Three Tips to Building Your Twitter Followers

Twitter is an overlooked amazing tool to connect with your target audiences without having to spend a dime on advertising. Through using the following steps consistently, within three months I went from 1,017 followers 2,045 followers. Due to the nature of Twitter, it is easy to build a following by branding your accounts, providing relevant content, and following active users. 

1. Branding Your Account - When building your personal brand to market either yourself or your company it is important to answer the following questions?

• What information do you want to share with followers?
• What information do you want to follow?
• How do you want others to perceive you? 
• Who is your target audience? 
• Define hashtags you plan to use regularly. 

These questions should make it easy to identify the foundation of your Twitter experience. Through actively using the answers from this plan, I was able to grow one of my clients accounts to 1,000 followers in our target demographic within one months time.

2. Providing Relevant Content - Content is a great way to connect with your audience and share with them the information that is most important to you.

• Create google alerts for relevant key words in your industry. This will keep you on top of relevant, timely news that your audience is interested to know about. Use these alerts to develop content for your followers.

• Use applications to stay up to date with national/international news. Use this as an opportunity to adapt the current news cycle to information relevant for your industry.

• Respond to others tweets. I see so many people on Twitter who, 'Tweet, Tweet, Tweet' but never respond to any of their followers. Engage in a conversation with your audience and those in your industry.

3. Follow Active Users - Did you know that as of April of this year there are over 550 million users who have never sent a tweet, this is over 44% of Twitter users. It is important to carefully follow others on twitter who are actively using Twitter. If you go after the active users this means you are more likely to receive interactions, re-tweets, and follow-backs with your account. 

• Use monitoring tools to follow those in your industry who are active on Twitter. You can do this by using tools such as Tweetdeck to see who is active and running on social media.

• Follow people in similar demographics as yourself, age, religion, ethnicity, interests, education, location, the list goes on and one. 

• How do you find them? The best tips is to follow the followers from accounts of those who are in your industry. For example, when I worked at the Utah Senate, to reach our audience in the Utah Region we would target followers from lists of local news outlets, city/public organizations, and local politicians. This helped us know we were following people in our demographic who also had an interest in Utah Politics due to the other accounts they were already following. 

Through actively applying these steps to your account you will see that you more than capable of building a following on Twitter. I know you can do it, social media is all about engagement--get out there and start engaging!