How to Get More Followers on Twitter
So you have a Twitter account. But your followers are limited mostly to your friends and their friends. Definitely you want to increase the numbers for a host of different reasons – perhaps your Twitter account is to promote your business, or you want to grow your network of acquaintances and make new connections, or you simply want to get your message across to as many people as you can. So how do you get a bigger share of the more than 100 million users of Twitter worldwide?
There are several practical things you can do:
Make your Twitter account worthy of being followed
Take a look at Twitter users with the most followers and study what makes their site interesting. Of course there are those that already have a following even before they started their Twitter account such as celebrities or commercial brands. You can learn from those which started small and built a big following. Remember that your Twitter account is just like a website – people will search for it and keep coming back to it if they find something useful, informative, entertaining and above all, they can connect with what they find in there. It doesn’t have to be some totally new information which you need to research and you don’t have to constantly wrack your brain to come up with some ingenious and original idea. Sometimes, the best “tweets” are those that are personal – they may just be talking about something mundane as what is going on in their day. But what sets them apart is they take on an active voice and make creative use of the 140-word limit such that their followers can relate to what they are talking about. You can also use your Twitter page as a link to facts and data that you think your followers will want to read on. It doesn’t always have to be about yourself or your product or service. Twitter is after all, a social networking system so it will also benefit you to relate your site to others in the same field of interest or speciality. Keep it fresh, interact with your followers and keep everything in balance.
Visibility is Key
Think about it: how can people follow you on Twitter if they don’t know your account exists? Promote it like you would promote yourself or your business. The simplest way to go about it is to add as many Twitter users as your friends, just like MySpace, Facebook or any other social networking sites. There is exponential growth that you can get from this. If you have other profiles in sites, you can add your Twitter ID or profile at the end of your email signatures, or your other online accounts. If you have a blog site then you can also promote it there. Or you can also explicitly request other users to recommend your profile, create a link to your profile or recommend you to their own network of followers. You can also drive traffic to your profile by employing some marketing strategies such as offering incentives or some form of motivation to follow you on Twitter; advertise it on the Internet; connect your profile to some noteworthy cause or relevant social event; or if you’re tech-savvy you can create an application or a tool and you can promote your profile through it. However, don’t make the mistake of “spamming” people just to get more followers. This can be more of a turn-off than something that will be beneficial to you. Again, learn from the experience of successful profiles. The more visible your Twitter profile is, the more chances that you will gain more followers.
Tweet Regularly
Once you have started to build your following, keep the momentum by tweeting on a regular basis. You can also time your tweets during peak hours, for instance, at the start of the day or after business hours when people have more time to browse around and find your profile. There is a debate about the frequency of tweets that should be made to ensure presence. Some people make the mistake of tweeting too often that the discussion trails get confusing and ultimately they lose the interest of their followers. At the end of the day, quality still prevails over quantity but make sure there won’t be a long pause in between tweets such that your followers will lose interest. Also keep a balance between posting new topics and responding to your followers.
Sign up for a reputable Automated Follower System to get followers for you. You do need to pay a fee for this professional service but if you want to build your following fast then you can consider this route. These types of systems have some sort of guarantee over the number of followers they can generate for you because they maintain lists which they can draw from. The advantage of signing up with a provider is that you don’t need to do a lot to promote your own profile, they take care of driving traffic to your profile for a certain time period. All you need to work on then is the content. But before you sign up with any provider you should study the options that are available to you. Compare their fees (providers’ fees can range from $8 for 1000 followers and above), the system that they employ to generate followers (some do outright purchase of followers’ lists while others swap from one profile to another), the guarantees that they make (some providers say they can provide up to 900 new followers a day). Of course you want quality following and the risk of signing up for these providers is you just get numbers without any guarantee on whatever else is in the list. Another downside to this is that you would need to also provide them with your Twitter name and password which can be a security issue later on. But if you can define your parameters to the provider and be vigilant enough to monitor their performance then this can possibly be a good boost to your Twitter following.
