1. Leverage Other Profiles
Do you have an existing online profile somewhere outside of Twitter (big or small)? Use it to springboard into Twitter. If it’s a blog, mention that you’re using Twitter in a post and link to it from your profile and contact pages. If you’re on Facebook use one of the numerous tools available to drag in your Tweets to facebook. Add it to your email signature, business card, mention it in interviews or guest posts that you might do…. etc. The same applies with any online (or even offline) presence that you have – link to your Twitter page and link to it often (if you’d like to connect with me on Twitter my feed is here).
2. Tweet and Tweet Often – But Create Space for Reactions
The more active you are on Twitter the more likely you are to have someone find you from within Twitter and add you as someone that they are following. Every Tweet you do comes up on the Twitter Public Timeline – so upping your Tweet numbers can help have you appear more often there.
Warning – Tweet too regularly and about nothing worthwhile and you run the risk of losing followers. What I’ve found is that on days that I’m more talkative than others that there can come points where I’m talking so much that my followers don’t have room to respond. Twitter can actually become quite confusing once you have too many trains of thought going all at once so I try to stick to one topic at a time and create pauses between them to let others interact.
3. Be Conversational
Apart from a good influx of new followers when I announced I was using Twitter at first the days that I get most new followers are those days that I interact with other Twitter users. Everytime you reply to someone and have them reply to you your Twitter ID appears in the feeds of others which exposes you to potentially thousands upon thousands of other Twitter users. Asking questions is perhaps the best way to get conversational on Twitter. Get 10 people to answer a question you’ve Tweeted and if even just one person signs up from each of those 10 people’s replies to you you have 10 new followers. Just as important is to participate in other people’s Tweets also – reply to their questions and ideas as much as possible.
The key with this approach is to be conversational about topics that will interest others. For example if you ask a very general question like ‘what cereal do you use’ and get a lot of answers – but i suspect you’ll get more answers AND new followers if the question was more relevant to people’s lives in some way (read on for more on this).
Another thought on the ‘art of conversation’ on Twitter is that I find I do better when I’m not talking about me. No one likes to hang around with people who just talk about themselves – so get the balance right between talking about yourself and talking about others and other topics of interest.
4. Provide Value
Tweeting on a personal level is fun and for many that’s as far as it goes – but if you’re interested in growing your Twitter influence you need to provide your followers (and potential followers) with value. It’s the same principle as growing a blog – if you help enhance people’s lives in some way they are more likely to want to track with you and read more of what you have to say. As a result your conversations should ‘matter’ on some level. Sure you can throw in personal tweets and have some fun with it – but unless you’re providing something useful to people (information, entertainment, news, education etc) they probably won’t follow you for long.
5. Tweet in Peak Times
Last week I tracked when I had new twitter followers add me and found (as I expected) that the frequency of ‘adds’ where made during business hours in the USA. My being situated in Australia can have some positives and negatives but one of the things I don’t enjoy about it is that I miss out on a lot of interaction with my followers who are on the other side of the world from me. I try to be online when the US wakes up (evenings for me) so as to make the most of the opportunities of being awake in this overlap time (similarly first thing in the morning for me can be good as my US friends are sometimes still at work or online at home in their early evenings). Tweeting during these times only increases the chances of someone finding you and adding you as someone to follow.
Bonus Tip
These are some of the things that I’ve noticed about my own Twitter follower numbers. I probably should add that for me it’s never really been a concerted effort. I do have the advantage of being able to do #1 quite well quite naturally but my last tip would be to just be yourself and Tweet form the heart. Don’t stress too much about the numbers but connect genuinely with the Twitter followers you already have and let the rest take care of itself!
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