Often people talk about volumes of followers and the importance to your business. In a mission to learn, I discovered the relevance of this, along with several golden rules for one branch of social media. I joined Twitter 10 years ago and never got into it for a number of reasons. This year, I found my old credentials, signed in, and on one a count, I found I had a hundred followers. On an unused account! That was more than my business had! It started me thinking, and playing with a social experiment and surprisingly complex learning curve.   I set up/reactivated a handful of accounts. I gave them each a purpose, changed their profiles, usernames, etc. and I decided on a different way to manage each.   One was set up as a user to comment on news & business commentary One was set up all about pets with regular posts, always replying to people who engaged Another was only about gaining followers, often blatantly Another was simply a regular company feed, used as a control And finally one was just an account for reposting and sharing other people's stuff but nothing new. Not one word!   There were thousands of ways I could have proceeded. My intention for each was to get followers, and not focus on likes, and I learned a lot of rules for what works, and what doesn’t, some obvious, some not so. So my learning curve began over the next few months.   As an experiment it had to be good enough to be of value, but not time consuming. It had to have some rigour, bu didn’t need to be 100% scientific like a PhD study. It had to be easy to modify and evolve, in order that I could rapidly adapt to any key learnings, and test them out.   So I rotated between the accounts, daily. I also refined the bio profiles when felt beneficial, with what I learned or felt worth a try to improve them and the associated engagement.   In other words strategies changed, to seek the humble follower.   It is worth saying that there are different breeds of followers. Some only follow what they clearly share a common interest in. Some only follow others that will follow them. Some only follow famous people. The bottom line is that Twitter users are not the same. Despite being a fairly anonymous platform, everyone uses it in different ways to one another, and to any other social media platform. Learning from others would also be a key part of my experiment.   I used it to keep up to date on news and public opinion. Twitter is a very vocal place! But comments on Twitter are also a good indicator of audience. Some use throw away comments. Some use likes. Some write to the maximum character limit. Some use emojis. And an increasing number use animated GIFs, the short movies that are an expression of amusement, frustration, or other reaction.   Scheduling became important too, but again, it had to be easy. Tweetdeck is a free Twitter scheduling tool (now owned by twitter). Sadly it has its limitations, but was put to good use to avoid my focus being constantly misdirected.   With my experiment set up, I began.