All the twitter gurus and experts (self styled – of course) recommend joining in or creating conversations to build your twitter following verses simply broadcasting what you think will interest your followers. In what should I tweet about Naomi from ittybiz asked her twitter followers for their opinions and concluded that twitter is for being social. Obvious perhaps? But many people broadcast. The point is, you should do both.
But what if you don’t have many followers to start up a conversation with? And if you only have a few or even a few hundred followers, it’s not enough. Take a look at the profiles of influential people in your niche and check out how many followers they have.
With that in mind here are 5 ways to get a lot more twitter followers.
1. If you’ve ever heard of google alerts, you’ll know it’s a terrific tool for delivering intelligence to your RSS reader, in real time, on any topic of your choosing. Well, you can do the same with tweetbeep. This is twitter alerts by email. Now you can find out who is tweeting about you, your products, your business or your niche. Then you can follow them. Twitter etiquette means most will follow you back. Watch the twitter stream and reply to their tweets and join in the conversation.
2. Hot topics, when they coincide with your niche, can be a terrific way to get your tweets in front of a lot of people. Trendistic will show you, in real time, all the hot topics on twitter. Watch this until you find something overlapping with your topic, then use twitter search, or the advanced search, to find who is talking about it and follow them. Hot topics don’t remain hot for long, so it’s best to join in conversations as soon as you find one.
3. Create your own network of experts by identifying key twitterers in your niche or topic. And how will you know when you’ve found an influential twitterer? Use twitter search and look for people who post frequently. Then take a look at their profile. Is it customised? Do they have a photo avatar? People who are not serious about using twitter don’t bother to upload their own photo. How many followers do they have. The more the better. Follow them and single them out into a different list using a twitter client, such as tweetdeck. Read their tweets daily. Reply to their tweets, join any conversations and provide useful tips; perhaps a link to a great video.
4. Automate who you follow, or semi-automate the process if you want to vet them first. However, the big benefit of automation is it saves you lots of time. SocialOomph will allow you to either automate or semi-automate (delays the follow by 72 hours allowing you to vet the follower) who follows you. Once you have this process set up, write a reply (automatically sent) to everyone who follows you to suggest they join your facebook page or subscribe to your blog. You’ll be surprised at how many people do this.
5. Retweets work like gangbusters at increasing your followers. Up to a third of your tweets should be retweets. It’s a form of social giving. When people compliment you at work you generally like them and feel obliged to return the compliment. Retweets are the same. It even works with infuential people. If you retweet them often, eventually they will notice you. Open up google reader, or your favourite RSS reader, and add the blogs of all the influential people in your niche. Then when you read a great post, retweet it. The other way to do this is from a twitter client, such as tweetdeck. Tweetdeck makes it easy to follow a list of people and retweet them.
There is no excuse for not increasing your follower count by at least 10 people every week. In fact, if you focus on tweeting every day, you should do much better than this. Subscribe to twitter counter and watch your follower count grow. It’ll give you a buzz when it increases each week.
