Gaining Twitter Followers & Earned Media

Gaining twitter followers is hard. Hey, it’s called “earned media” for a reason. This past week I have been reading up on as much material as possible on the topic and wanted to share a few insights.

Engagement is key. Twitter and all of social media in general is a two way road. This is not a top down message, so act accordingly: ask followers interesting and off beat questions, answer questions, and retweet interesting content your followers generate. Of course, this takes a lot of time and effort. Please refer to the second sentence of this post.

Provide true value. Post interesting and relevant links. Tweet interesting quotes that are brand related (especially if it has something to do with current events). Value will earn you retweets. Retweets are one of the best way to gain followers.

Be consistent. Be present on your account daily. Hootsuite is a great tool for this. It enables you to schedule your tweets. No one is going to follow a sporadic account.

Be spontaneous. Don’t make your message predictable. There is no formula for this stuff. Have fun with it. For example, make a mini contest.

Those four insights emerged as pretty consistent themes in everything I have read. If you guys have any more ideas on how to become a social media rock star, please don’t hesitate to share them here!