How to Engage More Followers and Fans on Twitter

Last week, I was helping a colleague of mine implement the social media presence for one of his clients.   He asked me to do some research on getting and increasing followers on Twitter.

I guess that’s the million dollar question huh?

First off, it’s the quality of followers or following… not the quantity!

I read articles every day on Twitter from some fantastic people that I am following.  (Check out my Worth Following list here: http://twitter.com/jerbuen/worth-following)

It’s difficult to write an all-encompassing list of how to do this, but I want to share some of my random thoughts:

Promote your RSS, Twitter, and Facebook accounts with attractive icons

If you send emails to your clients or publish articles on your website, make sure to include links with attractive icons that invite people to find you on other Social Media avenues.   That way the relationship doesn’t end with that email or news article.   Get them to follow you so they continue to see your updates through their preferred social media tool.

Useful and relevant only

On Twitter, don’t be shy to tweet an article that you find interesting.  Make sure to tweet relevant and useful information, though.  Useful can mean comedic as well.   You are what you tweet.   Tweeting too much will lose followers… tweeting too little will not attract followers.

RT! (Re-tweet)

If you find something interesting, don’t be shy…Retweet it!   Give the person credit as well – it can help open up the lines of communication and they may be willing to Retweet one of your tweets in return – therefore getting more exposure and more followers.

Check out this website to find out your retweet rank:
http://www.retweetrank.com

Analyze yourself

Evaluate your Twitter behavior.   There are some tools on the web that can help you do this – Twitter graders are one example.  Here’s a good one that evaluates your twitter behavior.  This tool uses an algorithm to weigh in factors such as number of followers, power of followers, number of updates, follower/following ratio, and engagement.

http://twitter.grader.com/ – to learn more, read How Does Twitter Grader Calculate Twitter Rankings?

Note: Your twitter rank doesn’t mean everything!   It’s just a tool to help you keep in mind how you tweet.   Remember, the key is really to engage with your followers!   Don’t follow everyone just to follow.   Build REAL relationships.

Use the hash

Use hashtags with your topics.   Simply put a # sign in front of any keywords within your tweet.   Or you can put the # with a keyword at the end of your tweet.   For example, you can write “The #Tarheels win again in the NCAA# Championships! http://bit.ly/tarheels” or “RT @jerbuen Tarheels rock the tournament http://bit.ly/ngc #ncaa #basketball”.  This allows your tweets to be easier to find through searches and fall into trending topics.  Read more about hashtags and why to use them here: http://help.twitter.com/forums/10711/entries/49309

Schedule the Tweets!

This is absolutely not required, but is a nice tool to use if you wish to use it.  Let’s say you tweet a new blog post you wrote sometime before you went to bed.   Well, overnight, your tweet may be pushed to the side by the 100s of other tweets over night.   Then what happens in the morning?  Your tweet was missed.   Twitter is real-time and is fast moving.

To give your tweets more presence, set up Tweet schedules to automatically repeat the tweets that are important to you.  Here are some Tweet Schedulers that you can try out:
http://rtweeter.com/Schedule
http://www.socialoomph.com

Follow GoodBye, Buddy

When you follow @Goodbyebuddy, you will be emailed whenever someone UNfollows you.   This can be a great sanity check. If you are consistently losing followers, you may want to evaluate your Twitter behavior.  Are you tweeting too much?  Are you tweeting useful information?  Did you say something negative in a recent tweet that turned some of your followers off?

Find out your TweetEffect

Find out which of your Twitter updates made people follow or leave you.  Basically this tool analyzes your tweets in correlation with your change in the number of your followers.   I personally do not think that it’s 100% indicative of the effects of your tweets because people can unfollow or follow you coincidentally.   Regardless, it’s still an interesting tool to look at if you are seeing a pattern.
http://www.tweeteffect.com

Find the TwitterTrends

Trendsmap.com is a real-time mapping of Twitter trends across the world.  You can see what the global, collective mass of humanity are discussing in real time.  Use this to target your tweets on the latest trends.  This will help increase followers who do searches on these trends: http://trendsmap.com

ENGAGE!

If someone RTs one of your Tweets, always check the mentions and reply back with a Thank you for the RT.   Even better, follow up with a question that can start a conversation.   This helps build a network and helps conjure and retain more followers.  People like to see that there is a REAL person behind the twitter account… even if the auto-tweets are setup!

Check out my previous post on “Building a Real Network On Twitter“.   It’s short and it’s worth a read.

Others?

As always, I would love to hear from you.   I welcome your comments and additional thoughts on the topic!

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