There are a bunch of tools to get people and organizations a mass of Twitter followers quickly. But raw numbers won’t help you. What your organization needs are followers that actually care about your product and want to interact with you.

That’s why I advocate slow, organic growth. Don’t go around mass following people (in the hopes that they will follow you back). Only follow people that you want to interact with and that would be interested in your organization or product.

Most importantly, create a quality experience on social media that will get people to interact with you, retweet you, link to you, talk about you and tell their friends about you. That’s the best way to get organic growth.

For instance, for our RarePlanet Twitter account, I only follow people and organizations who are involved with conservation or environmentalism or who are interested in them. We do not follow random people to artificially boost our follower account. We only follow people and organizations that we want to be social with and that would want to be social with us.

We’re also looking at ways to be as interactive as possible and be an experience that people find useful and that they look forward to. Our work on social media should be a positive for our followers/fans/friends or would-be followers/fans/friends.

We’ve had steady growth over the last few months, but what I’m more concerned about is our follower-to-listed ratio. There are people out there who have thousands of followers and are on very few lists. What this tells me is that the people following them back don’t know much about them and don’t care to know more either. When people put you on a list, they know enough about you to categorize what you do and they care enough about what you do to go through the process of categorizing you.

That’s big. Our follower-to-listed ratio is somewhere around 9 followers for every list we are on (it has been even stronger in the past). Many people and organizations that just randomly follow people have ratios north of 100-1. What does that say about the quality of the community that they are building?

Rare is a small organization that is only really known within the conservation community. We couldn’t just create a Twitter and Facebook account like a large organization and watch as followers and fans came in. We had to make our presence known, but I didn’t want to do it in a disingenuous or spammy way.

My plan (and it’s a plan that I think would work well for other small, less-known non-profits) is to provide a quality experience every day on Twitter and Facebook that isn’t just about the work that we do. We want to talk about what the larger conservation and environmental communities are up to, and we want to be a part of those communities on social media.

I also look through lists of people that I trust in the conversation and environmental space and find people to follow that I think we should connect with. I’m trying to following my 10-5 rule, which is that for every 10 posts that are talking at people (links to cool stories, videos, photos, blog posts from around the Web or work that we are doing) or asking people questions, we should have at least five tweets that are @replies to people we are following.

Do you have any tips to share about connecting with people on social media?

The latest numbers the company has shared with us include 15 billion photos uploaded in total, an average of 220 million new pictures posted each week, and at its busiest, 550,000 images being loaded each second.

Somehow news organizations lost sight of the fact that people love photos.

Instead they poured money and resources into newer, trendier fads, while neglecting a market they should be owning. What makes this even more inexcusable is how much money news organizations — especially newspapers — spend on cameras. Why give a photographer $10,000-20,000 worth of equipment for just a few shots to appear in the newspaper and online?

Still today most news organizations are only uploading a few photos from events that they take hundreds or even thousands of photos at. Still today news organizations are passing up events like high school proms, even though they are fantastic community and brand building events (and they will generate a ton of traffic and time spent). Still today most news organizations don’t allow users to upload photos to their Web sites.

Instead, people are uploading billions of photos to Facebook, Flickr, TwitPic and other sites. Imagine if those photos (and those eyeballs) were instead on news orgs’ Web sites? Imagine if news orgs tried to aggressively sell photos? Imagine if news orgs sold user-submitted photos and developed a profit-sharing model?

I hear all this talk about videos and databases and iPhone apps and Web ninjas, when news organizations could be making a killing by just utilizing something they have done well for decades: photos. Why have we lost sight of the fact that people love photos?

A few suggestions:

• If you attend a community event like a high school football game and take hundreds of photos (or thousands), upload hundreds of photos.
• Make photos big and beautiful. If my high school can do it, any news organization can too.
• Make buying photos incredibly easy. Again, if my high school can do it, any news organization can too. Check out their awesome photo buying system. Just click on the photos you want (with add to basket button under each photo), go to check out and select the sizes and quantities you want. Really simple.
• Allow users to upload photos. This is especially big for community events like parades, festivals, proms, sporting events, etc. Just check out how many people are at each of these events with digital cameras. We want their photos.
• Forget about captioning every photo. It’s a huge time sink that often delivers zero value (how many original captions could one sporting event really have?). Stop thinking about captions for community events and start thinking about tags.

Yes, the same Facebook that, had you listened to the digerati, has jumped the shark.

But Facebook hasn’t jumped the shark. It’s still becoming more popular and adding more features. Facebook may have jumped the shark for the kinds of people who have to try every social networking service in its alpha-invite-only stage, but it certainly hasn’t for everyday people.

It’s great to have friends who are pushing the envelope, and to be with people who are willing to try new things. I love my digerati friends. But we cannot lose sight of what the average person is doing.

When I say non-wired, I don’t mean someone without a mobile phone, computer or the Internet. But I mean people who don’t live and breathe Web 2.0. In fact, they probably don’t read Wired magazine, and isn’t that the ultimate barometer of one’s wiredness?

Let’s look at Twitter as a good example. If you just listened to bloggers and the digerati you would think that Twitter is the hottest thing going today on the Web. Oh wait, it’s jumped the shark because of frequent outages recently.

In reality, Twitter has less than 2 million users in the world. In many ways, Twitter isn’t even mainstream, let alone clones like Pownce. In comparison, Facebook has more than 70 million active users.

My friend is like the majority of Americans — high school diploma, has a computer with Internet, uses a mobile phone but doesn’t have a blog, probably doesn’t know what the hell Web 2.0 is supposed to mean (does anyone, really?) and probably has no interest in joining Twitter.

Ultimately, we have to build products that not only interest people on the cutting edge, but that also provide functionality that average person can and will want to use everyday.

For my friend, the time was right to join Facebook because its functionality made sense for him. I don’t think he’ll be joining Twitter (or FriendFeed) anytime soon.

Traditionally, I used Facebook to connect with some of my closest college and high school friends. We’d exchange inappropriate wall posts, send news over direct messages, post photos of each other and in general just have a good time staying connected, even though we have dispersed around the world.

Everything changed after Facebook opened up to everyone. Now potential employers were lurking on Facebook, scrutinizing every wall post, photo and friend connection. Now I’m getting friend requests from people I have never met.

It’s a whole different social network. As Facebook has gotten larger and tapped into a bigger social community, is has actually become less social between individual members. I now have more friends, but I less to share with each friend.

I have to be guarded. It’s no longer just my close friends viewing my profile. They get my inside jokes, our drunken photos from parties and they know when I’m serious or not.

Because of this, many of my friends have stopped using Facebook as much. Once you graduate, you have to think of your career, and the last thing you would want to happen is have a social network derail your career.

So, my profile is a lot tamer. I even use Facebook for business and journalism purposes now. This is why I finally put a link to my Facebook page on my connect page. I never publicized my Facebook usage before, because I tried to keep my friends list to people I know.

But times have changed. That’s why if you want to connect on with me on Facebook, you can. I have just a few requests of you if you choose to friend me on Facebook:

• If you want to be my friend, act like it. This means saying hello, sending me IMs and messages, debating issues and in general being social. Facebook is not LinkedIn. If you just want to have me as business connection use that service instead.
• I’m still going to be me. I can only make my profile so tame. I’m going to have fun on Facebook, and you should too. Again, if you want to see an extremely business side of me, there are other social networks for that.