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When I began blogging, facebook and instagram came pretty easily to me. Twitter, on the other hand, was a completely different science. I watched bloggers purchase followers by the thousands, but I wanted real followers, humans that cared about my message, people who would favorite and possibly retweet my content.
Today, I am excited to share great tips, on Growing Your Twitter Network the Right Way, from my friend, Holly Bertone. She has authored several books about her experience with growing social media, and today she is sharing her knowledge with us.
How to Grow your #Twitter following, the Right Way!! http://t.co/qbAcA46fF4 @PinkFortitude #bloggingtips #networkingtip
— Amy Nielson (@planplaytime) April 28, 2015
Thank you so much for the opportunity to share my knowledge with your readers. While I still consider myself a novice, I have grown my Twitter following from zero to over 3,000 in the first year (and currently over 4,000). While my strengths may not be in gaining thousands of followers, I have found great success in gaining the RIGHT followers! I learn as much as I can every day, and here are some of my tips and tricks. I would love to hear about your successes on Twitter as well!
The key is to balance quality AND quantity, and not have your following be bigger than your followers. To gain quality followers, don’t just follow someone and hope they will follow you back. You need to follow them, retweet a tweet of importance to them (one of their products or posts), and then tweet them directly with a personal and targeted message. For example, if the person I want to follow me back is a vegan foodie who is a military spouse, my tweet greet might be something like, “New follower via #creativebloggers #armywife #vegan have a great day!” Mention one or two items in their profile that you have in common – coffee, twins, location, whatever! Make it personal. If you want the quick and easy way to gain a larger quantity of followers, a lot of social media experts swear by this method. Find your Twitter guru in your space, and look at the followers in their lists. Find a list that is in the market you want, and just go down the list and click “Follow.” Now, by blindly following these people, you may not get as many followers back, but you can follow many more this way, and also much quicker, and there is always going to be a percentage which will follow you back. If you combine these two methods – magic will happen!
Teaser alert – you can read more about this in my book, How to Grow Your Social Media Following.
Currently, Twitter is my #21 overall and all time referrer. One fifth of my total social media subscribers are Twitter followers. For someone like a Neil Patel, who is a social media guru and has over 100,000 Twitter followers, Twitter is his number one referral source. For home, family, lifestyle, food, and mommy bloggers, Pinterest will probably be your top referral source, as that is where our primary audience spends their time. Don’t be discouraged if it’s not a huge traffic driver for you. Twitter is still a powerful tool, and you need to use it to get your brand and message out to the masses.
I haven’t gotten to the point where my retweets are organic. But I do use several methods to help. First is Triberr. It’s best to join tribes that share the same interest as you, like the Creative Bloggers Network tribe. Make sure the tribes you join are active, and have a moderator who keeps everyone in line. All you have to do is hover over the “share” button and the tweets will automatically be scheduled. Second are Facebook groups, like The Creative Bloggers Network Group. I am involved in several Facebook groups, and each group has a Twitter share once a week. You post your link to your tweet to get retweeted and do the same for others. On the same note, a lot of businesses host a Twitter Tuesday share party, where you share your twitter handle for others to follow, and you can follow them back too. Third, is Viral Content Buzz. It’s a free community where you share each other’s content, and a great way to get retweets and followers. Last but not least is to ask for retweets from the heavy hitters. You have to ask nicely, infrequently, and on your absolute top content. I will typically add “Plz RT thx!”
According to all of the articles I’ve researched, the best times to tweet are Monday through Thursday during East Coast Time business hours. I still schedule tweets on Friday, and have a few go out over the weekend as well.
You really need to use a scheduling tool. A lot of folks like Buffer, but I am partial to Hootsuite. There is a little known feature in Hootsuite where you can bulk upload your tweets via an Excel spreadsheet. You can read the step-by-step tutorial in the article How to Upload Bulk Files in Hootsuite to Twitter. For more Twitter resources and articles, check out my Twitter Board on Pinterest!
What about you? What are some of your best Twitter tips? Share with us in the comments below.
About Holly:
Holly Bertone, PMP is an author, blogger, and breast cancer survivor and advocate. She is the President and CEO of Pink Fortitude, LLC and Editor in Chief at the inspirational blog The Coconut Head’s Survival Guide. Holly holds a Masters Degree from Johns Hopkins University, a Bachelor’s Degree from Elizabethtown College, and is a Project Management Professional (PMP). Holly is an Ambassador for the Tigerlily Foundation,was accepted into the National Cancer Survivor’s Day Speakers Bureau, and was named a 2014 Woman of the Year by the National Association of Professional Women. She is passionate about reaching out to breast cancer survivors, and also volunteers for organizations supporting our military veterans. In her free time, she loves to garden, hit flea markets, antique stores and yard sales, and drink a cup of coffee on her back porch. Holly is married to a retired Green Beret, is a stepmother, and lives in Alexandria, VA.
40 Responses
Thank you for the tips!! Great ideas! Can’t wait to try them in my twitter account!
No problem! Holly did a great job. I’ve been working on implementing some of her tips. The more I use twitter the faster it builds. I’ve also starting tagging people when I share their articles. They often like or retweet the tweet, and sometimes they follow me back.
These are great tips! Twitter has always been a bit of an aggravation for me. Although for my own blog Twitter so far has the most followers, I have never felt much love from Twitter as apposed to say Facebook or Pinterest. It too often feels like I am talking to myself….but I continue with it in hopes that one day it will generate a bit more traffic to my site. Great post!
I know what you mean Kim. Twitter is my most difficult to get interaction on, but I’m excited to implement some of these new ideas to improve my traffic from there.
Awesome tips, Amy. I have been investing much less in Twitter than I used to, but coincidentally, I was searching for info on how to turn the table.
It would be a pleasure to welcome you to my Tip Tuesday Linkup Party with this blog. It is really helpful. Thanks for sharing it!
Thank you Debbie. Twitter is something I am working on still as well. I am excited to use more of Holly’s tips.
I spent a lot of time on Twitter earlier this year. I tripled my followers and I now get lots of interaction, although as Holly mentioned it doesn’t seem to drive much traffic to my blog at all. I get a lot of followers from participating in Follow Friday. I do it all without automation and it takes time but I think it’s fun! I also use buffer, Klout, and Swayy to get content and share it round the clock, and I have some IFTTT recipes I use too.
Thanks for sharing Leslie. I recently set up Hootsuite, but I haven’t tried those others you mentioned. I’ll have to look into it.
This is so great – I so struggle with twitter – thanks for the tips!
Twitter is tricky for me too. I have a lot of followers, but not as much interaction as I would like. I hope to keep growing my followers, improve my interactions, and hopefully start getting some twitter traffic to my blog.
I read this on bloglovin and saved it on my blog tips. Awesome article very helpful. Thank you for this info!
I’m glad you found the tips helpful. Twitter is the hardest social media platform for me, but I really want to figure out. I’m so glad Holly shared her ideas. I’ve already started using them and am seeing some results.
Twitter can be very tricky, but these are wonderful tips. It was very hard for me at the beginning as well, and sometimes hard to know your true followers. What a great guest post.
Twitter is tricky! I have had some success getting followers, but I want to increase my retweets and traffic. I haven’t had a lot of luck targeting people to retweet me unless I tag them in a post of theirs I’m sharing. That seems to be pretty effective.
Awesome! Can’t wait to use some of these tips!
I hope they work for you. Come back and tell us about your twitter success. I’m still working on my own.
I read this a few days ago and I’ve been thinking about it since. Twitter is scary to me, but this is so helpful!
I just started working on twitter in February. It is not completely intuitive, but I am learning quickly. I’ve increased my followers from 9 to 1200 in just 3 months, and I get a decent amount of interaction. I still want to increase twitter traffic to my site, so I’m still learning. Hopefully we all figure it out. 🙂
These re great tip. I am not a huge fan of Twitter personally and would probably not use if I did not have a blog. But, knowing that I need it for my blog I have tried to make an effort in making it work. I really like the idea of looking at bigger blogs with similar content and following their followers. It would be a way for them to maybe notice me too.
What I’m finding the most effective is sharing articles I like from larger sites and tagging both the site and the author. The author often favorites or retweets the tweet. Sometimes they follow. Other than that, following people in similar categories and subscribing to lists seems to help.
This article was much needed. Great information and really helpful. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks Gunjan! Twitter seems to be a tricky platform for most bloggers. I’m learning fast though.
Twitter has certainly been a challenge for me. These are great tips that u will certainly put to use. Thanks!
Pardon, that should be ‘I’
Come back by and let us know what works for you. I’ve been experimenting for a couple of weeks, and finding what works for my twitter feed.
great tips! thanks for sharing!
I just can’t seem to get in the groove with Twitter. I haven’t seen much from it, but Im sure thats because I can’t seem to get followers! Thanks for the tips. 🙂
The more I interact on twitter the more followers I get. I try to follow other mommy bloggers, parenting sites, and people in my focus area. I also retweet and interact on their tweets and tag them when I share their articles. It’s been helping me grow quite quickly. I hope that helps.
Twitter is doing well for me, especially with some of the more business type posts. I can’t see how buying twitter followers would do you ANY good in the long run. I do need to learn to use hashtags more effectively .
The only scenario in which I could see purchased followers being of benefit is if they allowed you to get over the twitter following limits. I get the most followers when I follow people with similar interests, so I want to keep following, but I won’t be able to once I hit the limit unless I have more followers. I’m not there yet, so we’ll see what happens.
Love this! Pinning to re-read later.
This is fantastic! I’ve bookmarked it to go over it again tonight and really get in to the nitty gritty. Twitter has been a legitimate challenge for me and your first tip is incredibly useful.
I just had that aha moment of “Ohhh so that is why people are alerting me that they are following, with a tweet.”
Tweet-greet. Huh.
(Now, I’m going to go pull my boots on and saddle the horse for a trip to the trading post.)
This article is so helpful. I only recently started using twitter regularly and can’t wait to implement some of these tips. Thanks for sharing this. Pinned 🙂
Great tips! I know for sure that following and expecting a follow back is not the right way to go about it, but having interaction is the best way. A bit like networking in real life!
This is great! Pinning for later to really comb through it all! Thanks for sharing! xox
I have over 5,000 twitter followers and still don’t understand it. I am a bit confused as the purpose it really serves. I enjoyed your tips and reading your post. Thank you for sharing!
i am new to blogging and never had a Twitter account before the blog… I appreciate all the advice! This has helped me out so much!
Thank you so much for this! I’m pretty solid on Facebook, and getting there on Google+. But I’m still way short on Twitter. This will be really helpful for me.
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Excellent content here to grow twitter following. I wants to share it with my friends.