Many people will tell you that they don’t care about how many Twitter followers they have and they definitely have a point. When it comes to Twitter followers, it’s more important to have quality people following you than a bunch of bots and fake accounts. However, when you’re first starting out in the Twittersphere, it’s nice to amass a small following.

A recent article in Business Insider says the #1 secret to growing your Twitter following is network overlap.  This means that when you see your friend follow a Twitter account, you’re likely to follow it too.  Additionally, the more you tweet and the quality of your tweets also matters.

On the other hand, being a debbie-downer is likely to slow down the number of people that follow you. You’re allowed to complain but try and keep it to a minimum.

Logically, the easiest way to get Twitter followers is to follow a lot of people and a big percentage of them will follow you back.  If you’re using this method and you find you can’t follow anymore people, it means that you’ve hit a Twitter follow limit. Twitter has imposed a follow limit to improve site performance and reliability to help make Twitter “a nice place for everyone” aka prevent fake accounts and spam.

There are other paid services such as Just Unfollow that allow you to follow people, unfollow people and copy the followers of your friends.  The lowest cost membership is $9.99 and this allows you to follow and unfollow unlimited amounts of people for two Twitter accounts. A free membership imposes follow limits. This option is good if you want to unfollow a large number of people that don’t follow you back.

Following a large amount of people at one time may hurt your reputation according to PC Mag. They say, “Following junk Twitter users can hurt your reputation. Remember that other Twitterers can see not only how many people follow you, but how many you follow and who they are. Influential Twitter users (the kind you actually want to follow you) will often check who you follow before deciding to follow. If you’re loaded with junk, they might pass you up!”

In conclusion, the best way to grow a quality Twitter following is to: 

• Follow high quality people that you are genuinely interested in. If you’re stumped, look at who your competition follows.
• Add a picture to your profile and make sure your Twitter bio is complete (and witty).
• Add a hyperlink to your profile to your website or LinkedIn profile. Add your location as well.
• Tweet and interact with other Twitter members often. This isn’t Facebook, you’re allowed to post as often as you like (as long as it’s not spam).
• Tweet about your niche 80% of the time and banter with your friends and network 20% of the time. This keeps your followers happy and also makes you look human.

If you would like help growing your Twitter following, please feel free to contact me at samanthataracollier@gmail.com or fill out this contact form. I look forward to hearing from you.