How do I continously increase my following on Twitter?

Hi Jenny:

There are a few things you can use as free automated tools to help increase your followers but nothing will be able to automate building the relationships.

You can use www.twollo.com and set it up to auto-follow people who tweet specific words.

Or you can use TweetLater to have keyword digests sent to you. From there you could review those tweets and then manually follow those people.

In either case be cautious so that you don't follow/unfollow too fast. If you want a good tool to clean up people who are not showing you the follow love my favorite is www.tweepular.com. (I normally run it about once a month). Though the last two times I used it it showed people were not following me that truly were (so use it at your own risk).

Hope these tips help!

Michelle @mmangen

There are various free tools for mutually linking followers some of which insert an advert once per 24 hours into your tweets. Just Google and find one that you like. I used one and went from 10 to 1000 followers in days. I then broke the link but there are still stragglers coming through every day since. I'm not convinced that it was a good idea as I'm not promoting or selling anything on Twitter (yet!).

Getting the right targeted traffic to follow is a bigger issue. I've had escort girls, religious groups, and cookery experts all start to follow me one week at a time. Very strange experience!

I unfollow those people who tweet every 2 minutes or so as I have found that they effectively block me from seeing other users. To keep followers I would suggest that you watch your frequency of tweeting and that you make the content relevant and interesting. It doesn't always have to be about your business - throw in the odd tweets on news stories or funny articles that you have seen. Try and retweet interesting articles from others as that will encourage people to check you out and maybe spread the word.

I would avoid using an automated tweeter as that can drive people away. Personalisation is the key but it is more time consuming. e.g. "Sunny in the Bay area today & have you seen the news at xyz website" is better than just the second part of that Tweet.

Hope this gives you food for thought & good luck!

You say that you feel like you are wasting valuable time because your followers seems to unfollow you. Their actions are a direct reflection of their engagement with your message (or lack thereof) — if someone unfollows you it is a sign that they feel that YOU are wasting THEIR valuable time. Gaining a following on Twitter is about more than just racking up large numbers or using bulk follow-unfollow software to bulk-up your following with random unengaged followers. Gaining followers on Twitter requires balancing a few distinct elements. Here are some tips to make sure you are engaged with the right audience and more likely to keep them following your every tweet.

1) Develop a bio which clearly distinguishes who you are and contains keywords relevant to your target audience — words they are likely to use in searches.

2) Search for the people whose topical tweets relate to your areas of business and interest. Follow them. Pay attention to the topics which most engage their audience

3) Begin a cycle of engagement. Post links to articles of interest to your core audience, leverage the power of the people you follow by RT’ing relevant posts, @reply to people and engage in micro-conversations, link to your own company’s content and press releases (but not too much). Remember to use #hashtags and words which are likely to be searched by other tweeple. A nice linkbait-crafted Tweet doesn’t hurt either to help you catch someone’s interest.

4) Measure, measure, measure. There are a lot of tools available which provide quick and easy tracking of any links you tweet. HootSuite (http://www.hootsuite.com) is my favorite, allowing you to both shrink long URLs as well as track statistics on how many people clicked on any given link. This is a great way to tell what topics engage your audience and which ones leave them cold.

5) Don’t be afraid to unfollow people. It’s a Twitter reality — sometimes you follow someone who just doesn’t add value to your Twitter experience. Maybe they don’t ever Tweet about anything of interest, maybe they overtweet and make it impossible to view other people’s tweets, maybe they are just spamming the heck out of you every day. Use unfollow to groom your audience, shape the quality of the people you listen to and that will influence the quality of your following.

You can’t remove the ’social’ from ’social media.’ Prove yourself to be a valuable information resource for your audience and you will gain followers – engaged followers. Get involved with other Twitter ‘influencers’ (people who create and promote content and already have strong followings) and you will show that you are committed to more than just placing advertisements in the Tweetsphere – this will give you reputation and credibility which translates into followers of value.

Dont worry about how many followers you have. In fact, forget it in the initial stages.

Find people of interest to the business, to network with, or who are considered authorities or a valuable resource. Follow them. Dont expect a follow back.

Some will follow back though. Get Networking. Speak to them, Retweet their stuff. Dont force sales or ask for favours from Day 1. How would you like it if the reverse was the same. Get on their blogs, leave comments, make yourself visible, offer advice, help, assistance and basically be human. It will bear fruit in many more ways than you might think.

Just don't look at it as an opportunity to communicate with vast amounts of people who will drop everything and run and buy your stuff. Lets get real here, that doesn't happen in the real world and is even harder to achieve on twitter.Also the Unfollow buttons can be pressed very quickly and also the spam and block button are right behind it.

I would never recommend using anything automated on twitter. Check out the big guys and see how they are using it (Ford and JetBlue are good examples). Then decide how to make twitter work for you.

At least that's just my advice, hope it helps you in making the decisions about how you use Twitter.

Tactic 1:

The best advisor I've found for helping me grow and manage my Twitter followers is Jesse Newhart (@jessenewhart in Twitter and http://jessenewhart.com/). Do what he suggests. His tactics work.

His best how-to videos are members-only but his ideas are definitely worth the price tag of joining his mailing list. Jesse is very respectful of your email address and he doesn't spam. His periodic newsletters are also filled with great ideas.

Tactic 2:

Segment you twitter stream into categories of interest and then participate in those conversations. For example, one of my streams is segmented by the keywords "social crm, #scrm" and variations. Every business day, I spend some time reviewing the conversations and tweeting in where I have something relevant to say.

Regular participation will allow you to gain credibility and build trust with other tweeters and that helps contribute to attracting followers.

As part of this tactic, make regular use of hashtags (#) in your tweets too. They're a great way to allow tweets on a particular category to congregate.

TweetDeck is a great tool to segment your stream.

Tactic 3:

Post links to any content you generate. Periodically repost links because those articles may be seen by a different group of followers. Be sure to use # where there are groups related to your topic. Or if none already exist, then launch your own hashtag.

Thanks guys for the info. I'm gonna try some of them.

Follow others and they will follow you