How to Grow an Organic Twitter Following

Growing an organic Twitter following takes time and work, but the rewards outweigh the cost.  Twitter was built to allow people to engage and share information in 140 characters or less.  If you are looking to build a following with automation software or just to look popular, then this is not the article you are looking for.

The accounts I manage are growing at a steady pace with these tips and tools I share today.  With some luck and the right execution, your Twitter account will grow nicely, full of real and interesting people that you can network with and promote your knowledge, product or service.

Tweet Often

Whether you choose to share your thoughts, share links to webpages, pictures, or videos, make sure you have something to say often.  Make sure that your frequent tweets are of some value to others.  Don’t tweet your every move.  Unless you are a huge celebrity, no one cares.

Pick a Niche

This is sound advice for any social media website, because if you tweet all over the place you become a spout of information, not a source.  People want to get information from the experts who to be the people that are dedicated to the knowledge of a certain subject.  Share your expertise, and people will follow you.

Use Hashtags

The hashtags (#) are used to point out the subject of a tweet, and are often searched throughout twitter.  In order to get people to find your tweets without being connected to you, they need to be easily able to find.  The hashtags are the easiest method to achieve this.

Twitter Directories

Many directories like Twellow, will help you increase your Twitter following by listing your profile under certain niche topics.  Check out The Top 4 Twitter Directories in 2011 to find out what directories to get listed under.

Follow Back

When the Twitter peeps start following you, follow them back; As long as they have something decent to say, why not?  Stay away from gimmick accounts that seem to have thousands of followers yet don’t tweet a thing, or spammers that tweet the same tweet over and over again, as that will clog your timeline.

Just Unfollow

For some reason, the human mind deems Twitter profiles that have more followers than profiles they are following as a more worthy and important profile to follow.  This causes many people to follow people in order to get them to follow back, and then they unfollow the person afterwards.  Trying to discover these profiles manually will take a lot of time and headache.  http://www.justunfollow.com will scan your followers/following data, and let you know who is not following you.

Use Your Lists

Make sure you create lists that are labeled after your niche topics.  There are a lot of generated lists on Twitter, or lists that have no value (eg. People-who-have-listed-me).  If you make your lists specific to specific subjects within your niche, people will actually follow your lists as well.  The personal benefit for yourself is that you will be able to find information in a specific topic when you need it by viewing your list’s timeline.

Retweet

If you read a tweet that you find useful, then perhaps you should retweet that piece of information to your own following.  People tend to be flattered when they see their tweets spreading through the Twitterverse.  Sometimes, they will even follow you if they are not already doing so.

Anything that is worth doing takes some time and effort.  Developing a strong, popular, and important Twitter profile is no exception.  Stick with it, engage your followers, and tweet away, and you will achieve the thousands of followers you seek; just be patient.