Friday 13 April 2012

How to Gain More Relevant Followers On Twitter - My Experience

LinkWith the popularity of our posts about how to optimise your pages to gain twitter followers (found here) I have been requested to post further tips to enhance your twitter experience. This post will be a general overview of my experience with twitter and what I have learned from using it.

I signed up to twitter 3 years ago and like everybody (maybe not celebrities) when they start Twitter, I found it a struggle to gain followers. I had basically signed up to it to see what it was all about. I didn’t really understand the potential it had, and like most people I would tweet randomly and hope that people would find my musings interesting and follow me. It wasn’t surprising that I didn’t get many followers and if I did they weren’t relevant to what I wanted, I hadn’t found my purpose or voice….

At the time I was primarily a web and graphic designer and I was starting to get requests to design social media pages for businesses and naturally my interest in social media marketing took off. (I now work as a professional social media manager and obviously run this blog)

Twitter for me, now had a purpose, it could be used as a platform to gain and share knowledge, to market myself and engage with other social media enthusiasts. So following this I set up my own twitter page again.

My original aim was to gain as many RELEVANT followers as I could in one month.. The first thing I decided to do was follow people in the same industry as myself who have an abundance of followers and see what they were doing that made their pages so successful.

My first realisation was at how often they tweeted. Power users tend to tweet and re-tweet up-to-date content regularly, engage with a high percentage of their new followers (My guess was that they didn’t engage with everybody as not every person who adds you would be relevant to yourself) and inject sparks of their personality into their tweets.

Following these observations I started to implement these behaviours into my own tweets and subsequently saw the amount of followers I had double in the space of one month. This correlation is no accident, twitter is a platform that you have to work at to gain the results you want, you have to post smart and often, engage with users and re-tweet relevant content to capture your audiences attention and gain that all important follow.

So basically in a nutshell in order for twitter to work for you to gain relevant followers you should do the following:

1. Have a purpose and a voice.

2. Think about your audience and what they what knowledge they would like to gain.

3. Write and post your own content (A blog is a great way to do this)

4. Engage with people (It is a social platform after all)

5. Don’t use it to only promote yourself (80% content 20% promotion is the tested and proven amount)

6. Be yourself.

If you follow these steps you will see that your twitter following will increase, with relevant followers, giving you more business opportunities, a wider circle of people in your industry to engage with and an opportunity to gain increased knowledge on your industry through research for content to share and other peoples shared content.


What have your experiences been with twitter? Do you have any other tips for success? Let me know in the comment box!


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