1. Don’t Be Stingy With the Follow Button

I am a firm believer in “give to get.” If you want more LinkedIn recommendations, then give some out and ask for one in return. If you want more Twitter followers, go follow people first. But, I don’t want you to just blindly hit “follow” on every profile you can find though. Target it down.

By using Twitter Advanced Search you can target down your search list to find exactly what you’re looking for online. In the example below, I searched for people who are tweeting with these exact words “more twitter followers,” and who are not using the words “buy or purchase.”

And now we hit “search.”

Results: Lots of people looking to get rid of their follower limit on Twitter. This means that they are following far more people than are following them. When this happens, Twitter locks them from following more people because they are flagged as suspicious.  If you are following lots of great people, awesome! But, if you’ve hit the 2000 following limit and only 500 people are following you back – there’s a problem.

Here’s how we fix that:

1.  Tweet better content! Something about your profile is turning people away.

2. Use a tool like ManageFlitter to unfollow profiles that have no photo, are in foreign countries that do not apply to you, that have high spam scores, and some people that don’t follow you back that you don’t get value from.

Now, as a social media manager, I’ll tweet to those people who turned up in my search and provide a solution to their problem or a link to this blog to tell them how to fix it. 😉

2. Spy on your Competitors’ Followers

First, you’re going to have to figure out who your competitors are that are using Twitter. Create a list of a few people who are rocking it on Twitter and then go look at who follows them. Are they people who could actually be customers, are they other brands, are they spam? Click through on a few promising looking profiles and see if this person fits your target client (And when I say promising profiles, I mean they have a profile picture, a description, a cover photo, and a location set).

Now look at who your competitors are following. You might also find benefit in following the same people whether it’s influencers in your industry, local businesses, or potential clients.

3. Hashtags Are Here to Stay So Use Them

To find more quality Twitter followers, use hashtags that are both broad and defined. Lean on the defined keywords heavily though. If I’m a B2B company in Missouri, then I’m going to look for brands and companies using hashtags like #STLBiz, #STLSmallBiz, and a combination of #B2B and #STL in the same tweets. There’s not a lot of #STLSmallBiz in use but they means a few things:

• Less competition!

• Higher chance of a quality user seaching that hashtag!

• You can dominate that hashtag feed!

Use broad hashtags to get more followers who are interested in more follow-for-follow and your general industry and use defined hashtags to bring in targeted, high-quality followers.

There you go – 3 ways to increase your twitter followers with quality people. In fact, these are the exact strategies I’ve used to increase my twitter followers. I now get a steady stream of new followers everyday. Try these options above and then come back and tell me how it went!

Feel free to post your twitter handle in the comments below so we can connect. You can find me at twitter.com/StephNissen_.