How to Get 200 New Twitter Followers Today.

With twitter it’s no secret that it takes some work to increase your Twitter follower base. Now that I have about 14,500 Twitter followers (500 this past weekend) I can appreciate the work to build and maintain those folks

Some facts about Twitter

1) The magic number is 140. But you get 160 characters for your bio, you get 140 characters to tweet a post and you get 140 characters for an internal email. It’s pretty simple and pretty hard. Try to figure out how you will get a compelling message across in a sentence or two. When I tweet I get a couple of hundred web visits extra and if I keep the post current (by reposting for a couple of days) I can double the number of twitter followers visiting my site or flickr page. It really boils down to the quality of your tweet and what you have to offer the reader. Remember the saying “WIIFM” or “What’s in it for me?” that your reader subconsciously asks when they read your post. Sometimes you can leave a twitter follower dangling so they want to go to your site but don’t do this too often if you want to remain credible. Since a reader wants something from your post you should give it to them. Think about personal situations. If your friend came to your house all the time and wanted you to buy his product you would be locking the door and turning out the lights the second his car pulls up in your driveway. However if your friend comes over and has some nice conversation and leaves it at that he’s not such a bad guy. Eventually you will wonder why he’s not trying to sell you something and you ask him. He lets you know what he sells and why his product is good. You like it and you buy it. Similarly if you are selling e-books on line you may talk about the industry, the news and other topics and eventually get around to directing your customer to a sales site especially of you are genuinely excited about a new offering. Tweeting really is the ultimate micro blog. So offer something of value and in return you should see results. I’ve heard the ratio should be around 10 interest tweets and 1 sales tweet but I’ll leave it up to you. The softer sell works better to acquire more followers.

2) It’s called the “World Wide Web” for a reason. Think of the “web” part. Do you sent them just to your sales site or to other sites you own? As an amateur photographer I have posted hundreds of photographs on “flickr” (a Yahoo subsidiary) and I often send people there. I often have one of my affiliate links under one of my photographs with a note and an affiliate link about the software that I use. There’s more than one way to persuade and this often works at getting me affiliate clicks.

3) Twitter has “follow” etiquette. You follow me and I promise I will follow you. That is within reason. If the person following you has nothing you want don’t follow back, especially if they pose as a sexy girl and when you go to the website it’s a guise to get you to sign up for internet porn. Simply block these people as they will give you a bad reputation.

4) Make sure you have a photograph of yourself for a profile picture. Don’t leave it blank as people are less likely to follow you without that little personalization and you may not be seen as a serious twitter user.

5) Twitter has follow limits. Twitter recognizes that with follow etiquette you may be tempted to blindly follow 100,000 people in order to get thousands of followers in return. Twitter feels this is gaming the system so you can follow 2000 people before they slow you down. Mind you that’s a very good start. (Don’t do it yet without finishing reading the rest of this post.)

6) After the 2000 follows are reached (that is you following 2000) you can only follow about 10% more when people follow you. Let me explain. You have 5,000 followers you can expect to follow a maximum of about 5500 until more people follow you. So let’s talk about the magic of getting 10,000 followers overnight for only $399.00. Don’t do it! These are people that have set up in some cases dummy accounts and have a robot that follows you from every account. You will have paid money for nothing. You will tweet and not one of these followers will check out your website. You could tweet “$20 bills for just one cent” and not get a single response or even a click.

Likewise if you start following loads of people just to get them to follow you back you will have very little success in achieving your goals from your tweets. Here is the single biggest thing you can do to be effective at tweeting. Go to the “rock stars” of your niche and see who’s following them!!! For instance say you were buying and selling military memorabilia. Search for people with the same interest by typing into twitter’s search box “#military”(that # is called a hash tag). This will bring up the latest tweets in that interest group. These people are currently using twitter and are active users. You don’t want to follow people who have opened a twitter account and forgot about it. You need active users. In these tweets you will find someone who could be an industry superstar with thousands and thousands of followers specific to military issues. Superstars in this example could be military magazines that have twitter accounts who have built up a following of thousands of twitter users. Stars and Stripes have about 24000 followers as I write this. If I wanted to contact military minded people I would start following their followers. I would also reconnoitre (military word for performing recon) the top followers of Stars and Stripes.

Once you have that long list of followers in front of you use your web browser's search function to type in a key word. Follow those people whose profile contains the key word. For instance “collector”. Now you will follow only those people and in a few days to a week you will have a highly concentrated list of followers who are military collectors. It you perform this sorting task 1-2 times per week over a few weeks you will have developed the best list on twitter. What good is having 100K followers if none of them are in your niche?

Finally in order to keep enough “follow room” for yourself you must start deleting the people who don’t follow you back. This can be difficult without software to help you but that’s a topic to itself that I’ll cover in another post.

So now you should have a good working knowledge of how twitter can be effect for marketing. Remember not to over-market because if you do you risk being ignored. In my research in putting together this article I actually contacted several active twitter users with 20K and over followers and asked them how they did it. Exclusively the answer was “with hard work”. No one used bought lists and while many employed some software that helped with the sort no one had their twitter account solely on auto pilot. Figure on 100-200 per week and as your follower base grows figure on 300 to 500 per week. Don’t sort (churn) too often and keep it to weekly or less. I understand there is a churning penalty with twitter so slow and steady is better than churning 3-4 times per week. (Churning is getting rid of non-followers and trying with a new bunch) Some people do not have their twitter account all the time so you are bound to lose some good followers if you churn too often.