Apr 12, 2011
Do You Need To Increase Your Twitter Followers?
At the outset, I would argue that increasing twitter followers should not be your objective. Instead, the high number of followers is a proof that your tweets are useful to your followers. Note that the title of this blog post could easily have been “How to Tweet?” since following best tweet practices will indirectly attract more conversations and thus result in more followers. Enough has been blogged about the ways to increase your twitter followers. This post is not going to repeat the most common and obvious ways. Having said that, there are some practical and highly targeted ways in which you can engage with the community and thus attract more twitter followers.
Here are three such ways:
1. Don’t just RT
One of the most common suggestions is to retweet other tweets by popular people. But the fact is that simple re-tweeting doesn’t help. You are more likely to engage in a conversation (and thus appear in other person’s social graph) when you are adding your own perspective to the tweet, summarizing the key points, or simply recommending a blog post. Consider this tweet from Chris Dixon summarizing the debate in the article. By summarizing, Chris has added another level of clarity, which is more likely to prompt his followers to either reply and/or read the article.
2. Tweet about events, even if you aren’t attending
Events are a great way to engage in meaningful conversations that are happening in real time. Engaging with people who are present at the event will have a higher response rate than just re-tweeting the tweets. Most of the events have hashtags but you can also do a simple twitter search to find people who are tweeting. Consider the response I received from Anil Dash who was present at the latest NY Tech Meetup when I was at a class in school.
3. Talk to brands
Some brands on twitter have huge number of followers. Engaging with conversations with your brand on twitter cannot only help you achieve visibility but also help other followers of the brand benefit from your conversation. Consider the below example where followers of Tumblr benefit from a conversation between the brand and a user who is facing a problem with one of the product features.
Other ways of engaging with a brand include, but are not limited to, genuinely praising/complaining the brand, finding new ways to use the brand’s product, suggesting new features, and blogging about the brand.
It’s time to stop bothering about number of followers. Focus on ways to engage with others on Twitter. Happy Tweeting!
[Cross-posted on Social Media & Entrepreneurship class blog here]
