Increasing your Twitter following

Nothing replaces breaking news or being part of a big-name brand. When I was doing basketball recruiting under a big-name banner, I ran the Twitter account for our sub-site along with mine. Even though that account was mostly just links to articles and I told people to follow mine as well, I got followers, but not nearly like the official account. And hey, some people just like stupidity. I know a bunch of bench-riding H.S. hoops players that tweet garbage and have twice the followers I have, and I think Friday marks three years for me on Twitter, so what do I know.

 

Interact. Above and all, interact. With other journalists, with readers, et cetera. You want people retweeting your stuff so that people start following you. Post consistently, post smartly. Be informative. Be opinionated. Have a voice. Everything everyone's said here is right on the money, from monitoring the characters in your tweets to getting into e-spiffs with big names.

 

Also, I know almost everyone thinks in terms of building their Twitter followers through the use of Twitter.

Thinking of ways to market your Twitter account outside of Twitter also helps. If you have a blog, set up a Twitter widget to display your tweets. Many sites have something like this in place. On my site's front page, we have a widget that shows all our staff's tweets. People can click on our handles and follow us directly from our front page. That helps, even if only a little.

 

Lots of very good points on here. One thing that I don't particularly agree with is keeping your follow count drastically lower than your followers. I am not saying you should follow every stupdi account you can find, but I don't think you are getting everything you can out of it if you aren't following a wealth of people. Anyone you think will provide important content, follow. If things are getting lost in your feed try to make lists.

I guess that is easy for me to say at this point, when there are far more interesting people out there than there are people interested in me (I follow more than 2x the people that follow me).

 

Lists have been a God-send. It's really the only way I use twitter now.

 

At our small little place in the corner of the world, we even put "Follow us on twitter" house ads in the paper. Has all the writer's and the rag's handle.

 

Lists?

 

Next to the "Follow" button, there is a silhouette of a head. Click on it.
The second thing down on the tab is the list function.
When you click on it, it will open a box that will let you make a list. All those that you put in each category you create will be the only ones that show up instead of every single tweet. You also don't have to "follow" the twitter account to get their tweets (unless they are private tweets).
That way, I can click through co-workers, beer sites, restaurants, my favorite teams, bands, etc.
You can make them private or public.

If you want to see how I have mine broken down...check here: twitter.com/spikechiquet/lists

 

Can I do this from my iphone or do I need to be on a computer?

 

No clue...I still have a dumbphone.

 

Agreed. Don't worry about the number of people you follow. As long as your account doesn't look like spam because you follow 3,000 people and have 2 followers, it's not a big deal. The key is to follow the right people to get the most out of your Twitter experience.

 

Damn, I opened this thread hoping someone had resurrected it with a Sarah Phillips joke.