You might use a search engine optimization or other content marketing strategy to attract visitors to your website, but how do you get them to join your conversation on Twitter? If you build it, they won’t come -- unless you follow these 5 tips for getting Twitter followers.
1. Provide relevant content: Typical advice from a content marketing company, right? Maybe so, but it’s dead on. Identify your target audience on Twitter (customers, perhaps) and tailor the content towards them.
Compelling content will get picked up by a follower, who will then retweet it (i.e. share it with their followers). If it’s compelling enough, or if these potential Twitter followers are exposed to your content with enough frequency, at some point they’re going to follow you.
Providing frequent updates is also key to growing your Twitter follower base the organic way. Depending on your business, the right amount of tweeting might be three times a week, daily or several times a day. Whatever frequency you choose, make sure it’s not oppressive -- or you’ll lose followers quickly.
2. Use hashtags: Hashtags (#Nashville, for example) allow your tweets to be searched by keyword. Make sure you’re using the right hashtag to categorize your tweets -- a keyword search on Twitter can help you identify this, as can online tools such as Twubs and Tagalus. Then, work that hashtag into your posts. When someone searches for that topic, your tweet will be among the results that appear. Some users embed the hashtag into the post (Wow, it sure is cold in #Nashville these days), while others prefer to append it to the end of a tweet (Wow, it’s so cold outside #Nashville). Don’t use too many hashtags in a post or it will become unreadable (not to mention annoying).
3. Promote your Twitter presence: Once you’ve established a routine on Twitter and have a few dozen posts under your belt, it’s time to start promoting your presence. Your website, email newsletter, even business cards should promote your presence on Twitter. An added bonus: Tell them why they should follow you -- special deals? company news? industry updates?
4. Follow people: You should follow the people whom you think should follow you. The reasoning is they’ll follow you back. Don’t be fooled by how simple this sounds. Finding those people involves checking out your followers’ followers, searching for specific users, and using online tools like WeFollow, which is a directory of Twitter users organized by interests. Another tip: So you don’t throw off your balance of following vs. followers, follow 10 new users at a time and wait for the numbers to balance back out. It’s OK to follow more users than are following you, but having a sizable discrepancy can send the message, “Spammer!” or at the very least, “Here’s my Twitter account, which is not worth following.”
5. Scratch some backs: If social media has taught us anything, it’s that it plays to people’s egos. Want someone to follow you? Give them a Twitter shout-out in the form of a retweet or mention. If they don’t bite and start following you, try again. Some users will never follow you, so don’t spend too much time on a single potential follower. Besides, Twitter has some 200 million users (and growing), so you’re sure to find someone else who wants to listen to what your company has to say.
Bonus way to get more Twitter followers: Whenever you have a post like this, always ask readers to follow you on Twitter. For example, please follow @hammockinc to be updated whenever we add a new post to Hammock.com. Two other Hammock-related Twitter accounts to follow are Rex's unique one-letter username, @R (6,500 followers) and the Twitter feed for Hammock Inc.-owned SmallBusiness.com, @smallbusiness (9,300 followers).
