Twitter offers a tool to search your email contacts to find people to follow, but that isn’t the best place to start. Many experts recommend taking a targeted approach to following people on Twitter and start with a few experts in your field, especially if you want to build an effective Twitter stream on subjects that interest you.
Follow Other People
Find people with interests similar to yours and follow them. That, in turn, will help you get Twitter followers. This is a basic and quick way to get followers on Twitter who add value to your Twitter experience. As you start following people, a snowball will slowly start rolling. The people you choose to follow will often check you out on Twitter when they see you follow them. If they like what they see, they may click the “follow” button and become one of your followers. When that happens, other people will see you on Twitter.
A Good Profile Helps Get Followers
Complete your Twitter profile before you do much following or tweeting. Invest time in learning the basics of how to use Twitter. Too many novices charge ahead with no clue of how Twitter works. Complete your profile and have interesting tweets in your timeline before following the people who you would like to follow you back. Otherwise, if you haven’t tweeted or filled out your profile, these folks may click away without electing to follow you. Make sure that, at a minimum, you have a photo of yourself on your profile page and have written a few words about yourself or your business in the bio area. Clearly identify yourself, too. People rarely follow mysterious, cute, or clever names without knowing who’s behind the Twitter handle, particularly in professional circles. You should follow people because the more people who follow you, the more likely their followers are to check you out as a follower of someone they follow. This is the snowball effect: You follow people, and some of them will follow you. Then some of their followers will check you out.
Follow Those Who Follow You, or at Least Many of Them
If you don’t follow the people who follow you, some of them may get irked and unfollow you. In addition to being good Twitter etiquette, following your followers may cause them to engage with you publicly on their timelines, attracting more attention from their followers. Again, it’s the snowball effect.
Tweet Regularly to Get Twitter Followers
Tweeting at least once a day helps get Twitter followers. Updating frequently (but not too frequently) also makes more people want to follow you. What is the right frequency for tweeting? Ideally, at least once or twice a day. If you tweet more often than that, use a Twitter tool to time your tweets and space them out; don’t send a barrage all at once.
Tweet About Interesting Topics and Use Popular Hashtags
The more you tweet about topics and hashtags that other people are interested in, the more likely they are to see your tweets when searching for those keywords and hashtags. If they like a tweet you send, they may click your Twitter handle to check you out. Tweeting high-quality content about topics relevant to your followers’ interests is the best way to build and retain a large following on Twitter in the long run. It takes time to build a following this way, but your ability to retain followers will be greater than if you get followers on Twitter quickly using the automatic follower strategies.
Thou Shall Not Spam
A word about how NOT to get followers on Twitter: The quickest way to lose followers is to use your tweets to advertise or to sell products or services. People are on Twitter to converse and learn. Twitter is not a TV.
Consider More Than Just Numbers on Twitter
This is also known as the quality vs. quantity debate. So far, we’ve mostly talked about the numbers game, how to get followers of any kind. But if you use Twitter to promote your career or business, be careful to get Twitter followers who are appropriate for your goals. That means choosing a Twitter strategy and targeting followers thoughtfully rather than taking a scattershot approach. Much debate occurs over whether people should pursue quantity or quality as they try to get Twitter followers. Would you rather have more followers of any kind or fewer followers who are interested in the same things you are? Most experts advocate quality over quantity, though both have a role in any strategy for using Twitter in marketing. If you care about quality, avoid tactics for getting Twitter followers that might backfire by alienating the people you want to keep and causing them to unfollow you. Many auto-follow methods fall into this category. If you use Twitter for business, most social media experts will tell you that it doesn’t pay to overdo it on following people or getting too many followers. In the long run, it can reduce the value you get from Twitter by cluttering your Twitter stream with messages from people whose interests don’t overlap with yours.
