How to get more Twitter followers (and boost your blog’s traffic)

Who doesn’t want to get more followers on Twitter? I’ve yet to meet someone who’d say its enough. Not just with Twitter followers but also with blog traffic.

In both these cases we all need MOAR of those, right?

Well I used to take Twitter very lightly. Mainly because I was not using the platform more aggressively. When I first got to know about Twitter a few years ago, it sounded all strange to me and I felt totally lost.

The tweets seemed to have a very little life time. There is too much noise. There are millions of tweets going out in a specific day and Twitter has 317 million monthly active users.

Now, that’s a BIG number and if I am not on Twitter I am missing out, right?

So you and I can go to Twitter and get an account just like that. And start tweeting. But your attempts to “make it” on Twitter will get meaning only if you have followers.

So here comes the million dollar question: How do I get more followers on Twitter (fast)? Huh?

Before diving in, let me tell you this – Even though I felt so lost with Twitter and even though I don’t actively use Twitter (besides few minutes per day), Twitter is my second/third top source of traffic in almost all the websites I run.

And, against my initial assumption, the traffic I got from Twitter is quite sticky! This came to me as a surprise.

And, at the time of writing this post, my Twitter follower count is: 11000+ combined across my 5 Twitter handles (those are not duplicate handles but my different businesses – @savvyblogtips, @janesheeba, @HostingAtBest, @dosplash).

This might not sound like a big number to you. But let me tell you this – this Twitter follower count that have is not achieved by using any tools or sites that help grow your Twitter followers on auto mode.

There is no “you follow me, I follow you” mode. And there is no “aggressive follow/unfollow” mode either.

While I am not totally against the above methods to get more followers on Twitter fast, I am not sure about the quality of the following I would get if I used them!

I hope you get my point here.

Even though quantity out-speaks quality when it comes to followers on Twitter, I strongly believe that you need both to be able to successfully drive traffic to your website via Twitter!

Let’s see how to get more followers on Twitter free, fast!

Your Twitter bio will help you get more followers on Twitter

A bio is where people can know a little bit more about you. But make no mistake, you don’t have the chance to write a full page essay about yourself – like you do on your blog’s About page.

Twitter bio is supposed to be short, concise and you have to make it interesting and at the same time informational (about you) in 160 characters. Yes, 160 characters (20 extra characters when compared to a Tweet).

Make those 160 characters interesting enough to keep people hooked; and that bio should also help people know about you!

Here’s a wonderful post by Neil Patel at Buffer blog on the key ingredients of a powerful Twitter bio.

Publish content that is share-worthy

Me: Publish high quality content

You: Roll eyes

Ah! So how many times in a day do you hear people telling you to publish high quality content? Annoyingly many times, right?

And how many times do you actually put that advice to practice? Hmm….

If the content on your website is mediocre or useless, then there is no point in people following you. People simply won’t be interested in you no matter how many smart techniques you use to grow your Twitter following – it simply won’t work.

Even if people follow you because of any automated methods that you used, they will come to know quite soon that you are not offering useful stuff.

And you know what happens next – they unfollow you. If your follower count gets decreased day by day, you cannot grow your Twitter following!

Here are some quick tips to publish content that will help you to get more Twitter followers for free:

1. Publish consistently – And share your content in Twitter once you publish it. If you are consistently tweeting out high quality content, you will get in the radar of many tweeps.

2. SEO your content and your tweets – Don’t get scared! It is not such a big deal. Use some keywords appropriately in your tweet and use hashtags appropriately (and sparingly). This way your tweets will show up in popular searches!

Here’s an interesting post on how Google indexes Tweets! And here’s another interesting one that discusses what signals from Twitter does Google care about as far as indexing Tweets is concerned.

3. Have eye-catching images in your content – Images do well on any social media and Twitter is no exception. If your content has good quality, informative images, you can tweet them out with your twitter handle and appropriate description. This description, hopefully includes your niche keywords and you can get on the radar of people who search for those keywords. Also make sure you make it easy for your readers to tweet out those images too!

Don’t annoy your existing Twitter followers

This is about keeping your existing followers. If you annoy your existing Twitter followers and if they keep unfollowing you, your Twitter follower count will decrease over the time and not increase.

What are all the annoying stuff that you should stop?

Sending auto messages – I used to do this once. I don’t remember which tool I used to do it. But when people follow me they will be sent an automatic message. And personally, when I get those messages from people I follow, I found them to be quite annoying! So I stopped doing it myself.

Tweeting annoyingly – Well, if you tweet too much it is going to be annoying to your followers.

Share useful stuff!

If you want people to “follow” you, then you should be worthy of following. That’s simple logic, right?

It is not just about the content on your website, but it also depends on other content you share on Twitter. Make sure you don’t just tweet your own content all the time. It will not only be boring, but will be overwhelmingly annoying too over the time.

Make your tweets interesting, engaging and useful enough. Apart from tweeting your content you could tweet the following stuff:

1. Quotes. These are powerful and can make someone’s day! You can either write your own tweet or search for other’s tweets with quotes and retweet them!

2. News and other timely happenings – People will always be looking out for news. If you tweet something hot, you will have a chance to grab others’ attention.

3. Images – You can tweet beautiful, pleasing images, or images with quotes, or images from the content of your site (promotional). In any case, images do well in Twitter.

4. Videos – If you found something interesting in Youtube, don’t forget to share it on Twitter. Sharing interesting stuff will make you interesting!

5. Jokes and funny stuff – Who doesn’t want to laugh? Just make sure you don’t share sensational stuff or stuff that could hurt someone.

Here’s a cool post by Ann Smarty on how to make your tweets stand out.

Engage in Twitter

Remember for one second that Twitter is a social media platform. Sometimes, we get too immersed in content marketing and look at Twitter only as a place to promote our blog posts.

With Twitter (and with any social media for that matter) engagement is a crucial thing.

Without engagement, you cannot get more followers on twitter. If you are wondering “how do I get more followers on Twitter” you should ask this to yourself in the first place: “am I engaging enough on Twitter?”!

Let’s say you’re on a party and you just sit in a couch. You do nothing but look at all people who chat in groups, who dance and drink. But apart from observing others, you don’t do anything yourself.

You don’t reach out to talk to someone. You don’t accompany anyone while they dance or drink. You don’t also respond to anyone who reach out to have a conversation with you.

Given this scenario, do you think you can make friends in that party? No for sure, right?

It is the same with Twitter (or any other social media platform for that matter).

Here’s what you can do:

1. Retweet others’s stuff if you find them interesting, or worthy to share.

2. Reach out to others who tweet your stuff by saying a “thank you”.

3. If someone tweets out a question to you by mentioning you, make sure you respond (reply to that tweet).

4. Appreciate when you see nice stuff on Twitter – be it an great image, or a quote or some awesome piece of content, apart from simply retweeting, tweet out some nice words of appreciation.

5. Once in a while wish people – a good morning, or wishing a great week will make someone smile 🙂

I’ve given you some suggestions here. You get the idea!

Properly connect Twitter with your blog

If you are a blogger, you probably have a tweet button in your blog posts, and may be a Twitter follow button (or not). Have you checked out those stuff to see if they work and are set up properly?

Here’s what you should check:

1. Do you have at least one connection from your blog to Twitter? This could be a tweet button, or a follow button, or click to tweet twee tables within content or anything like that! If you don’t have any of these, it is hard for you to grow your following, apparently (no surprise here!).

2. Does the Twitter share button in your blog posts have your twitter handle?

3. (Optional) If you want to boost your Twitter following, you should be including a Twitter follow button somewhere prominent on your site. Some blog owners won’t encourage this idea – as they see this as a way to drive readers away from a blog. It’s your choice! I’ve done it at the footer of my website.

4. Click to tweets – Do you include click to tweets inside your blog posts? Pick out short, punchy, emphasizing sentences from your post and give your readers a chance to tweet them out with a click or two.

Embed them beautifully inside your blog posts. Make sure those tweets are tweet-worthy. Also make sure you’ve included your twitter handle in that tweet (very important to get more followers on Twitter).

I use Social Warfare plugin which makes it a breeze to add beautiful tweetables inside my blog posts.

There are various styles in which you can display the tweetables.

Or you could use Click to tweet website to grab the short link.

Follow people in a strategic way

Now let’s talk about following. You can do it in a totally automated way. There are tools out there to do it. I am not going to tell you to do that.

It is not a strategic way of doing it. Of course you might be setting up the software to automatically follow people based on your niche keywords. But still, it is not a strategic way of doing things when it comes to following people.

First, ask yourself these questions: What is your goal when it comes to Twitter? You are reading this post to find out how you can get more followers on Twitter for free. But what are you going to do with those followers?

Do you want to drive traffic to your website? Do you want to build your following to show social proof on your website? Do you want to directly promote your own products or your affiliate products to your followers? Or do you just want to build your brand awareness on Twitter?

Once you get clarity on this, you have to search for people accordingly and follow them (and engage with them as well).

Here’s a post from Razor Social by Ian on finding people to follow on Twitter.

Use a combination of manual and auto!

Yes I just said don’t follow people automatically and don’t send automatic messages when people follow you. But not all automation is bad.

You can use automation sparingly and effectively!

There are tools like Buffer, Hootsuite and the like that make your job easy as a blogger. I personally use Hootsuite to promote my own content as well as to share other’s content.

I automatically schedule tweets to go out on specific times in advance – I do this as a batch process; if I don’t have this opportunity, I have to manually go over to Twitter at those times (first, remember to do so!) and spend time tweeting that out.

Now as soon as my blog post goes out, I set out a series of tweets like, one on the next day, one a week later and one a month later to keep the blog post fresh throughout. I also use click to tweets from within the post for this scheduling.

I have the Hootsuite hootlet in my browser (Chrome) and that brings up the Hootlet when I try to tweet ANYTHING.

When I tweet others’ stuff, I first choose one or more of my own Twitter accounts to tweet and then use the “auto schedule option” – this makes sure that I don’t just post lots of tweets while I am online and then no tweets for the rest of the day.

Also instead of manually scheduling, I use “Autoschedule” where Hootsuite will tweet that out automatically at the right time (based on my followers data, it calculates the best time my followers would be online).

I also use Hootsuite to strategically follow people on Twitter. I search for stuff I am interested in and when I see interesting people, I follow them manually 🙂

How to get more twitter followers?

I hope you now know! But just don’t leave after merely reading this post! You will be able to get more Twitter followers only if you put the advice in this post to practice.

It doesn’t take much time. In fact, I spend less than 10 minutes a day (and that’s not on ALL days) to follow people and engage on Twitter. I use a combination of direct and automatic methods to tweet.

Most of the stuff discussed in this post like connecting Twitter to your blog are set once and forget type of tasks – so they don’t take much of your time regularly.

If you want to get good quality blog traffic from Twitter, you should avoid totally automated methods to follow people and also to tweet.

It works great only when you do automation in moderation. You could easily get tens of thousands of followers everyday on Twitter by doing automated following and doing “I follow you; you follow me” campaigns – but trust me the followers you get that way won’t be of good quality; meaning – they won’t serve your purpose of driving quality traffic to your blog.

So are you ready to get more followers on Twitter?