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Twitter is one of the most powerful social network and most people who work in SEO/Webmaster/SMM niche know how to use this platform properly. By this I mean not get as many followers as possible, but get as many those followers who will engage with you.

This expert roundup will show you the most proven techniques and tips to get more “high quality” Twitter followers. I have asked 44 experts to share what do they use in their Twitter marketing to get more followers.

What are the most effective methods of getting new Twitter followers for you?

Here are the answers in detail. Enjoy the post, take notes and implement the info.

Don’t forget to share it with your friends and colleagues.

 

kane jamison

Kane Jamison contentharmony.com

Speaking at events has been the fastest way I’ve seen to get 50-100 new followers in a day for a personal account.

For a company, you either need to be interesting, or put out news and alerts related to your product that your customers actually care about. If you’ve got a bit of paid budget, try running your email list through a custom audience in Twitter and exclude the people already following your account – those people are likely to convert if they’re still interested in your company.


Erik Emanuelli

Erik Emanuelli erikemanuelli.com

I want to share a few practical advice and resources that really work for me.

To increase authority use MyBlogU, great for creating epic content, collaborating with other bloggers and being featured on their websites, by participating in interviews, while show casing your knowledge. If you create your own project, you can ask help to the MyBlogU team, to organize a Twitter chat, which is going to help you brand your name and improve your reach.

To promote your content, use ViralContentBuzz, which lets you include your best blog posts, after gaining credits by sharing other users projects. It’s an awesome tool to increase both Twitter mentions and followers.

To manage your social media marketing campaign, use Oktopost, which is a platform that allows you to monitor your keywords or mentions in real time, engage with your followers, schedule updates and measure the results of your efforts.

Finally, you want to join Triberr, a platform you can use to boost your authority and Twitter reach, having your content shared by influencers and marketers of your niche.

See, it’s not just about creating epic content with added value and waiting to have it promoted by your readers. These are some resources you want to use to actively market your brand, blog and name, while increasing your Twitter reach and followers.


Dan sharp

Dan Sharp  screamingfrog.co.uk

Be genuine and helpful, share unique insights or opinion and don’t sell or be overly promotional.

I think if you’re really passionate about something, then you don’t need to ‘try’ to find things to talk about or ways to attract new followers. It will just come naturally as you tweet, chat and share opinion with others about the things you care about.


simon penson

Simon Penson zazzlemedia.co.uk

Twitter audience growth is a long game if you want to create real value. Growing numbers fast is possible through things like competitions and paid account amplification through Twitter’s ad offering but often the audience it attracts is misaligned and not likely to improve engagement long term.

The best way is to work hard curating and creating the right kind of content that will attract and build an audience. We work hard to ensure what we share and write is the best it can be and as a result we grow very engaged audiences which ultimately have much more value.


zac-johnson

Zac Johnson zacjohnson.com

Finding success on Twitter is all about providing value to those who are following you. It’s also not just about numbers, it’s about engagement.

For example, let’s take a look at some of the most popular celebrities and brands on Twitter right now. Nearly every celebrity with millions of followers have 30-50% fake followers. This is important because celebrities and brands are often getting paid to send out promotional tweets, and this is based on their number of followers. Paying to have your message sent out to 30-50% of several millions is a big number and a lot of wasted cash.

At the same time, there are Twitter tools than can be used to help you grow your following online — just make sure you don’t use them in spammy ways or try to flood your account with thousands of users over night. Not matter what tools or methods you are using to increase your Twitter following, it’s what you do with those followers that matter most.

Here is where you Twitter success is determined. As mentioned, it’s easy to get people to follow your account. It’s not easy to keep them and it’s even harder to get them to retweet, like and share your content. Once you’ve mastered the art of creating social updates that people find value in, share with their audience and save (favorite) for later… then you know you are on the right path for Twitter success!


Logan Chierotti

Logan Chierotti internetreputation.com

I’ve found the most effective method for getting Twitter followers is to really engage people. Find other people interested in similar topics as you, favorite their tweets, retweet people’s tweets and most importantly post relevant content that will get shared. Find what’s trending in the news or your industry and use hash tags to target a bigger audience. For twitter, the more active you are the more followers you will get.


Tim Bourquin

Tim Bourquin  onlinereputation.com

When it comes to building a follow through social media and specifically with Twitter, it’s all about providing your followers with engaging content. Anyone can create a Twitter account and buy thousands of followers and send out content… but this is one of the worst things you can do. In terms of wasting time and money, this is a total wash. However, for getting your message out there, this is also a complete waste of time as you are only sending out tweets and updates to dead account.

The best way to approach this would be to follow other successful, well-known and social influencers within your niche. This in itself is a great way to get real and relevant people to start following you. However, you can take this to another level by retweeting their best social updates, following their followers and also engaging with other Twitter users as well.

Nearly all of the engagement and social updates on Twitter are one sided and promotional. Stand out from the crowd and grow your following by being real.


Jacob King

Jacob King jacobking.com

The most effective method is to stand out and share things actually worth paying attention to. I grew my twitter following by sharing clever stuff about SEO people wanted to hear more of, not by automating some crap or auto favoriting people who mention Matt Cutts or any sillyness like that. You can also help out people that matter, like if I tweet about a problem and someone helps me fix it I will always follow them and pay attention to them a bit. So find the influencers, do something useful for them, meanwhile be tweeting awesome stuff, and along the way don’t be a dumbass.  Remember to keep grinding, it isn’t magic and doesn’t happen overnight. Eventually your efforts will pay off and you start gaining some momentum, just keep going.


James Norquay

James Norquay prosperitymedia.com.au

  • Sharing Great Content on Twitter is a big one, if you want people to follow you you need to share quality not rubbish.
  • If you speak at any events where you have 300 people attending, always say at the start follow me on Twitter usually 50% of the crowd will use Twitter so you can easily get a huge mass. Also say any questions please ask me on Twitter.
  • Link to your Twitter account where ever possible.
  • Always try to get included in “top influencer on Twitter” style posts. You can get a huge amount of followers from them.
  • Always use the Twitter tweet box and Twitter Follow buttons on your websites and blogs you can gather many followers from that.
  • Always try to gain re-tweets and reply’s from big players in your niche.

Gael Breton

Gael Breton authorityhacker.com

While our Twitter account does not count hundreds of thousands of followers because we have not gotten to automate and outsource the process yet, we have been able to grow it using several methods. Here are the ones that worked the best for us:

1. Follow people that follow your competition. It’s probably the best way to get started, just unfollow those who don’t follow you once a week so you maintain a healthy following/follower ratio (more on that in this post)

2. Make following you on Twitter part of a giveaway incentives

3. Build incentives to tweet/follow in your content with social lockers or click to tweet quotes

4. Obviously having always visible share buttons both on desktop AND mobile


Joe Williams

Joe Williams zenoptimise.com

One of the best ways I have found is tweeting at a live event. This works particularly well when it’s within your industry and using the event hashtag because you know the new followers will be relevant. Speed is important as you want to get quotes from key speakers before anyone else.

A more common way is to link to your Twitter profile when writing on industry relevant blogs.


Venchito Tampon

Venchito Tampon venchitotampon.com

Here are a few social strategies that I use to increase my social followers (Twitter) on a regular basis:

1. Follow a decent number of active and targeted social users (e.g. those who follow your industry influencers or have a hashtag #seo – industry word, in their tweets). Use ManageFlitter to automate the process.

2. Make social sharing buttons visible in your content assets as this will get help your social profile attract new followers, once they’ve noticed that your posts are useful and eventually decided to follow your brand.

3. Add one-click follow buttons on branded pages (about me, our team, our history, etc..), given that those visitors searching for your brand pages are likely to convert to social followers.

4. Engage with social industry influencers by participating in weekly/regular chat discussions (e.g. #semrushchat). This is an effective way to absorb followers of your influencers, as they can see your expertise in your answers to industry related questions.


tom pick

Tom Pick webbiquity.com

Once you’ve been on Twitter for a while, hashtags are key–use them to help others find your tweets, and to help you find others tweeting about the same topics. Follow those who look interesting, and retweet or mention them in tweets.

Also, look at your most engage followers; the ones who retweet you and seem to tweet interesting content. Check out their followers and repeat the process above. Finally, though it’s not used as much as in the past, follow those mentioned in #FollowFriday tweets by those you follow.

In many cases, these people will follow you back.


Matthew Babry

Matthew Barby matthewbarby.com

There’s lots of ways of building a Twitter following, I did a full write up on my personal social media strategy that you may want to check out, but the advice that I’d give is to focus more on quality over quantity.

It’s easy to simply grow your follower numbers by following loads of users in bulk and then waiting for them to follow you back. This works but doesn’t add as much value in the long term. Instead of this, use a tool like Followerwonk to compare the followers of three of your competitors to find common followers. If they follower a number of your competitors then they’re likely to follow you and be really relevant.

Alongside this, it’s important to remember that most social activity happens outside of Twitter. Create content that is easily shared on Twitter and use custom images to promote it on the platform. If you don’t have design capabilities then you can use a tool like Pablo from Buffer to create awesome images in no time at all. You’ll also want to add as much social call-to-action on your website content as possible.


Bill Gassett

Bill Gassett –  Maximum Real Estate Exposure

If you asked anyone who signs up for a new social media channel what their goals would be the answer is bound to include getting more real engaged followers. Social media can’t be an effective tool unless you have people who are actually interested in hearing what you have to say. The mistake most people make when joining any social channel is just being a broadcaster and not creating relationships. You see it all the time – they blast their message out their like it is billboard advertising. The end result is very few people being interested in following this kind of person!

One of the best ways to get meaningful followers on Twitter is a heavy daily dose of the Re-Tweet button. Instead on focusing on your own content feature others first. There is nothing that will grow a following faster than promoting others and reciprocating those who have done the same for you.


Dave Schneider

Dave Schneider ninjaoutreach.com

Although it doesn’t sound terribly exciting, following people is the easiest way to get people to follow you back. You can use a system like Just Unfollow to remove people who don’t follow you back, so you can keep your quota healthy.

I recommend following people with a modest amount of Twitter followers, maybe just a few hundred. because they will see that you followed them and will be more likely to follow you back.

Additionally, being active on the platform, engaging in conversations, and having a link to your Twitter profile on your website helps as well.


Carrie Hill

Carrie Hill ignitordigital.com

Twitter Followers are tricky – because you want quality followers – not just numbers to have numbers.  I always recommend tweeting about 60% industry/niche info, 20% feel-good stories (if you can , and 20% sales stuff.  Your twitter followers are a direct result of the quality of your stream.  There are a few tips that can help you receive more followers based on what you tweet.

1. Photos in the twitter stream attract the eye and attention to your twitter stream – if the user is engaged, they’re more likely to follow.  Babies, food and puppies sell 🙂

2. Hashtags are a great way to get in front of a relevant audience.  Add a relevant hashtag to your tweet so anyone monitoring that hashtag has the potential to see your tweet and follow you.

3. Tag industry leaders in tweets. Contribute to the conversation, ask questions, be helpful and open to learning.


Rob Wormley

Rob Wormley wheniwork.com

Growing your following on Twitter is all about finding a good balance between automation and authenticity. What I mean by that is this: you’ve got to have the right tools in place that allow you to schedule your updates and track engagement opportunities in real-time – but you also have to keep the human side of things alive when it comes time to actually engage and interact with people. People don’t want to interact with a robot. They want to have real, valuable, authentic conversations with actual human beings. My recommendation for someone looking to grow their following would be to spend time manually interacting with people first. Learn the in’s and out’s of Twitter, build lists, retweet and follow people, share value. Once you have that down, you can slowly start adding more and more automation tools like Narrow,BufferHootsuite, and others that help make everything more efficient.


Ryan Stewart

Ryan Stewart  webris.org

Twitter is a powerful tool if you have an engaged following. Building that following is extremely difficult to do. At this time I’m writing this, I have about 1,500 followers on Twitter, and growing by about 20 – 30 a day. While all of my followers are real, I use a black hat method to get their attention: bots. Twitter bots crawl a certain hashtag and either reTweet, favorite or follow the user who used your hashtag. I have my bot crawling hashtags like #seo, #analytics and #digitalmarketing. In the 2 months I’ve been using it, I’ve seen my Twitter account grow at astounding rates, as well as traffic to my site from Twitter increase 100% month over month. This tactic isn’t for everyone, but when you have a busy schedule, it’s the best method I’ve found!


Wade Mcmaster

Wade McMaster designwebidentity.com

I first start by offering consistent tweets with links to great posts, images, quotes etc and then find influencers in my community and follow some of their followers.

Once I have a ‘base’ following of 1000 or so, I keep the tweets coming. I try interact with them and as many influencers as I can to spread my reach and gain more followers naturally. Doing a roundup post (like this one!) is another top way to get a lot of retweets from Influencers which usually results in more of their followers following you if they like what you offer.

One more tip: keep more followers by following back as often as you can!

Overall: engage, offer top notch quality, follow back and keep the tweets coming consistently!


patrick coombe

Patrick Coombe elite-strategies.com

1 word: interact

Try to insert yourself in topical brand discussions. Avoid saying things like “me too” or “totally agree” etc and keep your responses intellectual and retweet worthy. See if you can find discussions that influencers are discussed in.

Also keep it positive. It’s ok to disagree with someone, but having a negative tone and being constantly skeptical can be off-putting to many people.

Twitter chats area also a great way to interact and gain followers, especially if you bring something to the table. The brand leaders / chat moderators might follow you and the people who’s questions you answer might follow you.

You might not be an influencer, celebrity, or a-lister that gets 1000’s of new followers per day, but you definitely can work your way up slow and steady.

Bottom line is that people like to follow people that have like minded ideas.


Umar Khan

Umar Khan socialcubix.com

For me, the most effective method to get Twitter followers are:

Twitter chats – I’m a great fan of Twitter chats and always try to participate in the famous weekly ones organized by SEMRush, with the hashtag #SEMRushChat; CMI with the hashtag #CMWorld; and, Buffer with the hashtag #bufferchat.  The rule is simple: the more effective and relevant your answer is, the more shares and followers you will get.

For searching your related chats, I’d recommend using http://twchat.com/ and http://nurph.com/

Talk to Influencers – Every industry has a handful of influential individuals active on Twitter. Follow them and respond to their tweets. Make sure not to sound like your average everyday kind of follower, but rather respond to them keeping in view the chief point and be ready to dish out helpful pointers, should they ask for it. Chances are high that they will follow you right back or at least retweet your tweet, which is eventually going to yield targeted followers.


Sue Anne Dunlevie

Sue Anne Dunlevie successfulblogging.com

I believe in strategically following other bloggers in order to get followers. I make sure that the people I target to follow have #blogger or #bloggingtips in their tweets so that I’m following my target audience. I also follow people that have “blogger” in their bio and I even follow the blogger’s followers using ManageFlitter.com. This method has worked out really well for me and I now have an engaged audience on Twitter.


Loz James

Loz James contentchampion.com

For the last year or so I’ve been using an excellent iPhone app called CrowdFire (formerly JustUnfollow). It enables you to follow a few people every day and then unfollow the ones who don’t follow you back. I’m in the content marketing niche, so I simply started following the followers of major influencers in my sector – because their audience would fit my blog perfectly.

I started out by following 30-40 people everyday (in random amounts) until I reached 2,000 followers, at which point Twitter’s rules mean you have to start the unfollowing process in order to get more followers. What I also did was edge up the amount of people I followed daily – based on every 1,000 new followers I got – so as not to be spammy or get my account suspended.

Now I follow around 400 people a day – and each one gets a welcome message through the software that thanks them and invites them to listen to my podcast, which is responsible for hundreds of visitors a month just on its own.

Although I follow and unfollow high numbers of people, I am selecting who to follow based on shared niche interests – so this is a strategic approach.

I’m moving up towards 20,000 followers at the time of writing, but I also found that once my account got above 10,000 – more people started following me anyway, so I’m not as strict with this system now as I used to be, and don’t have to worry about missing days sometimes. It’s a great strategy so give it a go 🙂


Jignesh Gohel

Jignesh Gohel olbuz.com

According to me, the most effective method to getting new twitter followers (here for me, new twitter followers are the one who are my target audiences or to closely related to business or services) is to participating in twitter chat. I personally participating in various popular twitter chat which provides an opportunity for healthy discussion and can help you to increase the follower base depending upon your participation. As it will definitely vary from industry to industry but having sound knowledge about topic is strongly recommended. Otherwise you may lose your followers too!


Stuart Walker

Stuart Walker nichehacks.com

I’m more into Facebook than Twitter as the traffic converts better for me and it’s much easier to reach your audience (I have a private mastermind group that has 2K followers and a lot of interaction) but one way which I’ve automated getting shares and followers from Twitter is using TwitterFeed to auto tweet out new content from blogs I like and have it mention their @Twitter name so they know I’ve shared.

This way I’m constantly sharing bloggers content which they notice and will in turn re-tweet and share my stuff bringing in new followers.

Aside from that I’m not focused so much on Twitter.


Kurt Frankenberg

Kurt Frankenberg shoestring101.com

I don’t think buying followers is a way to go. You want real, organic followers. TwitterAudit just told me I have 98% real followers… gotta go find and delete the 2%!

My best Twitter strategy is to go poach followers from my competitors.

Heh… actually, I don’t view any one person as being in direct competition with me, it’s more like others that serve the space of startups, entrepreneurs, marketing.

So after making a connection with someone whose tweets and conversations I appreciate myself… I go into their “following” folder and follow about 50 or so whose profiles stand out to me. Sometimes I’ll shoot a few of ’em
a question.

It actually only takes a short while to do this.

Meanwhile, once a week or so I use Tweetadder to identify who isn’t following me back and take ’em out.


Ian Cleary

Ian Cleary razorsocial.com

The most effective way of getting followers is following more people.  But you need to follow people that are relevant to your business so you need to use a good tool to identify the right people.  I use Manageflitter which has great targeting options to identify the most suitable people.  With Manageflitter you can apply really extensive filters.  For example, you can view people that have an active account, create tweets in a certain language, have relevant keywords in the their profile, you are not following them already and they have a reasonable number of followers.  I recommend to pick smaller groups of new followers and engage them with great content and they will follow you back.


Jamie Knop

Jamie Knop seoweather.com

One of the best things you can do to increase your Twitter followers is to interact with influencers in your niche that have a large following on Twitter. If you work in that industry, you should know who these people are, but if you don’t you can use a service like Followerwonk to find the influencers in your niche. Once you have a list start following them, interacting with their tweets, going to their websites and interacting there by commenting or even getting more personal and sending an email. The chances are they will get curious and check out your Twitter profile, even your website if they like what they see. Then if they like what you’re about and are interested in what you share, there is a chance they will follow you. The key to this is persistence, it doesn’t happen over night. Once you have influencers following you and you share valuable content they are interested in you have a good chance of them also sharing it with their audience, that could be to 10,000 followers or 100,000 followers. If they do share your content prepare for an influx in traffic / followers.


Marcus Miller

Marcus Miller bowlerhat.co.uk

There are lots of ways to get new followers but what really matters is quality and not quantity. Raw numbers are of no use unless the people you are connecting with have some potential value. That could be from a networking perspective, influencers or people who could at some point become customers so at Bowler Hat we always tailor this to the needs of the specific client.

Building followers is something that needs context so let me give a couple of examples:

  1. Potential Customers – it is hard to beat blogging about topics that are your expertise on high visibility sites. In my niche sites like Moz.com and Search Engine Land are the digital megaphones you want to shout from. Ensure the content you create is designed to help and educate your target audience and ensure your bio has a link to your social profiles. Followers via this method can then be engaged with post follow and relationships, hopefully business relationships can be built from this.
  2. Content marketing opportunities – If I wanted to find more places to guest post and get our message out there then engaging in industry chats on Twitter can be a useful way to meet folks. Weekly sessions like #seochat provide a way to network with industry peers and again create the seeds that relationships are grown from. This will build a relationship with a real person and another relevant follower.

In my mind social is all about relationships. Huge numbers don’t matter a great deal to lots of folks. Certainly, some businesses can and need to operate at scale but for many simply looking at number of followers can lead you in the wrong direction. Think about building relationships rather than followers and you are already way ahead of the competition (even if they have a higher follower count).


Marcus Taylor

Marcus Taylor ventureharbour.com

I think a good question to ask is, why do you follow people on Twitter? For me personally, I don’t follow people because of any specific tactic they used – I follow them because they share interesting information that helps me learn and grow. I think that’s the case with a lot of people.

So, my advice would be to stop focusing on the quick fixes and look at the bigger picture. Are you becoming the sort of person you’d want to follow on Twitter – and are you interacting with the people who’d appreciate what you have to say? If not, what do you need to start doing?


Gabriella Sannino

Gabriella Sannino level343.com

I’ve been using Twitter since 2008 with over 10K followers but honestly, I couldn’t really give you the winning formula, however I do notice jumps in my followers when I join hashtag chats, when I’m speaking at a conferences, webinars, or at a company training for social.

It’s no surprise people want to know there’s a human on the other end of an account, therefore, here are a few things that can help:

1. No egg picture but your face

2. Keep your tweets shot in order to promote RT’s. We’re dealing with 140 characters

3. Content is King, make sure your content is awesome

4. Create a great bio

5. Custom use of an about page is always a huge plus

6. Replying to others with a “.” prior to hitting reply will show others in your following how interactive you are

7. Make sure your time line has an 80%-20% share. 80 % others posts and 20% your posts


Ads Bridge

Alex AdsBridge.com

My main piece of advice is to Treat Your Updates As Valuable Content for your followers

I’m sure everything a brand tweets is a content, which means you need to decide if the content you’re putting out, is the valuable content your audience want to read and can interact with.

I’ve noticed that our twitter audience doesn’t care that much about brand updates. That’s why promotional updates have the least interaction of any type of tweet.

Let’s look at a simple example from our AdsBridge twitter feed.

When I post about something close to service updates, there are zero interactions.

Then, when you compare that to a tweet about news from affiliate marketing  – which most of our audience is interested in – it gets 200% more interaction. For example, we spent a lot of time creating our landing page optimization inforgraphic and have seen wonderful social activity and engagement with it. This type of content performs very well, as it’s a quality resource and relevant to the industry.

Before I post on Twitter, I ask myself a few questions:

  • Do my audience benefit from reading this?
  • Does it add value to my readers?
  • Would I want to read this?

Simply by making this switch and focusing on content, you’ll see a huge increase in your Twitter followers. Because people will know they can rely on you for solid, valuable content all the time.


Tommy Landry

Tommy Landry returnonnow.com

Twitter has changed a lot the past few years, and the days of buying followers are past us now. There are a few ways to grow a following now, especially for those of us who are focused on quality:

1. Curate and share great content on Twitter – if you want likeminded followers, share content that they will be interested in seeing.

2. Engage with the community – Comment on and share posts by people who share content in your same niche, build rapport with them, and in many cases they will choose to follow you

3. Create content on your own website and others – As one of the most effective methods, generating content on your owned web property as well as guest posting on popular sites for your target niche (think Search Engine Journal, Social Media Today, or similar sites if you are in marketing), you will naturally grow followers both through people who like your content as well as followers of people who tweet your content.

4. Figure out how to earn retweets naturally – I’ve seen in the past first hand, when your tweets get retweeted or favorited a lot, at least a few followers seem to jump in within a day or two.

Twitter is one place where you simply can’t take shortcuts. Stick with it over time, try some of these tips, and you’ll see progress in due time.


Harris Schachter

Harris Schachter optimizepri.me

If you’re just starting out with a brand new Twitter account I would recommend curating good content which is on topic with the audience you’re trying to build. This can be done most efficiently with the RSS feeds you’re already reading (or should be) and using a tool like Buffer to load up posts into your queue for distribution throughout the day. You can also hook up your bitly account to buffer so you can track the clicks to each share, letting you slowly refine the type of content which works best. If you need more automation for content curation, you can take those same RSS feeds and hook them up to a tool like Twitterfeed, which will automatically tweet anything that comes through that feed via your account. This one has a fine line between just enough and too much, so make sure you use options to space them out as well. Additionally in Twitterfeed you and append or prepend hashtags to each post for each feed to extend your reach.

But the best way to increase a Twitter following is to be you. Engage with people, answer questions, pose questions, and sprinkle in some lightweight personal content like a non-controversial opinion. This can help you standout as a real human when potential followers are deciding whether or not to follow you. You also want to follow the right people, not just everyone you come across. Finally, DO NOT buy followers. They’re all fake, and it is obvious. The goal is to have a following of real people who will engage with you, not just to have a big number after your name.


Pavlos Giorkas

Pavlos Giorkas pavlosgiorkas.com

The most effective method for getting twitter followers is to follow and comment on hashtag conversations. With this method I am getting 3 – 5 new followers whenever I am engaged in a hashtag conversation in the niche which I operate.

People who follow a specific hashtag that you comment with, are like-minded people who have the same interests as you do. If your comments are smart and to the point you will start getting retweets,likes and most importantly followers.

What you need to do is simpe:

  1. Find the most popular hashtags by going to https://www.hashtags.org/trending-on-twitter/
  2. Start commenting on a topic by using the hashtag.
  3. Watch your followers grow.

You can do this in your spare time or before you go to bed.


Dom Wells

Dom Wells humanproofdesigns.com

Getting Twitter followers is all about engagement. If you’ve got a website that engages people, they’ll likely look for your Twitter handle and follow you. Similarly, if you’re using hashtags and tweeting engaging tweets, you’ll followers that way too. Re-tweeting and sharing relevant content is always good as well…people don’t tend to follow those who just promote or share their own stuff.

Another useful trick is to try and engage with somebody who has a large audience. Tweet them a question, comment, or suggestion on something, and if they reply, you can sometimes start a conversation. Lot’s of people will watch this conversation, giving you a chance to get new followers.

Also, taking part in (or hosting your own) roundup posts such as this one are great for exposure to new audiences as well.


Philip Kleudgen

Philip Kleudgen restaurantcoverings.com

I’m a heavy Twitter user so I have a decent following on Twitter, but I built it up over years not weeks. What I do is sharing high-quality content from other blogs in my niche and I tweet more than ten times a day most days (I. Love. Buffer.).

On top of that I like to follow Twitter influencers and many of them not only follow back, but some of their followers tend to also follow me afterwards.

Last but not least I ask people to connect with me on Twitter on my email subscriber thank you page. That helps to push some additional followers depending on the number of new opt-ins I get.


Matt Wolfe

Matt Wolfe mattwolfe.net

I’ve used several techniques to grow my Twitter following. I’ve used tools that automatically follow people with the hopes that they follow you back, I’ve tried aggressively using hashtags with the hope that people following those hashtags would follow me, and I’ve tried a variety of other strategies.

There’s been three strategies that always outperform the rest…

1. Share really good stuff and tag the creators. I use Buffer to share great content that I find from around the web that’s relevant to my target market. I always include the person’s username who created the content when I share it. I round up a lot of followers because a lot of people like the content that I curate and the content that I create myself and I gain a lot of followers from the content creators themselves because they see that I like to share their stuff.

2. Favorite good tweets from people in your target audience. Do a hashtag search for a topic in your niche and favorite the best posts that come up. You will gain a lot of followers because people love their ego stroked a little. When you favorite something, the original poster sees that you favorited it and there’s a good chance they’ll follow you.

3. Pay to do a follower campaign. I will actually run ads on Twitter and target the followers of someone else in my niche. When people follow you back, you know they are targeted and you know they are fairly active on Twitter.

I don’t like using tools that automate the following of people. You never know if you’re following real people or bots. Share cool stuff, show some love (with a favorite) of cool content you find, and occasionally invest some money to grow your following. This is how I grow my following by 40-50 people per day right now.


Brian Jackson

Brian Jackson brianjackson.io

Here are a couple tricks I use to get new Twitter followers:

1. I always make sure to mention the brand or author in my tweet (this can increase your reach dramatically if retweeted).

2. I always make sure to use 2 hashtags in my tweets. Not 1 or 3, but 2 seems to be the magic number.

3. I use buffer to schedule my RTs so they are spread throughout my feed.

4. I make sure to only share information that is relevant to my niche of followers

5. I share awesome content from my feedly collections I have built up over the years (the best guys in the industry)

6. I use twitter symbols to make my tweets stand out (http://www.piliapp.com/twitter-symbols/)

7. I unfollow people that don’t follow me back using ManageFlitter.

8. I only follow people in my niche.

9. For every 3 tweets I make sure at least one has a picture.


Reginald Chan

Reginald Chan successground.com

The one strategy that works for me all the time is to share content of influencers related to my niche. Every time I find an interesting post or tweet from an influencer, I will share it on by mentioning the influencer himself.

The concept behind this is pretty simple. By sharing the tweet, certain people who follows you and the influencer will see the tweet. In return, they may consider you as sharing a related tweet related to their interest which results in a follow back.

But yes, only a handful will see the tweet and in order to maximize your reach, add a period right in front of the influencer’s Twitter handler as below:

.@Influencer – Great article by [name]! Read it more here [link].

This Twitter technique requires time and effort, thus taking some time to see the results. However, in a long run, you can easily grow your Twitter followers without breaking any Twitter rules.


Mikael Uusitalo

Mikael Uusitalo cubicledropout.com

If you want to add users a great way is to start interacting. Very often all the tips and tricks I see is based on providing great content in a one way fashion. While great content is good you can provide it in bite-size through interaction. Don’t fear providing your opinion or knowledge to discussions or questions if they are valid, specific and on point.

Listen in on hashtags, identify questions and weigh with your opinion. Dedicate a few hours per week and actually speak to people more then often you will gain followers if you provide value in your input. Great tools to monitor for possible discussions where you input is valuable are: Topsy, Socialmention and plain hashtags in say Hootsuit.


Ashley Faulkes

Ashley Faulkes madlemmings.com

The most effective way I have found of getting very engaged and active Twitter followers online is to follow people who are following some bigger names (aka influencers). Let me give you an example: if you follower a guy like Neil Patel and watch his tweets, you can see who is engaging (retweeting, favoriting, commenting) and then see if they are a good fit for your niche. Then you follow them. I find that most of these people are interested in the topics that the influencers tweet about and are always looking for new people to follow.


Freddie Chatt

Freddie Chatt freddie.pro

You want to make sure you not only increase your followship but also maintain & increase your engagement. To do both of these follow these steps:

  1. Follow the people you wish to follow you
  2. Share & compliment a piece of content they have published
  3. Watch their tweets and answer any questions that they ask their followers.

Alternatively if you don’t care about engagement and want to “fake it ’til you make it”, buy them.


robbie richards

Robbie Richards robbierichards.com

1. Aggressive follow/ unfollow strategy
2. Ask subscribers to follow you on your welcome email
3. Include a prominent follow button in a sticky header bar using the Sumome “Smart Bar” app
4. Automate the sharing of high quality from the RSS feeds of industry thought leaders/ publications. Append their handle to the automated tweets to start building relationships.
Here is a case study I did that shows how I collected 1,048 new followers and increased my Twitter referral traffoc 159% in 3hrs.

 

Conclusion:

Twitter is very powerful social network and after all experts have spoken you know what tips work better for them and what you should avoid, for example buying followers. The most important is to engage with the right audience and it will bring you more high quality followers : -) BTW, just in 1 day this post received 30 social shares on Twitter. Some very trusted Twitter users like Bill who has 22k followers retweeted this expert roundup:

 

If you have something to share with the experts, let them know below in the comments!…