A simple search on Google on how to Increase Twitter Followers will yield pages upon pages of results of ways to grow your following. Most of them can be shady, get you fake or uninterested followers just to mushroom your numbers, or take absolutely forever to accomplish.
However, I’ve recently had a fair amount of success growing my Twitter audience with interested and engaged followers. Now I’m gradually getting more retweets, including some of my older blog posts. I’d like to share with you 8 steps that will help you increase Twitter followers and get on the right track towards getting interested and engaged followers, without using unsavory practices to do it.
How to Increase Twitter Followers
1. Establish Your Account
If you haven’t already, you should definitely make sure that you have an account set up and populated with some tweets that give potential followers an idea of what you have to offer. Even if you use my methods, you won’t increase Twitter followers if they don’t know what to expect. If you have friends on Twitter, follow them and have them follow you too, if you think they’d be interested in your content.
People don’t typically follow low follower count accounts since there are a lot of spammer and egg accounts out there. Make sure to use a profile photo so you’re not mistaken for an egg also, and so your followers can put a face to the account. If you don’t want to use your face publicly, then use something that represents you.
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For example, my mom wants to start an online store called Koala Treasures so she could use a koala as her profile photo. People usually like faces better than things that represent you, but either is better than no photo at all.
I would also recommend getting the WordPress plugin Revive Old Post, as it helps considerably in keeping older posts alive. I wish they had it for other social networks as well. Revive old post will automatically tweet a random old post, at an interval you specify, and you can also add hashtags to include. It is a very useful plugin, and I have been using for some time now. You can choose categories to be excluded, for example, contests/giveaways, and Revive Old Post will not tweet those out. As a general rule, I am not a huge fan of automation, but that and RoundTeam are my exceptions.
I do not recommend using something like truetwit, as I know that I at least ignore the direct messages I get from its users and most people probably do as well, so there’s not much sense in it in my opinion. I usually send DM’s personally, rather than via automation, although I did once use a DM all service to direct message all of my followers my social media details.
2. Create a Manage Flitter Account
If you create an account on Manage Flitter or another similar service, this will help considerably later on in the decluttering phase. If you get a pro account, $12/month for a single Twitter account, you can do even more with it. I’ll share more of Manage Flitter’s benefits as I progress through this guide.
3. Follow Influential People In Your Niche
As a new Twitter user, or even if you’re somewhat established but still fairly small, many of the bigger influencers in your niche may not follow you back. However, at this point, you’re not in the market for follow backs just yet. We’re looking to make connections with bigger bloggers in your niche. They may be more likely to follow you back if you engage with them, retweet and reply to their posts. I know I am much more likely to follow people who retweet or mention me.
Right now, though, you want to retweet and mention worthy content in your Twitter feed. You can even create a list of these people so that when you follow others, their tweets don’t get lost in the ether. Consider adding them to your Manage Flitter whitelist, so that in future steps, they don’t accidentally get unfollowed. Retweet and engage with them whenever possible.
4. Follow People Who Follow Those Influential People
Now you’re ready for one of the methods of gaining new followers. Once you have some content in your account, some engagement with influencers, and some followers you know or have interacted with, the quicker network building begins. Pull up the follower lists for those influential people and follow their followers, especially the most recent ones or those who have tweeted most recently.
You could even follow the people who have retweeted or mentioned them. Don’t be discouraged if an influential blogger in your niche has 25,000 followers and you only have 500. Chances are, at least some of their followers will be interested in you too if you’re in the same or a similar niche.
Take Scary Mommy for example. On her Twitter account, she has over 460k followers and is only following 1,279. This means she probably isn’t likely to follow me back. However, out of her 460k followers, at least some of them would probably be interested in my blog too, since its focus is parenting. It would take me forever to follow her followers, and I’d have to unfollow to make room for more, but if only 1% of them followed back, I’d net 4,600 new followers, so you see how big an impact that can be.
[clickToTweet tweet=”How to Increase #Twitter #Followers – Follow people who follow those influential people!” quote=”How to Increase Twitter Followers – Follow people who follow those influential people!”]
I don’t recommend putting all your eggs in one basket, though. I was just using that as an example. Instead, follow a few hundred followers from several different people in your niche. This will surely help you increase Twitter followers. You can even go back and do it again a while later, once they’ve acquired more new followers. I was simply using Scary Mommy as an example.
If you spread them out anyway, you are more likely to find people who will follow you out of interest. You will notice some of the same people following multiple people in your niche, making them likely candidates to follow you too. When you do this, you’ll notice the need after a while to declutter your followed accounts, and I will discuss that later, but let’s tackle another method of gaining engaged followers.
5. Follow People Who Use Certain Hashtags
Hashtags are a great way to connect like-minded people. Until recently, even I didn’t understand the full value of hashtags. I used them, sparingly, but didn’t really seem to notice a significant effect from using them. However, hashtags can be great for connecting with people interested in following you.
Find hashtags in your niche, for example, #parenting and #kids for me, and follow people who tweet with those hashtags, reply and retweet if you can as well. This is another great way to connect with people who will follow you back.
And, you can check the hashtags at a variety of different times and find an almost endless supply of accounts to follow since the users using them are always changing. I usually follow everyone who’s used the hashtag in question over about the past hour, unless the account looks questionable, but usually, you will get great ones that fit well with your niche.
6. Follow Your Suggested Twitter Users
Suggested Twitter users aren’t quite as reliable as some of the other methods, which is why they are further down the list, but they can still be extremely useful. In my case, most of the time, my suggested Twitter users are almost always fellow bloggers, often fellow mom bloggers, so connecting with them is still a great idea.
And a lot of bloggers follow and support each other, so it’s definitely worth trying to make connections. Also, as your Twitter network grows, particularly with people who are interested in you, you’ll eventually get to the point where the follows are flowing in naturally and organically because you’re being suggested to other similar users.
7. Use Manage Flitter To Follow Filtered User Lists
One of the features of Manage Flitter Pro (the plan that is $12/month for a single Twitter account, and has other options for more accounts if you have them) is the ability to do a detailed and advanced search. And, filter for users with certain words, parts of words, or phrases in their display name, username, bio, or other fields, though these three are the main fields I use.
If you’re a parenting blogger like me, you might search all fields for mom, kids, or words like that. You might search the bio for parenting, momblogger, or other similar words and phrases. For parenting bloggers, remember that people in different regions have different words or spellings for similar words.
For example, Americans use ‘mom’ where British and Australians use ‘mum’, so don’t forget to search for ‘mum’ too. There are also the spellings mama and momma to remember. You may also notice that if you search for ‘father’, you may come up with priests who may not necessarily be fathers in the parenting sense of the word, but more the father to their congregations, so don’t be surprised.
8. Decluttering Your Followed Accounts
I may have put this section at the end, but it is incredibly important, and you won’t be able to continue with the above steps without doing this periodically. Manage Flitter can help with this too.
First, figure out the accounts you want to continue following whether they’re following you or not. These are the accounts that add the most value to your Twitter, and as mentioned earlier you may want to put them in a list to keep track of their tweets. Make sure to add them to your Manage Flitter whitelist so that they don’t get accidentally unfollowed when you start getting click happy when unfollowing.
Use Manage Flitter to filter people who don’t speak your language, haven’t tweeted in over 30 days, aren’t following back, or may be fake (only included in Pro), and unfollow anyone who fits the bill that you did not already whitelist to keep. The whitelisted users should not appear in those lists anyway.
Be careful not to follow or unfollow too many users in a day or Twitter might take issue and think you’re a spammer or a follow troll. I’ve been able to follow/unfollow a few hundred at a time without issue, though. If you use my steps multiple days in a row, then you want to give those you’ve most recently followed a chance to decide if they are interested.
You can then set Manage Flitter to exclude people you’ve followed within a certain amount of days, so for example, you won’t unfollow anyone you’ve followed in the past three days. This way if people are just totally uninterested, you can clear them out, and keep the ones that will engage with you. This will help increase Twitter followers through engagement!
Some people disapprove of following people in this manner, but the way I figure it, they aren’t random as you are specifically trying to select people you think might like what you have to offer. Your blog represents you, and if you intend to make money from it, then it’s your business, so it is important to go through the decluttering process periodically and eliminate anyone that doesn’t interact unless you are especially interested in them. This will help you increase Twitter followers that are interested.
I know that this Ultimate Guide to Increase Twitter Followers has gotten a little long, but it is my sincere hope that the suggestions herein are able to help you not only to increase Twitter followers but to do so in such a way that the followers you get are legitimate. I must admit when I first started out, I paid $5 for a bunch of eggs on Fiverr just to swell my numbers. This did not help engagement, and it looked bad because most of them had less than ten followers.
I must admit when I first started out, I paid $5 for a bunch of eggs on Fiverr just to swell my numbers. This did not help engagement, and it looked bad because most of them had less than ten followers. Manage Flitter helped me eliminate those as well. It sucked to delete so many followers, but it made the ones I kept only the legitimately interested ones, which has helped in the long run.
I hope that these suggestions to increase Twitter followers are helpful to you. Feel free to share your results in the comments section below, as well as any other suggestions you might have for ways to get legitimate and interested followers on Twitter.
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