One of the most commonly available brands of social-media snake oil now available is the kind that will help you grow your Twitter following to Greg Odom-like proportions. It’s a rare day that my inbox isn’t violated by some multi-step program that will have thousands of folks hanging on your every 140-character burst overnight. Usually the bulk of the advice is either platitudinous–Be authentic, Engage your community, Provide value–or so highly technical in nature as to miss the point of Twitter, which is simplicity. If you want a platform to game, try Google. At least, the search engine’s algorithm is complex enough to warrant some thinking about how to beat it.

Not so for Twitter. Sure, you might be best off posting at certain times of day and there might be convincing, data-driven grammatical guidance on how to earn those precious re-tweets that will give your Tweets a better chance to go viral. But that’s not what really matters.

I can say that with dead certainty because we have a site whose following has exploded over the past four months–and not from two to eight or 100 to 400 or even 5,000 to 20,000. Since January, Fashionista.com— whose Twitter handle is @fashionista_com— has gone from about 23,000 followers in January to more than 124,000 today. And it did so without relying on any gimmicks, research, or profound social-media advice unless of course you count mine. Which you probably shouldn’t.

Fashionista.com Twitter ChartThe site’s editors, Lauren Sherman and Britt Aboutaleb (who is unfortunately leaving us), have built (unofficially) the third-largest Twitter feed of any fashion news brand, trailing only Women’s Wear Daily and Elle.com, both of which have staffs that dwarf our  operation. They’ve done it by taking the sensibility that informs their blog and applying it to their Twitter feed. A radical approach, huh? Though it’s best you check out the site for yourself, I’ll try to capture their approach here: Fashionista is smart and high-curated, enthusiastic without being frothy, critical without being catty. And, importantly, I can say it’s personal without being totally subjective because it pulls in hundreds of thousands of readers every month, some of them fashion’s leading lights. And some of those, Elle Creative Director Joe Zee, fashion PR maven Kelly Cutrone and Glamour Editor Cindy Leive, have even thrown us a few retweets.

Given that personal touch, it only makes sense that, unlike a lot of content producers disseminating their work out on Twitter, the girls haven’t succumbed to the time-saving lure of an automatic service, like TwitterFeed, which simply and uncreatively regurgitates blog headlines.  On @fashionista_com, all the updates are handwritten. Says Britt, “The readers want to feel like they know you and automatic feeds are like spam.  They probably do more harm than good.”

So that’s lesson one: Turn off the feed. Or, if you absolutely can’t, sprinkle in some human-penned updates to break things up a bit.

Lesson two comes from the same place. If you shouldn’t be mechanical about how you’re posting, you also shouldn’t be mechanical about what you’re posting. While the girls are sure to promote their posts on Twitter, the feed isn’t only reserved for that. They also drop Tweets on “who’s wearing what at a party, which model’s been spotted in Soho, a great piece of vintage we stumble upon or maybe something we hear that doesn’t warrant a whole story, but that our followers would want to know.” Giving readers access to social events or just calling out a model’s whereabouts livens up the feed and keeps it from being solely a promotional tool for the site.

Lesson three is this: Follow some people back. I’m not saying you should follow everyone who follows you. I’m not talking about the spambot ho’s showing up with increasing frequency or even the real people who are equally annoying, if less seductive. They should be ignored. But you want to give people the sense that if they follow you, you might just follow them back, proving that you’re not some sort of elitist, like this guy. For the mathematically-inclined among you, Fashionista’s follower to followee ratio is 11.88 to 1.

And… lesson is over. You’re probably already enjoying your newfound legion of Twitter followers, even if you’re not quite sure what it all means. For Fashionista, that growth has meant more traffic, that’s for sure, even if Twitter-spawned visits don’t increase at the same pace as the following does. It’s also given greater heft to sponsored-tweet opportunities with site advertisers like Rachel Roy and The New York Times.Our new but promising partnership with the search service Lijit means that @fashionista_com tweets will show in searches on Fashionista.com. That’s exciting, even though we don’t have a firm grasp yet on how that will impact the volume or quality of on-site search in the long term.

If nothing else, Fashionista will see its reach and influence increase and that, after all, is pretty much the name of the game.

Matt Creamer is executive editor of Breaking Media. You can follow him on Twitter at @matt_creamer.