The same question comes up when talking about Twitter marketing and promotion: How can I get more Twitter followers?  When users are just starting out on Twitter, they don’t have many connections and don’t know many people in the Twitterverse.  And with just a handful of followers and resulting low credibility, no one is getting in line to follow them.

Working on Twitter for the first time can be intimidating.  Your list of followers is tiny, no one is paying attention to your Tweets, and your time is not well spent. Even after being on Twitter for a while, you may notice your follower count plateaus. Marketing on Twitter is often though of as a numbers game.  The more followers, the more credibility and reach.

Quantity vs. Quality

The old adage applies to Twitter, its a choice between quantity vs quality.  The first thing to do when you think about strategies to increase the number of Twitter followers is to specify who you would like to be in your list of Twitter followers, is it really important to have lots of Twitter followers, or is it best to get Twitter followers that are most likely interested on the topics on which you are tweeting. There is a distinct difference between quality followers and quantity.  If your using Twitter for your business its important to ensure that the followers you follow are interested in your topic, so you need to balance all your activities to get numbers or activities aimed at earning specific followers in your target market – this is because having lots of random followers may turn off the targeted Twitter followers. So always think about how and why you are using Twitter when deciding which strategies fit for you.  In most cases, quality wins the argument.

The “Dark Side”

There’s one online marketing technique that goes against the grain of normal methods.  The “Dark Side” or “Black Hat” methods.  These techniques are usually against the rules with the online social platforms like Twitter and Facebook.  We recommend to people, who are on Twitter, not use the “Dark Side” techniques, because your account might be penalize or disabled, these techniques can put out all your legitimate followers and end up making you look very bad towards them. Here, are some tips clearly noted, as “Dark Side”. You will encounter all these methods as you go along, and it’s important for you to detect some techniques that may give you more problems than benefits.  In our opinion, using automation and SPAMing/cloaking/being sketchy are two completely different things.

Techniques to Get You More Twitter Followers

1. Use Relevant Content to get Twitter Followers.

Your content is needed to be relevant and interesting to the users you want to follow. Find out and provide content to your followers on a regular basis and you’ll see how your followers grow. Also, include some other types of content like straight messages/comments on other topics, links to your own made articles, links to other materials, surveys, images, etc. – anything that may help you look worthy.

Posting some trending topics may get you lots of Twitter followers that are more likely interested in trending topics. As many twitter users post about any general topics as well as those different topics to their businesses this could lead to attract more users, but they won’t be interested in your other topics as well, so balance all the topics you post.

The Dark Side: Post links only to trending topics. Look some interesting articles that are already posted, package them us as your own and report them, without giving any credit to the original poster. Include links only to your own topics and no links to other type of sources. This might be a bad way because you show yourself will show how not very helpful you are to your followers.

2. Make a Profile that will get you more followers.

After finding all people to follow using “Who to follow” users can also find your profile by using this search engine and Twitter tools if the information for your profile is relevant and of interest to them.

•          Your Twitter profile ‘Picture’ can make a difference if users read your existing post and follow you. Using your own picture is a lot convincing on increasing number followers rather than having some icon. It helps people to know who you are when meeting face to face. An icon maybe better, but its best to have your own personal picture and often not to change it as it will confuse some Twitter users.

•          Make a good ‘Name’ will be based on your overall Twitter technique, having an appealing name can be a great strategy because it most likely follow you. Consider using good keywords in your name, so people may see you faster when it comes up in searches.

•          ‘Location’ is important if you want to have followers near your area, or your place is relevant to your posts.

•          Add some links to your most relevant site under ‘Web’. Including social profile site can be a plan B if you don’t have a site to include; but be sure that it has reliable information about you. Having non-links might turn-off some Twitter users. Its time to make your own page, creating a special landing page on your site specifically welcoming those users that have arrived at your site from Twitter.

•          ‘Bio’ is the important thing, write some things about yourself that impress the respectable followers and be sure to include some high-traffic keywords‘keywords’, as well. These are the keywords that people will be searching.

Update your background!  There are tons of resources out there for Twitter backgrounds.  Find something relevant for your background, or even better, have a custom Twitter background made.  You can get a custom background for $5 on Fiverr.  Having a custom background keeps your readers engaged and builds trust and relevancy.

The Dark Side: Putting a sexy image for your picture. It does not actually work for people. You list some high-traffic keywords in your Twitter  profile so that it will come up on searche results whenever someone searches.

3. Only Follow people you really want to follow.

Following people is not that easy, but many people follow everyone that follows them. Check out the tab “who to Follow” on Twitter, and see who twitter suggest you to follow also you can search it for yourself. Always remember to follow those users that are prospects, influencers, clients in your industry, media etc.

The Dark Side: To people, who are in to quantity rather than quality of list of Twitter followers; follow as many users as possible, it doesn’t matter who they are of what their interested are. Lots of people (mostly bots) will follow you back and your follower count will grow.  Then you can unfollow the unimportant Twitter accounts and keep your Twitter TFF ratio in tact. Some users will eventually unfollow you, but many will not. Twitter has disabled many accounts that have done this, so watch out the numbers of people you follow and unfollow at once.

4. Interaction with your Twitter Friends.

•          Always listen to people that want to interact with you and ‘@reply’ to join the conversations or start your own with the. In this case, you get to know more about them and chances are they will follow you back.

•          ‘Retweet’ post by these people, using the old version “RT” so that the user will appreciate that you are retweeting and may then to follow you.

The Dark Side: You need to retweet everything the Twitter orofiles you are following post, and in turn they will follow you back and return the retweet favors.  Twitter may eventually disable your account if they found out that the number of retweets is not normal by any regular post.

•          #FF or #FollowFriday is a common thing where you can ask some people to follow. If you #ff those people, it would get their attention, and they may be thankful enough to give you a mention to their followers. The best chance is to a have a higher quality #ff if you include best quality things about the follower you want them to follow.

One Pleasant #FollowFriday showing why you need to follow the user.

•          Be thankful and generous. Thank those users who follow you where you mentioned them so that others think to follow you, as well.

5. Find people that INFLUENCE the people you want.

•          Some new users jump out being shy into an existing conversation, but that’s what Twitter is all about. The Tweeting or post is for all to see, if a user want it to share to limited people only private they’d go offline.

•          You as a long-time user on Twitter should help the newer users, especially if they don’t know around Twitter, and if you are making a good effort on helping them, they eventually follow you and mention you on their tweets. This is one way of building a strong bond relationship with your twitter followers; don’t be shy to ask for a Retweet.

•          If you particularly interact with your desired followers be sure to watch every post you made so you don’t appear like your needy or just a local-businessman that wants to sell your product all day, which will be a huge turn off to your followers and your existing followers.

•          Be aggressive on looking at profiles of your followers that you want to follow and then see who they follow, if you interact with these followers they may follow you and their followers may follow you eventually.

The Dark Side: Be sure to ‘mentions’ and ‘@replies’ few people promoting your businesses and services without any other context involved. This could be spam and can get you blocked by some users and Twitter might disable your account for abuse behavior. If you use SEO spam and email, many followers often to get away of being blocked, if only for a short of getting attention; but it won’t give you long relationships with your twitter followers.

6. You have all the time in the world, including getting more Twitter Friends.

If your followers are online, make sure you too are online so that you can interact with your twitter people in real time. Post some context regularly so that they will see how active you are of giving real information; but don’t post a lot because people might take it as spam and eventually unfollow you. Find the right time on posting context.

7. SPECIAL OFFERS for your Followers

Some surveys say that users usually retweet links that are useful and an interesting content rather than random special offer, if you choose to post lots of special offers this might be just the reason why they follow you and eventually unfollow you if you lose your special offer. This won’t bring you long-time relationships with some of your twitter friends.

8. Use your advantage among your Twitter competitions.

Competitions among others are quite difficult. Twitter competitions, like special offers, may bring more twitter followers but make sure to make special competitions that is well organized and worth taking for so that many users will attract and the right kind of followers will become your long-term followers also it can avoid numerous conflicts over the other competition.

The Dark Side: Regularly run competitions that encourage users to tweet and retweet a post or link over and over, or to let them use different Twitter accounts to tweet and retweet and get more chances to win. These techniques are clearly against Twitter guidelines, so you run the risk of losing your Twitter account.. This show the techniques may look you bad, and you will lose lots of twitter followers.

9. LIVE TWEET Events and TV Shows

There are some countries that some Twitter people are following TV shows together, and you will found numerous of people to follow, during these live tweeting sessions. This sees that Social Medias is a big threat to the TV industry because people are reading use to their social media channels while not watching and not paying attention to the shows and commercials. This is true in other places and for popular TV shows or celebrities you are likely to find a group of people on Twitter that shares your interest. The types of shows that usually good with ‘live tweets’ streams are the live and reality shows like Academy Awards, sporting events, The Apprentice, etc.

‘Live Tweeting’ is a big part of some conferences on the Twitter world, other events and webinars (online and offline), particularly those related to the technology and Internet. Posting things related to the said TV Show might be a solid way to start an interaction with other people on Twitter and eventually might follow you after. This will be a good bonus to you because of its huge exposure and the reaction of the people on Twitter will be extravagant. Include the #hashtag for the ‘live-tweeting’ session so that your tweets will be seen during the live sessions, and after if they do a search.

The Dark Side: Post the latest promotional message using the #hashtag of a “live tweeting” session to gain popularity among users who are on the session. Lots people may see you post, but most will be irritate by it. It’s better work on building the bond of the relationship towards your followers, then promoting yourself to them nicer later.

10. Use #HASHTAGS for your topics.

Tagging other twitter users simultaneously to your post is strongly not recommended. Hashtags is better on if the topic is not used in your messages. Some industries used Hashtags in a regular basis then it would be a great deal to use the agreed Hashtags. I expect that people on Twitter will be more aware on Hashtags and eventually overuse it in hopes of showing up in real time Google searches, but this tend to be incorrect because your messages will be hard to read and not easily can be retweeted. It’s better if you use the desired word in your messages and it will still show up in the searche results as well.

#hashtags- are a visual aid to help people see specifically what you are posts are all about.

11. TWITTER DIRECTORIES AND APPS that will help you get more Twitter followers.

There are lots of Twitter Applications that claim to help Twitter users to get your more followers than the manual adding. Well, they help you on looking users with similar interest to you or show you who you want to follow and don’t want to follow, etc. Any purpose that you want to use on this Twitter Apps it only shows to make you feel comfortable with how they use your information. The applications will auto-follow or send direct email or messages for you, ensure the right balance of actions as Twitter monitors and restrict the number of actions that can occur within short periods of time.

 

•          Tweet Adder – in our opinion, this is the #1 tool when it comes to increasing your follower count

•          http://friendorfollow.com – it helps you show a person who is not following you.

•          http://tweeteffect.com – it shows tweets that gained or lose you followers.

•          http://wefollow.com – Twitter’s directory of tagged topics.

•          http://www.tweriod.com – it shows when your followers are online.

•          http://klout.com – a unique app that measure a users influence to you based on Twitter metrics.

•          http://refollow.com – manage follows/followers.

•          http://www.twellow.com – Twitter users Pages.

•          http://twitaholic.com – it automatically ranks users by their numbers of followers and provides statistics if you sign up.

•          http://twiends.com – find similar interests.

•          http://paper.li – it provides you a daily or weekly online ‘paper’ showing link posted by the targeted people you follow. People being included in tweets is really appreciated and come out that your account will be brought a number of new followers and eventually may follow you.

•          http://tweetpdif.com – compares followers of two users.

•          http://twtrfrnd.com – another app that compares followers between two users.

•          http://twidiumapp.com – $45 after a 7 day trial. It will send follow request.

•          http://socialnewswatch.com/top-twitter-users – the top twitter account will follow you back.

Many of these apps are free or have a free version, and many offer premium versions, so remember to look for apps that will suit your needs.

The Dark Side: Don’t waste your time developing good relationships with your followers. Instead, buy more followers!

•          Buy followers yourself – use cash, gifts or donations to purchase followers.

•          Buy followers through a service such as Usocial (100,000 for $3,500)

•          Buy an existing account that has a huge number of followers. This may be good if the account is related to your interest or business.

If you buy followers, let us know how you did it. We have read things about it but and haven’t tried ourselves.  We would love to hear some feedback on how it works.

12. Bring up your Twitter account whenever possible

•          Use the Twitter profile link and post it to your other websites.

•          Business cards or letterhead or any kind of printed material.

•          Other Social networking sites.

•          Advertising online and offline.

•          Tell people to follow you on Twitter in some groups, or events, etc.

13. MEMBER on OFFLINE COMMUNTIY to join Twitter.

Having active organizations of people will make them a much stronger presence online people. If all of the members in your group on Twitter participate, promoting themselves and the said organizations will benefit all. Look every following group of people as a potential follower.

•          Your boss, colleagues, etc.

•          Friends and family.

•          People you worked at in previous employment.

•          Member of offline networking groups.

•          People that share the same interest with you: sport teams, arts organizations, clubs, etc.

Your full participation of using Twitter can result in influence of lots of people.  This is the foundation for Marketing on Twitter.  A new user won’t pull thousands and thousands of followers on Twitter with the white hat methods, but you will get solid-real active twitter users that will give you good referrals for you. Quality vs Quantity. Your circle of friends is the key to reach out to the community.

Try these techniques. If you do have other techniques that have helped you since you started marketing on Twitter, we would live to hear about them and how they worked for you.  Please post in the comments.

Tagged as: get twitter followers, increase Twitter follower count, twitter followers, twitter marketing