How to Build a Powerful Twitter Following

If you’re tweeting to only a handful of followers, you might as well not be tweeting at all.

Twitter is one of the most widely used and valuable platforms for brands. It’s an excellent channel for connecting with your audience, spreading the word about what you do, and raising your profile.

But all of these things are only possible if you have a sizeable following. Otherwise, you’re just yelling into the void and getting nowhere.

Plus, even having tens of thousands of followers isn’t enough. You need to have the right kinds of followers, people who are actually interested in what you have to offer and have a chance of becoming customers someday.

You want an army of engaged fans, hanging on your every word and lining up to sing your praises. That’s something that can take a while to build, but it’s well worth it. In this article, we’ll take a look at how brands can do it.

First, let’s quickly go over why Twitter is such an important platform for brands.

Why is Twitter so important for brands?

There are a number of key reasons why Twitter is such a valuable platform. Here are some of the main ones:

• It’s a big audience. With 353 million monthly active users (and growing), Twitter offers a huge amount of potential reach.
• It’s a young audience. 38% of U.S. Twitter users are between the ages of 18 and 29, and 26% of users are 30-49 years old. This makes it ideal for connecting with your Millennial and Gen Z prospects.
• Twitter users are generally positive when it comes to interacting with brands. 93% of Twitter community members say they’re open to brands getting involved if this is done the right way.

These points (and many more) all combine to make Twitter the perfect environment to promote your brand, build relationships with your followers, and gain new audience members. So let’s dive into some of the ways you can do that.

How to build a Twitter following your competitors will envy

Tweet with the right frequency

The perfect tweet frequency is different for every brand. CoSchedule suggests 3-7 times per day as a good rule of thumb, but others insist that more is better.

Generally speaking, if in doubt, you should try to tweet more. It’s unlikely that you’ll drive followers away with just a few extra tweets a day, but you might be failing to show up on their radar by tweeting too irregularly.

It’s important to track the performance of your tweets carefully and work out which frequency works best for you and your audience.

Use hashtags wisely

Hashtags can be a great way to raise your profile and show up in the right communities. There’s a right way and a wrong way to use hashtags, however. Here are some best practices:

• Look at what hashtags your competition is using and how effective they are
• Find out which hashtags were successful on your last posts and try to replicate it
• Don’t overuse hashtags — 1-2 per post is the optimal amount

Interact with your followers

Too many brands treat social media as a one-way street. In fact, Twitter is the perfect place to interact with your followers, build relationships, and learn more about them and their problems (which you can then solve).

There are lots of ways to spark interactions. You can simply ask a question and encourage followers to hit reply and answer. You can also use Twitter’s poll function to carry out simple surveys. You can ask users to retweet your tweets for the chance to win a prize, and you can quote their tweets with your own comments.

Retweet valuable content from your followers and other users

Retweeting content from other users is a great way to show up in your followers’ feeds with relevant, valuable information and insights. It puts you on the radar without being self-promotional and establishes your brand as a reliable source of content. It also helps build goodwill with those you retweet.

Your customers will sometimes tweet positive things about their experience with your brand. This is a perfect opportunity to retweet a free review of your services. It’s a good idea to quote the tweet and say thanks.

Be funny and personal

To really connect with your followers and build a memorable brand, it’s important to inject some personality into your tweets and develop a distinct voice that people want to hear.

A great example of this is the diner chain Denny’s — they consistently churn out unique, funny, and relatable tweets that their audience loves.

Try to make your tweets personal — show your followers that you understand their problems and the topics they care about by writing tweets that deal with these issues and address their pain points.

Provide real value in your tweets

While being funny and entertaining is a significant plus on Twitter, it’s also essential to provide real value in your tweets. Find out what challenges your potential followers are grappling with and solve them with actionable tweet content.

Personalise your profile

Twitter is rife with bots, and it’s important to show your potential followers that you aren’t just another one of them. Prove that you’re the real deal with a highly optimised profile, a unique photo, and a bio that makes it clear you’re a real brand run by real humans.

Make it easy to find your Twitter

Embed links to your Twitter in your website, blogs, email signature, and wherever else your audience might find you. Encourage followers on other channels to check out your Twitter, and always be mindful of directing new potential followers to your page.

Use promoted tweets, and ad spend wisely

Twitter’s promoted tweets feature can be a great way to pick up new followers if done right. You can ask it to target your preferred demographic with paid ads directing them to your page.

Include images, videos, gifs, infographics

If there’s one thing Twitter users consistently respond well to, it’s media. Tweets with images and GIFs do well, but videos are 6x more likely to be retweeted than tweets with only photos.

And more retweets means you’ll show up on more feeds, raising your profile and exposing your brand to many more prospective new followers.

Track, monitor, and tweak

One of the most important steps when growing your Twitter account is using data the right way.

Twitter has its own built-in tool — Twitter Analytics — to help you do this. You can follow the number of likes, impressions, and retweets you’ve received on each tweet and the overall numbers for your account over a specific period of time.

Other useful tools for this include Hootsuite, Buffer, and Followerwonk.

The data you glean from these apps can help you optimise your Twitter strategy, so you post the right content, at the right times, in the right way to maximise your chances of picking up new followers.

Twitter is an incredibly rewarding tool for marketers if used in the correct way. If you can build a substantial following of engaged users who care about your message and brand, it can be a fast way of gaining many new customers.

At Blue Beetle, we can help you do that. To find out more, get in touch.