First of all, this post is not for those seeking artificial methods of getting 10,000 twitter followers in a week. So, if that’s you, read no more.
or more importantly, your business, this should work for you.
1. Write interesting, informative tweets. Sounds obvious, but if you have been on Twitter for any time you will see your fair share of nonsense and spam. I suppose its personal taste, but if all you ever tweet about is your delightful cocker spaniel who you think is your child, well… I don’t care so I don’t follow. If you constantly send out sales-pitch tweets, that’s annoying, I don’t follow. If you like to do Tweet-bursts, that is, tweeting many times in a short period of time filling up my feed with your crap, I’d don’t follow. Basically, keep it interesting, not TOO self-promoting and space it out so you are not annoying people.
2. Follow most of your followers. The basic idea here is to follow those who follow you. What this does is gets you more exposure when others browsing through another’s followers list they may find you and follow. I did say, “most”… there are some general categories you want to avoid.
Avoid Following:
- Eggs – those who have not bothered to change their profile image and still have the default egg image. Usually they are not valid accounts, or idiots who aren’t going to be a good connection anyway.
- Sexy lingerie models – You know, “Alexa Smith” with some picture of a 19 year old hottie. Usually these are just spam accounts with porn links. However, if you routinely hang with 19 year old hotties, never-mind; follow, follow, follow!
- Non-followers – One thing to be aware of is that people using the artificial techniques often temporarily follow people, then ditch them later. These people are obvious because their FOLLOWING list is MUCH smaller than the FOLLOWER list. Unless they are a celebrity, or a well-known person or entity, this should not be so. Most people should have about even following to follower ratio, and if you are fairly new, you will often have MORE you are following, then are followers of you. Just check their FOLLOWING count, if it is disproportionately small and they don’t seem to be all that well-known or compelling, you should pass, they will never follow you back.
Other than that you can give people a shot and follow them. Every so often you can prune your Twitter lists and stop following the non-followers and keep your following to followers ratio at a reasonable level.
3. Use #hash tags. This is often overlooked by Twitter noobs. Hash tags are subject tags that you can assign to your Tweet. All you have to do is type a # in front of a word and you have tagged your tweet. These hash tags become click-able links and people who click on the tag will get a list of posts that used that tag. So, you can be found by way of the subject matter of your tweet and pick up a few new followers each time. Pick generic tags that are specifically related to your tweet for best results.
4. Talk to People using @. Like the hash tag, the @ symbol is used in-front of another users Twitter username to call their attention to the tweet. The user who is mentioned in the tweet will get a notification that they were mentioned and most will check to see who mentioned them. Now, this can obviously be abused, but for Natural Twitter growth, speaking to people directly on your Twitter feed by mentioning them by name with the @ symbol works great to get their attention and possibly pick them up as a follower. Not everyone bites at the apple, but as long and your mentions are sincere and not spammy, people will often follow you.
5. Seek out Related Businesses. One of the best techniques to get REAL interested Twitter followers is to associate with similar or related business people. Use the advanced search to find these types and you will be amazed at how many actually follow you back. For example, since I run a web design company I am interesting to other web designers and companies, but even more so to freelancer’s and small businesses who provide ancillary services often used by web design companies. Occupations such as copywriters, graphic designers, programmers, search engine optimizers, and so on; all want to follow me because they may get a job out of it or maybe learn a thing or two. This is the single most effective way to gain followers and use Twitter properly. You can attract many people and establish Twitter feeds with people that are interesting to you and that are INTERESTED in you. In this way, you can create a useful network of cyber associates that will continue to follow you for a long time.
So to recap, these techniques are simple and are intended to build a solid list of interesting and interested followers. You may not get 1000 new followers per week, but you can slowly grow a quality list of followers over time which may reach 1000′s eventually. Avoid artificial Twitter techniques that just waste everyone’s time and stick to simple, natural, effective methods that really work.