I’ve noticed many artists use a highly selective, yet very restricting, follow or don’t follow method of maintaining their Twitter accounts. They won’t follow anyone who isn’t strictly a friend or can help them with their career in some way. They only tweet about their own art a couple of times per week. Yet they would like many more followers and are really puzzled as to how to get them. I see artists with as few as 23 followers or around 100 followers, and that number remains unchanged week after week.

The problem with that sort of limited following and tweeting may seem obvious–so very few will see your tweets– yet so many artists continue to use this method to overly control their twitter feed because they don’t understand simple Twitter controls.

You don’t have to tightly screen your followers. Instead, follow more twitter accounts and use settings such as the Turn Off ReTweets.

The simple truth is that many on Twitter are paid by advertisers to Retweet. The amount they are paid is determined by the number of followers. For instance, I know of one site that pays someone with 1,000 Twitter followers about .50 cents for a tweet or retweet, someone with 10,000 Twitter followers about $5-10 per retweet, and someone with 100,000 followers $25.- 50.00 or more! Tweeters are paid to make certain Tweets go “viral.” Not surprisingly, many set up multiple Twitter accounts for the purpose of making money this way.

When a Tweet genuinely goes viral, you’ll often read news stories and articles about it. Genuinely viral Tweets indicate a strong mainstream interest, and careers can be made and celebrity gained from genuinely viral Tweets. So advertisers try to mimic these viral Tweets by paying others to Retweet the same Tweet from Twitter accounts with large numbers of followers.

How To Turn Off Someone’s ReTweets–

Visit your Twitter account each day to review your new followers.

When you have a new follower, visit their Twitter page and scan their recent tweets. If you see nothing but retweeted content that has nothing to do with fine art, or any of your other interests, you can still follow them back but click on the gear icon and in the drop down menu click on Turn off Retweets (as illustrated in the photo above.)

That way you can build your following and keep all the noise out of your Twitter feed.