Twitter is a great tool to get your target audience discover you, your blog and the value your blog creates. It helps establish a link between you and your audience in a non-threatening way and can be a great part of your online blog branding and marketing strategy.
This article will focus on how get a lot of Twitter followers and new readers to your blog.
How to increase number of your Twitter followers
Concentrate on building a large number of followers. The more people that follow you and know what you are about, the more clicks and visits you will get to your blog. But make sure you don’t start following people who don’t have interest in your subject.
Here are some recommended ways to get more followers that are interested in the topic you are blogging about:
- Track down twitterers that are interested in your blog field by using Twellow. Search for relevant keywords or go into the relevant directory and get a list of interested twitterers. Rank according to “followers count” to see the leaders in your field. Click on their profiles, browse their followers and see if some of them are interested in following you.
An easy way to get people to follow you is to start following them first. Some twitterers have their accounts setup to follow all the followers, so when you follow them, they will automatically follow you back.
- Twitter-bait. Tweet to or about Twitter leaders in your field. They have a lot of followers and they scan Twitter for people talking about them and their products. If they find your tweet interesting and respond to you, your username will be exposed to all of their followers. Some of these might click on your username, start following you and start reading your blog.
- Promote your Twitter account on your blog, in blog comments, forum postings and in your other social media profiles. Just as you would promote your blog, put your Twitter username everywhere and expose it to as many people in your target group as possible.
Ratio of following vs. followers
People tend to place large significance at the ratio of the number of followers you have and the number of people you follow. Following a disproportionately higher number of people than having followers will give a bad image and you might find it hard getting new followers. Twitterers with more even numbers or a higher number of followers, are seen as more trustworthy and influential. Use Your Twitter Karma to unfollow those who aren’t following you to make your numbers more even.
Customize your Twitter account
- Customize your Twitter profile with your picture, your blog URL and description. Most twitterers will check your profile to decide to follow you or not, or to learn more about you when they read some of your interesting tweets.
Make sure to be consistent in your branding on different social media sites. Try to use same nickname, same avatar and publish related content on each.
- Register TweetLater to add additional tools to your Twitter account. You can set your account to automatically respond to your new followers with a personal message, you can automatically follow people that follow you and you can submit tweets to be published at specific times.
Now you are ready to go. Post your first tweet and start browsing around for like minded people. Be consistent in growing your followers. Make sure all your tweets are of excellent quality and make them all relevant to your blog subject. In time your reputation will grow, twitterers will start following you automatically, and your blog traffic referred by Twitter will increase.
Twitter Marketing E-Book
For much more information on Twitter, check out my “Twitter Marketing E-book: How to go viral on Twitter“. The e-book includes all the tips on how I use Twitter to build my authority, drive traffic to my blog and get customers. Enjoy twittering!
Image by: Catr
Join thousands of bloggers and get all my blogging tips for FREE! Subscribe to HowToMakeMyBlog via RSS or via e-mail.
If you liked this article, you may also like:
Why I run my blog on Thesis Wordpress Theme
Thesis theme gives my blog a professional, clean, easy-to-read layout and SEO friendly design. Thesis makes it simple to make your own blog unique. See more details and get your own Thesis today.
{ 26 comments }
Good post. There are several tools that you can use to set up auto follow but tweetlater which you mention is probably the better of the ones available.
Great info. Timely and helpful to noobs and vets alike.
I think that one of the most important things to add to your profile is a link to your web page – any web page about you will do. I like to click those and find out a bit more about someone.
Cheers!
George
I like the way you have the Twitter ID in the coments form input. Very cool. I have seen this a few times. It’s a plugin or something like that? I have used most of these thing like Twellow, Tweelater and Twitter Karma. I’ll add something else to the list there are many Twitter directories that you can add your twitter information to. I think this seems to attract new followers as well.
@Houston Search – Yes, it is a plugin from http://www.fiddyp.co.uk/wp-twitip-id-plugin-add-a-twitter-field-to-your-comment-form-easily/ .
Please note that you don’t have to input @ in the field, it is added automatically. You just have to input your Twitter username.
Great ideas. I especially like the one about twello. I mean for most of us the goal is to get people who would be interested in the subject we blog about, so this sounds ideal. In fact, I am going to check it out right now.
awesome advice
Thanks for the list of tools, tweetlater looks like it could be very valuable.
I think ‘ratios’ are more applicable to gears than communications although a 2000:1 ratio with one tweet never inspires confidence. I’ve found a lot of followers can appear after a particularly good conversation breaks out, so lots of interactivity has paid some dividend (personally)…
Cool advices, even though AutoFollow and AutoDM are not well received by some twitterers
Hi , Many thanks for the great tool
I had not come across Twellow until I read about it on here
Have a great one
Hamant
Great article and even better introduction to the Twitter utility sites that I wasn’t aware of beforehand.
Thanks!
Great post! I’m going to check out Twellow and TweetLater right now…
Excellent post, I signed up for Twello right away, and found 10 watercolor artists and started following most of them.
This is very timely and useful information.
Thanks very much
Great post, socialtoo.com do a great service for free that allows you to track how many people follow you or unfollow you in one day, they also send a DM to all your followers saying whaterver you want.
Great post! I sent this to a client of mine today, and they found it extremely helpful. Don’t forget about the Twitter Wiki! *=)
Hmm Quite Interesting. Well for me its just I follow the Ones who follow me. This makes a quite big following too. Cause many a times i see twits on my page by a user to another(@) and many a times the conversation makes me track down the user and check what is it actually.
Ratio n all is kinda sulky but ya Customization surely helps. Besides spend some genuine time in Twitter and start networking with people , you would surely have a good following henceforth. Sharing images, twitter wiki are some things which makes twitter account more fruitful.
Nice compilation of tips, get it updated with some missing things
The tools and all are just useless as they aren’t that effective many a times, makes everything so much artificial doesn’t it?
Cheers!!!
I made several searches for keywords I am interested in (e.g. with twellow), but the best to find followers and peoples to follow was to browse through the contacts of the people I have already started to follow
I found this article to be very useful, it opened my eyes to “different methods and tools I can use” to better market my brand. My “following” to “followers” ratio is pretty big. I don’t just follow anyone, I have to find there post’s helpful, informative. No tweet spammers please.
My method I’ve used successfully has been to use twitter’s built in SEARCH! I would simply type in a targeted KEYWORD, in this case I used the word “blackberry” as that’s what I market. Next thing you know it I get thousands of results with people posting there “BlackBerry Addicts”, BlackBerry’s Are So Helpful, BlackBerry This, BlackBerry That.
Potential followers ripe for the picking. What I do next is common sense, I simply @reply to them and suggest they might find my twitter profile interesting and helpful at the same time and that they should considering following. A very direct approach, as you need to be in real life situations when it comes to handling matters as these. And the end result is of course some great followers for you!
Thank you Marco!
@Giancarlo Colfer – I am glad I could help and glad that it works for you!
Customizing your twitter page is a great way to encourage the people to follow you. And as you said, including your twitter ID in your signatures (email, forums etc…) is another great way.
By the way I didn’t know that Twellow service, thanks for sharing it! It seems to be very useful
Thanks for this article, I bookmarked it and I also follow you on Twitter.
It’s very important that you follow people from your niche and it is not necessary that you have to follow everyone back.
Love the article.
Stumbled.
Terrific post! Love reading your site and following you on Twitter…
Thanks for including this post. I’m new to Twitter and this is very helpful in understanding what Twitter is and how to use it. So far it’s a good deal of fun.
I like to use the twitter friend generator to follow and unfollow people on twitter. works great and haven't had any problems as of yet.
Great post you have here. Thanks for this useful site that I can now ease up following members I need.