I love Twitter. I am not even sure why I first joined the social network in the first place but I am glad that I did. I joined in the summer of 2009 wanting to share my photography. When I started my blog in 2009 I figured that I should have an account for that too.
These days I just have one Twitter account that I update. I have almost 7,700 followers. I feel like I have worked hard to get there and have also made a few mistakes along the way.
If you are first starting out with a Twitter account you are probably overwhelmed with it. I have a lot of friends that don’t quite get Twitter at all. 140 characters? How does that even work? What in the world does RT mean? How do I get people to follow me? Is it rude to start chatting with other people who are in the middle of a discussion? What is the point of Twitter anyway?
Twitter is certainly a different animal then Facebook is. I see Facebook as a place where my friends are, where I can connect with them on a more personal level. I see Twitter as a place to make new friends, connect with others and share what I am doing.
If you have a blog or a business, it is a good idea to be on Twitter, even if it scares you or you don’t understand it. It is a great place to connect with others, find new blogs and promote your own. It is a great tool if you know how to use it and it shouldn’t be ignored.
So, how do you grow your Twitter account?
Here are three simple ways to do so:
#1 Make sure your information is filled out. I rarely follow back anyone who doesn’t have a profile filled out. I also never ever follow back people who have the default picture as their photo unless I know them in real life. So you have to make sure you at least change that. You don’t have to add a photo of you, it can be your logo, your dog, a flower or anything that works. Just make it something so you appear to be a real person and not just a bot. As for the profile, just write a little bit about yourself. You can see what I have written in the photo on the write. You want people to be able to find you based on what you are into.
#2 Add people daily. When you add other followers, a lot of them will add you back. You can find new followers using a few different methods. If you go to the Twitter website, it will give you some suggestions. I like to go there everyday and add a few people who I think I would like to follow. You can also do a search. If your blog is about knitting, you can go and search, “love to knit” or “knitting” and Twitter will give you a list of people with that in their profile as well as people who have talked about your keywords. You can also find some of your favorite, more popular people you follow on Twitter and see who are following them. This tells you that they like that person too so you probably have something in common. When you go ahead and add people daily, you will get new followers from the people who are adding you back.
#3 Interact. It is important that you interact with others on Twitter. You can do this by asking questions, making comments, replying to others and retweeting them. Favorites is also a nice way to tell other people who that you enjoy what they are posting. You want a mix of interactive tweets with your promotional tweets. It is the best way to use Twitter and to get to know others. It also doesn’t have to take up a lot of time. You can go onto Twitter a few times a day and see what people are talking about.
Are you on twitter? I would love to connect with you there too 🙂
How have you gained Twitter followers?
Great post! In my experience the biggest key is true engagement. Particularly if you are trying to grow an engaged following, while big numbers that you can get from just buying followers LOOK fancy, they aren’t really doing you any good in the long run