Silicon Valley venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki once said, "Frankly, there are only two kinds of users on Twitter: those who want to attract more followers, and those who lie. Even without celebrity status and a dedicated builder, you can become a Twitter celebrity and sit on a large following. The following guide will teach you how to get more followers on Twitter.
Perfect personal information. Make sure your profile is complete by uploading a personal headshot with clear features and a detailed profile. It's important to let your fans know about you and your hobbies.
- Using headshots for headshots is both easy and grounding. Take personal headshots at an angle to avoid shining clutter into the frame. Crop the photo to a square and don't scale it so that fans can't zoom in on the headshot for a closer look.
- You can also use your company's branding for your avatar instead of a personal photo. Never choose a personal avatar that is too random to avoid being taken as a spam account.
- Many Twitter users will read your profile before deciding whether they want to follow you or not. A good profile can help you attract more followers.
Post tweets that are interesting or enlightening. Most Twitter users will skim through your recent tweets before deciding if they want to follow you. So the better the quality of the tweets, the more followers you will have.
- Diversify the content of your tweets. Tweets should be rich and diverse, don't just post about your own journey. Post more about your hobbies, share some life philosophies, or post some funny pictures for a change.
- Tweet content should be interesting. Tweets should be written in a way that is interesting and engaging. Post more about your life experiences, if your stories are interesting, followers will be interested in your daily life.
- Post more interesting links. Find some fun stories like man-bites-dog online to create tweets. Guy Kawasaki, a Twitter sensation with 100,000 followers, even pays people to collect interesting news worth tweeting. Many sites have content that lends itself to tweet writing.
- Tweet more multimedia content. Post pictures, videos or audio every now and then to add interest to your tweets.
Choose the right time frame to tweet more often. Fans don't like tweeters with low activity levels, so tweet more often. Send at least one tweet a day, two is better, to boost the account's following.
- Choose the time of day when users are active to send tweets. If you always tweet late at night, users won't have a chance to follow you. The best time slots for tweeting are before work (before 9pm) and after work (around 6pm).
- Pay attention to the time difference. Most Twitter users are American, so tweet in EST or WEST time.
- Overly frequent tweets can occupy fans with fresh alerts and overwhelm them, which can lead to follower loss.
Adding hashtags. Adding hashtags attracts users with the same interests as you and increases the spread of tweets.
- Write tweets by popular hashtags and add hashtags (Twitter Hotlist is on the left side of the home page). Doing so will boost the exposure of your tweets.
- As with other tweeting tips, there are limits to adding hashtags. To improve the quality of your tweets, it's usually enough to add one or two relevant and interesting hashtags. Don't add random hashtags or add them pointlessly just because the tweet mentions a keyword slightly.
Follow all fans. This method may sound unreliable, but it works well. Fans will probably unfollow you when they find out you're not following them. Twitter, like most social media, requires "courtesy and reciprocity."
- When you follow each other, the other person may make a public statement about it, which can also help you gain exposure and get his fans to notice you as well.
- You might be worried that you don't have the energy to follow that many people, and that's normal. After you follow more than a hundred people, it's unlikely that you'll want to follow what's new about each person. This is when you have to be selective in reading what's new about each other.
Get users to follow your account. You can post your Twitter address on your own blog, email, other social media or on the web.
- Doing so will get people who are already interested in you to follow your Twitter account.
- Use icons. Icons like buttons or counters can draw users' attention and increase the number of followers.
Attract celebrities or stars to follow you. If they tweet you or retweet your tweets, you'll get higher exposure.
- You can grab the attention of celebrities by @ing each other. You can send @ messages to any user, even if you are not following the other person.
- Select a celebrity (or a user with a large following) and send an @ message to the person. This message will be displayed on the page and will be visible to all visitors.
- If you are lucky, the celebrity may reply or retweet your message, or even follow you. In this way, your tweets will be seen by thousands, if not millions of subscribers, which will surely help you gain a lot of followers.
- Even though there is little hope, you can send a message or two a day to a celebrity and try to get retweets. The more interesting and original the tweet, the higher the likelihood of getting the star's attention.
Follow people who are like-minded with you and then follow their followers. This method may sound complicated, but it's not difficult. Find users who have similar interests to you and far more followers than you, and then follow each other and each other's followers.
- For example, if you like tarot, try to find a user who also likes tarot and has a large following, and then follow the other person's followers. If your profile and tweets indicate that you are a tarot lover, then there is a good chance that the person will follow you.
- But be careful, following too many people may lose potential followers.
Ask other users to retweet your tweet. Getting retweets increases exposure. From time to time, you can follow your tweets with the words "ask for retweets" and ask your followers to retweet them for you. Occasionally posting a link to a up-tweeting tutorial article can also help you get more attention.
Repeat popular tweets. Search your Twitter username and watch which tweets get the most likes or retweets, then repeat the popular tweets every 8 to 12 hours.
- Doing so can help you get more attention and attract users who haven't seen your tweets before. Users use Twitter at different times of the day, with spikes of activity in the morning and evening.
- If followers are critical of your repetitive tweets, you can either tone it down a bit, or just delete the complaints!
Remove users who aren't following you regularly so you don't reach your follow limit. After you follow more than 2,000 people, Twitter will restrict you from continuing to follow others. However, you can continue to follow other users once you reach 2,000 followers.
- When the follow limit is reached, you can unfollow those users who are not following you. You can also unfollow users who have low activity, or boring tweet content, which lifts the follow limit and is nothing to regret.
- As the number of followers grows, it becomes more and more difficult to find out those users who are not following you. Fortunately, you can use software like Twidium or FriendorFlower to clean up your followers.
- Once you've finished cleaning up, you're ready to follow new users. Watch out for more of those potential followers!
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Follow automatic mutual followers. "Twitter Redditors" (Twitter users with high follower and following counts) will generally follow you automatically as well.
- Twitter redditors follow a lot of other users, but unlike spam accounts, they have equal or more followers.
- You will often see these users when browsing Twitter pages (for example, their tweets may be retweeted by your followers), or you can just search for "most tweeted accounts" or "most tweeted owners".
- Most of the people who follow spam accounts are autofollow users. Such users may follow thousands of people but have only a measly five or six followers.
- Followers who follow spam accounts. These people will increase their followers by spamming each other.
Find fans by keywords. You can search for keywords that contain your own points of interest to find potential followers.
- If you're a heavy metal fan, try to find users who are like-minded enough to tweet about your favorite bands. Reply to their tweets and then follow each other. Show each other what you have in common and there's a good chance they'll follow you too.
- You can also retweet each other's quality tweets. Doing so not only builds a connection with the other person, but also presents good content to your own followers.
Tip
- You can open several Twitter trumpets. Accounts with improper methods of seeking fans may be treated as spam accounts and thus be blocked by Twitter. If your main account is very important (e.g. contains your full name, or is an exclusive brand, etc.), you can open smaller numbers to test the waters for up-tweeting techniques.
- Work to maintain the number of followers you already have. Fans will read tweets from tweeters and then periodically unfollow some tweeters they find uninteresting.
Don't
- Don't send auto-generated messages to avoid being unfollowed.
- The Twitter system can detect accounts that are heavily followed or unfollowed in a short period of time. If your account is detected, the hotness of the account will be affected.
- After following each other, don't delete each other just because they don't immediately follow each other. It is not too late to wait at least five days first and then unfollow the other person if they haven't moved. If you unfollow immediately, you run the risk of being treated as a spam account and thus being blocked.