Growing your Twitter following can be invaluable. A larger following increases the authority of your Twitter profile and broadens the reach of your own content marketing efforts. It opens up lines of communication in your industry, helps build upon your positive online presence, and offers you a pool of potential leads for your business. You’d be hard-pressed to find a downside to growing your followers.
In this post, I share a simple but effective strategy to organically grow your Twitter following with users in your industry. It’s a scalable process, so use it as much or as little as you’d like.
Let’s take a look:
The Tools You’ll Need
We’ll be using 2 tools for this process: Tweepi and RightRelevance.
First, connect your Twitter account to Tweepi. You’ll be using this tool to trim the fat -- that is, get rid of folks who don’t follow you back. Tweepi is an easy way to keep track of that and much more.
Then, connect your Twitter account to RightRelevance. We’ll use RightRelevance to easily find the users you want to follow.
The Strategy
Once you’re logged into RightRelevance, type in a category that’s related to your industry or niche. For me, I’ll try 'personal branding.'
Add it as a saved channel so you can refer back to it later.
Then click the influencers tab and decide whether you want to filter by people or organizations. I want to target individuals, so I’ve clicked the “Person” option.
Finally, decide if you want to tailor it even further by location. I want to filter my followers based on New York City, so I’ll click that option.
Now all that’s left to do is scroll down and follow the people that interest you. I’m not going to be too picky because I’ve already let the filters do that tailoring for me. I know that the accounts I follow are going to be people who fit squarely in my industry and live in my city. Perfect!
You can use this method to follow 20, 200, or 2000 people, depending on your goals and time limit. Don’t forget to switch to a new category and do the same thing all over again. I’ve already used “personal branding,” but I could also try “reputation management” and “content marketing."
The Clean-Up
Once you’ve followed a batch of users, give them a few days or a week to follow you back.
Then log into Tweepi and click on the category of users called “Not following back.”
The “not following you back” section is pretty self-explanatory. It shows you all the users who, well, haven’t followed you back. You can also see some interesting stats about when they last tweeted, where they’re located, their follower count and follower ratio.
Go down the list and “unfollow” anyone who you’re ready to cast aside. There are bound to be some people or organizations you want to still follow despite their unreturned thanks, so just keep your eyes peeled for that as you fly down the list.
That’s it!
Now that you’ve got the hang of it, try it out using other categories and other filter settings to see if you get different results. And let me know how it goes in the comments section below!