5 Ways to Increase Your Twitter Followers

With more than 200 million active users, Twitter is still one of the fastest growing social media networks along with LinkedIn and Pinterest.  With this many users, it may seem inevitable that once you sign up, followers will flock to follow your account, especially those familiar with your brand.  Gaining Twitter followers is not quite that simple.  Here are five ways to help your brand gain Twitter followers and brand ambassadors:

Tweet and Tweet Often

Tweeting less than once a week is not going to put you on the fore front of news streams  In fact, tweeting less than once a week is no recommended.  Tweet as often as you can with relevant, interesting content.

Tweet Great Content

You have put your heart and soul into your business and want to share it with the world through social media.   Tweeting great content will drive people to follow and interact with your brand.  Where do you find this great content?  Here are a few ways:

-Content Creation: Content is still king and writing and maintaining a blog on your website can provide great content for your Twitter followers, which in turn, will get them looking at your website.

-HootSuite Streams:  Pick two or three topics that represent what your business is about and topics you believe your followers will be interested in.  Create a stream (or streams) in HootSuite that will collect tweets with the keywords of your choice.  This can help sort through some of the Twitter clutter, and provide you with great content to share with your followers.

-Google Alerts:  Pick two or three topics like you did in HootSuite and set up Google Alerts to give you content from all around the web.  This can be customized to alert you once a day or in real time.  Depending on the topic, you may want real time results to create buzz around a particular topic.

Interact!

Providing great content will get your followers tweeting and retweeting what you are sending out to them.  Interact with those who are sharing your content. Thank them for sharing and retweeting your content and strike up conversations with people you follow for discussions and debates on topics relevant to your business and followers.

Follow Others in Your Industry

Twitter has provided its users with a “Discover” tab that takes information you have provided in your profile and information you tweet about and gives you who to follow recommendations.  Following people in your industry will get you tons of great content to share with your followers, ways to interact with others interested in the same topics, and examples of tweets that work.

Make Your Profile Stand Out

Recently, Twitter has changed the aesthetics of the Twitter profile.  Now, in addition to a basic profile picture and background, your Twitter profile can also have a header picture that is 1252×626.  Use this to its full potential to represent what your brand is all about.  Make sure your bio tells the most about your company and that your profile picture is your logo or a photo that best represents your brand as a whole.
Using these 5 steps, your brand will be headed towards a socially interactive and successful future on Twitter!

Courtesy of Social Media Today