5 Ways to Increase Your Twitter Following

Written by  //  09/26/2011  //  Social Networking  //  2 Comments

twitter

College students seem more likely to make Facebook their home, than Twitter, even avoiding LinkedIn until they’re nearing graduation. Twitter offers many advantages neither of the other services offer, although you can and should integrate your tweets with LinkedIn.

If you’re looking for way to increase your Twitter following without attracting spammers only, there are five steps you can take to ensure that you’re worth following:

1. Offer Information — Your profile should say something about you and include keywords that can help people find you. One of the most important words or phrases is the name of your school. Mention your school, your major and some of your interests, and find or make a background image that tells people something about you. For example, if you’re an astronomy major, a solar system background can help you get noticed.

2. Offer Advice — How much advice can you offer with just 140 characters to play with? More than you think! You can split your advice up into segments and post these one right after another. Not at once so that people take you as a spammer, but 1-2 minutes apart. Use a desktop client such as HootSuite to schedule your tweets, allowing you to collect your thoughts before uploading your tidbits. Be interesting — if you have unlocked the secret code to your favorite XBox game, then let people know how you did it.

3. Offer Assistance — Twitter is a community of people who tweet, but also retweet messages. Retweeting is important, because it shows that you care about what other people say and have found their tweet or link to be of value. People will follow you if you actively give and take with Twitter, and help you gain access to their followers too. Who knows, the H.R. guy at the company you like could be one connection away from someone you helped.

4. Offer Friendship — Social media seems to be so unsociable, at least when it comes to face to face contacts, right? Yes and no. It is easy for some people to hide behind a social media wall, but it is just as easy to reach out and befriend someone. Do so without an ulterior motive — demonstrate that you care and value this person’s Twitter activities. As far as face to face meetings go, that may come later when you both appear at the same social media convention.

5. Promote Thyself — Take care of the first four steps and you’ll have much more liberty to promote yourself. At this point, you’re a known quantity and just the person others are following and will recommend to their friends. Go ahead, send out some tweets to let people know that you’re looking for work. Or, wanting to meet up at a football game. Or, whatever. Your credibility allows you to push the envelope, provided that you avoid spamming and know when to hold ‘em and know when to fold ‘em.

Once you’re established on Twitter, don’t forget to move over to LinkedIn and update your information there. To add your Twitter account to LinkedIn, visit “Edit My Profile” and click “Add Twitter account” next to the Twitter field. Twitter will ask you to verify your account name and password. Once the account is verified, you’ll be asked how you’d like to share your tweets on LinkedIn. Once your accounts have been joined, you can make changes by clicking on “edit” adjacent to your Twitter name.

Resources

10 Twitter Tips for College Students

Do Your Professors Use Twitter?

Using Twitter to Land Your Next Job!

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • StumbleUpon
  • LinkedIn
  • Digg
  • Delicious
  • HackerNews
  • BlinkList
  • Tumblr
  • MSN Reporter
  • Reddit
  • Print

2 Comments on "5 Ways to Increase Your Twitter Following"

  1. Christeljem Calo 09/29/2011 at 12:38 pm ·

    Great tips. I should consider these steps so I can have SOME followers. In our school, it’s FB that’s really popular that’s why it’s hard for me to get some followers because most of my schoolmates don’t care about my tweets. Do you think posting updates in FB via twitter would also help?

  2. Matthew C. Keegan 09/30/2011 at 4:10 am ·

    Christeljem, posting updates to Facebook can certainly help especially if you have a fairly large and engaged following. When people want more information, they’ll click through FB to get to your site. This makes for a good way to get additional traffic.

Comments are now closed for this article.