By Vic Conner
Growing your Twitter following is one of the most important parts of successful social marketing. If you don’t have followers, who is listening to you? Likewise, it is important to have followers that on the same wavelength as your brand—you can’t market a steak to a vegetarian.
With just a couple free tools, we will learn how to get more Twitter followers that will love your brand.
You Can’t Build a House without a Foundation
There are a few tasks we need to check off the list before we can start building a Twitter following. Consider these suggestions a foundation.
Twitter Profile –
Your twitter profile needs to have a well written Bio that gets right to the point. Short and sweet. Be sure to include what you do/what you sell. Add your website to the Bio in addition to the “website” section.
The profile image you are using should be clean and resolute. Use your logo. The same for the profile banner; make sure it is resolute and includes a CTA.
Content –
What are you going to tweet about? Put some real thought into this. Make your brand’s voice really show through. Talk about your product and service, but not too often. Don’t shout in the dark. Post every day.
How are you going to schedule your tweets daily? Are you going to get on Twitter each day to tweet? BufferApp is a powerful tool that allows you to schedule tweets for many days to come.
Got those out of the way? Perfect! Let’s move on!
Use Followerwonk to Find Followers
This is the secret sauce. Followerwonk is an app developed by Moz that can provide detailed analytics and insights into Twitter. There is a free version and a paid version. We will just need the free version for now! We will use this tool to find relevant followers who are more likely to follow you.
- Navigate to https://followerwonk.com/ – Select “Search bios” from the menu bar. Select “Search Twitter bios only” from the dropdown.
This will allow us to find Twitter users with certain words in their Twitter bios. By doing this, we find the users that are on the same “wavelength” as your brand. Their following will be beneficial to both parties—you get a new audience member, and they receive your content!
So let’s say you own a pet shop and you want to grow your followers. We would select words like: pet lover, dog lover, animals. Let’s give it a whirl.
- Type in your keyword and press “Do it”. For this example, we will use “pet lover”.
- A list of Twitter users will pop up with a bunch of numbers. Press “Following”. This will order the accounts based on who follows the most people first.
- Start going down the list and Ctrl + clicking the user account names. This will open their profiles in new browser tabs. Open around 10 or so at a time so that your computer does not freeze.
- Click on each tab. Screen the profile for activity. Ask yourself: Is this someone I’d like as a follower? If so, follow them! If not, don’t. Close the tab after.
- Repeat!
Keep in mind: You can follow up to 1000 people a day, so don’t be afraid to keep adding people!
If you Engage, They will Follow
So now you are following a lot of people… but how do you get them to follow you back? You must interact with them and start conversations! Eventually, they will want to follow you back!
Throughout each day, periodically check on Twitter and perform the following:
- Reply to Tweets EVEN if the topics are not part of your brand
- Retweet posts that your brand would agree with
- Direct message users if you are legitimately interested in what they do or if you have authentic curiosity about them
The key to success: Be authentic. If you are not, people can sense that from miles away.
Continue to follow more people day-by-day and interacting with them. A HUGE following won’t come overnight. It is something that is built over time, but it is worth it.
