Even though many marketers realize the value of Twitter, they are unable to to grow their follower base to enable them to have their messages reach a wider audience. In this post, I will cover the important tips to help you grow your Twitter fan base.
- Create a good bio page with a professional photo/company logo, 160 character description about yourself and a link to your company website. Branding starts from the bio and you would be surprised how many people ignore the simple fact.
- Find your niche. Don’t post in too many different topics. Your audience has not subscribed to the New York Times. Pick the area that you have a lot of expertise in, and post relevant content in that domain. While you can occasionally tweet about other topics, make sure 70-80% of your tweets stay within the topic.
- Be a good listener before becoming a good talker. All too often, marketers use Twitter as a one-way communication tool rather than leverage the power of conversations. Find interesting conversations in your timeline and start responding to it. By providing intelligent responses, you build your brand and follower count.
- Follow 20 new people in your niche, every week. Try to build conversations with at least 10 of them. Every month, prune the inactive contacts to keep your followed/follower count to a good level.
- Be the “go to guy” in your niche. Make your tweets informative and enlightening. That will make others see you as an expert in your category.
- Promote other’s tweets. If you find a tweet interesting, retweet, favorite or reply. That will get the attention of the tweeter and could develop into a connection.
- Use correct hashtags in your tweets. This will make your tweets searchable for those keywords and bring more attention.
- Publicize your handle. Include the Twitter handle in all official & personal communication – email signatures, blog sidebars, comments on other blogs, letterheads, brochures, etc.
- Spread your content. You don’t want to either crowd your followers with too many posts nor leave your account inactive for a long time. Many marketers find a posting frequency of 5-7 tweets/day as the ideal. If you create too many good tweets in a day, use a tool such as Buffer, to schedule it for later.
- Add variety to your tweets. You don’t want to appear one-dimensions. Apart from promoting your pages, add links to relevant news sources, insights, questions, images and videos on your tweets. This will make your profile interesting for your followers.
- Be the nice guy that people want to hang out with. While online fora offer plenty of opportunity for you to flame or troll, the successful guys make it an opportunity to show the nicer side of them. Be helpful, responsive, entertaining and interactive. That will make you the person, people want to be seen with.
