How to Grow Your Twitter Numbers
May 24, 2011 by Paris Permenter and John Bigley
Filed under Bloggie, For Bloggers
Recently we had a question from a reader about how to grow your Twitter following:
I see that you have a very substantial following on Twitter and I’d love to know if you might be willing to share what has worked best to build real followers, not huge numbers of irrelevant followers as some social media “experts” charge for.
That’s a good question! We’re happy to share what has worked for us. Presently we have about 13,500 Twitter followers on @DogTipper (we’ve just started @CatTipper).
We’ve built our numbers the old-fashioned, hand-picked way. We haven’t spent any money on advertising to grow the account, and we don’t use any kind of automated way of getting followers.
First, before you even start trying to get followers, you’ll want to set up your account to show that you’re serious about Twitter. If you haven’t yet selected your Twitter handle, be sure it’s one that carries out your brand. We’re DogTipper.com on this blog, @DogTipper on Twitter, www.facebook.com/dogtipper, etc. Sometimes we’ve followed people for months without realizing their ties to their website because their Twitter handle doesn’t match their site name. We keep it all the same and keep the avatars the same from account to account, too.
Be sure to customize your Twitter account by uploading an avatar and creating a custom background. This shows that you’re serious about Twitter and helps share a little more information about you (and therefore why others should follow you). First impressions count for a lot so don’t let your first image on Twitter be this default image for those who don’t have avatars:
Your Twitter background in “New” Twitter isn’t quite as meaningful as it was in “old” Twitter since the available space is now smaller but it can still convey some important information about your business. You can make a custom background, like we have for DogTipper:
or you can just select a color that’s tied to your branding like the green background we have for CatTipper.
Next, be sure to complete your profile since many people will read it to decide if they want to follow you. We chose “USA” for place since we didn’t want to be confused with a local business. Our business description includes our home page URL.
Be sure to update your email signature file with your Twitter address; we also include ours on our business cards. And add either a widget or some sort of link on your blog so readers easily know that you have a Twitter account. Twitter has some easy-to-add resources for adding widgets, follow buttons, tweet buttons, and more.
Once all that’s done, it’s time to start following people. You can visit some of the directories that are searchable by subject to start locating people to follow (and be sure to add your account to these directories while you’re there!) Here’s WeFollow.com’s directory of dog users (OK, we had to share this since we’re #1 right now!)
and here’s their Pet directory:
After you login, it’s very easy to start following accounts in this directory. More directories include Twellow.com, TwitterCounter.com, and Twitaholic.com. (This are the largest but there are many more out there; just search for “Twitter directories.”)
Once you’ve started following some people in your sector, start tweeting. Don’t make every tweet a link to your posts; share the Twitter love by retweeting other relevant tweets. Include some of your personality in the tweets when you can and occasionally ask a question to encourage interaction.
We don’t automate our tweets (by pointing our RSS feed to Twitter) but instead write every tweet ourselves to keep things a little more personal. Also, we try to make sure our tweets aren’t right at 140 characters but are far enough below 140 characters whenever possible that they’re very easy for others to retweet without having to go word by word and abbreviate. If it’s easy for your tweets to be retweeted, you have a much better chance of being retweeted and therefore gaining more followers.
We’re also active in the special days on Twitter like #woofwednesday (also abbreviated just #ww) and #followfriday (or #ff). These hashtags (#) helps categorize the word immediately after the hashtag (don’t leave a space after the hashtag). We often use hashtags for words that we know people will be searching for such as #dogs or #giveaways. Generally we don’t use more than two hashtags per tweet (and often no hashtags).
On #woofwednesday and #followfriday, many Twitter users will tag (by putting the @ symbol immediately before a Twitter handle) some of their favorite users to follow. #woofwednesday focuses on dog accounts, #meowmonday on cat accounts. As you see #ww mentions come across your feed, you can follow any accounts you like. (It’s not like a Facebook profile which requires a two-way approval; it’s more like a Facebook fan page where you can be someone’s fan without their approval.) Every account you follow is an account that may potentially follow you back.
Any time you see some of your favorites interacting with others on Twitter, though, you can follow them. You can also visit your favorite accounts’ profile pages and see who they follow. Unless a user is protecting their tweets (look for the little lock symbol), you’re free to follow them. Twitter will restrict the number of people you follow at a time when you start out and will also prevent you from following too many people if don’t have a sufficient number of followers.
A book we read that was very helpful is Joel Comm’s Twitter Power 2.0: How to Dominate Your Market One Tweet at a Time
Start slowly and handpick the accounts you want to follow, tweet relevant information, and, little by little, your numbers will grow.
About Paris Permenter and John Bigley
DogTipper publishers Paris Permenter and John Bigley are a husband-wife team of full-time writers. The couple has authored over two dozen books and 2,500+ magazine articles.
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