Twitter is one of the great social media sites, and is a brilliant way to let people know what your doing, where you doing it, and to interact with friends, colleagues, customers and potential customers. However, many people join, follow Stephen Fry, Justin Bieber and a few other celebs, posts a few tweets and then wonder why no one is following them.
Other people spend hours following others, and wonder why no one is following them back. There are a few things you can do to increase your number of followers, that work and that help improve your social network reach. So here’s a few tips that should help:
- Follower sanity is better than follower vanity. What does this mean? Well, it’s easy to go to fiverr.com, and pay $5 for someone to give you 5000 followers in a matter of hours. However, all these followers will be accounts that are made just for following people, not real people who will read and interact with your Tweets. There is also a risk that Twitter will close these accounts over time, and your follower count will drop. This is good if you just want to overtake your friends in follower numbers, but no good for business.
- Use it, or lose it. Twitter is all about interacting with people. If you don’t interact, its a bit like standing in the corner of a room at a function, not talking to anyone, and hoping someone will come over and speak to you. You need to get out there, start Tweeting relevant tweets, interact with people, and don’t be afraid to join the conversation.
- Start Local and Branch out. Depending on who you want to target on Twitter, start by targeting one area. Many Photographers work mainly in one town / area. So go to Twitter and use their search facility and enter your town or area. On the results page, you can choose to view the Tweets containing that name, or the people who have listed this as their location as well, or its in their bio.
That’s the basic tips to start with. Use Twitter, interact, post relevant Tweets and find people in your local area. These are the ground rules which you should always follow. Now we know this, we can move on a bit and follow some do’s and don’ts.
- Do Follow people in the hope they will follow you back. This may sound obvious, but someone may never know you existed until you start following them. Many people follow back their followers (we @BadgesPatches do). Others will want you to interact with them before they follow you back.
- Don’t follow inactive users. When you view someone’s profile on Twitter, you can see when they last Tweeted. If they haven’t tweeted in the last few months, is it worth following them?
- Don’t be afraid to unfollow people who don’t follow you. If you’ve followed someone, and interacted with them, but they haven’t followed you back, don’t be afraid to unfollow them. It may be worth just asking them to follow you, as they may have overlooked it. Unless their Tweets really appeal to you, is it worth following them?
- Do ask people to ReTweet for you. There is nothing wrong with Tweeting ‘We have an amazing offer 20% of everything, Please RT’. The more people that RT for you, the more exposure you get.
- Don’t use Twitter just for business. OK, we may get shot down for this, but people deal with people, so use your personality, and talk. If your account is just 100% business, you may put of some followers.
- Do put your twitter username in your email signature, your business cards, your Facebook profile, your website, your advertising, basically anywhere anyone can see it!
- Do use the Twitter search. I know we mentioned this above, but the search is a great way to find new people to interact with. Try searching your profession, your area, even yourself!
- Don’t expect overnight miracles. Some people may jump a few hundred followers overnight if their Tweet goes Viral, but this is rare. Expect it to take some time, but don’t worry, you’ll get there in the end 🙂
That’s just a basic overview for now, we will be doing more, to help you get more Twitter followers. This will include using Hashtags, and going over the numerous websites that can help you manage your followers and Tweets.
If your really keen to get more relevant Twitter followers, we can do it for you. It does cost, so please do contact us if your interested.