How to Reach The 100,000 Followers Mark on Twitter

Twitter is all about reach. To succeed on the platform, you need to build as many interested followers as possible. Note the word interested; it’s critical. If your follower count is inflated by thousands of bot accounts, it’s not doing you any good. Bots – and disinterested users – don’t retweet, don’t @mention and don’t interact with your account. They’re just a number, and it’s not the number that’s important. It’s the people. How do you attract the right kind of people and, more importantly, keep them around?

Don’t Tweet Too Much

If you’re flooding the feeds of your followers, you’re going to drive them away. A few well-timed valuable tweets are better than an endless torrent of retweets and a flurry of activity in a half hour period. This is why scheduling posts to appear throughout the day is valuable. If your only activity takes place during the hour you sign on before leaving work for the day, you’re not making use of the platform to its fullest possible extent.

Always Be Relevant

One great way to lose followers is to post tweets no one wants to see. Another common problem is when you’re running a Twitter profile that only has relevance around a certain time of year. There’s no good way to keep a Halloween-themed account relevant all year round, after all. As a business, you likely don’t have many of these problems, but you still need to strive to maintain relevance. As soon as you stop posting tweets users want to see, you’re going to start losing followers.

Avoid Being Too Promotional

This advice is sound and valid for blog posts, tweets, Facebook posts, shares on Google+ and everything else. Promotional language should be reserved for actual advertising. When you’re posting on Twitter, your goal is not to sell your products directly. Instead, it’s to build an audience and to gain their trust. Only once you have their trust as a valuable source of insight and information can you direct them to your site, where they can see your products and be given the opportunity to purchase them.

Don’t Repeat Tweets

More specifically, don’t repeat the same tweets over and over to the same audience. You can, and in fact should, post the same tweet for your blog post during different times of day. You want to hit the different time zones for maximum exposure. You don’t, however, want your users to feel like you’re just stuck on loop, that you have nothing new to say. That’s when you start losing followers; they’re tired of seeing the same posts day in and day out.

Be Consistently Active

If you show up, make a few tweets, start building a following and then disappear, those followers are going to forget about you and unfollow your account. It’s a common phenomenon; Twitter accounts that are left inactive often fail to come back. It’s almost always better to create a new account and start fresh than it is to try to revive an account you have a history of abandoning. Try to post a few times every day, no matter what. Constant activity is like a regular blogging schedule; it’s essential to maintain an audience.

Be Unique

One of the top reasons cited for unfollowing someone on Twitter is when the account shares nothing new. If the only things your business account posts are your own blogs, the popular blogs posted by everyone else in the industry, and current events you can find on any news site, you’re not bringing any sort of value to your users. You need to, at the very least, provide your own thoughts when you share posts other people are sharing. At best, you should write your own commentary on the ongoing events. Don’t just retweet; retweet and add commentary.

Interact with Followers

Twitter is about building a community, and building a community is all about engaging with your followers. You need to make sure to interact with your followers on a regular basis. When you post a tweet, hang around for a while and thank people for their retweets. Thank them when they follow you. If they ask a question, answer it. The point is to build a relationship, and you can’t do that if, whenever a user tweets at you, you’re not around to respond.

Don’t Automate Everything

This continues the trend of interacting with your users. If you write tweets but have a scheduler post them, you aren’t around to thank users for retweets and answer questions. This kind of lack of activity can doom your account. Remember, it’s social media; you need to be social. Posting tweets and never responding, never retweeting anything posted by someone else and other such antisocial self-serving tactics don’t work.

Follow Your Followers

Almost all of the above has been to keep the followers you have. How do you find more? One good way is to automatically follow anyone who follows you. Now, there are some benefits to being selective with the people you follow. If you’re flooding your feed with accounts whose posts you don’t care about, you’re more likely to miss content from the people who matter. On the other hand, you never know who among your followers will have a piece of valuable insight you might otherwise never see. You can always unfollow them later, as well, if they turn out to be spammers.

Follow Industry Leaders

Search out the thought leaders in your industry and follow them. This gives you a ready source of valuable information and insight, and it gives you potential access to their followers and the people they follow.

Follow Their Followers

Speaking of, follow the followers of the industry leaders, if they look relevant to your account. Perhaps more importantly, follow the people they follow. If the thought leaders in your industry found someone worth following, they’re probably worth following.

Search Industry Tweets and Follow or Respond

If you perform a few selective searches, you can find ongoing conversations about problems your product can solve. Just make sure you’re paying attention to context. You don’t want to embarrass yourself by suggesting your product to fix a problem caused by your product in the first place.

The hardest part about growing a Twitter account is establishing it from the ground up. Once you’re past that initial hurdle, you have a much easier time growing your social brand.