How to Get Twitter Followers
In our previous post, Managing Your Twitter Accounts, we talked about some of the available tools for managing your Twitter account. By the way, we go into much more detail about our Infinite Pipeline Relationship Development process in our new book, The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for B2B Sales Success – Sales Person Edition. See the bottom of this post for more info.
In this post, we continue the Twitter series, and look at how to increase your number of followers on Twitter.
Some rights reserved by Lisa NorwoodHow to Get Followers
Whether you use the much-improved Twitter Webpage or one of these applications, you’ll want to start out by following interesting people. Following means you will see their tweets in your timeline, similar to the following figure:
Figure 44 — Example Twitter Timeline
You can start by following us: @smpgcom. If you know a person’s Twitter handle, you can go to their page on the Web by typing twitter.com followed by a slash and their handle, without the @ sign. For example, here we are: twitter.com/smpgcom.
One thing you’ll find out once you start following people is that you’ll magically get some followers of your own. That’s because not only are your tweets now showing up on your followers’ sites, but many people track new followers of people they follow, and decide to also follow. In general, the more people you follow, the more will follow you back. You can find likely people to follow by searching for keywords that interest you. We discuss Twitter search in more detail in the upcoming post Searching on Twitter.
When you’re ready to send out your first tweet, start by saying something about what you’re interested in. Just try not to make it about your cat, going up stairs, or how long the line at Starbucks is.
Incidentally, your followers are called tweeps, not twits.
Follow to Get Followed
As we said above, the best way to get followers is to follow others. Then watch their Twitter stream and you’re likely to find other interesting people to follow, who might also follow you back. Of course, you should include your Twitter handle in your email signature and in other promotional materials.
Another handy way to find people to follow and encourage people to follow you is to use Follow Friday. This is a tradition on Twitter. Every Friday people recommend other tweeps as good people to follow by posting recommendations and including a hashtag, which is a quick way to create a keyword by putting a hash, or pound, sign at the beginning of a word or phrase (no spaces). In this case, people use the hashtags #ff, #followfriday, and a few others to mark their posts recommending cool people to follow. (There’s more on hashtags in the upcoming post Use Hashtags.) Other people search for these tags and often check out the people recommended. Here’s a recent sample of Follow Friday activity:
Figure 45 — Example of Follow Friday
Since you’re new at Twitter, it’s not likely anyone is going to recommend you via Follow Friday just yet. So start off by recommending others. People will be curious about you, and if you’ve created a good profile, they may decide to start following you. Of course it helps if you have a few interesting, pithy posts under your belt before you try this.
How to Get Twitter Followers is the 105th in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’re just past page 296. At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 6WXG8ABP2
Get our new book, The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for Business-to-Business Sales Success online here. You can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV
What Others Are Saying
“Infinite Pipeline offers practical advice for using social media to extend relationship selling online. It’s a great way to get crazy-busy prospects to pay attention.”
—Jill Konrath, author of SNAP Selling and Selling to Big Companies
“Sales is all about relationships and trust. Infinite Pipeline is the ‘how to’ guide for maximizing social networks to find and build relationships, and generate trust in our digital age.”
—Sam Richter, best-selling author, Take the Cold Out of Cold Calling (2012 Sales book of the year)
“Infinite Pipeline will be the authority on building lasting relationships through online social that result in bottom line business.”
—Lori Ruff, The LinkedIn Diva, Speaker/Author and CEO of Integrated Alliances
