592 Followers certainly puts my 27 to shame. Of course, those who follow me are mostly friends of mine whom I’ve met in real life–and I don’t really try that hard to gain followers.

That aside when it comes to gaining followers, I say it’s the same as in real life. Do not concern yourself with the number of people you have and just focus on delivering the passion; numbers, awards, and the like will all come on their own.

When you write passionately about something, when people can feel your ambition dripping from every word on the computer screen; you’ve gained a new follower right then and there.

And remember, if you don’t hit your ultimate goal–quality over quantity.

Best of luck for New Years.

Great post, and congrats on your 3,000th tweet, I’m currently less than 1/2 at 1492… I agree with your premise, the twitter wine community is a terrific source of knowledge, the folks up here are not just reflecting whats happening in the business, but are truly beginning to effect it as well. It’s a great thing!

Twitter is really turning into small topic driven communities with a larger community, and that doesn’t always encourage cross-over between groups. The groups are incredibly tight knit… you’ve got the wine geeks, the foodies, the lifestyle folks, fashion, shopping, techies… but these groups tend to stick much to themselves, not venturing into other segments. Thats the missing link…

I’ve recently begun following folks from other interests that follow me, and my number of followers has jumped quite a bit in recent months. I’ll encourage all the wine folk out there to surf through the tech community which surprisingly has the most cross over with us, but also hit the foodies and lifestyle folks as well. Doing this will in time mix it all up a bit.

Here’s to @winecast hitting 3000! Keep up the great work!

Congrats on the milestone. As a follower of Winecast, I really appreciate your content and advice. As an avid twitterer, I have also come to the realization that it is just as important who you follow as who follows you. But if you want to hit the follower milestone, I would recommend using http://search.twitter.com to find wine related comments and promoting your twitter account more on this blog since you only have a very small twittercounter badge here. Hopefully, those two will help get you there.