7 Clever Strategies For Earning More Followers on Twitter

We all yearn for more fol­low­ers on Twit­ter. Twit­ter has proven to be a great place to mar­ket and brand your blog in the past months. How­ever, a lot of peo­ple don’t seem to be able to cre­ate a large enough audi­ence to really effec­tively mar­ket their blog.

All of the “How to get Twit­ter fol­low­ers” arti­cles out there tell you the same stuff over and over again:

• Get a brand­able user­name, an avatar that matches your per­son­al­ity, and a great cus­tom Twit­ter design.
• Retweet great con­tent you see
• Post great con­tent on your blog and get it retweeted
• Cre­ate good discussions
• Tweet con­sis­tently use­ful information

Sure, that stuff might work, but it’s not fool­proof by any means. I have read a plethora of arti­cles that have helped me build my Twit­ter accounts, but none of those arti­cles ever have sug­gested any­thing that I am about to write about in this article.

Earn­ing > Receiving

The theme of this arti­cle is to earn your Twit­ter fol­low­ers rather than just get­ting them handed to you. A com­mon method that is used to get fol­low­ers is just mass fol­low­ing a bunch of people.

If you have tried that method, the chances of it work­ing for you are high. But ask your­self this, did you really earn those followers?

1. Write About Twitter

Throw out some Twit­ter arti­cles on your blog every once in a while that is aimed at help­ing some­one enhance their expe­ri­ence using the web­site. We have been doing it here this past week, and we have def­i­nitely seen the impact of writ­ing about Twitter.

Right before I left for my vaca­tion, I pub­lished an arti­cle titled “7 Sim­ple Tips for Effec­tively Mar­ket­ing Your Blog on Twit­ter.” It’s about Twit­ter, and it did pretty well while I was away.

Over­all, the arti­cle received 24 com­ments with­out me reply­ing to any com­ments and 32 retweets. The traf­fic it brought to this blog was pretty decent from just retweets:

I would even encour­age you to get your com­mu­nity involved and have them share their Twit­ter with you. I did that here, and a lot of peo­ple got involved and shared their Twit­ter account with every­one else.

2. Have a Twit­ter Contest

Twit­ter has become a great place to hold a con­test on your blog. Top blog­gers like Shoe­Money and John Chow have used Twit­ter to hold con­tests with great prizes and as a result, they earned a bunch of new followers.

If you ever do hold a Twit­ter con­test, be sure to keep the fol­low­ing in mind:

• Make sure you have peo­ple fol­low you and retweet a mes­sage with a BRIEF descrip­tion and a SHORT URL to the contest.
• Use a tool like Retwee­t­Radar to keep track of those who have retweeted your message.
• Offer a great prize, because you will need to offer a lot to get a lot of peo­ple to tweet about your contest.

Hav­ing a con­test requires a large amount of effort, but if you use the proper tac­tics to get word out about your con­test, you should see some real benefits.

3. Quot­ing Others

Quot­ing a pop­u­lar say­ing or state­ment is a pop­u­lar trend on Twit­ter, and is some­thing that has great poten­tial to bring in fol­low­ers. You can either find a quote some­where on the Inter­net, or you can sim­ply retweet some­one else.

It’s really just like tweet­ing a link over and over again. I can break the whole process down for you very easily:

1. Find a quote and tweet about it
2. Some­one will see it, will include your user­name (RT @AlexFraiser […]).
3. All of their fol­low­ers will see it, and if they like it, they will retweet it again with your user­name in it still.
4. The process may or may not repeat many times, but the chances of get­ting even a few retweets is very high.

A quote is not just a great way to get retweeted, but if it you can find a quote that relates to the topic of the niche you tweet about, then you are still pro­vid­ing qual­ity con­tent to your read­ers AND mar­ket­ing your Twit­ter name. Tell me that’s not a good deal!

4. Study the Power Users in your Niche

What­ever niche you’re in, there is some­one who is going to be the best. Maybe that per­son is you, and maybe it’s not. Try to find these peo­ple who have thou­sands of fol­low­ers and see what they have done to earn so many followers.

Once you have found those peo­ple, study their tweet­ing habits and try to apply some of them to your own tweet­ing rou­tine. The key things to look for in a pow­er­ful Twit­ter user are usually:

• Time of day they tweet — The time of the day they tweet can really have a big impact on how many peo­ple get to see your tweet before it is pushed down by other tweets.
• Type of tweets - Fig­ure out what they tweet about. Do they just tweet about what they are doing, or do they deliver great con­tent? See if they post links a lot, and how they keep the ratio of link­ing and text steady.
• Inter­ac­tion - How often do they inter­act with their fol­low­ers? Look for the @replies in their stream and see what kind of con­ver­sa­tions they cre­ate with their followers.

Of course you shouldn’t go out and copy what other peo­ple do. Just look at what you have learned from study­ing these power users and do your best to build off of their rou­tine. You don’t find suc­cess through copy­ing, you have to learn to build off of some­thing and have it relate to you.

5. Use #hash­tags and Opti­mize Keywords

Believe it or not, you can opti­mize your tweets just like you can opti­mize a web page by doing a lit­tle key­word research. If you can find out a topic to tweet about and include a few pop­u­lar key­words on Twit­ter, you should see some dis­cus­sion being created.

By using hash tags, you can find out what’s hot and what’s not on Twit­ter. If there is a lot of dis­cus­sion about a cer­tain topic, then there is a lot of focus on that topic. If you get involved, some of that focus can be turned onto you.

Like any forum or blog you par­tic­i­pate in, if you con­tribute enough to the dis­cus­sion then you can become a trusted source of infor­ma­tion. What hap­pens when you cre­ate trust on Twit­ter? You get more followers!

6. Save your best tweets for Friday

You may or may not be aware of the trend­ing topic that goes in every Fri­day on Twit­ter called #Fol­lowFri­day. Every Fri­day, many Twit­ter users rec­om­mend peo­ple to fol­low, and that usu­ally results in peo­ple get­ting hun­dreds or thou­sands of extra fol­low­ers every Friday.

So why should you save your best stuff for Fri­day? Dish out your best con­tent on Fri­days, and if some­one who is par­tic­i­pat­ing in #Fol­lowFri­day sees you post­ing great stuff, they will be more inclined to include you in their rec­om­men­da­tion list.

It makes more sense to save your best stuff for Fri­day then Mon­day. You may be great to some peo­ple, and they may want to rec­om­mend you on Fri­day. But if you post all your best con­tent on any other day than Fri­day, your chances of get­ting that con­tent seen for Fol­low Fri­day is decreased and peo­ple may for­get to rec­om­mend you.

7. Cre­ate Incentives

Peo­ple will be more likely to do some­thing for you if you can offer them a reward for doing it. It is very easy to take advan­tage of that con­cept on Twit­ter and use it to rake in many followers.

One of the most pop­u­lar incen­tive I see being used on Twit­ter goes some­thing like this:

Help me reach 1k fol­low­ers! I will give my 1,000^th fol­lower a spe­cial prize! Please RT!

That should spark some inter­ests and get more peo­ple to start fol­low­ing you. The only prob­lem with this trick is that the peo­ple fol­low­ing you may not be really inter­ested in you, they just want that prize. That’s why you should give out a reward that is related to your niche, if who fol­lows you is impor­tant to you.

Isn’t Being Clever Great?

If you can use the advice I have given you, then I really believe you will start to see more fol­low­ers com­ing your way. I am always exper­i­ment­ing with new tricks to increase my fol­lower count on both of the Twit­ter accounts I use, and I have used a cou­ple of these with great success.

What tricks have you used on Twit­ter that you think are smarter than the aver­age method? I would love to see what you come up with!

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