How to get more Twitter followers without paying out an arm and a leg?

It’s easy to build Twitter followers but it’s hard to build a Twitter following made up of a truly relevant audience that would benefit your business.

So, stay away from those schemes selling Twitter followers if you’re just paying out for random people who are not relevant to your business.

Here are some ideas on how to get more Twitter followers today, the type of followers that will benefit your business!

1.  Follow relevant people who are already engaging with you

When you find people that are sharing your content or engaging with you on Twitter, these are people who are likely to make good followers. You will need to check out their profile to see if they are relevant but it’s a good target group to start with (assuming they are not engaging with you with spam content).

One way of doing this is using a tool called Commun.it.  Commun.it picks out people that are engaging with you and call these Supporters or Engaged Members. It also identifies Influencers in your niche.

Here is an example.  Commun.it has identified the following 3 people it considers to be Supporters.  These are people who have engaged with us, which could mean that they shared our content several times or that we have had conversations with them over Twitter.

If I pick out the person on the list called Mucha and then hover over his name with my mouse, Commun.it shows more detailed information.

You can see that Mucha had 11 engagements with me so far, so he obviously find something interesting about my content.  I had asked a question on Twitter about who was using Infusionsoft and Mucha responded.  We engaged in a conversation because Mucha works in Marketing and has a very good knowledge of Infusionsoft.  This is a perfect follower for me: someone that is interested in technology and works in Marketing.  Winner!

So, by tracking who you are engaging with in an efficient way using a tool like Commun.it you can start to gain a bigger and better following!

2.  Seek out relevant people based on their expertise

There’s nothing wrong with searching out people who are worth interacting with, and there are tools available that allow you to search Twitter bios to find people that are relevant.

ManageFlitter provides free functionality which allow you to do a search of bios.  You can search for keywords and then further narrow down the search to find people in a particular country, or who have a certain number of followers etc.

In the following example I searched for people who had put ‘Social Media Manager’ in their bio, who live in England and who have more than 1,000 followers.

3.  Monitor keywords

All the content on this site is based around social media tools and technology so  I track when anyone mentions ‘social media tools’ in their tweets. I do this to keep an eye on content that is written and shared around this topic because I want to hear about any new articles and developments. However it’s also a good source of followers because I am able to see the same people/organizations sharing a lot of content in this area.

There are several free or low cost tools you can use for this task, for example Brand24, Google alerts or Mention. In the following example we have set up a keyword search for ‘social media tools’ and filtered based on microblogs, which ensures that it will include tweets in the results.

 4.  Find popular and relevant Twitter users

Another way of getting more Twitter followers today  is to start building relationships with influential people within your niche.  This is one of my preferred methods of growing your followers.

To do this, you start by making a list of the most influential people within your niche and ten engage with them on a regular basis to build up a relationship with them. At first they may ignore you, but if you put the work in you’ll get their attention.  Comment on their blogs, mention them in your blog posts, mention them in your tweets, and share their content. If they get to know you and you provide good content, it’s likely that they will follow you back and also start sharing your content. This kickstarts their own followers into following you they will see your content.

There are many tools available to help you find those influential followers, for example, twtrland. This tool allows me to search Twitter by location, skill or name.

For example, if I search for ‘Social Media Marketing’, these are the first 3 people displayed – Jeff Bullas, Neal Schaffer and Lilach Bullock.

When you hover your mouse over any particular profile, you see a rating based on that person’s amplification, reach and relevance.

• Amplification – The higher the amplification, the more people see the content that they share.
• Reach – The size of their following relative to other people, based on the skill you searched for.
• Relevance – How relevant this person is based on the skill you looked up.

If you click on each person you can drill down and view their full profile.  Here is a summary of some of the interesting information about Jeff:

You can see that Jeff tweets quite a lot, and he gets on average 663 retweets for every 100 tweets he sends out.  This means there is good amplification!

Twtrland allows you to do a full analysis and see a person’s top tweets and who they are interacting with, where their followers are, and much more.

5.  Use Hashtags in your tweets

When you overdo hashtags or make them very general they are not going to add any value.  For example, adding in #sport in your tweet is not going to help you at all.

But, when used well, hashtags can be very useful for building up your followers. Here are some examples:

a). Conferences

If you are at a conference, find out the hashtag and tweet regularly throughout, making sure you use the hashtag.  If you provide really good, relevant information you will get followers from other people at the conference and also from people who are not there but are tracking the conversation.

b). Twitter chats

Twitter chats are conversations based around a hashtag which defines the topic.  These conversations happen at specific times, for example, there is a #blogchat every week run by Mac Collier.  By finding Twitter chats relevant to your niche, and engaging in conversation on them can be a great way of attracting new followers.

c). Sharing content with hashtags

When you share your content on Twitter, consider the hashtags that people may use to track content on that subject.  If you make good use of popular, specific hashtags it means your content will be picked up by more targeted people, which will result in more followers.

6.  Advanced Twitter Filtering

If you want to be really proactive about building your following, use Socialbro for advanced Twitter filtering. This tool offers great functionality for targeting Twitter followers, increasing engagement, measuring data through analytics and managing your Twitter account.

The targeting functionality is really powerful because there are so many filters available to find the right users to follow. In the following example I’m looking for people that have ‘social media tools’ in their profile, have a Kred score above 540 and have more than 10,000 followers.

Kred is an influence measurement tool which rates people out of 1,000.  These tools are generally not that useful on their own, but used in combination with other filters can help you find relevant people.

Socialbro is a very powerful tool with some great functionality and the filtering is really great.

7. Share great content

If you share great content on a regular basis you will inevitably pick up more followers.  If the content is very good, the more active you are, the more followers you will achieve.

Think about how people search for other users to follow.  Are they searching for tweets with relevant keywords?  Are you including these keywords in the tweets?  Are they filtering their ‘mentions’ to see who is talking about them?

What’s next?

If you’ve got this far I’d love you to take action.  Here are 3 ways:

1. Get more Twitter followers today by following the guidelines above.

2. Share this content with your friends if you have enjoyed it or found it useful.

3.  Give me a comment below.  Tell me if you like this post, if you got value from it, what tactics you use.  I would love to hear from you – in fact, it would make my day!

Looking forward to hearing from you!