Building a strong social media platform is essential to generate a solid return on investment for your digital marketing efforts. But if your brand’s Twitter following is stuck in the double digits, chances are your posts are going unseen and doing very little to build your reputation as an industry influencer. The following growth hacks will help you increase your Twitter following and establish yourself as an influencer in your particular niche.
1. Take Advantage of Following Tools and Curated Lists
Following and unfollowing is key to building an active, engaged audience for your own Twitter account. But finding relevant users to follow can be a challenge. Thankfully, there are several tools that can make finding and following influencers and other relevant users easy. For example, Growthority recommends combining Chrome’s Twitter Follower extension with curated lists of Twitter accounts to easily follow hundreds of users at a time. The Twitter Follower tool allows you to follow every account on the list with its “Follow All” option, or you can manually add followers for more specialized targeting.
Of course, you should be sure to use curated lists that are actually relevant to your industry. These lists should include industry influencers and those who would be interested in your product or service. After a few days, unfollow any users who haven’t followed you back with a tool like JustUnfollow or Manage Flitter. This way, you’ll be able to build your audience while still maintaining an even following/followers ratio.
2. Make Your Content Tweetable
As your audience continues to grow, it is equally important that you provide them with content that they will actually want to interact with! While creating high-quality content for your blog is an important first step in this process, making it easy for your site visitors to share that content will play a major role in building your Twitter following.
Social Media Examiner recommends using ClickToTweet, an app that allows you to create a custom pre-written tweet to accompany your article link. You then add the link to your post, where users can simply click to share your message on their own Twitter account. Typically, it’s best to choose an insightful quote or statistic from your piece while also tagging your Twitter account. This not only makes it easy for your blog readers to share your content, it also ensures that those content shares will build your Twitter following.
3. Use Others’ Content
Nobody wants to follow an account that is purely self-promoting. Alternatively, you may not have as much content as you need to be regularly tweeting throughout the day. So how do you balance these two issues while still creating opportunities for growth? The answer is simple: use content from other Twitter accounts.
It may seem like a tall task to find quality content to share on your account, but if you’re already following industry influencers (see tip one), your Twitter feed is probably full of quality information that would be equally relevant to your followers. Be sure to tag the originator of the content in your own tweet; this makes it more likely that you’ll earn a retweet (and possibly even new followers) from the influencer whose post you’re sharing. Tweeting others’ content can be so valuable that Social Media Week recommends you do it for 80% of your tweets.
4. Schedule Tweets So You Have More Time for Interaction
Interaction and active engagement are key to your success on Twitter. This is especially true when it comes to building your own following. Retweeting, favoriting and commenting on others’ tweets plays a key role in getting your account noticed and encourages others to engage with you. The thing is, you also need to take the time to consistently post engaging tweets to your own account. The simple solution for finding this balance? Social scheduling tools.
Scheduling tweets in advance will give you more time during the week to find and engage with relevant Twitter users so you can build your own active following. Hootsuite, Buffer app and other tools allow you to plan your content well in advance so you can schedule posts for when your followers are active on Twitter to increase your engagement. Best of all, this will leave you with additional time to engage in one-on-one interactions to build rapport with other Twitter users.
5. Analyze the Competition
While we generally don’t like to think of our competition in a friendly light, analyzing the followers and strategy of your competitors can play a key role in growing your Twitter following. Competitors can be a great resource for finding new accounts to follow while also providing you with an additional opportunity to see which strategies are effective in engaging your niche’s audience. Tools like Followerwonk can help you analyze your competitors and compare them to your own account so you can better hone in on an effective messaging and following strategy.
Conclusion
As you implement these tactics, the reach and effectiveness of your Twitter marketing efforts will greatly increase. The growth in engaged Twitter followers will in turn lead to higher traffic for your website, further establishing you as an industry authority and helping you achieve digital marketing success for your brand.
Image 1 from jis.ac.uk. Image 2 from freestocks.org
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