Getting more followers on Twitter is a goal for most businesses. At Wishpond, we know getting quality followers – those who are interested in your brand, who will retweet you, and @mention you to their followers – is an even better goal. Here are a few steps that show you how you can get more followers, and increase your Twitter engagement. Getting Quality Twitter Followers:

1. Make sure your profile is complete with an avatar that shows your face and a solid bio. It’s important that people know who you are and what you’re interested in.
   • The simplest and most personal way to go for an avatar is a photograph of your face looking straight into the lens. Avoid funny angles or having anything else in the photo. Crop it into a square, but don’t shrink it down. You want people to be able to click on it and see the larger version.
   • If you own a company and want to use your brand as your avatar instead of a photograph, this is perfectly acceptable. However, using random graphics or images as your avatar can give the impression of a face or spam account, so they are not recommended.
   • Many people will read your Twitter bio before deciding whether to follow you. A good written bio can help you get much more followers than a poorly written bio.

2. Tweet well and tweet often is a way to have more followers on Twitter. Selective followers will also glance at your most recent tweets to see if you’re worth following.

3. You should have a minimum of one post per day and ideally two posts per day to maximize your account.Make sure you’re tweeting on a variety of subjects and not just your personal thoughts or what you’re doing at the moment. Talk about your hobbies and interests, share a piece of insightful advice, or post a photo of something cool to switch it up.
   • Be interesting, transparent and provocative. Share intimate news about your life. If you can spin a good story, you might get readers addicted to the daily dramas of your everyday life.
   • Post interesting links. Find the man bites dog story. Search the web voraciously for a nugget you can spin into a good tweet. Guy Kawasaki, who has over 100,000 followers, goes as far as paying employees to find buzzworthy stories for him to tweet. There are many websites you can scour for prime Tweeting material
   • Post multimedia. Switching things up with pictures, videos and even sound clips here and there can make your posts more fun to follow.

4. Follow people who follow people that are like you. If you’re a tarot fanatic, for example, find another tarot fanatic who has many followers. Follow those followers. If it’s clear in your bio and your tweets that you’re a tarot enthusiast, they’re more likely to follow you. Be cautious though; following too many people may draw potential followers away.

5. Ask people to retweet you. Being retweeted pushes your exposure to the edges of your Twitter network. Simply adding “Please retweet” or “Please RT” to the end of some of your posts here and there (not all the time) can remind your followers that you want them to spread the word for you.

6. Search for tweets with keywords related to your topics of interest. Let’s say you’re a metalhead. Look for people who mention your favorite metal groups. Reply to their tweets and then follow them. Your response will show them that you have something in common, and make it more likely that they’ll follow you back. Better yet, retweet them if the content is good. Not only are you forming connections with other Twitter users, but you’re also bringing good content to your followers.

7. Use hashtags. This is another way to connect to people with similar interests and to increase the visibility of your tweets. Add hashtags to your tweets and also create tweets based on hashtags that are popular on Twitter at the time (you can see these as “trends” on the left-hand side of your Twitter home page).

8. Use Social Promotions, like vote contests, sweepstakes, and photo caption contests to make your tweets go viral to followers of followers. Find out how easy it is to make your promotions at Wishpond.

9. Regularly unfollow people who haven’t followed you back. This is especially important to avoid follow limits. The first limit you’ll probably hit is when you’ve followed 2,000 people. You won’t be able to follow any more until you have 2,000 followers. As you follow and get followed, it’ll become time-consuming to “clean up” your list (unfollow people who aren’t following you back). There are services like Twidium and FriendorFollow which can help with that.

10. Repeat your most popular tweets. Do a search for your Twitter name and observe which of your updates get the most replies and retweets. Then repeat those in a slightly modified way a few times roughly 8-12 hours apart. You’ll reach more people this way because you’re more likely to catch the attention of people who missed your updates the first time around. People “tune in” to Twitter at various times during the day (and night). If you get complaints about repeated tweets, you might want to slow down, but you probably won’t.

Getting Quantity With Your Twitter Followers:

1. Follow everyone who follows you. It might seem counter-intuitive to do this when you’re focused on gaining followers, but it’s a good practice because people who notice that you didn’t follow them back might unfollow you. Also, when you follow back, some people might respond to you publicly, which will give you some added exposure to their followers.
   • If you’re worried that you won’t be able to keep up with that many people, you’re right. Once you’re following over 100 people, it’ll be pretty much impossible to read all their updates. You’ll become more selective in who/what you read.

2. Follow people who autofollow. “Twitter celebrities” (Twitter users with huge numbers of following and followers) are also likely to follow you back automatically. They’ll be following over a thousand or sometimes tens of thousands of people, but unlike spammers, they’ll have the same number of (or more) followers. You’ll stumble upon such accounts during your Twitter travels (e.g. when they are retweeted by someone you’re following), but you can also do an Internet search for “most popular Twitter accounts” or “popular Tweeters”.
   • People who follow spammers are likely to be autofollowers. Wait until a spam follower follows you. Spam followers will have 1,000+ people they are following, but only 5 to 150 followers in return. Follow everyone who follows the spam follower. Those are likely to be people who are following in return in order to boost their own follow count.

3. Put up “Follow me on Twitter” links on your blog, e-mail, other social networking outlets, and across the web. That way, people who are already interested in what you’re doing can easily find your Twitter Profile and follow you. Using graphics, such as a button or counter can also be more effective at catching attention and getting you more followers.

4. Try to get celebrities or famous people to follow you on Twitter. That will increase the chance that they will tweet at you or retweet one of your tweets, increasing the visibility of your Twitter account.

This article was slightly modified from the original version found at: wikiHow to do anything Check out how Wishpond can help you gain more followers on Twitter with our Twitter Social Promotions.

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