've found that about 12% of the people with an interest in SEM have an automatic follow back set up. More will follow you as the day goes on. Give it a few days, then go to your followers page and drop the ones that aren't mutual. If they're not in to you, then it's time to just move on.

I started the week with around 50 followers. After a few days of testing this script and really not working very hard at it I'm coming up on 500 followers. Sure, I'm no rock star, but having a conversation with 500 people that share my interests is, well, interesting!

We're thinking of all kinds of things we could put into the premium version of the PMS Social Suite to expand this concept. If you attach a database to this you could do some brilliant things. If you've got any ideas, please drop us a note.