Serious Social Media users, bloggers, and business owners can use specific strategies to greatly increase their Twitter followers or possibly use a Twitter Marketing Tool to generate an income.
The free tracking and graphs in Twitter stats tools such as TwitterCounter make it easy to determine which strategies are most effective. The jumps you see here are from testing a new method:
The jump shown on February 8, 2011 is 233 followers; the larger jump on February 17 is 455 followers. Interested in what caused the jumps? I started following as many of the people following my favorite Social Media Expert Kristi Hines aka @Kikolani as Twitter would allow because Kristi and I write about very similar subjects so her followers are likely to be interested in what I write too.
Once I follow Kristi’s followers I will follow my other favorite collaborators starting with Online Business Tips advisor Michele Welch aka @NewBizBlogger who created the collaborative Business Blogging Tips ebook The Synergy of Business and Blogging. I put links to their Twitter accounts in my BizSugar post about Small Business Advice.
HOW TO IMPLEMENT THIS TWITTER STRATEGY:
- I do my following and unfollowing in the wee hours of the early morning or very late at night. Apparently if you follow or unfollow too many too fast during business hours Twitter may block your access for 24 hours. That has never happened to me even though I have used this strategy at least half a dozen separate times.
- There are following limits on Twitter. If you hit the Twitter Follower Limits (when you follow 2000 or more than a certain percentage over how many follow you) Twitter prevents you from following any more people until either more follow you or you unfollow some you are currently following.
- Since Twitter prohibits automatic unfollowing and has eliminated Twitter apps that provided that functionality, the only way to unfollow non-followers to follow new followers is to do so manually. Currently the most efficient way to do that is using JustUnfollow. You can unfollow up to 50 non-followers per 24 hour time period for free or up to 100 non-followers if you Tweet that you are using JustUnfollow.
- I DO NOT recommend buying followers or using ANY “get followers fast” tool, app or strategy or following for the sake of following. It only makes sense to follow those who are interested in what you Tweet and write and whose Tweets and content you are interested in. You can modify this strategy by simply choosing the person or people you follow who have the type of content you are most interested in.
No doubt some will argue against the desire to have many followers or to follow many so I want to address that right up front. The more people you interact with the more people you can assist and influence.
For every 100 people who read something you write, only 1-2% are likely to take any action at all, so if you are interested in being an effective change agent you have to reach more than a few hundred or even a few thousand people.
Here are some additional tools that will assist those who DO understand why many followers and following many is necessary:
- Why You Should Put Your Twitter Username on Your Blog, Ecommerce and ALL Web Sites.
- If you follow many you can Use Twitter Lists to focus on just the specific section of the Tweets your followers are sending you need in the moment.
- How to use Twitterfeed to create a consistent presence and support the best content of your favorite bloggers and collaborators.
- Getting Started on Twitter Videos and How-to Use Twitter posts.
- Twitter Tools for Managing Twitter accounts including Managing Multiple Twitter Accounts – comparisons and reviews of popular Twitter tools including CoTweet, Hootsuite, Tweetdeck and many others.
- Find other influencers and monitor your influence using PostRank Connect, Klout and PeerIndex.
If you are a business or blogger and need assistance setting up an effective Twitter strategy, need training on how to use Twitter tools, or do not have the time to do this yourself and are interested in having your Twitter strategy implemented for you, contact me or leave a comment in this post.
Double your effectiveness by pairing this Twitter strategy with creating a consistent Twitter presence through Using Twitterfeed. If you’re new to Twitter we have some great Twitter Tutorials and videos. If you aren’t sure whether you want to follow that many people or not read Using Twitter Lists.
Related articles
- Twitter Counter Acquires Popular Twitter Stats Provider Twitaholic (mashable.com)
- Micro Acquisition: TwitterCounter Subsumes Twitaholic (techcrunch.com)
Gail Gardner
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Thanks for your effective twitter marketing tips. It really worked for me and I really loved it. I will be sharing this link in social media and to all peoples I know.
I believe, having lots of twitter followers is useless without making them active by contacting them directly or atleast mentioning them in your posts. I don’t know what you do with your followers or how you get benefit from them but I make/use ma own bots in approaching all of my 6k followers by mentioning them in my tweets.
I can offer this to you as well if you like.
Regards,
Thanks, this is good info. We’ve been looking for a good solution for monitoring our Twitter campaign in the future. I really appreciate these “round-up” types of posts with links to several tools, resources, etc.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned Crowdbooster as a good tool for monitoring your twitter reach, growth, etc.
Hi Marty,
There are so many Twitter apps and over the years I’ve been using it they have come and gone so quickly. I haven’t personally used that one and I don’t recommend what I haven’t tested unless I know someone I trust who swears by it.
I have now brought all my Twitter posts together in one comprehensive round-up in my Twitter Best Practices post.
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In my opinion, it’s best to following real people and not just auto-follows. If all of your followers are just auto follows, then your social media marketing is useless. You should target real people that share the same interest as you. It’s the key to be successful in social media marketing.
Its really important to target the right followers. Using clever techniques you can see a spike in traffic such as what your graph shows. I’m fairly new to some of these techniques, but I’ve been reading a lot recently how people have been using various techniques to increase traffic to their sites. Thanks for the info, really useful stuff!
Great technique. Following the followers of someone who writes about the same stuff. Maybe even your competition. Buying followers is quite useless. A waste of your money.
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following and unfollowing can be very effective but I think you just end up massing followers that are not interested in your product / service / what you have to say because they are just like you… collecting followers. The real followers come from your website. To get the most out of your site you need to promote twitter appropriately on-page. They are the followers that are valuable.
These tips are new and helpful. i would implement them right away and hope to increase my twitter followers. I have given links to my site and have installed various games to entertain the visitors. they tend to enjoy it a lot and this improves the traffic to my site. I hope to do lot more and get better revenues.
Followers can get tricky sometimes 🙂 I’ve had both good and bad experiences with followers so now what I do is, I try to follow those who are related to my niche or those who share similar interests with me. I think the journey becomes fruitful only when we actually have something to share in common.
I face huge trouble in un-following. When things get boring then I want to un-follow, but it proves to be time taking and I give up or un-follow 2 – 5 on Sunday. Your Justunfollow thing sounds really helpful to me, I might as well try it and if it works then my friends would love it too. This timing thing that you mentioned is new to me. I would try surfing it late night or early morning. Would do anything to have more followers! Thanks for your tips.
Successful blog always pay special attention to latest news about the topic he writes. Also, he must be a lifelong learner and always learn from others what to improve his blog.
Track your links using Bit.ly or another service, and you’ll quickly begin to see a picture of what tweets get retweeted and what ones don’t. This is extremely valuable information for anyone looking to maximize their Twitter presence, as it can help you refine when you tweet and what you write.
If you’re not targeting the right audience on Twitter, they’re less likely to engage with your content. For instance, if you own a dog grooming business but your followers have bios that include “cat lover” and “music aficionado”, they are not likely to retweet you or click on your links.
Knowing whether you’ve targeted the right followers is crucial to seeing high engagement and conversion rates from your Twitter account.
Twitter Snipe is actually a really cool program I recently found. What it does is allows you to put in a keyword and automatically follow the people who are talking about that keyword.
I have been using Twitter Follower website since it has been launched….. not too long ago, and have met very different types of people. It is a great site!
The major focus here is just to make sure you Tweet what is going to be interesting to your followers, and as you say here, follow plenty of other people in the same line as you, and their followers will follow you in turn.
Bloggers all around the world displays some facts and stats in terms of subscribers, visitors and hits to show their popularity on their blogs. Twitter Count is another option to show poplarity.
Twitter takes some getting used to. It isn’t easy to condense your thoughts into 140-characters or less, and it’s even tougher to try to build a following. Sometimes, you’ve got to be a little creative with your approach to Twitter if you want to really make an impact.
Definitely that’s what I do right now, I keep following people who are related on my niche. What I did not know was about the business hours and I will start using following and unfollowing users by night or early morning.
Thanks,
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Use different other services to know who is following you, and use the suggestion tool to get the suggested twitter users to follow. By this you can connect to relevant people around the world and they are most likely to follow you back, if they find you as relevant.
Spam is a terrible thing on Twitter, and it will turn off followers faster than anything else. Don’t engage in anything that might be considered spammy, such as repeating the same tweet every minute or two, sharing links without vetting them, or only @mentioning someone to promote your own goods or services.
Understanding the difference between @mentions and @replies can keep you from inundating your followers with messages that aren’t relevant to their Twitter experience. If you @reply to someone, only you, that person, and people who follow both of you will see the message.
If I could change anything about Twitter, it would be the question that appears on the front page: “What are you doing?” While that might have been the original concept of Twitter – similar to Facebook’s status updates – Twitter has evolved into much, much more. Forget about telling people what you had for breakfast – unless it was at a new restaurant that you think other people would like. Your daily routine is inane chatter, but going out to a restaurant is something that might be useful to other people.
The same is happening with me rakesh , even i think i should try to increase my followers considering these tips… Thanks for the Tips….
It can be hard to know the exact etiquette for “returning the favor” when someone follows you. For example, on the @Affilorama feed, we don’t follow everyone who follows us, because we have thousands of followers and we want to be able to retweet the most interesting content for ALL our followers. That is why we typically follow other “gurus” or feeds of other people and sites that regularly post interesting links and content that our followers would like – for example @Mashable @AbestWeb and @CopyBlogger.
Hello,
Those who are not following you do not see your Tweets unless someone they follow RTs them OR they do a search.
If no one follows you no one will see your Tweets. If someone does not follow me I do not follow them so I usually will not see what they share to ever read it or comment in it or share it with others. See my post about Twitter Lists for more on that.
The more followers you have the more people will see your tweets. Most of your followers will NOT see MOST of your Tweets so you have to have tons of followers to get any kind of response. For example, when I had about 6,000 followers my links would get about 60 clicks on average. Now that I have 17,00o+ I can get 120+ clicks on a link and often many RTs.
If you only have a few followers you will get next to no clicks and no RTs.
growmap would love you to read ..Twitter Best Practices- How to Use Twitter Effectively
It appears many assume that EVERYONE on Twitter can see EVERY TWEET on Twitter IN THEIR TWITTER STREAM and that is incorrect!
growmap would love you to read ..Twitterquette- Twitter Feeds are NOT Burger King – Why Everyone Can Not Have It Their Way
I also see someone’s feed without following by
http://twitter.com/nickname
For this or for reading Tweets by searching, someone does not need even Twitter account
I cannot imagine that someone reads feeds of all followers without specifically searching/looking something/someone
So, this concept is still blurred to me.
Anyway, no less interesting to me question:
where is it written (about visibility of Tweets depending on following)?
We must always remember that WE are not ordinary Twitter users. They don’t look for, know about, or necessarily use /nickname or even search (even though it is now finally visible on their main Twitter page).
Many of them don’t use Hootsuite or Tweetdeck or CoTweet or schedule tweets. They simply see what happens to go by when they happen to be logged into Twitter. If they aren’t following you they won’t ever see you.
Average Twitter users are not like those of us who use Twitter lists and follow thousands or even tens of thousands. They follow a few dozen to a few hundred and some even less than that.
I can not speak for everyone else, but I do these things:
1) I skim Twitter lists when I am looking for what has been tweeted lately about someone or something.
2) I use search to find specific tweets.
3) I visit key collaborator’s pages to see what they have tweeted lately that I can share (and I also use Twitter lists to do this).
4) I search for growmap and use the @growmap built in search and I act on (reply, RT, share, comment on) what is sent to me or tweets that mention me.
5) I skim recent activity in my timeline and RT, share, comment in or even review on StumbleUpon and feed to Twitter, Facebook and Friendfeed what I see there that catches my eye (which is why IF you follow me I may share something for you and if you don’t that can’t happen).
Yes, if someone puts my username on something I will see it without them following me, but if someone doesn’t follow me I am not nearly as likely to be paying attention to what they’re doing.
That only followers see your Tweets is documented in Twitter help (full text at that link) under Types of Tweets and Where They Appear where is says:
“Where it appears for the recipient: In the home timeline view of anyone who is following the sender.”
“Places it will never appear: In anyone else’s Profile page, unless they retweeted the message.”
growmap would love you to read ..Twitterquette- Twitter Feeds are NOT Burger King – Why Everyone Can Not Have It Their Way
I use twitter to grow my business online. It is a great way to get traffic and backlinks to my website.
Actually, Twitter is for people who have attention solutions, not attention problems. Twitter allows people to pay as much or as little attention to a particular user as they want; Twitter provides a way for people to keep track of lots of different threads of thought. The world has an attention problem. Twitter is one way of coping with that.
Hi Luke,
You are one of the fortunate few who understand why we use Twitter. You might find something among my Best Practices info of benefit.
growmap would love you to read ..Twitter Best Practices- How to Use Twitter Effectively
I have made a twitter account but , i really dont know what to tweet…. please guide me on what to tweet that people feel like reading and following my tweets…
Hi Sean,
What to tweet depends on what your Twitter account niche is. If you give me your Twitter username and the URL of your business or blog I am happy to give you some ideas. If you don’t want to do that publicly use my contact tab above.
See the post I put in CommentLuv in this reply for more tips on how to use Twitter.
growmap would love you to read ..Twitter Best Practices- How to Use Twitter Effectively
Myth: Twitter is comprised solely of status updates.
This is not quite accurate. Twitterers have a basic “profile” page, with information about themselves, a customizable background (more than we can say for Facebook’s draconian homepage design) and direct messaging functionality. The fact that those messages are limited to 140 characters doesn’t make them status updates.
Is it wrong to mention your Twitter count? A week or so ago, my @sciencebase twitter account was slowly edging towards 7000 followers, as of this weekend, it passed that number, which is nice.
Check out this link
http://twittercounter.com/pages/100
Really unbelievable numbers …… hopefully by using your useful tips will soon reach these numbers…….. 🙂
One useful tip also to increase followers in twitter is (#hash tagging). Tweet about your passions in life and #hash tag them. Quality content coupled with an easy way to find it never fails. If others enjoy your content, they’ll add you.
Thanks Gail for this useful post…I bookmarked your post and tips for my future strategy great tips to bring more followers
We already reach the limit and now it is difficult to manually unfollow people who did not follow us.
Hey Gail…
Firstly thanks for another very informative post… Over the last two days I have been implementing your suggestions on twitterfeed and my followers have started to grow very quickly.
FYI everyone this works.
Great post. I have been looking for some tips like this to grow my twitter followers in a good and naturally way, without spamming people. I don’t just want to have a lot of people following me. I want someone that
Are interesting in the same thing as me and someone I can connect with and share tips an knowledge with. Thank you for the tips.
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Explain to your followers what retweeting is and encourage them to retweet your links. Retweeting pushes your @username into foreign social graphs, resulting in clicks back to your profile. Track your retweets using retweetist.
These strategies sounds very practical and a must follow….. I have even started implementing these strategies to fetch more followers….
Interesting take. I have an account that I’m trying to grow. I’ll follow these steps and see what happens.
btw…MyBlogLog is dying…might as well zap that widget over there… 🙁
MyBlogLog has been “dying” for 2+yrs now. 😉
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LOL… I stopped looking at MyBlogLog 2 weeks after signing up!
I always enjoyed MyBlogLog’s interface…but I too never really used it for anything other than to make my account and wire it all up…for no other reason than to be there too. lol
I agree that MyBlogLog has been a goner for a long time. I’ve kept the widget for that and Blog Catalog because I like to see who has popped in so I can catch up with them
However, as I type this both of them are having trouble loading (Blog Catalog is missing entirely and MyBlogLog took far too long to load), so most likely will be gone or at least moved to a page somewhere and out of the sidebar during my upcoming redesign.
growmap would love you to read ..Small Business Internet Marketing
Sounds like an interesting strategy. I will try it and see how it works out for me. Too bad I can’t unfollow automatically (I wasn’t aware of this rule).
Excellent article Gail, not that I expect anything less. I really haven’t put much time into trying to grow my following, I really just follow those sources I want to follow or specific connections.
Excellent article Gail, not that I expect anything less. I really haven’t put much time into trying to grow my following, I really just follow those sources I want to follow or specific connections.
All though if I were to work on increasing my followers, Kristi’s list (along with yours) would be my first stops to grabbing a few new ones.
Hi John,
Thanks for taking the time to comment. As I often say, Success Is a Numbers Game and those who don’t understand that will have a really hard time winning.
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This sounds like a very interesting tool because using twitter has not been very effective for me.
Now a days every one is following twitter to update the latest news and information when ever they get. Its a leading in social networking. We can easily market our sites. I also have account, daily i update the status and follow the followers.
From a long time my twitter followers number neither increase nor decrease. I think I should follow your Kristi formula. Thanks
I just started on twitter and just wanted to ask. Is it bad if I don’t follow the person following me? There’s this twitter guide I read that it’s “social etiquette” when I follow the person that follows me. Do I really need to?
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Some good advice. I was also unaware of the add/remove policy of twitter uesrs. Thanks for the heads up. Going to set up up now.
My company already exceeded the limit of following people, so we are deleting those that we deem irrelevant to our niche.
Very interesting.. i have just made an account on twitter and was just in the dilemma that how will i increase the list of followers… Thank you for sharing these useful strategies….
A huge jump indeed! And I agree with you, follow only those that are related to what you’re doing. There should be a purpose in your adding followers and not just following in random order or just so to increase follower or following count.
Hello Gail,
Like Dennis, I too don’t believe in “get quick followers scheme” but your strategy of actually getting users that you already know that are interested in the subject you are blogging about.
I also noticed that people have started to realize that twitter is good only when you have masses of people listening to your tweets, because I think that twitter is not a social network that provides a lot of visibility to your content unless you have a lot of followers. So this kind of strategies are somewhat a needed bad.
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I have to admit that i’ve not really been using this twitter stuff for serious online marketing till lately and I think it really worths it, a good way yo build your numbers is by following those that follow you
Wow, that is a huge jump. I am so new to this Twitter thing that I didn’t even know that if you follow and unfollow too many too quickly during business hours Twitter may block you.
Thanks for sharing the steps I need to take to implement this Twitter strategy, I will follow through on it and see how it works for me.
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While I do not believe in any mass-follow schemes, at least you put a logical twist on the usual advide.
The usual advice being to follow the followers of the big and/or popular…you’re twisting it a bit to add the fact that they should t east write the same style articles.
I may be interested in outsourcing this in the near future, we’ll see.
Dennis Edell would love you to read ..What’s YOUR Favorite Twitter Plugins and WHY
You can also find the top experts in your niche at wefollow or twellow and then follow their followers to get additional people following you that share the same interests.
I will never understand how people manage to get traffic from twitter. I can understand facebook, i’ve used it for a long time and i’m still using it event though it went down a little lately. But twitter is beyond my power of understanding.
I’ll give your strategy a try when i get the time, it certainly looks solid.
Hi Gail,
Twitter is like a headache for me and I don’t know how what to do about it. But after reading your post I some confidence hope these tips also work for me too.
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I have never used twitter but have intention to explore it in near future.
Hi Gail:
I just recently became Twitter focused. I had my account set up for awhile and blindly went into twitdom.
I have been working on my own strategy to see if it produces positive ROI. I hope to publish results soon. Anyhoo, your tips and your strategy..top notch.
I also use twitterfeed and man, what a tool. I love it. I can support my faves and constantly feed info to Twitter and maintain a presence. too many people drop off the Twitter scene and are swallowed up.
I am certainly going to look into the TwitterCounter as I had not heard about it before. THANK YOU!
Lisa
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Hi Gail,
Great information and I usually just follow 50 people a day. Every 3 days I’ll go in and unfollow certain people but I like to use ManageFlitter for that. You can unfollow as many people as you want and it will actually show you their last tweets and the last time they tweeted. So it’s pretty easy to see the people who have been inactive or have never tweeted. I weed them out first.
I also use some of the other tools you suggested and I always enjoy reading posts on Twitter because I still learn a lot on how to do things correctly and what I may be doing incorrectly. I’m still a work in progress.
Thanks for sharing these tips. Really enjoyed your post.
Adrienne
Hi Gail,
I have to admit, my Twitter numbers have been a bit slow going. As you, I do everything manually and am selective on whom I follow because it’s important for me to at least attempt to create a relationship with other users.
Of course once you start reach the 500+ following mark that’s nearly impossible, but at the very least would like to have some commonalities with others.
Some great tips here and I really have to focus one day a week to building my numbers b/c Twitter is a powerful tool in business for sure! It’s a process I know, but I think one worthwhile allocating some time into.
As always, great stuff. And thank you for the shout out! You are the best. 😉
I have never heard of the twitter counter. thats so cool Thanks for the tips.
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Gail, this is a very timely post for me. I actually started doing essentially the same last week. What I’m doing is looking at the most relevant lists that list me. I’ve been going through the lists and clicking on the names of interesting people who are currently tweeting. I have a system for determining whether or not to follow, and if the person passes my test (less than half do), I follow.
I’m taking it a bit slow. I want to keep my follower number lower than my following number. And like you, I do everything manually.
Question: How long do you wait before you unfollow?