How to increase your Twitter followers

About a year ago I decided to give Twitter a try. I have opened an account and started to follow different people which were interesting. I wanted to tweet but I didn’t know what to tweet about. Then I joined IMU and I started to tweet about the sessions and the great things we learned there. So I got some new friends and chat a little with them. Then I graduated IMU and I came back to my previous question: What should I tweet about? I have tried several things till I got to the experiment I will tell you in this post.

My expertise is in marketing and branding so I decided to tweet about marketing, social media and personal branding. This drove me to the next question: where should I find subjects about my area of expertise? At that time I have already set some alerts on Google. I used them to learn more about my interests and I was reading a lot. Then I thought that if I read something interesting why not tweet the link and the title of the article or a line that I found interesting. This led me to another challenge. How to tweet so that my audience would read my tweets. Because I use to do the reading in the evening for 1 hour I was tweeting only in the evening and this didn’t got me too far. Only the people who were online at that time could benefit of what I was telling to the world. It was a very narrow window. Couple of weeks later I learned that Guy Kawasaki was repeating his tweets and he was using Objective Marketer to schedule them. I gave it a try and a month later I got more than 1000 relevant followers and here are the steps you need to follow in order to increase your followers with relevant people.

1. If you are not on Twitter yet go and open an account
2. Fill in your profile (bio, location) and upload your photo. People are more likely to follow other people than to follow accounts that do not have a photo.
3. Select the things you will tweet about. Focus on a niche, do not try to tweet about everything what is trendy. People want to connect with other that have original content not with those that are following the trend. Try to find out what your audience want to know and help them out.
4. Get ideas on what to tweet about by setting alerts, searching on the web or on other social media platforms. I recommend LinkedIn where you can find groups that serve your niche. Join these groups and you will get plenty of subjects to write about.
5. Schedule your tweets. You do not want to upset your audience with your tweets. If you tweet 3-5 times per minute, I will not be able to listen to others. From my experience I found out that 2-10 tweets per hour work just fine.
6. Repeat your tweets at different hours. I repeat every tweet 2-6 times at different hours so people that are on different time zones can get them when they are checking Twitter.
7. Use a tool like Objective Marketer, TweetDeck or Hootsuite to schedule tweets. I like Objective Marketerbecause I can use it for Facebook and LinkedIn, not only for Twitter and has some great analytics.
8. Follow back. As a general rule you should follow back the people who follow you. Before following you should check what that person is tweeting and what followers she/he has. I do not follow people that have 0-10 tweets and their accounts are older than 2 months.  If they start sharing more  I would reconsider. I have also decided not to follow people that tweet about getting hundreds or thousands of followers and they have just 60 followers. I have also decided not to follow people that discuss about MLM (multi Level Marketing) because I am not interested in this. I am sure they have their niche but I am not in their audience.
9. Don’t be afraid to un-follow. Recognize when you did a mistake and followed somebody who is spamming you.
10. Thank people that re-tweet you. Thank people that include you on #FF or #FollowFriday. Follow these people (if you didn’t do this already). They are more likely to follow you back.
11. Re-tweet your followers messages if you find them interesting for your niche. This will help establish long lasting relationships.
12. Engage your audience. Don’t leave your followers questions un-answered and ask them for help. If you do not know the answer to their questions just re-tweet them. May be one of your followers can help. Enter the conversation if you have something to say, don’t let it go.

Do you have other ways to increase your Twitter audience? Drop me a comment bellow.

Photo credits: wonderferret