5 Ways to Build a Twitter Following Organically
Many people ask me how I keep managing to grow my twitter following on my @shanegibson account. I don’t and have never used any type of auto-follow software or participated in any type of Twitter Ponzi scheme. I avoid the get rich quick crowd like the plague, in fact some of my tweets have offended them on mass. In our soon to be released book Sociable! Stephen Jagger (@sjagger) and I talk about 16 ways to organically build your Twitter following. Here’s a condensed version of 5 of those strategies:
Follow retweeters
Often a good tweet or quote that you do will be passed on by several people. Many of the resulting tweets will be done by people you don’t know. Follow those people, they have already proven they like what you have to say and there’s a good chance they will follow you because of this.
Follow people who follow your competitors
If your competitors have a strong online engagement strategy then there’s a good chance that they have a good concentration of quality connections on Twitter. If their interest revolves around a service you provide or blog content that you create then there’s a good chance they will follow you back. Be wary of following people who are connected to competitors that are not engaging or have a weak twitter strategy, there’s a good chance their follower quality and relevancy for you will be low.
Follow people who talk about your competitors
Follow people who talk well or badly about your competitors, either way they’re spending money on or have interest in your business or industry. Follow these people and begin a dialogue with them, after a few interactions you will begin to develop rapport with them.
Use Twellow.com to target key people and groups
Twellow is to our knowledge the most comprehensive Twitter directory on the web. It was developed by Webpronews a subsidiary of iEntry a leading online publisher. It includes 5.4 million Twitter profiles organized by geography, industry and various industry sub-categories. If you want to target CEO’s working for IT companies in Texas it will provide you a list of people to follow. Highly organized and easy to register and use we consider this tool a key tool for anyone serious about building a targeted Twitter following.
Contextualize your tweets when following to be followed
Often when you’re networking the first few minutes of a conversation will help you determine if you will stick around and socialize. The same thing goes for Twitter, think about the people you are trying to attract and make sure your Twitter updates will reflect their interests, stature and culture. This will increase the chance of them following you.
For example, if you used Twellow to find CEO’s then you most likely would do several Twitter updates that interest them. You would follow 40 or 50 CEO’s, many of whom would check out your profile to see what you are about. You could quote Warren Buffet, then link to an article on leadership and maybe retweet a couple well known CEO’s as well. In essence you are having a conversation that CEO’s would follow.
The idea is to make sure that your dialogue matches the market you are targeting during a 5 to 7 day time frame.
If you liked these Twitter tips you can register for information on getting an advance order and bonus e-book of Sociable! here:
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