Not a celebrity yet? Then you’re going to need some help growing your Twitter following. We already know that Twitter is a powerful tool for building an engaged audience while seamlessly directing users to your website or blog. So how do you increase the impact of your marketing efforts? By getting more relevant followers. These four tips will have you expanding your reach in no time.
Follow relevant users
There are several apps out there that make it easier to find users that are genuinely interested in you and your brand. Tweetdeck allows you to steadily grow followers by searching for users based on location, age, industry and keywords. Tweepi helps clean up Twitter accounts by using stats and analytics, making it easy to get rid of inactive or irrelevant users. Using Twitter’s search tool, you can also find new accounts to follow by doing a relevant hashtag search and then engaging with users by answering questions, mentioning them, or retweeting. The math here is simple: follow + engage = users will reciprocate.
Schedule your tweets
Studies show the more you tweet, the more followers you’re likely to have. Studies also show that you have about… zero minutes each day to spend tweeting. Okay, that’s not an official study, but I bet it’s true for you. Using tools like Hootsuite, Buffer, or my favorite – Social Essentials – allows you to schedule your tweets in advance so you have a consistent flow of tweets in your Twitter stream. This means you can schedule a chunk of time to plan your content for the next few days, weeks, even months (our outsource the entire custom content creation and save even more time), and then check a very big to-do off your daily list. Save time and increase engagement? Well, that’s a no-brainer.
Tweet some inspiration
Quotes are bite-sized bundles of wisdom, motivation, and inspiration that people love to share. This is probably why they tend to see more engagement than other kinds of tweets. Brainyquote and Goodreads both have a searchable database by topic and author, making it easy to find the perfect quote to align with your message and branding. If you want to take engagement a step further, use an app like Canva or Buffer’s image creator, Pablo, and slap that quote on top of a graphic. Using an image on Twitter increases retweets by 28%!
Join a twitter chat
Engaging with others in your industry is paramount to growing your following. Twitter chats offer a way to connect with new people in your niche, gather priceless information, and establish your name as an industry expert. Find relevant chats and add your expertise to the conversation. Then follow and engage with the other participants from the event.
Don’t dismiss the power of networking via Twitter: setting aside time to engage pays off with returns in the form of increased thought leader status, brand exposure, media attention, and sales. So keep tweeting, baby!
