10 Ways to get more twitter followers

This guest post is written by Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg and the cofounder of Revision3 and Pownce. Kevin, who has over 88,000 followers on Twitter (making him the second most followed after President Obama), also “bloggs” at kevinrose.com. He is an investor in Twitter.

Ten Ways To Increase Your Twitter Followers:

1.Explain to your followers what retweeting is and encourage them to retweet your links. Retweeting pushes your @username into foreign social graphs, resulting in clicks back to your profile. Track your retweets using retweetist.
2.Fill out your bio. Your latest tweets and @replies don’t mean much to someone that doesn’t know you. Your bio is the only place you have to tell people who you are. Also, your bio is displayed on Twitter’s Suggested Users page. Leaving it blank or non-descriptive doesn’t encourage people to add you.
3.As @garyvee says, “link it up.” Put links to your Twitter profile everywhere. Link it on your Digg, LinkedIn, Facebook, blog, email signature, and everywhere else you live online. Also, check out the great feedburner-like badges from TwitterCounter for your blog.
4.Tweet about your passions in life and #hash tag them. Quality content coupled with an easy way to find it never fails. If others enjoy your content, they’ll add you. Learn more about #hash tagging here.
5.Bring your twitter account into the physical world. Every time I give a talk, speak on a panel, shoot a podcast, present slides, or hand out business cards, I figure out a way to broadcast or display my twitter account.
6.Take pictures. Pictures are heavily retweeted/spread around. This one from US Airways Flight 1549 has been viewed 350,000+ times. For mobile pics use iPhone apps such as Tweetie or Twitterific, both which support on the go uploading.
7.Start a contest. @GardenCentres offered a free macbook air if he reached the #1 most followed spot. That never happened, but Jason added thousands of followers…brilliant.
8.Follow the top twitter users and watch what they tweet. Pay attention to the type of content they sent out and how they address their audiences.
9.Reply to/get involved in #hash tag memes. search.twitter.com lists the hot ‘trending topics. Look for the #hash topics and jump in on the conversation (see #4 for links to #hash instructions).
10.Track your results. TwitterCounter will show you how many new users you’re adding per day and Qwitter will email you when someone unfollows you after a tweet.

Twitter - Using Twitter can increase sales

This week has seen Twitter launch Twitter 101; a guide for businesses of how to use Twitter. We’ve looked before at how organisations can use Twitter, and this guide covers the basics as well as showcasing a few cases studies of what some businesses are doing.

The guide itself is part a how-to guide, part an explanation of what Twitter is and part a set of ideas and examples. The fundamental recommendations from Twitter can be summarised in four simple steps

1.Listen to what people are saying about your brand on Twitter
2.Set up your own presence and be honest about who you are
3.Follow people that are relevant to you
4.Respond to discussions about your brand and business
This approach of listening first is a great way of starting to develop a strategy of how your business should use Twitter. Once you know what people are saying about you, what issues they are discussing and what problems they raise, you will know what kind of responses might be expected of you when you get to stage 4. But I would suggest an additional stage that builds on this information. Getting your strategy right.

There is a strong argument for brands being on Twitter. Experimenting and finding out what works for you. However, you will get most success if you take a step back first and think why you are doing this. What are your business aims and what do you hope to achieve. How will you measure your success and evaluate if you are getting out of your use of Twitter what you hoped?

This needn’t be a lengthy and complex process but it is one worth doing. It helps to focus what you are doing and gives the use of Twitter a real focus and direction. Different businesses will be in different situations, with different business needs and different strategic aims. Think about where you are and where you want to go and then brainstorm how you might use Twitter to help you get there.

Innovation is great and social media is a fantastic medium through which to innovate. But a little bit of focus and strategy will help turn this innovation into something that you can evaluate. Something that you can assess and something that you can improve on.

Only if you think about what you want to achieve will you really be able to measure what you have done and the success it has brought your business. Then you’ll be able to add to the great case studies from the likes of Dell and Pepsi that are listed in Twitter 101.

Article Quoted from the Fresh Network Blogs

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