Gaining new Twitter followers will be a key goal for any business tweeting.  The more relevant followers you have, the more people that are going to see your tweets when you make them, and in turn the more that might share your message by re-tweeting it.

Getting new followers by following people

One of the most common ways of gaining new followers is by following people with your account.  What might happen is that you find some relevant accounts (they must be relevant!) to follow, click on the follow button and that is it.

Then what?

What’s the problem here?

You’ve followed them but you’ve shown no real interest or interaction.  Imagine going to a networking event, strolling past someone whilst putting your business card in a bowl next to them, and then proceeding on your merry way.

The issue is that you’re one of many; our own account often has 10 new people following it on any given day and this is not an unusual scenario.  What we then get is 10 small thumbnails of accounts that have followed us shown within our notifications.

They don’t stand out.

What’s the result?

If you simply push the follow button and do nothing else we have found that around two to four accounts will follow you back out of 10.  That’s between 20 and 40 out of 100; not a ratio we want to be shooting for.

What’s the answer?

The next time you want to follow someone make sure that when you visit their profile you have a good look through their timeline; if nothing else it will give you a decent idea of whether or not it is someone that is worth following when it comes to your business.  If the answer is yes, then we are still going to click follow but we are going to go one step further.

Look at their last few tweets and see if there’s anything you can do to interact; this can be by re-tweeting, liking or by commenting.  Share some of their content, get into conversation with them and show some interest.

To use the networking analogy; this is going up to someone, having a chat with them and getting to know what they’re about.  That’s completely normal and it’s how things work in real life, so the internet should be no different.

Asking questions will always spark engagement.

You will also find that you stand out in their notifications; instead of being a thumbnail photo amongst many, you will be there with your comment, re-tweets and likes.  This is ideal if they’re catching up on a lot of notifications.

What’s the end result?

We’ve found that when doing this you will get around seven or eight of the accounts following you back out of every 10 you follow; that’s a decent increase from the two you were getting and it also takes very little time.

The roll-on effect is that when more and more accounts interact with you and follow you it shows up on their follower’s Twitter accounts too, so you may well find that even more accounts begin to follow.

It really is as simple as that and it really is a win-win scenario!

If you’d like to know more about how we can help to grow your social media presence then please do give us a call on 01566 232323 – we’d be happy to have a chat.