Find top tweeters by topic on WeFollow
Once you’re on Twitter with a nice branded profile, tweeting appropriately and engagingly and following key people in your community, it’s time to build your followers. Why do you want to do this? Because building followers on Twitter is like building up your email list. Once you have a sizable list, you can announce your latest product, service or event – so long as it is genuinely of interest to your followers and you’re not doing a hard sell. Like an email list, you don’t want people on there who are not interested in what you’re offering. You don’t want to randomly broadcast a wasted marketing message – you want to engage your fan base of followers who are actually interested in what you do.
The big secret is simply: follow more people. About half will follow you back. OK, there is a bit more to it, and a few caveats. Here is my Five-Point Exploding Twitter Technique, for significantly increasing your followers while maintaining their value:
- Only follow people who are in your community of interest. Follow people who are likely to be interested in you and follow you back. Where do you find them? One way is to do a keyword search for people who are tweeting about your topic, or look at who is tweeting from a conference within your industry by following the hashtag. A more efficient way is to find people like yourself, who are tweeting in your subject area – and follow their followers. Their followers are also likely to be interested in your tweets, if they’re already following someone who is your ‘competition’ in the Twitterverse. To find these people, look at some of the Twitter directories that sort people according to industry or topic, such as WeFollow or Twellow.
- Stay within the Twitter follow limit. There is a limit – you can’t just follow everyone. Twitter will stop you from following any new people once you hit the limit. However, that limit increases the more followers you have. Anyone can follow 2,000 people. After that, you can follow 10% more people than follow you. So, if you have 5,000 followers, you can follow 5,500 people.
- Unfollow people who don’t follow you back. Does that seem harsh? Not really. If people don’t follow you back, they’re clearly not that interested in what you have to say. Just like you don’t want random, uninterested, disengaged people clogging up your email list, you don’t want uninterested people taking up valuable space in your allowance of people you can follow. In this way you can free up space for new people to follow. You can find those people who you follow but who don’t follow you by using Friend or Follow.
- Create content that people actually want to read. Finding followers is easy. Keeping them is harder. In the same way people can stop subscribing to your email newsletters, they can stop following you on Twitter. If you stay focused on engaging your followers with useful, interesting, regular content, you will not only keep your followers but attract new ones. There’s no real substitute for creating a useful news service.
- Create community by using hashtags (#), re-tweets (RT) and replies (@). By using Twitter in a social way, rather than treating it as a one-way broadcast medium, you increase the interest and value in your tweets, which will make you more interesting to follow. Hashtags are keywords that start with the # symbol and become hotlinks to a timeline of everyone tweeting with that hashtag in their tweets. They are popular at conferences, where delegates frequently tweet what is going on, with the hashtag (e.g. #lbf10 for the London Book Fair 2010). That means that everyone can follow what is going on – whether they are at the conference or not. Hashtags will also make you more visible to people doing keyword searches using hashtags. Do this authentically though – don’t hijack a trending topic!
This can be a bit time-consuming. But by following this strategy you can incrementally increase your followers to very high levels in a relatively short space of time. What’s more, the people on the list you’re building are all interested in what you have to say – and they have chosen to follow you! Even if you followed them first, the choice to follow you back is theirs, so this is an opted-in mailing list of people in your community of interest.
As your list of followers grows, your 10% allowance grows with it. And having a high number of followers also makes you more visible on Twitter, since more people are likely to re-tweet your posts, and you appear higher up in your sector in the Twitter directories. This means you may only need to actively increase your followers when you first start using Twitter since, once you reach a critical mass of followers, your Twitter success will build on itself.
