Twitter can be a great way to get interested persons to follow links in your tweets and increase your website’s traffic. They can bring you new leads, prospects and customers.
In your zeal to gain new followers, it is easy to find yourself getting less quality even as you gain followers. This can happen when you employ software to shortcut the process of finding new followers.
You’ve seen tweets that say “Find followers automatically. I got 2,000.” and the link to the service. Sounds good, right? Then why do the Twitter accounts featuring these “spam” tweet often have less than 100 followers?
The answer is the service is far more interested in getting other Twitter users to sign up than it is in getting you new followers.
You just end up posting hundreds of their “spam” tweets that end up driving your followers away. They might not un-follow you, but they won’t read your tweets either and therefore won’t be clicking through to your website.
And, for a business, getting followers to click through to your website or to visit your location is the primary reason for even having a Twitter account. But you have to offer good material in the form of links to worthwhile content as well as short, standalone information.
And the more you tweet, the more potential followers are exposed to your content. I recently made one change to MHMSM’s Twitter strategy and our new follows have increased by ten-fold.
And the followers we are getting are higher quality as well. THey have found us based on our tweets, not by any phony signup techniques.
I’d rather have a few hundred followers who are actually interested in what we offer than a few thousand who are just trying to run up their follower numbers.
What should you do to maximize the number of high-quality followers on Twitter?
- Auto-follow those who follow you. I use SocialOomph.com to auto-follow and to send a quick DM (Direct Message) to my new followers.
You can also use SocialOomph to handle multiple Twitter accounts, to schedule updates, post updates to Twitter, Facebook, your blog and more. You can also shorten links using SocialOomph’s free services. SocialOomph has a professional version available as well that adds many more features. I haven’t tried the pro version as of now.
- Use AutoTweet software to be sure that all of your WordPress posts or Joomla! articles are tweeted as soon as you publish them. You can get the WordPress AutoTweet Plugin here and the Joomla! AutoTweet Plugin here. But be sure that you configure them correctly or they will look like auto posts and likely be ignored.
- Reply to any DMs you receive that aren’t auto-generated. If someone takes the time to contact you about something interesting you tweeted, be sure to respond to them personally. It IS called SOCIAL Networking.
- Don’t spam people with constant ads for your product or service. Give them great info and then slip in a plug once in a while. I’m never offended by someone who gives great info pushing something they like, but if all someone ever sends me are ads, they might just get un-followed.
The bottom line is to get yourself a Twitter account, tweet consistently and treat others as you’d expect to be treated. Twitter can help you build business just as it has helped thousands or others. Treat it as a serious resource and it will work for you.