How to get more Twitter followers

There are over 320 million Twitter users worldwide. Once registered, you can publish short status updates of up to 140 characters known as ‘tweets’. Anyone can read these and then respond with ‘retweets’. Understanding its potential to reach out to a wide audience, many public figures (such as artists, politicians, and sports personalities) use the service to communicate with their fans by “microblogging”. Some have as many as several millions followers.

If you’ve only just created your Twitter account or still need to optimize it, a little patience is needed. Generating a wide audience doesn’t happen overnight, but with a driven attitude and the following actions, you’ll have better chances of finding and keeping more Twitter followers.

1. Optimize your profile
Create a strong profile. The profile picture and description gives potential followers an indication of your company’s services and core principles, so you must first ensure that your profile is complete. It’s therefore important to highlight the central brand, product, or service. Don’t treat writing your biography as a chore; use it to your advantage and write something that makes you stand out from your competition.

2. Connect Twitter to your personal website and social media accounts
Integrating a Twitter button onto your website allows visitors to access your profile directly. It also helps to include links to any other social media accounts in your Twitter bio and vice versa.

3. Provide diverse, content-rich tweets
The key to gaining more Twitter followers is in offering valuable information in your tweets. Before potential users follow you, they will probably read some of your older entries first, so it’s important that your tweets are of consistently high quality. Take your time to find diverse and interesting topics and regularly add exclusive links and multimedia content.

4. Tweet regularly and at the right time
Keeping up-to-date is of utmost importance on Twitter. Users prefer regular entries to sporadic updates. Try to keep your tweet workload the same and tweet at least twice a day. Publish your tweets around your readers’ schedules; the best time to tweet is either side of working hours, when users are most likely to check social media. Don’t forget to also send tweets out at the weekend.

5. Use hashtags
By using a hashtag (#), you can ensure that your tweet appears when users search for a particular keyword. This is also a good way to gain a few extra followers who you wouldn’t normally have reached. But avoid using too many hashtags, and also irrelevant ones that have nothing to do with the topic. It’s all about finding the right balance.

6. Follow your follower
When you gain new followers on Twitter, you should repay the favor by following them back, otherwise you risk them unfollowing you. This way you can also be sure that your entries can be publicly answered, so your tweets reach more people. You may also get more followers from following users.

7. Tidy up your follower base
If you’re still new to Twitter, you probably don’t need to clear up your account, but as you start to get more followers this task becomes more important. In order to avoid follower limits you should delete users from your list who aren’t following you back. If this task is too large and complex to tackle, there are tools such as Friend or Follow, which come with useful filters and different methods of sorting through your list.

8. Communication
Reaching out to users and connecting with followers is the easiest way to benefit from networking through Twitter. Share information on current and interesting topics, share valuable entries from other users, and thank users for retweeting your posts.

These tips are just some of the numerous optimization possibilities that will result in you getting more Twitter followers. The more you use the social media platform, the more uses you will have for special tools for maintaining your Twitter account. Programs that help with account management, tweet publishing, and statistical evaluation come in very handy once your follower count hits the thousands.

As with Facebook likes, it’s also possible to buy Twitter followers. This generally includes fake accounts that increase your number of followers, but don’t provide any value to you. The purchased accounts don’t retweet your entries, don’t publicly comment on them, and don’t have a relevant list of followers. The problem is that many providers aren’t very reputable and some fake accounts are designed to send spam to your real followers. If it comes to light that you’ve bought followers, maybe from a sudden suspicious increase in the number of followers, it could damage your reputation and even lead to your account being suspended.

Avoid blatant self-promotion, sending automatic messages, and posting links with no explanation. Request that users retweet your entries in the right context. Only with a long-term, strategical plan will you have success in getting new Twitter followers.