It’s pretty easy to see why you want lots of Twitter followers if you have analytics on your websites – you get TONS of traffic! As I’ve explained in my posts about WordPress plugins (category “Blogger“), I’ve set things up so that I automatically post a tweet promoting my latest blog posts as soon as I publish them which brings my Twitter followers over to my blog. There are other uses to Twitter too:

• If you’re an affiliate, you can tweet your affiliate links and hopefully make some sales
• If you sell your own products, you can advertise them – I Tweet about Two Crafty Chicks and our Etsy shop
• You can Tweet out promo codes and coupons
• You can sign up with companies that pay you per Tweet – the price per Tweet is only really worth it if you have a lot of followers, but it’s something to aspire to right?

For Twitter to be useful for marketing you have to have an audience for your Tweets. I only have 993 followers right now. This is not a lot in Twitterdom, but it’s important to note that yesterday morning I had about 705, give or take a couple. I thought I’d share the easy and FREE things I did to get over 200 new followers in a single day – and I’m getting several more every hour! Please note, there is something to be said about getting targeted followers that are more likely to actually read and be interested in your tweets, and more likely to click on your links and even buy your products – that is not what I’m covering here. There is a simple human tendency to follow the crowd, and what I am showing you to do here is to get a crowd following you, so that when you go for your target niche later on, you will have a little street cred you know? Here are a couple simple steps to getting a base of followers to build on:

PREP YOUR ACCOUNT

1. Post a profile pic. Not posting a pic is like social suicide on Twitter and a clear indication that you are probably going to be spamming.
2. Fill out your profile info, in a non spammy way! Tell a little about yourself, not what you are selling or promoting.
3. Make sure you have a full page of tweets on your profile page. People aren’t likely to follow you if you only have a couple tweets.
4. Make sure you have a combination of personal Tweets, trending Tweets, reTweets and @ replies. If there are any ads, make sure that they are about a 1:10 ratio. You want to show a bit of yourself, show that you have interesting and valuable things to say and that you interact – no one likes self-centered Tweeple.
5. Get to know the Twitter lingo. You’re already on Twitter, and you are reading this post about Twitter, its too late to be ‘too cool’ for Twitter!
6. Create a free account on Social Oomph. Don’t get all crazy and start using all their features – some services the offer are AGAINST TWITTER’S RULES! Do not risk having your Twitter account shut down. The only things I want you to do is set up “Auto-Follow Back” people who follow you AND a direct message when they follow you. Please, no links in the direct message, you have plenty of time for that. Something simple like, “Hi there! Thanks for following me!”  will suffice.

NOW GET SOME FOLLOWERS

Before deciding to follow someone, check out their profile. If the number of followers is much greater than the number they are following, they probably won’t follow you back. If they seem interesting or funny, you may want to follow them anyway, but remember you are limited to how many people you can follow if you don’t have enough followers, so choose wisely.

Don’t follow a million people in a single day, but you can follow A LOT. You risk being shut down if you are aggressively following – especially if you are unfollowing a lot of people too.

1. Head to We Follow Back and click on each of the links under the heading “WE FOLLOW BACK” on the right sidebar. There are a lot of them, and I’ve found the best way to do it is to right click one, select “open in a new tab” then go to the next, do this for about 25 or so. Now go through each of the tabs and follow each account. Feel free to not follow a couple if they seem too spammy or have no Tweets, you’ll just be weeding them out later anyways, so save yourself the time and be a little selective now, but not too selective! Your main goal is just to build your list. Besides, it doesn’t hurt to give everyone a chance right?
2. Add your name to the list on We Follow Back by entering your Twitter name into the box on the right side bar. Now people will follow you! Don’t worry, you will automatically follow them back (as you agree to by being on the list) because we’ve set you account up to do this on Social Oomph remember?
3. Go to Sebatian’s List of 1001 Twitter Users Who Will Follow You Back and do the same thing. You can pay him $10 to get added to the list if you want – I didn’t.
4. Head over to the Social News Watch’s List and do the same thing. Be careful with this list – there are A LOT of users who obviously aren’t following back as evidenced by their following/followers ratio. Don’t forget to follow the users who listed themselves in the comments!
5. NOW THIS IS IMPORTANT! Add yourself to my TWITTER FOLLOW BACK LIST. Post your Twitter user name and your pledge to follow back. I am compiling my own FREE list of users who actually do follow back. I will test, so don’t add your name unless you plan to follow back or you have set up auto-follow on your account. Please also post a short description of what you tweet about, and three to five keywords. I plan to categorize follow back Twitter users to help with targeting. If you don’t add your own description and keywords, I will have to do it myself, which may mean you won’t be added right away, and I may not get the real topic of your account the way you’d like others to see it.
6. Keep an eye on trending topics on Twitter. They are listed on the right side bar on your Twitter home page. If you see something with a ‘hash tag’ (looks like #) that you can comment about, do it. The hash tag categorizes your post with all the others with the same hash tag and makes your Tweets visible to people outside your network of followers. A lot of times these topics are funny or silly and if you add something that people enjoy, they will follow you. Never ever post unrelated spammy Tweets with trending hash tags just to get it seen. This is against the Twitter rules, and it really annoys other Twitter users and will NOT get you followers.

Check back for my guide to getting TARGETED followers who are more likely to click on your links!

By the way… As I’m finishing this post, I’m now up to 999 followers at http://Twitter.com/TanyaBones – that’s another 6 followers since I started this post, and I’ve done nothing!

UPDATE: It’s July 17th (12 days after I originally posted) and I’m up to 1600 followers!

UPDATE: It’s August 11th and I now have 1956 followers!