So you have a twitter account.
- How do you increase your followers?
- How do you make sure they are people who actually do want to follow you rather than people who just want YOU to follow THEM!
- How do you keep you followers interested?
And what are hashtags? Do they make things easier or not?
Hashtags
I struggled to understand what hashtags were and ignored them completely! Then I read an article on finding more targeted twitter followers and finally realised what hashtags were all about.
A hashtag is basically like assigning a tweet a category. This means that when you see a hashtag in front of a word you know that the tweet is actually about that topic.
Here’s an example. Supposing you had a blog about about dogs and were looking to follow people who tweeted the word DOG:
“I had so much to drink last night I was as sick as a dog…..”
“I was in the #dog house to check everything was…”
Which person would you follow? The one with the #dog because you know the tweet is about the topic of dogs rather than just using the word but it is not actually having anything to do with dogs!
So hash tags are a way for people to be part of a community on twitter – in the example above a community of people interested in dogs.
This makes them very useful when it comes to following people. If your particular niche has a community in twitter (i.e has a hashtag) then these are the people you will want to follow!
Anyone can start a hashtag – you mention a word in your tweet with a hashtag in front of it and then it becomes ‘live’.
Using Hashtags Correctly
- If you Tweet with a hashtag on a public account, anyone who does a search for that particular hashtag may find your Tweet – so good if you want people to find you and follow you.
- Don’t start #spamming #with #hashtags. It is recommended that you never use more than 2 per tweet.
- Use hashtags only on Tweets relevant to the topic or you will defeat the whole idea of them.
Finding Targeted Followers
You can find targeted followers for free yourself or you can use software. Some of this software is expensive while others have the potential to get banned due to spamming complaints! (Did you know that Tweet Attacks is being sued by Twitter? Apparently another 4 companies with similar software are also facing the wrath of Twitter).
Getting Twitters Followers – Free Method
You will find a lot of people using Twitter will automatically follow people who follow them! It’s the polite thing to do right?
It is quite time consuming following a load of people who have mentioned a particular word you might be interested in but if you start to search for hash tags instead it makes the task quicker and more effective! It helps you to do this task in bulk and the people you follow are even more targeted!
Step 1
- So whatever your niche keyword is you would do a search on Twitter for #keyword. You will get quite a few results and you need to make sure that the results you get have the hashtag before the keyword rather than just the keyword itself.
e.g. listbuilding – ignore these
#listbuilding – these are the ones you are interested in
Step 2
- Click on the avatar of any result that had the #keyword to see the profile of this person. Have a look at the description that they have written about themselves.
- Are they really interested in listbuilding? Do they mention this in their profile? If so then great.
- How many followers do they have? Ideally the more the better! To get the most out of this method only use people with at least 2000 followers.
- You might have to search through quite a few before you find a good one!
Step 3
- Now you need to find out who is following this person because you will want to follow them!
- So while in this persons profile page click on followers and you will see a long list of people. The list will just go on and on as you scroll down the page.
- Click on the follow button next to each person and follow them yourself (you will need to be logged in to your twitter account to do this).
Twitter will put a ban on your account if you follow too many people to quickly. It happened to a friend of mine so she had to stop following anyone for a week or so but after that she was able to follow again!
I recommend following not more than 20-50 initially. The more followers you have the more you will able to to add. However, Twitter also notices if you are following everyone and no one is following you back! Again Twitter will ban you from following any more people until you increase the number of people following you back.
How do you do this? Well if you remove some of your followers then you will be able to follow more people again.
How Do I Know If Someone Has Not Followed Me Back?
Obviously you will want to get rid or unfollow people who have not followed you back. There is a neat little tool to find out this
information.
If you log into Just Unfollow with your twitter details it will come up with a list of people who have not followed you back! Cool huh?
So if they haven’t followed you back within a week then just unfollow them! Now you will be free to start following some other people!
Update:
The one tool that constantly keeps up to date with twitter terms and regulations is SocialOomph. You can join for free or upgrade. I recommend it because while other tools still encouraged automatic following and unfollowing, Social Oomph removed it from their software when twitter announced it was outlawed!
Therefore I feel confident that they will continue to provide ethical software. Join for free here.