How to build a bigger Twitter following
If you rely purely on your organic search ranking in Google as a sole source of income, then there’s a chance you’re making a mistake. Google have proved recently that they have the power to pull the bottom out of the search results at the flick of a switch, meaning that site owners, no matter the quality of their content, products or services, can be completely hung out to dry. For this reasons it’s necessary to develop other traffic sources to your website.
The most effective alternative traffic sources then are the social media websites, specifically Facebook and Twitter. In this blog I’d like to offer a few tips about how to build a Twitter following properly. Forget about buying hundreds of these automated profiles, they don’t engage and don’t send traffic so are therefore worthless. With a few simple tips, it is actually quite easy to build a bigger Twitter following……
How can I get more Twitter followers?
Building a decent Twitter following is not an overnight occurrence, it takes time and effort, but once it is established it should provide a healthy stream of highly targeted traffic, as well as increasing the opportunity for social engagement and brand building.
The first thing to do is make sure you have an attractive Twitter profile page. It should feature strong branding (logo, company strap line, brand colours etc.) and also include contact details about the business. This makes the entire profile seem more authoritative and will usually increase the level of engagement and quantity of people that follow you back.
The next thing to do is use Google search, Twitter search or your own industry knowledge to identify the 5-10 leading or most socially active brands in the niche you are targeting, or at least other businesses on Twitter with a similar target audience. You then need to start going through their followers and following them and hopefully because they are already following a similar brand, they will be more inclined to follow you. You could even use the Twitter search function to specifically identify those that mention or express an interest in your niche in their bio, because again, these accounts are more likely to follow you, and more likely to engage with you in the future.
We recommend that you follow no more than 1,000 people per day as doing so is likely to be classified as ‘aggressive following’ by Twitter, and it could end up with you having your account removed. This is where tools like ‘ManageFilter’ will come in handy, because it offers you a lot more control over how you Follow as opposed to the main UI on Twitter. It’s handy to use ‘ManageFilter’ to check your account once per week and streamline your following strategy. For example, you might add 200 followers per week. Once per week I would review that and find 100 people that haven’t followed you back (this often indicates they aren’t very active on Twitter), unfollow them, and follow 100 more people associated with the previously identified brands.
This approach should start getting you a steady stream of new followers, but it’s important to consolidate those new followers by regularly contributing with funny, valuable and niche relevant Tweets. Always post links to new articles you’re publishing on your blog, but go further by sharing quality content that other authors within your niche are publishing. Not only will this win you influential friends within the industry, but it will show to your followers that you take are an authoritative information source.
The chances are that if you are building a Twitter following for a business, you’ll have a main website. Increase your brands visibility on Twitter by making it a feature of your brand homepage. Perhaps have a counter with the number of followers, or have a feed showing your latest Tweets so visitors directly to your site are made aware of how following you will benefit them.
Hopefully this blog has a few tips you can use to reinforce your search engine optimisation efforts with social media marketing, but if you have any questions, please call us at Dental Design today on 01202-677277.
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