How I Built My Twitter Following

Building a Twitter following can be quite confusing at first.  When you first open an account at twitter.com you have no followers.  You can add your first followers using the “Find People” menu setting on the top right.  You can look for people you know, search popular email accounts like Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, AOL, or MSN.  You can invite your friends by email or even select suggested users to get yourself started.

Now that you have some basic Twitter followers, it’s time to get serious about finding more followers.  There are two basic strategies: quantity and quality.  The quantity strategy is the easiest.  Click on your “following” below your profile name and you will see all of the people you have added and are now following.  Click on the first one and then select either their “following” or their “followers” and you will get a list that you can immediately start selecting to follow.  Click away and you have followers. 

Now if you are lucky, these people that you are now following will start to follow you back.   Click on enough of these and you will eventually build up a following of random followers.  Perhaps you are wondering why you are doing this.  Because you want easy followers.  Well this is kind of easy …

The alternative strategy is to find quality followers.  Start by entering some search terms into the search box to the right underneath your direct messages.  For example, if you like music type in “music” and see who is talking about it.  If you like the posts (tweets) then click on their name and follow them.  Return to the search and do this again, and again, and again. 

Try joining wefollow.com and enter your search terms (tags) and follow those that are categorized using your search term.  Once you find these quality people try searching their followers or who they are following and you can recruit more followers.  Still need more?  Try mrtweet.com, a service for making Twitter connections, or twitter.grader.com to see how your tweets and following rank out of all twitter users.  You can use twittercounter.com to see how your following is growing, and it even has a nifty little badge counter that you can put on your website, blog ,or emails to recruit and advertise your growing popularity.

OK, your popularity is growing and now you need more automation.  What’s next?  tweetdeck.com is good for managing your tweets and conversations.  Post good quality tweets, retweet other posts you like, and reply to others with valuable content and you will continue to build your following.  Other applications include hootsuite.com or tweetlater.com that include tools for URL shortening, statistics, and scheduled tweets, all important for managing your tweets.

Still need more followers?  Search the web for various Twitter directories.  Users can be found for accountants, business, engineers, or groups and interests.  Search and you will find it on the Internet. Try twibes.com, twellow.com, or twitr.org to name a few.

There are many more applications for Twitter.  As you join various groups, services, or directories, your following will grow almost automatically.  Others will look you up using the same techniques and many will start following you too.  At this stage you should focus on your quality tweets (posts) to justify the value of following you so you can keep your followers.  If you do it right, you should build a Twitter following that you can converse with, ask questions of, and even get leads and new business from.  After all, social media can be a very effective business tool.  Follow me at twitter.com/bizmasterz.

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Originally published in 2009 by Bizmanualz, Inc. under the title How I Built My Twitter Following. All rights reserved. Reproduction permitted with attribution only. www.bizmanualz.com