Develop an Authentic Twitter Following Using These Tips

Twitter has become an essential piece to business branding. Every organization with a content marketing strategy should be using Twitter to regularly tweet out company content and engage with followers. Twitter is the go-to platform for millions of users all over the world for breaking news, videos, photos, blogs, and quick bits of information all delivered in real time.

However even with a full library of great content, growing a following can be a major challenge. For genuine and meaningful engagement with your brand, it is not enough to just develop a large following. To see a measurable ROI from Twitter, an authentic following must be developed. Here are a few of my tricks of the trade I use every day to strategically grow my client's Twitter accounts, and enhance their online presence amongst their target market.

When developing a strategic plan to expand your company's Twitter presence create a list of influential businesses and individuals within your industry. Start following them and their followers. Engage with their Tweets by favoriting and regularly retweeting.

Clicking on industry relevant hashtags reveals a leads list. The people that are most often tweeting with hashtags that are trending within your industry are the most engaged users. You want these people following your brand. 

When strategically following users that you would like to have in your network, not all of them will follow you back. Creating a compelling profile will increase your follow back ratio.

Keep in mind that Twitter will begin putting restrictions on following more users if your following versus followers ratio becomes too unbalanced. So, make sure to use an unfollower app (do a search in your device's app store and you will find many of them). An unfollower app will enable you to trim the fat of the users that do not follow back, making room for people in your network that want to engage with your brand. Once you have freed up space in your network, follow more people using the methods described above.

Add all your company's prospects to Twitter lists. For example if you are looking for investors in your startup, create a list called "world class entrepreneurs." Once you create your list, you can begin adding both existing prospects and search new ones to add. When you add someone to a list, it gets their attention creating more profile views and followers.

Add a "follow us on Twitter" button to all company correspondence including email, brochures, blog posts, and newsletters. Make sure that the Twitter follow button is prominently displayed on your website. Nobody is going to see it if it is tucked into some obscure corner. Take it a step further and add a live Twitter feed to your website that shows your latest Tweets. 

Consider devoting a portion of your monthly advertising budget to promote your top Tweets. Promoted tweets are paid tweets that enable you to take your tweets to new audiences based off keywords, geographic location, and more.

There you have it, several of my absolute best tips that I have used to grow my own Twitter following to over 25,000 and add thousands of followers for my clients each month. I hope you find these tips useful and will use them to strategically enhance your organization's presence on Twitter. Please do engage in discussion below about growing an authentic Twitter following or anything else that came to mind as your read my post. 

"To begin seeing a measurable ROI on #Twitter, check out this post from @SocialMktgSltns on @LinkedInPulse. #TwitterTips." <Click to Tweet>

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About the Author: John White is the Chief Marketing Officer at Social Marketing Solutions, the LinkedIn group owner of Publishers and Bloggers, contributor to Dice Tech News, Linked Into Business, and more. In June of 2015, John completed his MBA with a specialization in Marketing.

Need a blogger to help tell your company’s brand story or support for your company’s social media marketing? Email me at john@socialmarketingsolutionsllc.net or call me direct at 970.692.3270.