Four Easy Ways to Increase Your Followers on Twitter

May 12, 2010 Posted by Asma Chang in Blog, How To Of SM, Social Media, Top News

Four Easy Ways to Increase Your Followers on Twitter

Here’s the thing: I’m not going to tell you your marketing objective should be to increase your followers. It can NEVER be your objective; unless you’re a celebrity or a star. But if you fall into any of the domains such as a marketing professional, an entrepreneur or a blogger, your ultimate objective for using social media sites must be to i) spread awareness for your blog or website, ii) generate demand; and ultimately, iii) convert visitors into customers; or in case of bloggers, convert them into loyal readers. So once the goal is settled, then we can work on maximizing the number of followers as a means to achieve that goal. In simple words, increasing your followers is only a way to reach your marketing objective.

Now that we’ve got that cleared, let me give you four very simple but practical ways to increase the number of followers on Twitter. This post can be particularly helpful to anyone who still hasn’t become familiarized with the Twitter Power.

Here’s how you can do it:

Give More Details About Yourself: Tell people who you are; what you do and what you’re interested in. You can do this in a number of ways. There’s an option where you can write your short bio. Utilize that. Another way can be to use a customized background with more details such as your email address, telephone number or skype name. You can create your own personalized background or use Twitback.com.

Build Relationship: Social media is all about relationships. It’s about conversation. Don’t use it just to pitch your products or blog content. Engage with your followers; talk to them; reply to their tweets; thank them for following you; recommend them to others in the Follow Friday trend.

RT@Mike_Stelzner Retweeting is the best form of flattery says @GuyKawasaki: And it works. Retweeting is also another way of engaging with people; and a very powerful one too. Some people think Twitter is all about sharing content of your own blog. But the fact is that it can work for you if you even retweet others’ content. The best practice is to combine both strategies i.e. share your own content plus retweet others’.

Don’t follow spammers. From the above tip, an important one emerges. Don’t follow spammers and don’t retweet their tweets. It may burn your reputation to ashes and even get your existing followers unfollow you. There’s no harm tweeting/retweeting about a product/service if it’s useful and relevant. But sharing tweets like ‘Get 100 followers in 24 hours’ or ‘Become a millionaire today’ can only end up annoying your followers and plunge your chances of getting more followers.

Last but not least, it’s the consistent effort that makes it all worthwhile. Don’t lose hope. I haven’t. Practice these techniques and let me know how it goes.