I love Twitter. What a tool to meet people, promote your business, advertise sales and get the latest news. I always check Twitter first, don’t you?
Community is your most important priority – engaging them, exciting them and educating them can mean the difference between a handful of retweets and a massive, loyal online community. Having a relevant presence on Twitter is extremely important when building your brand. Twitter is growing quickly and there’s a lot of noise out there. Take the time to plan your presence carefully and share relevant content that is engaging and will build your community.
So how can you build a following made up of real people? It’s easy, so let’s go!
Once you sign up for Twitter, find your friends, your colleagues, your favorite businesses and news sources and follow them all. They will get a note that you are following and hopefully will follow you – though there are no guarantees. So, follow people you are interested in connecting with, don’t follow people or organizations in an attempt to gain more faceless numbers.
After you’ve followed your first few accounts, you need to find people and resources that are relevant to your interests and your business.
HOW TO FOLLOW RELEVANT AND VALUABLE ACCOUNTS
Once you have your initial set of who you are following look at their profiles and see who they follow – if interesting and relevant, follow them too.
Use hashtags (more on this in the coming weeks) and engage in trending topics to discover who’s talking and what’s relevant to you.
Retweet or mention users (another topic coming soon) you’d like to gain as followers.
Have a catchy bio – an interesting bio (with key terms and links to your site) can attract more followers – look like a real person or business.
Use services to find people by location. If a relevant “twitterer” is followed by lots of people, they might be a good person to have in your community. Try using Foursquare (https://foursquare.com/) and Google Places (https://www.google.com/business/placesforbusiness/) – mobile apps to discover who’s close by and how they are connected to other individuals in a room via publicly available social media profiles and location information from Twitter.
Once you’ve followed relevant accounts you’ll need to focus on gaining followers.
TOP 7 TIPS FOR GAINING TWITTER FOLLOWERS ORGANICALLY
- Share content more often than you are selling, don’t promote your business more than 50% of the time.
- Repeat your most popular tweets. Use a tool like Hoot Suite (https://hootsuite.com/), to discover which posts are popular.
- Regularly un-follow people who are irrelevant to your business and who haven’t followed you back unless you get value from their tweets (sometimes following too many people can work against you – there are some limits in Twitter).
- Follow others, yet be cautious as quality is more important than quantity. You want to be able to stay up to date with what’s happening and join conversations.
- Create lists to help filter tweets…lists help you organize your followers into categories or groups, which allows you to easily see tweets from a specific group without having to scan your entire feed.
- Do NOT use a follow service, grow followers naturally or you won’t be seen as human and authentic – the secret to a successful Twitter account.
- Remember, gaining relevant followers on Twitter won’t happen overnight – steadily improve your follower numbers month to month to build a valuable community.
With these tools and tips, you’ll become a Twitter giant! Stay consistent and don’t give up. Do you need support with your social media efforts? Contact us to find out how we can help.