How to gain followers on Twitter

We’ve been doing a lot of work with clients around social media recently and those who are new to Twitter frequently ask us how to generate followers. Well, here’s a few steps to consider:-


1. Check out who your friends, contacts, customers and competitors are following and follow them yourself. The rule of thumb is that about half will follow you back.

2. Compelling content will get you followers! So remember, the message comes before the medium, so don’t just tweet any old nonsense. One way to get good material to tweet is to use Google alerts (www.google.com/alerts) to prompt you about stories featuring subject matter you’re interested in and which will interest potential followers. Position yourself as a resourceful contact.

3. Tweet using keywords as it will help you to be found when people search. Equally, you should put the right keywords on your homepage biography.

4. Retweet interesting tweets by people you follow. They may well do the same for you and carry your message to a wider audience and attract you new followers.


You might find after a week or two that some of the people you have followed haven’t followed you back and you might want to unfollow them. You can do this manually, but there are a number of tools that you can use to manage twitter accounts that will do this for you in an automated fashion (such as Huitter).

Be careful when using these not to rid yourself of more than a couple of hundred followers at a time, as it may flag up your account with Twitter. Automated activity sometimes implies spammer activity – and this is usually sufficient for Twitter to suspend accounts - permanently. After all, they’re sitting on a multi-billion dollar intellectual property – they don’t want it to be compromised!

A couple of other tools to consider using are bit.ly and monitter.com.

Bit.ly allows you to shorten URLs that you post (useful, as tweets are limited to 140 characters), but also gives you some really interesting metrics like number of clickthroughs and retweets.

Monitter allows you to follow what people are tweeting in real time around specified keywords and within a geographic radius. So you could follow what people are saying in your area and on key subjects. You can then be first to respond.

We’ll be posting more social media, marketing and public relations tips in coming weeks, so be sure to follow the blog and be first to know!