10 Ways To Increase Your Twitter Followers

Twitter is one of the biggest social networks on the planet and provides a great way to find out what's happening around the world and to get your message out to the world. Whether you use it to let the world know what you're up to, generate leads for your products and services or to share links and information witht the rest of the world, you need followers. The more followers you have, the more of an impact your tweets will have. So, how do you go about growing your follower numbers? Here are some tips that can help:

1. Fill out your profile for yout twitter account, and especially the bio and your avatar. Your latest tweets and @replies don’t mean much to someone that doesn’t know you. Your bio is the only place you have to tell people who handle you are, especially if they only know you by your twitter handle. Also, your bio is displayed on Twitter’s Suggested Users page. Leaving it blank or non-descriptive doesn’t encourage people to add you.
2. Learn about and use #hash tags. Quality content coupled with an easy way to find it never fails. If others enjoy your content, they’ll add you. Learn more about #hash tagging here.
3. Encourage your followers to retweet your updates. It's not just about how many followers you have, it's also about how often you get retweeted. Retweeting pushes your @username into foreign social graphs, resulting in clicks back to your profile and hopefully more followers.
4. Be liberal with linking to your Twitter profile everywhere. Link it on your email signature, website, LinkedIn, Facebook, blog and everywhere else you live online. Embed a twitter feed widget on your website.
5. Bring it into the physical world as well. Every time you give a talk, speak on a panel, shoot a podcast, present slides, or hand out business cards, figure out a way to broadcast or display your twitter account.
6. Follow the top twitter users and watch what they tweet. Pay attention to the type of content they sent out and how they address their audiences.
7. Reply to/get involved in #hash tag memes. search.twitter.com lists the hot ‘trending topics. Look for the #hash topics and jump in on the conversation. If you're tweeting on behalf of your organization, remember to keep it relevant to the topics that you would want it to be associated with. This is a great way to be seen as an authority with something important to say about relevant topics.
8. Keep the content relevant. If you are managing your orgnization's twitter account, make sure the status updates you post are relevant to your target audience. People will follow you if you have something to say that they are interested in. Too much frivolous information and you'll start losing followers.
9. Track your results. TwitterCounter will show you how many new users you’re adding per day and Qwitter will email you when someone unfollows you after a tweet.
10. Use viral marketing tools to get visitors to your site to spread the word. There are a few tools out there that can help you achieve this, but of course here I'm going to plug the one we developed :) - zeedna site owners can utilize our z.socialize & z.engage to push content directly from their site to twitter, resulting in more links back to the site from twitter as well as more @mentions.