5 Easy Steps to Get More Followers on Twitter

Posted May 23, 2010 | by irene | in Social Media | 7 responses

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Here are five easy steps you can do right now to get more followers on Twitter.  No time for chit chat, let’s get right down to it:

1. Follow OTHER people on Twitter.

The best way to get more followers is to follow more people yourself. This works because chances are if you follow others, they will also choose to follow you. It also works because your chances of being retweeted go up – the more you are retweeted, the higher the chance that others will find you and your tweets of interest, and so will follow you.

Now, if you really want to make this work for you,  you want to follow the right people. Depending on your business or activity, this can be people in your geographical location, your industry or those who tweet about the same topic as you do.

How to find and follow  people in your geographical location

If you are a local business or  personality, you might want to follow other Tweeters who live in your city or geographical area. This is good for retail businesses or services, bands, radio stations, film festivals, organizations and clubs, groups etc. – anyone whose business is mainly local.

Here are some tools you can use to find Tweeters in your ‘hood:

• Twellow.com/twellowhood
  Click on the map to find your country, then province, state or region until you get to the city you want to target. Twellowhood will then show you a list of all the people who tweet from that location.  You can now scroll through the list and choose who you want to follow, then make some time for the dull work of pressing the “follow” button next to them. I did this this morning while listening to podcasts and recorded tutorials.
• Use Twitter advanced search.
  Click on the link above to take you to Twitter.com’s advanced search. When on the page, scroll down to where it says “Places.” Add the city you are targeting, the distance from it you consider reasonable, and click “search” at the bottom of the page. You will be provided with a list of all the twitterers in that area. Now what you do is roll-over the Twitter user-name and click on “follow.” Make sure you are logged in with the right Twitter account if you have more than one account.

How to find people in your Industry or Topic

• Once again use the   Twitter advanced search. This time scroll to where it says “Words.” Enter your industry, or topic, like marketing or voice-overs. You can get very specific using the fields they provide, for example  use ” This exact phrase” for multiple word strings like “video production.” You can even excluding certain words, for example when looking up Newfoundland you might want to exclude the word -beiber  or you’ll get lots and lots of kids people trying to  bring Justin Bieber back to Newfoundland in your results (Please, Justin, if you hear this Come BACK!)
• Use Blastfollow to find people who used a certain hashtag and  follow them immediately.

How to find people in your Industry AND  your location
You can once again use  Twitter advanced search to search through the content of the tweets but you may get better results if you want to search only the Bios and Names of Twitter users. The best tool for this is Google’s advanced searched. This extra cool tip comes from Guy Kawasaki’s presentation on how to be a power Twitter User and are simplified below.

• If you want to search through the bios of Twitter users, use this formula in Google search but make sure to change the word voiceover to the service you are interested in :
  intext:”bio * voiceover” site:twitter.com
  Google will now search only through the twitter.com site and the results page will only show those who put voiceover in their Twitter bio.  Very handy.
• If you want to search through Twitter user names you can use this formula.
  intitle:”voiceovers* on twitter” site:twitter.com
  Google will now search through the users who put voice over in their Twitter user name, like twitter.com/voiceoveractors or in their actual displayed name that appears in the right hand top sidebar (that name is editable! See below Tip 2.)

Last but not least, you can follow everyone who follows you. This can be done manually, or you can automate this with tools like: SocialToo, SocialOomph.com/ that have autofollow commands.

2. Make sure YOU and are easy to find on Twitter

By using the  reverse-process of the tips above you can make sure others can find you or your service more easily:

• If you are a local service provider try and put your industry or town in your name e.g Twitter.com/voiceoveractors or e.g Twitter.com/realestateNL
• Change your displayed name  – this is the name that appears in the right sidebar at the top before it shows your website and bio. You can change this to include your key offering or keyword. E.g John Smith Voiceovers. To edit your displayed name choose Setting from the menu top right of your page and then choose Profile.
• Make sure your bio has your keywords or phrases that one can find you with in it. Use a keyword searching tool to find phrases that people actually use when searching. Google’s keyword tool is good for that. Remember if you are a band or author that putting your genre in your bio is a good idea.

3. Start being helpful and offering advice

Don’t waste people’s time. Do be helpful and someone worth following:

• Start by tweeting good content: tips, tricks, anything you deem useful.
• Tweet regularly. Try setting a schedule, like tweeting  every day during an afternoon break or just before bed.
• If you run out of things to say, Tweet other people’s content. Things to tweet are useful articles, reviews, ebooks, videos,  sites, white papers that you have enjoyed.
• ReTweet other tweets posted by the people you follow. Use RT plus the original poster’s login at the start of your tweet to give them credit (should look like : RT @ireneduma plus the original tweet.)
• Search your genre or area of expertise on http://search.twitter.com/ Then answer people who are looking for something or asking for help. To answer them make sure you use their twitter login name preceeded by an @ sign. E.g. use @ireneduma if you want me to see your tweet. Make sure you follow these people too.
• Search your keywords or area of interest then retweet the best posts to your followers. You will often receive a public thank you that exposes your twitter handle to new audiences.
• Get involved with memes. Memes are current trends and can be found on Twitter here tweetmeme.com,
• Use hashtags in your posts to be included in the memes. Read my article What are #hashtags to learn more about hashags and how to use them.
• Post pictures with twitpic.com

4. Ask people to ReTweet you

When your followers ReTweet your posts it promotes your @username. This will makes it more  likely that other Tweeters will  follow you  because 1) they found the post was useful and 2) it came with word-of-mouth marketing: their friend is following you so you must be worth it.

• You can put Pls ReTweet this in your post. Don’t use this every time, but it’s good for timely tweets and/or non-profit do-good deeds.
• Add a tweetmeme  retweet button to your website. It also comes as a plugin for your web site built with WordPress – get the  tweetmeme plugin here. That’s what I am using on my blog – you can see it at the top of this post, flush right.

• Retweeting is easy if you use tools like Tweetdeck or Hootsuite.

5. Ask people to follow you.

And make it easy for them to do so.

• Put your link to your twitter page  on your website, Facebook page, email signature, forum signatures, business card, bottom of every blog post
• Get Twitter badges or widgets to place on your website:

  http://twittercounter.com/pages/twitterwidget

  http://twittercounter.com/pages/buttons

• and always ask people to follow you.

Like this – if you liked this, please follow me on Twitter.com/ireneduma

and retweet it by clicking on the button at the top of the page.

Thanks!

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