Twitter has been a major platform used by businesses to keep up with industry and consumer trends while engaging with customers at the same time. It’s a great way to market your business directly to your target audience. But how do you get your target audience to follow you on Twitter? Building up your followers and maintaining them can be a daunting task and we understand that many businesses spend a great deal of time on this with little or no result. Let’s change that.
We can start by digging into the treasure chest of social media secrets to share a system you can use to grow your Twitter audience. This system is designed to help you manage posts, engage followers and build up a social media presence in less than five minutes a day.
Step 1: Grow Your Twitter Followers
Crowdfire
The key aspect of success with any social media platform is your direct audience. This could be your friends, subscribers or in this case Followers. Followers, as you can see from the title, is the key focus of this first step. We will be showing you how to increase your follower count with real accounts, relevant to your sector, within minutes.
One of the most effective tools used when growing social media exposure is Crowdfire. Crowdfire is a simple but effective online solution used to manage and acquire new, as well as relevant Twitter Followers. The solution is based on a popular Twitter-growth principle: Follow/Unfollow. Following a Twitter user will notify them and prompt some of them to return the favor by following you back. Usually they do so if you publish content they are interested in so it’s important to produce content relevant to your target audience.
Usually, identifying relevant users and following/unfollowing a lot of them at a time is a time-consuming task. This is where Crowdfire comes in. It allows you to run/work through this process in an efficient manner. Furthermore, it allows you to send personalized automatic welcome messages to users who follow you back.
This helps you make your first big step towards gaining more followers quickly and efficiently. If you follow the steps below, you will quickly begin to see the results you are looking for.
- The first thing you’ll want to do is link your Twitter account to Crowdfire. You can do this by authorizing access to Twitter through the sign-up page.
- You’ll then want to unfollow anyone who is not currently following you back. This can be done by clicking on the ‘Non-Followers’ section and removing them from there.
- Next, create a list of competing accounts or those with audiences similar to who you want to attract, as their followers may have an interest in your business as well. Save this and move on to the next step.
- Click on the ‘Copy followers’ page and paste a Twitter handle from the list we just compiled into the search bar. Then click the follow button next to each user to add them.
- Additionally, as mentioned above, you can set up an automatic welcome message to be sent to anyone who follows you back, through the Crowdfire DM Automation feature. You can use this to pitch your business or warm up a potential lead.
- That’s it! Repeat this process daily and you are on your way to Twitter stardom!
Some useful tips to help you along the way
- Having a low following-to-follower ratio gives your account more authority as perceived by the Twitter users that follow you. It also compels Twitter to be more lenient in placing restrictions, which it does if it thinks you’re spamming users – something you should never do.
- Try unfollowing old followers and inactive followers starting from, say 6 months ago. Do this every few months to improve your following-to-follower ratio.
- You will spot users on the way (maybe your CEO) who you don’t want to unfollow. You can ‘Whitelist’ such users. You can also ‘Blacklist’ users you never want to follow.
- Clicking through ‘follow’ and ‘unfollow’ buttons one by one is designed to be tedious in order to avoid spam, but it is time-consuming. We found a way around this – a piece of code, essentially a hack, that you can add to your bookmarks, which will automatically click that big round button for you. Here is a step-by-step guide we published some time ago.
- While Crowdfire offers a free package it does have a limit (of 100) on the number of accounts you can follow and unfollow in a 24-hour period. If this limit seems insufficient and you want to do some bulk following you can sign up for the minimum package of $9.99 per month, boosting the limit up to the Twitter-standard of 1000 per 24-hour period.
Step 2: Manage Your Tweets
Buffer and Scoop.it
Step 2 is all about content. Content is a major element of a successful social media account, whether it is simple and beautiful copy, visual graphics, or video. It is what you engage your Followers with and why they continue to follow you.
In this step, we’ll show you how to post new and interesting content consistently, even when you can’t come up with it yourself.
To do this you’ll be using two applications in conjunction with each other: Buffer and Scoop.it.
Buffer is an online SaaS solution that assists you in the general management of your posts. It helps you keep your Twitter accounts updated straight from the platform, track your tweet popularity and see what appeals most to your audience. It also allows you to create posts in advance, queue them and schedule them across a range of social media platforms, simultaneously. Scoop.it, on the other hand, is an online content marketing platform that allows you to discover new curated content, as well as edit and post it straight to any social media platform. In our case, we will need it to post directly to Buffer. Its data semantic technology allows you to find content on many different topics, helping you to keep your social media accounts active with new, interesting content every day.
- Your first step would be to link your Twitter account to Buffer and Scoop.it. Just like Crowdfire, you can do this through the sign-up page by authorizing them to access your Twitter account.
- What you’d want to do next is review your previous tweets on Buffer by clicking on the ‘Analytics’ page. Find out what acquires the most clicks, likes and retweets. This gives you a bit of insight into what is popular amongst your followers.
- You can then use this information to generate more popular tweets by searching related topics on Scoop.it. From Scoop.it you can then post straight to the Buffer queue from the platform by clicking the small green square on the top-right of the post.
- Finally, you would want to queue posts on Buffer, filling up days and time slots. Being able to do this in advance allows you to plan your tweets weeks ahead of time. This keeps your account active and your followers updated at all times.
Tip:
Buffer bloggers suggest optimum tweeting times are from 12-1 pm, on average, for each time zone. Try taking this into account when scheduling posts.
Conclusion
For many companies out there, Twitter is a major part of a business, sales or marketing strategy. In all cases, it is a branding tool used to engage and interact with target audiences. They say content is king, and they also say that brevity is the soul of wit, so we are aiming for witty content here. Traditional brainstorming and research has proven to be very time-consuming, so when you’re strapped for cash and time, take the route startups take, and hack your way through. But remember, the entire point of saving time with Steps 1 & 2 is for you to direct that time and effort into quality content, as suggested by Scoop.it.
So what are you waiting for? It is time for you to create a real personal connection with your audience. And sit back, relax, and watch your audience grow!
