How to get real followers on twitter without using any tools | SMMSUMO
Step 1 – Narrow your niche
I mentioned above that twitter is not only a numbers game but is more closer to an interests game. This means that in order to get followers that will actually care about your tweets, you need to narrow down your niche and go after people with a very specific profile.
Before starting this experiment I decided that I would go after people that tweet about #digitalmarketing. Our industry is made up of a number of related niches like SEO, social media, content marketing, blogging etc but my profile and tweets are more relevant to Digital Marketing so these people are closer to my target audience.
You may think that the niches I mentioned above are all part of digital marketing and this is true but I wanted to focus on the people that tweet specifically about digital marketing (using the particular hashtag), since I noticed that these people have interests that match mine and tweet about things I would normally tweet.
By segmenting your audience at this level, you get better results and it’s the first step in becoming an authority twitter user for that niche.
Step 2 – Optimize your twitter profile
After you narrow down your niche, the next step is to make sure that your twitter profile is optimized.
This means having a profile picture (a real picture of you and not an icon or animal), a good description about what you do including the hashtags you have selected to target.
Step 3 – Find potential users to follow in your niche
Next, is to actually find which users to follow. The best and easiest way to do that is to open twitter and search for your hastag(s). Scan though the results and start following people, retweeting the ones that you find relevant for your audience or even mark some as favourite so as to get the attention of other people.
When you re-tweet or mark a tweet as favourite, the other person gets notified and some of them will check your profile and follow you.
When selecting the users to follow, make sure that they meet the guidelines below, because this will increase the chances of them following you back.
- They have a profile picture and meaningful profile description.
- They follow a number of people. If the number of people they follow is much less than the number of people following them this means that they don’t follow back so even if you follow them most probably they won’t follow you back.
- They have a good number of followers.
- They tweet frequently using the hashtag you are interested in. You don’t want to follow someone because they used the particular hashtag once, but you want users that consistently tweet about it.
Being selective of who to follow increases the number of people that will follow you back. If you select anyone without doing the above checks soon enough you will end up with a big number of following and not enough followers.
Step 4 – Anything you tweet should be optimized for your niche
Another technique that I used that proved to be very effective was to tweet a number of times per day using the hashtag #digitalmarketing.
As you will read below, I also use buffer to share some of my tweets but for this case study I had twitter open while I was working and every couple of hours I published a new tweet. The tweets were not all from my websites but I tweeted from a number of sources and also retweeted from the stream.
Every time I did this I noticed that immediately afterwards I got new followers, retweets and listed in different lists. It is important to understand that your potential twitter users are in different timezones and by tweeting several times per day you can see which times work better for you and also reach a larger audience.
A good practice is to tweet in real-time when you are awake and use a scheduling tool to send out tweets while you are sleeping.
Besides having the hashtag in my tweets I also included images that make the tweets more visual and interesting.
Step 5 – Find and follow industry leaders
The chances that popular and ‘famous’ twitter users will follow you back are minimum but you still have to follow them for many reasons.
For starters, you want to know what they are tweeting about and find opportunities to retweet their posts or even send them a message. They are more likely to reply to you on twitter than any other medium.
Second, a lot of people (as you will see below), scan their profiles and find people to follow and you want to be one of them.
Third, most of the times their tweets go viral and get attention so by retweeting these popular tweets, you also increase your chances of getting your tweets retweeted and reach more people.
Fourth, I will cover this in more details in another post but having a list of twitter users that are industry leaders can prove very useful when you want to advertise on twitter by targeting specifically those people.
Step 6 – Don’t forget to follow back
While your goal is to get as many followers as you can, don’t forget to follow back. When someone follows you check their profile and if they are a good fit (see conditions above), follow them back.
What I do is check my twitter notifications every couple of hours and follow back interesting people. In case I missed someone, I find them later using one of the tools I am using (keep reading and you will see below the details).
Following a number of people is not bad provided that you have more followers than following. This makes your account more ‘authoritative’ and in the long term this can prove to be very important.
Have also in mind that many people use tools to manage their followers so if you don’t follow them back they will unfollow you in a few days.
Step 7 – Reply to mentions or retweets
Twitter (and social media in general) is about connecting with people so it is important to reply to mentions or thank someone that retweeted your message. I don’t use any tools for this because the idea is not to spam users with ‘thank you messages’ but to really connect with them in person.
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