7 easy steps to your first 100 twitter followers. For those of you who are new to Twitter (like me), here is how I got my first 100 followers. Tips for twitter newbies.
I am reasonably new to twitter. I opened my twitter account about four months ago and really started tweeting a couple of months ago. It took me a bit over a month before I had my first 100 followers. You can achieve this a lot quicker if you spend the time. A bit of a late starter I suppose. I am not one of those who quickly jumps on the latest band wagon. I most say I am still trying to get the hang of it and find the 140 character limit a bit frustrating. I mean how can you have conversation with the limit. Anyway that is beyond the point. Here I want to share with you my journey so far and how I built my first 100 followers.
So down to business now. Here are the 10 steps which I went through in order to get my first 100 followers.
1. Open an account. If you haven’t already signed up for an account go to http://twitter.com/ and sign up.
2. Create your profile. As a bear minimum these are the fields you need to complete.
Name: Use your real name and make sure you separate your first and last name. This is how people can find you.
Username: This is your display name in Twitter, which will show up against your posts and also in the web address for your twitter: http://twitter.com/DynamoAsh. DynamoAsh is my username
BIO – Write a strong bio. Make sure it is relative to what or who you are.
Photo: Go to the picture tab and upload a nice picture of yourself. It is very important to have a photo, otherwise you are trying to socialise without a face!
3. Follow people you already know: Ok so now you have your profile setup and want to start getting followers. Before you get followers you need to start by following people. It’s a bit like you follow them, then they follow you. So click on Find People and start by following the people you know, then go to “Find on other networks” tab and import people from your email address books (these are people that already have twitter accounts). Because these are people you already know you can be sure that almost all of them will also follow you in return.
4. Follow people you like and admire: Basically these are people you like to get to know or quite simply want to follow their posts. These can be leading figures around your topic of interest or business related people whom you admire.
5. Discover people who share your interest: Say for example if you are into marketing you can quite simply search marketing in the Find People search box and this way find people who have mentioned marketing in their profile. The second search you can do is to search for marketing in the search box in the side bar. This search box will search all posts that contain marketing. So here you can listen to discussion going on around your searched topic and find people you find interesting to follow.
For more advanced users try Twellow.com . Twellow has a category function that you search for individuals within certain markets or categories. It is really good, and will give you tons of people to pick from.
Pick your target guru, and click on his/her followers ‐ Click as many as you can, add every single last one of them if you can. I know it seems like a lot of work, but it’s worth it. About 40% of the people you follow will follow you back.
6. Post interesting tweets. This is a bit then up do you whether you are so passionate about one topic or your business that that is all you want to tweet about or maybe it is more your personal thoughts and quite simply what you are up to. Personally I tweet about things that I believe are worth sharing and as yet I am not doing high quantity of tweeting just about everything that comes to my mind.
This is what @SeanMalarkey, who has101K followers, says: “Live and die by this ‐ Give 80% and take 20%. In other words, don’t sell sell sell. Give back, believe me it works.”
I’ve given you some ideas on what to tweet – but try and be personal – tweet things that are relevant to your niche or target audience.
What gets re-tweeted
- Funny tweets
- Cool articles
- Quotes
- RT of other good tweets
The more you post good tweets the more people will find you and follow you.
7. Start conversations.
Generally conversations start in two main ways
1. You retweet somebody else’s tweets. Twitter has just released an updated version to make this easier. Up to now the way it has been is that you copy the original message and Add RT to it. Twitter has just released an updated version which automates this. You can find out all about it here http://bit.ly/7q1hQl.
2. Start or engage in a conversation using the # tag. See the picture below. You can see that OscarDS has re-twitted a message with hash tag #CGWhiz. If you were to click on #CGWhiz then you will see all the tweets with that hash tag. In other words all the tweets from people engaging in this particular conversation.
TIP: for steps 3-7 I would recommend setting aside a little time everyday or every other day. Don’t rush through it trying to do it all at once. Building followers takes time. The more you engage the more followers you will have.
Some useful tools:
http://tweetlater.com Once registered, click on “add account”, add your Twitter account and it will give you an option to automatically send a DM to all new followers.
http://www.tweetdeck.com. Makes browsing and organising your tweets easier. Also you can add your Facebook and myspace account here.
Ashkan is an SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and social media consultant who helps website owners achieve high ranking in Google’s organic search results. Here Ash shares his experience, tips and advice to help you make the most of your web business. 
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By the way, there are of course tools out there which gets you 1000s of follower in no time. I don’t use any of them. The 100 followers I talk about are genuine people interested in what I have to say.