How to grow your followers without advertising
So, you’ve signed up for a Twitter account, now what? First, ensure you have a Twitter account that’s worth following. To do this, you need to create a unique voice. Your word choice, the content you share, the people you retweet, should all fit the voice of you and your Twitter account. ‘Tweet the way you speak’ – Twitter should be an extension of you and your personal brand. Just remember that you have a 140 character limit.
Optimize your Twitter Profile
One of the first thing that a person will look at when you show up in their feed, on their followers list, or elsewhere is your Twitter bio. You only get 160 characters to introduce yourself to the Twitterverse, so make them count!
Dr. Sears’ twitter Bio
Be clear, to the point, and highlight the thing that are most likely going to be discussed on Twitter. Be sure to focus on the most important thing(s) about you.
Dr. Al Sears is America’s #1 Anti-Aging and Paleo MD.
You may add a few hashtags – but be sure to follow best practices. Don’t over-do it. Hashtag soup is a big faux pas, people will assume you’re going to spam them with articles they don’t care about.
Add your location to your Bio – (People sometimes look for others in their area) – and a URL if you have one. Alternatively, you may add a link to your Facebook, Instagram or Linkedin page.
Upload a nice profile picture and header. Choose images that show a bit of your personality. Keep it fun, and don’t make it overly promotional. You may to use one CTA in the header, but don’t make it sound spammy, or it will turn people off.
Get Twitter Followers
To build your following, you need to get in front of people and get their attention. The most reliable way to do that is to follow people. Between 10-50% of people will follow you back if you follow them. Although a small portion of followers will be using auto-follow-back programs, most people will just follow you back because you seem interesting, and you followed them.
Don’t follow aimlessly! Try to follow people in your target audience – people who you think would be interested in your content, and who would be most likely to follow you back. Here’s a great way to do this:
- Go through your followers, find people similar content as you and who have a lot of followers
- Go to their page
- Start following their followers in the hopes that they’ll follow you back
You can speed up this process by using apps like Tweepi and Manage Flitter. Both offer services to make it very quick and easy to follow a lot of people at once, and to target who you’re following. You can also use Tweepi and Manage Flitter to unfollow those who don’t follow you back.
Twitter will let you follow up to 1000 people a day. For a brand new account, you shouldn’t do more than 100, and you may never want to go much above 200 to be totally safe. Twitter will block your ability to follow if you follow too many people in one day
You can get twitter followers by favoriting Tweets. Favoriting a tweet gets a persons attention and can result in them following you. You can use auto-favoriting scrips and apps like Twitfox to speed things up or you can do it manually.
Another way to gain exposure is to join conversations on Twitter (Twitter chats). These conversations revolve around a certain hashtag. You will not get many followers from Twitter chats, but participating in these chats will increase your visibility and you might be followed by some high influence people. If you’re followed by someone with influence, look at their account and follow some of their followers. Their followers will see that the influencer they’re following follows you and assume that means you’re important and an influencer yourself.
Once your following on twitter starts to grow, it’s important to keep these followers. To achieving this, you need have good well timed content. You can combine Tweriod and Buffer to build an optimal sharing schedule. Here’s how – First, go to Tweriod, sign in with Twitter, and see when your followers are most active. Then, take that schedule, go to Buffer, and set your tweets to go out during those high-activity times.
Tweriod gives you the best times to tweet. They analyse both your tweets and your followers’ tweets so you can start tweeting when it makes most sense to reach others.
Buffer is a Social Media scheduling app.
If you use Buffer to schedule your tweets, you’re guaranteed that they’re hitting your audience when they’re most active!
Bonus
How to Automate the Discovery of Twitter Leads
6 Productivity Tools for Twitter
6 Ways to Use Advanced Twitter Search for Increased Influence
How to Create a Twitter Chat: 4 Success Tips
Over to you…