Top 5 Ways to Grow Your Twitter Audience

So you’ve heard all about Twitter and decided to sign up. But now that you’re in, how do you grow your Twitter followers? This post is the first part in our series of ‘Guides to Twitter’, written by Alisha Ramos, a volunteer with Bright One. You can follow Alisha on Twitter at @alishalisha and Bright One at @brightonecomms.

1. Follow relevant Twitter accounts.
What does “relevant” mean, you ask? Once you define the niche for your brand (for example, “nonprofit”), a simple search on Twitter with the relevant keywords will bring up several recent tweets that mention that keyword. You can sift through these accounts and see which accounts could be relevant to your brand.

Once you find a few key Twitter accounts to follow, the rest of the process is quite organic. You can look through the followers of these accounts and see which ones are relevant to you, or even search through their lists if they have got any set up and do the same.

Following relevant accounts usually prompts people to follow you back. This is not to say however, that you should follow every Twitter account imaginable. Notice the phrase “relevant accounts” — why would someone follow you back if they are not interested in what you have to say? Make sure you keep everything, from your tweets to your tweeps, relevant, and the rest will follow.

2. Use hashtags.
People search for hashtags on Twitter all the time. By adding hashtags to the end of your tweets, you can bet that someone will stumble upon it and decide to follow you. One simple hashtag might be #nonprofit.

3. Engage in conversations.
One thing your Twitter should not do is to simply promote yourself. Nobody wants to follow a Twitter account that is simply an RSS feed of their blog posts or news.

To capture the attention of others, and to remain personable and personal, it’s important to engage in real conversations with others. The simplest way to do this is to @ reply – either answering questions that have been posed, asking a question, commenting on something they have posted, and so on. But as always, don’t simply do these actions to do them – be sincere in your every interaction and you will see better results.

Retweeting is another way to engage and to distribute ideas or links that you believe are valuable to your audience. For more info on retweeting, take a look at Twitter’s own guide.

4. Add value.
Simply tweeting about your day is not going to be particularly interesting to your audience, so you should keep in mind this golden rule: add value.

Whether it’s releasing a nugget of information from your organisation, or tweeting about something you just read on the internet (with a link, of course) – whatever you post should be relevant and valuable to your reader. “Content is king” not only for blogs but for Twitter accounts as well.

5. Stay relevant.
If you are running a Twitter account for a nonprofit organisation, keep it relevant to nonprofits or what your organisation is doing. Unfortunately, no one really wants to read about what you had for lunch!