Meet The Man Who Convinced Taye Diggs to Follow You on Twitter

Most people know Taye Diggs from the Grey’s Anatomy spin-off Private Practice or his marriage to Idina Menzel. But for more than 500,000 lucky people—myself included—Taye Diggs will always be the celebrity who is randomly following them on Twitter.

See, unlike every other famous person on Twitter, Diggs follows almost the same number of people that follow him. And he doesn’t just follow other celebrities, Taye Diggs follows just about anybody. Be it...

...a Connecticut police department:

...a building superintendent:

...or someone’s mom:

For years Diggs' liberal approach to Twitter and amassing followers was one of the great mysteries of the Internet. Then, in 2015, the Today show finally got him to admit what many had suspected for a while: a social media expert told him to do it. Diggs himself, it turns out, is actually a kind of a technophobe who says “social network” when he probably means social media.

So we tracked down Taye Diggs' social media maestro, Lance Laifer. If you’re imagining some selfie stick-waving 25-year-old, you’re way, way off. Laifer, who runs Old Forge Media, is a 51-year-old ex-hedge fund manager from Long Island and he’s made it his mission to follow the world.

Have you always worked in technology?
I’m 51-years-old, so I went to college before they had computers. The first time I used one for work, I had a big Compaq portable computer that was the size of a briefcase.

When did you start taking the approach to follow a lot of people?
I’ve always kind of thought of social media as a two-way device. Early [in the company’s history] we met with a big retailer who had a lot of followers. I suggested to them that the easiest thing for them to do would be to follow as many people plus another 10%. And they told me that it would adversely affect their Klout score. Basically, they didn’t want to listen to that many people. To me, that’s like having a telephone and just using the mouthpiece and not the earpiece. It just doesn’t seem like you’re treating people with respect. I think it seems like you’re trying to elevate yourself. The biggest offender of the group is Twitter themselves. How many people do Twitter follow?

I’m looking and @Twitter follows 139 people.
And how many followers do they have?

Fifty-three million.
Maybe they’re trying to be cute with the “140 character limit” but still, it shows a complete and total lack of engagement. They put up a tweet 24 hours ago that has 53 retweets. Based on 53 million followers. That tells you something’s drastically wrong with the way they’re operating this account.

How many people do you follow on your personal account?
I would actually say I don’t use my personal account. Just because I don’t have the time. I only follow 30-odd thousand people.

So how would you describe what you do?
We try to synthesize social media management with business plans.

How many people work for you?
We don’t really tell people that.

So when you first started the company you were just helping people grow their following?
I thought that was all the business was. I thought everybody in the world was going to need this. I didn’t realize how difficult it is to get people to want to follow people because they think it doesn’t look cool. There’s this real school of thought, when you tell people that they should follow [lots of] people, they think you’re nuts. I have empirical data that shows that it works.

So how does it work? Is the people Taye Diggs follows automated?
You can’t automate your following on Twitter. So it’s all manual. We believe that you should be on there as a person and we shy away from scheduling software and things like that.

How do you decide who Taye Diggs is going to follow?
There’s no defined path. We sort of want to figure out what’s best for our particular client in terms of following. Every follower on Twitter is not equal.

So if I was to take my Twitter account and sit and follow all the people who follow me, and all their followers, do you think I could double my followers?
We don’t randomly follow like that. There’s a real process. That’s not something we would recommend doing.

Do you have some kind of proprietary algorithm?
It’s an algorithm that’s in your head.

What does a day look like for you? Do you sit down at a computer and, you know, follow a bunch of people on behalf of all your clients?
We don’t have a physical office. I spend a lot of time on the platform, and going to meetings. I only wear golf pants because I carry five phones with me.

Do golf pants have big pockets?
Yeah, they have very large pockets.

I did not know that. Why do you need five phones?
Video is an important part of what we’re doing, so I have a lot of stored video on my phone. I want to make sure I have photos and the videos and everything accessible and I just keep running out of memory. Dropbox takes too much time.

What happened when Taye started to become famous for following a lot of people?
There was tension on it. You know, people didn’t understand what was going on. My perspective on it is people acted rather immaturely. Look how many people Justin Bieber follows. [Ed’s note: Bieber follows 262K people and has 77.4 million followers.] However people interpreted it, I think most people in the world, when they got a follow from Taye Diggs, they felt happy.

I feel like there are a lot of celebrities who are now following a lot of people Twitter—Melissa Joan Hart and Montel Williams are two that come to mind. Are you responsible for those accounts too?
I would say no comment.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.