This is just a quick reference. If you have more helpful tips, please add them. For starters, I do not recommend purchasing Twitter followers. Most of these are just massively created accounts and not legit people. Instead, you should work to build legit/organic followers. 1. Create a Legit Account that looks like a real individual. It is a bad idea to use a company name/website name as real people tend to shy away from these individuals thinking they're spammers. 2. Create exciting Tweets using popular hashtags. I've found this to be the best way to get followers. You should make relevant posts for the hashtags. 3. Cool pictures are very helpful. Post these with relevant trending hashtags to try and gain a few followers. Using unique and interesting pictures will help. 4. Try using Follower Friday and other Twitter trends. This is definitely worth a try. Send out individual's names who are following you and they may do the same. This will give your username a little exposure and potential some new followers. Anymore tips? Remember that it is a bad idea to follow a bunch of people and then unfollow them once they've followed you back. This will only get you unfollowed and possibly banned. Never do this. Hope this little post can help somebody.
Tweet funny things to people with loads of followers so other people wonder who you are. Have a creative twitter name that others can remember but also makes them curious. Being JohnSmith is not interesting or memorable.
Think of Twitter like a giant cocktail party. Be courteous, add to conversations, and don't drink too much while you're there
Fake followers are harmful to your account. Organically attracting real targetted twitter followers is more difficult now because Twitter's new format makes the following process more time consuming with large header images and side by side displays on your followers page. We're now getting around 300-500 new followers per day at the @P2PEngagement Account (24K+ real targeted followers and growing fast). But were very selective and generally only follow back accounts relevant to our core niches. It's really important to get real followers, don't fall for buying fake. I think that fake follower accounts (run by people who intentionally buy fake followers/likes etc) will go the way of spammy, poorly spun content pages from Google via Penguin and Panda. Make sure that you target 1 to 3 personal or business niches and only follow accounts that directly related. Use a Twitter content marketing strategy, only post content that your targeted followers and ideal customers (folks looking for your product or service on social media but haven't been able to find you yet) will love. That means high quality posts from industry thought leaders and amazing images that anyone would love. You can tell if images are good to post based on their #of RT's and likes they've had. When people are deciding to follow you, they often take a quick look at your stream. You want images and RTs there with recognizable names and breath taking images so they will want to click follow. Don't billboard! Make sure that 7 out of very 8 tweets minimum are high value content that meets the interests and passions of your ideal followers and customers. Also, make sure that you have an pleasant if not stunning Twitter header image to attract or at least not turn off visitors who are considering following you. You have a split second to form that positive first impression. These are just a few of the dozens of powerful twitter engagement strategies that have really paid off for us. Feel free to ask more specific questions here Directed to P2P... would love to help you really succeed at Twitter especially for business. We get thousands of targeted page views to our blog alone from Twitter each month. Feel free to ask about how to optimize your account, optimize tweets so they are more likely to Twitter-top list for your keywords or about our powerful pre-emptive engagement strategy: Gratefully, David H. BA (Psy.), MA(OD) Lead Engagement Synergist @P2PEngagement
In the 6 months we've had a twitter account built around a fictional character, we've done many of the things you all have suggested: organic/legit approach, high value content, tweets with cool pictures using popular hashtags, some funny, all intended to help somebody gain insight or feel better, ... etc., which have resulted in no new followers who stayed more than a few days and only a handful of tweets favorited or retweeted. Clearly we're doing something wrong (ya think?) but beats me what it is. Some background: Master Armaton is a character in the book series The Folk of Yore. Last December we (the creators and publisher) saw Andrew Fitzgerald's TED talk "Adventures in Twitter Fiction" and were blown away by the concept of using twitter to bring a story to life, blurring the lines between fiction and reality, a key element of The Folk of Yore on its own. Beyond the 4 books you can get as free downloads, we'd like to use an open source approach to expand the story, allowing readers to become involved in developing their own branches. Twitter seemed like a perfect way to do this but we don't seem to be able to get it off the ground. Would it be too much to ask anyone who could help to take a look at what we've been doing https://twitter.com/MasterArmaton and offer some suggestions or recommend resources so we could reach beyond the empty abyss we've been tweeting into? Thanks very much for any help or suggestions you can offer. Peter One of the writers and artists and co-publisher
Master Armaton: Your account just looks like a spam one, tweeting a bunch of meme-like pictures to get followers.
Thanks to ShipRaider for sharing this perception. Since spamming isn't our motivation (the individual pictures often take hours to photograph and render in Photoshop, hardly the modus operandi of a spammer), can anybody offer some helpful suggestions? Our purpose is to share the pictures along with the embedded text as we said in the original post: Any ideas or resources?
I retweet interesting tweets within my niche and am always interested when someone retweets me. If they do I'll usually check them out to see what they've been tweeting about, and will definitely return the favor if I find something good. I just discovered the "Pin to Your Profile Page." You can do that with one of your best tweets that links to the site you're promoting. What happens is when you pin it, that tweet will go to the very top of your timeline. When someone comes to check out your timeline, they will be much more likely to retweet that specific tweet if you have it pinned.
Thank you for you helpful comments, Rebecca. You know I'd thought about doing this, though it seemed a bit absurd when Armaton has all of 2 followers. But I'll begin doing it. Good idea. I'll do this as well. I've also got to redo the header image. It was designed for the old smaller format. I think it's time for some basic retooling across the board which your BookReview.Ninja website has been helpful in inspiring. ShipRaider's comment notwithstanding, we're not interested in spamming our way to followers. Here's the thing: I have a basic lack of understanding about twitter. For example, I don't get how to keep up with following hundreds and certainly not thousands of people the way so many do. In that case, why follow so many people if it's not just to get followers yourself? I don't get how to function in this arena. I've googled around and not found any resources that satisfactorily explain this, the philosophy behind using twitter. Can you recommend any?
On my background (not for the logo) I used twitrcovers.com. I like them. It's free and doesn't require signing up. You just click the button "Set As Your Twitter Background" to try different looks. I think Twitter is a great tool. My target audience for my website is indie authors. Using the search box I can find them - and it's all free! I don't heavily promote. I'd estimate 5% of my tweets are promotional and I keep a tweet that links to my website pinned to the top of my timeline. I also watch my notifications. Some people have asked about my service, others just want to chat. I'm planning a free service that I think will be popular when I'm ready to advertise it on Twitter. That should bring a great deal of targeted traffic to my website. They might also purchase my review service or sign-up for something I'm offering as an affiliate. Although, I'm not overly concerned with that right now as my website is brand new. Actually, I'm still working on it. I don't just follow a lot of people. For example, I avoid anyone with a model avatar that only tweets quotes. They're usually fake. I like meeting other entrepreneurs, and of course, self-publishing authors. To keep up with them, I normally just check my notifications a few times a day. That's basically what I do. You just have to kind of get in there and experiment to see what works for you. p.s. It may also be that Twitter is just not your cup of tea. For example, I don't like Facebook. I just think, what's the point? Why is it even so popular? And yet, I love Twitter. So...
I have a cooking website and I started with some one liners "The only thing better than a good friend is a good friend with chocolate" "if the recipe calls for butter or margerine" for the love of god use butter" etc. etc. Every time I post these tweets I get 3 or 4 new followers. I also use a plugin that every time I add a blog post it tweets, but, it does not tweet an excerpt from the post it tweets a standard message that I can change any time I want. Currently it tweets. "Oh No, it looks like Al is blogging again (link to post) That, to me, is much more a personal approach that the first 100 characters in a post. al