I set up my Twitter account only five months ago, although at the advanced age of 22 I’ve been on Facebook more than 6 years.. After creating the account I asked myself, “Who should I follow?” I began by Googling my favorite athletes, actors/actresses, news outlets and major television stations—in essence I wanted to follow the biggest, best, and ‘brightest’ Twitter stars—all with the goal (unrealistic as it turned out to be) of gaining followers from the Twitter elite.
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Uh-Oh
Within a week or two of the creation of my Twitter account, I had a fluctuating base of followers ranging anywhere from two to six on any given day. I found this to be wildly discouraging. How could I be a part of a social networking site of over 105,779,710 registered users (See: Huffington Post) and manage to gain no more than six followers? What I learned is that as easy as it may seem to do, it takes some strategic thinking and a consistent effort to gain the followers that you covet so badly.
1. Strategy
Before you embark on your journey to become a Jedi Knight of the Twitter world, you must ask yourself “Who am I targeting?” That is, who do you want to be reading your tweets? If your goal is to build a community with an eclectic variety of followers, then one of the best ways may be to provide fellow Twitterers with content that is interesting, relevant and engaging, spanning several topics (Ex: professional sports, movies & cooking). Conversely, if you are using a Twitter account for business, you are probably targeting a select group. You will need to tweet about topics that are relevant to your business and more importantly, your target audience. In any case, regardless of your goal, it’s important that you include a mix of types of content: original messages and/or comments on relevant topics, links to your own articles or other relevant material, and most importantly, retweets, mentions and other interactions with your growing tribe.
2. Face-to-Name
Another key to attracting followers to your soon-to-be magnificent account is as simple as adding a face to the page; whether or not that is adding your face or a cool graphic, it is essential that you add something personal or unique (note: if you’re not going to add a picture of yourself as the face of your profile, it’s important that you add something relevant to the target audience: i.e., if you tweet about baseball, have your profile picture feature something that is baseball related). Simply put, an egg on the face of your profile screams inexperience (or worse, spammer!) and will have your account overlooked in no time.
3. To Hashtag or Not to Hashtag
One thing to be wary of is constantly stuffing tweets with popular, high-streaming hashtags. This is an all too common mistake amongst users, experienced and inexperienced alike. From the onset, this strategy seems like a viable one in order to attract followers to your page: tweet and hashtag popular topics, and surely the followers will come. This, however, is not always the case. More often than not, your tweet may be washed away by the thousands of other users and content flowing in with these same trending hashtags. Hashtags are the most successful when they are relevant, used consistently by you and your audience, and work with the natural flow of the tweet. Don’t be fooled: popular hash tags do not skyrocket you to Twitter stardom.
So as I’ve explored the Twittosphere over the past few months and employed that tried and true technique of “trial and error” – my following is up to 56, with more to come (hopefully)! Perhaps it’s not stardom, but I’ve learned as a ‘mature’ college graduate that it takes time and several successful battles before becoming a Jedi Knight.
Note: You can find me on Twitter as @mhenderson89.
