5 Spectacularly Easy Strategies to Get More Twitter Followers

Do you wish you had more engaged and interested Twitter followers for your business?

I get it! After all, nobody wants an empty room as an audience or followers who don’t care.

So, how do you attract more followers on Twitter? And how do you find the accounts that are relevant to your business, active, and engaged?

Let’s talk about the simple things you can do to find the right audience for your business. But before we dive into strategies, you need to understand a few critical concepts.

Why Do You Want More Twitter Followers?

1) To Reach and Connect With People

You must have followers to have a positive impact on your business. If you don’t have followers, then you don’t have people who care about what you’re saying. No followers = no people = no sales.

Your goal is to connect with real people and have real conversations. These interactions will eventually lead to transactions.

Remember, people are on social media to connect with others, have fun, stay knowledgeable about the news, etc. They aren’t on social media to be sold to, so don’t push the sale or they will run away faster than Forrest Gump from bullies.

2) To Show Social Proof

As much as I hate to admit it, you do need a healthy amount of Twitter followers to show what is known as “social proof.”

However, your goal is not to collect followers like trophies. Rather, seek out those connections that make sense and interact with followers to grow your presence.

With this effort comes the social proof you want/need to help your business.

3) To Boost Your Ego – Nope!

Please don’t go looking for followers to make yourself feel better. Having lots of followers doesn’t mean you’re the popular kid on the block (although it does feel like that sometimes).

Furthermore, it takes time and effort to build relationships and connections online. Be prepared to do some work. You’d best accept now that you need to be in it for the long haul.

Using Twitter for business isn’t a quick win and it’s not about you. You’re there to build relationships and provide value.

Which Matters More: Quantity or Quality?

These followers need to real people who are active on Twitter and who are relevant to your target audience. There are a couple reasons for these parameters.

Obviously, the end goal is helping your business succeed. As such, you want real people to follow you. Fake accounts are useless. Although they inflate your follower count, the person doesn’t exist. You’d have better luck engaging with the spirit world.

And you want active followers. Otherwise, they won’t see what you’re posting and they won’t be interacting because they aren’t using the platform.

According to Wishpond, 67% of Twitter users are more likely to buy from a brand they follow. Thus, you want an audience that is interested in what you do, what you sell, your brand, and your content. This is what I mean when I say that you should be looking for targeted followers. These people are more likely to become fans, brand advocates, and customers.

Your follower quantity doesn’t matter if the quality isn’t there.

What’s the First Step Before Trying these Strategies?

Before you do anything to get more followers, make sure your Twitter profile is awesome. Your profile influences whether or not people follow you.

• Fill it out completely. (Don’t leave anything blank!)
• Use a pinned tweet.
• Make sure your bio and header photo explain what you do and why they should care.
• Include a few keywords in your bio.
• Imagine that your profile is an introductory handshake with each follower.

Ok, I think we’re good, on to what you came here looking to learn!

Five Simple Strategies to Increase Your Twitter Followers

1) Keywords

One way to find followers is to start by searching for accounts using keywords and topics relevant to a specific industry or niche.

Tweets are searchable, so using relatable words can help you find people to follow.

Remember: as a business, you’re looking for followers who might be interested in what you tweet about, your products and services, and your content.

For example, maybe you sell shoes. “Shoes” as a keyword works as a starting place. To discover keywords related to shoes, go to RightRelevance.com.

In the search box, type “shoes.”  In the upper right corner, you’ll find “Related Topics” to use as possible keywords.

To dig deeper into keywords, you can click “Influencers” at the top. The site will show Twitter accounts that are influential in this niche.  The topics in boxes below each influencer’s name are other potential keywords.  You can click on them to see even more “Related Topics.”

Once you have your keywords, you can start searching Twitter to see who’s tweeting using these keywords.

For example, I chose “Fashionista” as a keyword from the expanded Related Topics list. I typed it into the Twitter search box, selected “Accounts,” and bam! There are the accounts interested or tweeting about that topic.

Go about doing this for each keyword. Review each account to determine if they are real, relevant, and active. If they are, then follow them.

2) Hashtags

Trending hashtags in your niche are another way to search for potential followers on Twitter.

If you don’t already know the popular hashtags for your industry, then you’ll want to do a little research. Hop on over to hashtagify.me to figure out what hashtags your audience uses frequently.

Sticking with my previous example, I typed “shoes” into the search box. Hashtagify displayed the all-time top ten related hashtags and a popularity score. Plus, it showed the most recent top media to see what’s being tweeted now using the hashtag.

Next, do the same thing you did above for keywords, except this time type the hashtags from Hashtagify into the Twitter Search box.

This time, check both the Top, Latest, and Accounts tabs to see who’s using the hashtag. Review each account—checking to see if it’s real, relevant, and active—then follow when appropriate.

3) Twitter’s Advanced Search

Twitter’s advanced search is another option that is quite robust when it comes to finding information on the platform.

You can use advanced search’s many fields to help you find relevant followers.

Sticking to the shoe example, I typed “I love shoes” into the “This exact phrase” field and chose English as a parameter. Then I was able to see who used this phrase in tweets and in their bio.

You can make your search even more specific and drill down to location and other parameters. For example, let’s say you want to find local people who like the same sports team. You can use the “More options” drop down menu to tweak your results by location.

You know the routine: after you find relevant accounts, check each of them out to see if they are real, relevant, and active before you follow.

4) Industry Influencers and Other People’s Accounts

Utilizing the influencers in your industry is another way to find followers.

Influencers aren’t limited to people. Influential accounts may be conferences, events, publications, competitors, podcasts, brands, tools of the trade, etc.

Above, I detailed the process for finding keywords and mentioned drilling down to influencers using the Right Relevance website. When you’re researching your keywords, take note of the influencers too.

Back to the previous example, these were the top influencers in the shoe industry.

Make a list. It’s a good idea to follow influencers and even reach out to them. They are important and often affect change in their niche.

But I suggest going a step further!  Visit their Twitter profile and search through their followers to find potential connections. It’s likely that many of their followers will also be potential followers for you too since you’re in the same niche.

5) Automation

While the previous strategies have all proven effective, using automation to grow your following is the fastest, easiest path to connecting with other Twitter users.

Growing Your Following Manually

There’s nothing wrong with the manual method to grow your Twitter following. It’s not difficult to do. However, there are some drawbacks.

It’s time-consuming.

The tasks we discussed aren’t hard, but they do consume time. You’ll need to work on this process weekly for at least 30 minutes at a time.

It’s never-ending.

People will unfollow you on a regular basis, so you’ll have to be finding new connections regularly. Plus, you’ll want to be extending your reach and growing your audience, which is an ongoing effort.

It’s tedious.

Once you follow people, you’ll have to wait a bit to see who follows you back. For those accounts that don’t follow you back, you’ll want to unfollow most of them. (I’ll explain why next.) You’ll need to monitor who doesn’t follow you back and manually unfollow them.

It’s tricky.

Twitter has rules regarding each account’s following to follower ratio. For example, you can’t have 100 followers and be following 10,000 accounts. To keep your ratio in check, you’ll need to unfollow most accounts that don’t reciprocate your follow. (Twitter is even pickier about the ratio until you hit at least 2,000 followers.) Twitter doesn’t make their ratio rules public, so be careful because you don’t want to be thrown in ‘Twitter jail.’

Growing Your Following with Automation

I greatly miss the now-defunct Social Quant tool! Sadly, I haven’t found a replacement that I like nearly as much.

Twitter has tightened their rules and gotten very picky about automation. You want a tool that connects you with engaged, active accounts who might be interested in you and the topics you tweet about.

In the past, Twitter generated nearly all of my lead generation, and Social Quant was a big part of my success. Consider tools such as ManageFlitter and Commun.it for automation when it comes to Twitter growth. You’ll love the less manual way of growing your community!

Automation Tool Benefits

• Saves time (that you can use for engagement instead)
• Connects you with relevant followers
• Manages the follower/following ratio
• Keeps you out of Twitter jail

Final Thoughts About Growing Your Twitter Followers and Building a Community

There’s nothing hard about building your targeted Twitter audience. The strategies are easy. What’s hard is finding the time, dedication, and passion for growing your community—while making sure you don’t break any Twitter rules in the process.

Grow your Twitter followers using the manual methods here so that you’re familiar with how the process works. However, if you find that you are falling behind in Twitter growth, then give automation tools a chance.

If you’re looking for more strategies on how to grow your Twitter community, don’t forget to check out this article that is packed with awesome advice:

30 Expert Ways to Get More Followers