How to build a Twitter following - without spending all day!

byKerryAnn61

3.5K followers

6 years ago

I asked myself "How do I build a Twitter following?" I wrote a post on my blog today about how I have been gaining a Twitter following without spending hours each day.

There is some good training here, but what if you just don't have time to surf the web finding information to share. Likewise, you may not be an 'expert' in a particular field yet want to build a following of people to whom you can later promote your 'product' to. This is the situation I am in.

I do not claim to be an expert, and there are many ways to grow your Twitter following, however this post is to share with you the steps I have been taking.

I wish to build a social media following, and when I find a product to sell on Amazon I will let them know. Tweets like, yea I found a product. It's ready. On the way. Made it to USA. Trying to build excitement before gently letting them know what it is. Then 'share' my excitement.

I have therefore been building a cross section of the community as my followers. I have not worried about 'targeting' an audience. I may follow gardeners but some of these will have dogs and I may sell a pet product. It does not mean I only have to have dog lovers in my followers.

Likewise, if I later sell in Europe & Asia, having followers from around the world may mean some of them will be interested. It does not mean that they will buy - simply that I will have people I can tell about my product and ask them to share this information. Engagement, rather than selling.

The following is basically what I have am doing to get my followers up by a hundred or more a week without mass following and unfollowing. I tried this and it caused many problems. I have also only used the free Quuu & Buffer tool to post 2 tweets per day automatically. I also choose not to spend money trying to build a following.

A hundred may not sound like many, but over a year it adds 5000 new followers with little work.

1. I automatically follow back everyone who follows me. I check each time I log in.

2. I have made a 'list' of celebrities & influencers - people who follow me with large audiences are added to this list. Once I follow back, I check my notifications and hover over the name and check their following. Then if they have a large audience, I add them to the list. This way I can quickly find their posts and like and re-tweet and have my name appear within these feeds. This way my name appears to many people and if they respond to a comment, or one of my posts, It gets seen by many new people.

3. I have liked and re-tweeted some posts from my general feed as well as the influencers list.

4. I log in 3 - 5 times per day for about 5 minutes. As the Twitter feed moves so quickly and I am often online when many are asleep, periodic posting means I may be seen more often by different people. If you can only log in once, then please do so. It is important that you follow back or you will quickly loose some people as they think you are not active.

5. I have used hashtags occasionally trying to reach more people. Of course, often there are hashtags in the post I re-tweet.

6. I use Unfollowspy to carefully unfollow.

Of course, if I spend more time and like, comment and re-tweet more posts of people with large audiences I could grow even quicker. As my following starts to increase I imagine people will look at my profile and think - "larger following, more people = I will follow this person". It is how I think when considering someone to follow, so I expect others will too.

I hope this helps you to build your Twitter following, slowly but surely without getting into Twitter Jail and without wasting time following and unfollowing hoards of people and going nowhere.

cheers

KerryAnn