How do you generate followers on twitter?

[activitysuper]

Hi,

How do you generate followers on twitter?

I see a lot of people are saying follow others to gain more followers, use #tags and engage with other peoples tweets.

But with the last point, all the tweets I find under search are spam.

As an example, if you searched 'SEO' all you are going to get is lots of ' view this article' type tweets.

It's almost like there is more business/spam then actual real people.

Cheers

[EGOL]

I have 17,000 subscribers.   That brings lots of traffic into my website every day.  Imagine the opportunity loss if they were not getting daily invitations to my site.

[ManishD]

Your concern and question both are valid and I do not encourage to the process of "follow and unfollow" until you get your desired number of followers. It doesn't work to help you spread the word out.

I have tried many ways to gain actual followers, and here are the ones that you should use, too.

1. I share as much useful information as possible with the current followers. If you get a retweet from a few of your followers, chances are high that you'll get a few relevant followers through this way.
2. Find out influential people in the niche your working on and follow them closely about what they're posting, how they're communicating, and how they get more followers. This would help to know the more detailed ways to get real followers
3. Do retweet of the tweets you see on your twitter home page (Of course, insightful ones). This might help to gain you a few followers who find the retweets helpful made by you.
4. Follow the people who do retweet of your post and they will follow you back (If they aren't already)
5. Do recommendations - You can recommend the most useful user that you have found in your followers list and can tweet their names using @. - write a short message why you're recommending them - this will prove that you're real human and not a software
6. Participate in twitter chats and provide most useful information to the participants.
7. Along with the informative posts, also make some tweets with inspirational quotes.
8. Place your twitter username in the signatures of your emails, business cards etc.
9. Do tweeting focusing on the timezone of your target audience. If you'll tweet when they're sleeping, you're probably not going to get any benefit/followers.
10. Do great guest posts and mention your username in your bio. This is the real source of real followers.

I hope these would help you out. To get more insight, I would recommend to follow below link.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-we-increased-our-twitter-followers-by-250-whiteboard-friday

Watch video, follow instructions and go through comments carefully. You'll get a lot of insights through comments also.

[activitysuper]

Thank you, makes sense.

Do you think feedburner is a must for blogs?

[activitysuper]

Great reply,

So follow real people.

So if I followed 100 real people but non followed back, would they still be exposed to my tweets in anyway?

I maybe be wrong but from what I thought was: you follow them, fingers crossed they check out your profile like what you are doing and follow you back. You then hope one of your tweets stands out to them in their feed and they retweet or engage in some way which generates exposure for your profile to their following?

[EGOL]

"This piece of content" helps you get followers for your "next piece of content".

Give people an easy way to tweet about your content and follow you.  When you get a new piece of content tweet about it.

We have addthis buttons at the top of every page and publish a feedburner feed with all of our new content and great stuff that we see elsewhere on the web.

[activitysuper]

Thanks for reply,

If someone did manage to produce a piece of content which was 'best of the web' how would they go about getting exposure for it on twitter though?

Would you need to rely on other marketing channels to do this?

[Visiblics]

Well, you're right. now people on twitter have started using fake account to spam, especially in SEO, real estate, make money, work from home industries. Facebook has 83 million fake accounts too.

@Mashable, an account with close to 3 million followers have about 12% fake followers

But still there is no way to get rid of it. As far generating more followers is concerned you have the answer. "follow others to gain more followers only real, influential people, use #tags and engage with other peoples tweets. real people"

Off beat. There is one tool which can keep you updated about your fake and inactive followers: http://fakers.statuspeople.com/ and http://www.tweepi.com can help you to get rid out of these fake followers.

Hope this helps

[EGOL]

If you are doing things that people want to know about then you will attract followers like bugs to a Georgia porch light.... and if you are not doing anything that people want to know about then you will have to pay to get phoney accounts following you.

Don't worry about followers and do something of note.

[Matt-Williamson]

I would start by saying do you have a strong email list of customers - if so create a nice eye catching email asking them to follow you. You are more likely to be successful if you give them an incentive/ good reason to follow you.

As simple as following other people and thanking those that follow you  with a tweet will lead to more follows, although this is a slow method.

Don't write off hashtags just take time to research the most effective one in relation to your field - this does include SEO as a niche.

Use the newly integrated followerwonk to identify relevant people and authorities to follow and mark out as those best to engage with. Building you relationship on twitter with these authorities will lead to more followers through the exposure of your interaction with them on their feed to their social following.

One final point - make sure your site has twitter social integration, making it easy for content to be tweeted and also making it easy to follow you.