Twitter followers are a near requirement for a good business Twitter strategy.
Having the right followers of your Twitter account means that your target customer will see your tweets, find them useful, learn to trust you and eventually pay you for your product or service.
You can do it without followers by using hashtags and mentions, but it’s much easier to have success with Twitter when you have followers.
So the strategy on Twitter since it launched has been for people to get as many followers as possible. Over the years, that strategy has changed to getting as many of the right followers as possible. Because if your followers aren’t your customers or customer influencers then there is really no point.
A popular way to get followers is to follow your target customer on Twitter. People get an email when someone follows them on Twitter. And even if they have this notification turned off, it’s still possible to see the follow when checking your Mentions column.
As you can probably guess, being able to follow people to get them to follow you back can lead to spam. So Twitter cuts you off at about 2,000 people to follow unless a certain number follow you back. And if you follow 2,000 and then unfollow those that don’t follow you back you’ll raise a red flag at Twitter and they might cut you off from following for a while.
What I’ve found is that there is a strategy that can work just as well to get followers.
Using Blog Posts To Get Twitter Followers
This is a strategy I’ve kind of stumbled on instead of seeking out.
We’ve been doing posts on the GBW Blog aimed at expanding our audience. These posts would be lists that include individuals and companies doing good things in the online world like sharing quotes, creating great blog posts and having good software products.
The posts are helpful to our readers and the companies appreciate the efforts too because it’s free publicity for them.
We’ll share these posts on Twitter and mention those included in the post.
The individuals and brands will see the mention either by getting a notice via email or by checking their Mentions column. We’ll often get Favorites of our tweets, retweets and on occasion, the individual or brand will follow us.
Here’s an example…
We wrote a post about great startups with business blogs. That post included Lyft, which is a really cool company where people can ride share. We included the company’s Twitter handle in our tweet. They must have seen it. I believe they favorited and retweeted the tweet.
And they followed us:
But the cool thing you’ll notice is that not only do these tweets attract the people you mention, they attract the followers of the people you mention.
We haven’t really been tracking to see if we get followers of followers, but since we’ve been using this strategy we have gotten more followers than before of other people interested in our content.
Action Steps
I have three action steps for you based on this strategy and other strategies for getting followers.
1. Blog About Individuals And Brands
Take our strategy that we’ve been mentioning in this post.
Write posts that include your target customers or their influencers. They take effort, but it’s worth it. Write those posts. Share the posts on Twitter and mention 2-4 of the individuals and brands in the tweet.
You’ll see that you’ll get favorites, retweets and follows.
2. Follow Your Target Customers
This is still a good strategy as long as you stay focused.
Here are some criteria for following your target customers.
a. Make sure they’re active on Twitter
b. Make sure they have at least 1,000 followers (in case they retweet your tweets in the future)
c. Make sure they fit your target customer profile (obvious point)
3. Use Relevant Industry Hashtags
This one has worked well for us to and I think it’s another source of our recent influx of new followers.
We’ll use about 1-2 hashtags in our tweets now. I did some research to see what the most popular hashtags were in our industry.
Now we use those hashtags in posts. The people that follow those tags see our posts and if we’re writing good content they’ll follow us to get more of that good content.
Remember: Don’t Spam
If you get carried away with any of these three strategies you’re going to be seen as a spammer.
Use these strategies within reason. Don’t continue to mention a company over and over again based on the same blog post. Don’t follow a bunch of people for the sake of following them. And use hashtags, but not too many. I use about 1 or 2 in each tweet.
Try these strategies out and don’t move into spam territory and you should see your follower count increase. And the great thing is that your followers should be your potential customer, which is the whole point of Twitter marketing.