How To Gain Twitter Followers

TWITTER TIPS

The following tips will help you gain more followers on your twitter accounts, and to maintain those followers.  Dan Zarella did a scientific study on over 40 million tweets and retweets and came up with some amazing data about Twitter.  I am going to share lots of tips and tricks to help you gain active followers.

GETTING READY TO GAIN FOLLOWERS

1st -  I want to point out that your profile should be completed.  Have a profile picture, a short bio, a link to your shop etc.  Otherwise people will be less likely to follow you back because you don't seem "real" or established.  So if you haven't work on your twitter account, get a nice background up, and profile picture etc.

2nd - You can only follow so many people on twitter.  This is based upon a ratio of the number of people following you.  So the more followers you have the more people you can follow.  With this in mind consider using a program such as www.manageflitter.com  or unfollow.com.  These programs will automatically unfollow people who never follow you back. 

3rd - Consider setting up an account with hootsuite, or tweetdeck.  Both of these programs help you track multiple social networking sites (facebook, twitter etc.) and allow you to schedule tweets in advance.  You can see anyone that mentions you in a tweet or RT's your tweets. It is great to help you organize and prepare to kick your account up a notch.

MAKE YOUR TWEETS AND RT's COUNT

People aren't going to follow you if you aren't active, if you don't help RT, if you don't provide solid content etc.  So here are some tips on how to tweet, what to tweet, even WHEN to tweet.

1.  Try to balance your content with shared content.  I have read multiple times now that when you tweet something promotional you should then try to share 5-10 tweets about something else before tweeting something promotional again. 

2.  Peek tweeting hours - 9am - 5pm (use hootsuite or tweetdeck to schedule tweets during those hours even if you aren't home!)  4pm is the HIGHEST PEAK time.  And there is a huge event every single Friday called Follow Friday so you will get the most bang out of tweet on a Friday around 4pm. 

3.  Interact with others, don't just post your posts or do RT's.  Some twitter experts claim to have 75% of their tweets as @replies.  Meaning @promofrenzy, a direct reply to something within your twitter feeds.  This way your followers feel you are listening and you are engaging them directly.  (this can be hard if you have a ton of followers or limited time but you do the best you can)

FINDING FOLLOWERS

It is really important you try to target your target market.  You can do this by searching by specific categories, local businesses, or even searching for etsy, artfire shops, small businesses etc.

1.  First step is to connect with friends.  You can look up gmail, yahoo and aol accounts and even link your twitter to Linkedin, Pinterest, or facebook accounts . So start with friends you already have and see if they are on twitter and connect. 

2.   Here are some programs that can help you find local consumers:

www.localtweeps.com

www.trendsmap.com

3.  Follow people in your industry, niche and topic area.  For example, being in the jewelry business maybe I can find beading magazines to follow  You can use:

www.tweetadder.com

www.wefollow.com

www.listorious.com

www.twellow.com

4.  Follow from Users' Twitter lists and "following" links.  Search twitter for a person or organization.  Then click on their profile page, and click on the link labeled, "following".  You can then follow their followers.

You can also look through twitter lists on specific topics.  (follow individual users from their profile page, not just the entire list.  Otherwise you only see what the person managing the list is doing and won't get a lot of follow backs)

5.  Participate in #FollowFriday.  You promote other people worth following by recommending followers.  Just select someone you follow, write a short explanation of why, and tag it with #FollowFriday or #FF

Your tweet could look something like this, "@galla15 You may like these Etsy shops, @sewinggranny @promofrenzy (List as many as you can in your 144 characters) then put #followFriday at the end.

6.  Consider starting your own twitter list.  We had a promofrenzy list at one point actually!  :( 

7.  Participate in Twitter chats.  Use these programs to find active chats on topics in your market.

www.tweetgrid.com

www.tweetchat.com

8.  Answer questions and offer advice.  To find hashtags that are of interest in your area use

www.wthashtag.com  Once you know the hot topic you can ask questions or try to answer questions that seem HOT.

INTERESTING TIPS

In my research I found out some keywords that will help you get more RT's.

1.  Newer, shorter services, such as bit.ly, ow.ly, and is.gd, were much likelier to get retweeted than older, longer services, such as TinyURL. Ouch.

2.  Keywords to use: 

The # 10 is very popular (top 10 lists)

Asking people, Please Retweet helps.

Using the word Twitter helps believe it or not! 

Social media

Blog or new blog post

How to

3.  Use Punctuations.  85% of RT's have some form of punctuations in them!

SUMMARY

Don't get overwhelmed by all the resources and information provided in here.  If you have been on twitter for awhile these programs/resources are for you.  If you are just starting out, start with the basics.

Get your account, profile, pics set up.

Find your friends from other social networks and link up your multiple accounts to start.;

Start following others, and RT for others, replying to others to get your followers active and others interested in linking up with you.

Have fun interacting and finding your target market through twitter.