Now that you know the greatest feature of Twitter, “Search”,
let’s review how to successfully complete something that is absolutely required
to make anything from Twitter, gaining “Valuable Followers”.
It is a fact that if you don’t have any followers, your tweets are kind of useless. They will always be included into the public feed that anybody can browse, but they would be drops in an ocean of tweets (Twitter has 18 million users now, and even if 60% of Twitter users abandon their accounts within their first month of use, that sums up anyways in a lot of tweets at every second).
I wrote “Valuable Followers”. Their number sure counts; the bigger the number the more influence and interaction you will have. But quality matters actually more than quantity. The question is how to gain followers that are interested by what you have to say? Where to find them? How to start? The value of Twitter is in the dialog you can establish with people, and the contribution you can make to selected topics of interest.
Like for a blog, the first step is to define what you want to cover, and what you want to talk about. You need an identity and a positioning on Twitter like everywhere else. Are you a subject matter expert and do you want to engage people on this topic? Do you want to promote your company and its services? Or do you want to share your view on technology, politic or anything else. Without being 100% specialized, you should be somewhere (I exclude again the use of Twitter for just interacting with friends and family. I only consider here a professional use of it).
With a clear positioning in hands, you are ready to start your quest. Here are my advice to build a strong base of valuable followers.
1- Leverage Search on Key Words
Using the Search function, target tweet thread that are related to the topic you want to cover. You can launch a few searches to cover more space and keep them all visible thanks to the tools I mentioned in my previous post. Then identify the most valuable people, the ones who are making interesting posts, who are RT’ed by the others, and who have a lot of followers. Just follow them to start with. They might follow you back, although recent changes in the way Twitter allows you to follow people has discouraged Twitter users to automatically follow back. That was very common a few months ago.
2- Reply to targeted users
If you feel good, have found your Twitter voice and could add something valuable to the discussion, you can “Reply” to them, engaging the dialog directly. Not sure they will answer either, but your chances to get noticed and followed back are higher… if you really added value.
3- Use hashtag
Hashtag are words preceded by the sign # that people use to tag their posts. You can read this article on Mashable to better understand the concept.
The benefit of a hashtag is easy to understand. When you have identified hashtag related to your selected topic (use this site to do it: ), searching on them will bring you a new flow of people sharing the same interest. From there, use the same technique, follow the most influential ones and engage them.
4- Add value
This is certainly the best advice: value, value, value. People will follow you if they learn something from you. Spammers and people sharing only “what they are doing” don’t get much traction, unless there are celebrities, or worst they are blocked. Twitter is a highly transparent and public space and people abusing the system get usually strong fire back.
There are three ways to do it.
a. Directly in 140 characters… always challenging!
b. By directing people to interesting articles, blog posts… and posting their url. My recommendation is to save room and use short url then, such as http://bit.ly/ (short url converter is embedded in Seesmic Desktop)
c. By ReTweeting (RT) interesting tweets that you have liked and want to make more visible and share further.
5- Be consistent
You read the statistic, 60% of Twitter new users drop their account after a few months. And amongst the existing users, a very little percentage actually post something every day (average is 14 time a month, meaning some people post once in a while and others do more than 10 times a day). If you want to gain and keep followers, you need a certain discipline and post on a regular basis. My recommendation in a professional environment is 2 to 3 tweets a day, always aiming to add value.
6- Be nice
Yes, be nice. Thanks people who “RT” you, answer users who “D” you (interact directly with you), say “please” when asking something, and thanks also people referring you in the #FollowFriday weekly movement.
Twitter is a social environment and being nice, while not hesitating to challenge ideas, is a must.
You should be ready now to smartly use Twitter in your professional world, identify people and topics of interest, contribute by adding value and grow your follower base regularly.
If you are a Twitter user already, would you recommend other techniques and way to use it and gain followers? Please share your experiences and advices by leaving a comment.
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