Matthew Woodwardmatthewwoodward.co.uk/tutorials/how-to-get-followers-on-twitter/

With over 320 million users, Twitter is a traffic goldmine.

But it can take a lot of time and effort to build a big enough following to drive meaningful amounts of traffic.

We’re talking years of dedicated effort.

I thought I was doomed to buying followers from Indonesia, when thankfully I discovered a method that shot myTwitter following through the roof in a matter of weeks.

In this article, you’re going to learn how I doubled my Twitter followers in just 75 days (and how you can do thesame thing).

Not only that, but you’ll also learn how to put the whole process on autopilot.

What You Will Learn

How to get followers on Twitter (for free)

How to attract targeted and engaged followers in your niche

How to drive traffic from Twitter

How to attract people who follow the influencers in your niche

And how to automate the entire process using 3 tools

ALERT: Increase Social Media Traffic & Engagement Instantly With My Case Studys!

Why Twitter?

First off, let’s quickly break down why you should even care about this platform.

Check out these stats:

46% of Twitter users use it at least once per day

Twitter has over 320,000 million users

74% of people who follow small to medium sized businesses do so to get product updates

52% of users say they have bought a product they first heard about on Twitter

Twitter is my #1 source of social media traffic

Jokes aside, there is a ton of opportunity on Twitter and some dead simple ways to harness it. Especially whenyou have learned how to drive traffic to your blog using Twitter.

Better yet, you can automate the entire process to build your following and Twitter traffic on autopilot, andactively sharing your content and attracting shares adds social signals to help you to increase Google rankings.

You can also attract indirect backlinks from the increased exposure.

But I know what you’re thinking:

What about share counts? Didn’t Twitter take those away?

Yes, they did.

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And I can show you how to get them back in less than 10 minutes.

How to Get Your Twitter Share Counts Back

Using this method, you will be able to get the last 7 days of your Twitter shares back and all of your future ones.

Head over to NewShareCounts and type in your URL:

Click “Sign in with Twitter” and follow the on-screen instructions. This is how NewShareCounts tracks yourTwitter shares.

Next, it gives you instructions to get your share counts back for the official share button, SumoMe, Shareaholic,AddToAny, Jetpack, Mashshare, and all of the other major sharing plugins.

Most of them involve pasting a code in your site’s HTML and shouldn’t take you more than 10 minutes.

My Personal Twitter Stats

Now that you’ve got your share counts back, let’s take a look at my results from this Twitter growth case study.

First off, Twitter was my #1 source of social media traffic over that time period, and I only published one newpiece of content:

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Using the manual method I’m about to show you, my Twitter account grew by 2,790 followers in 4 months:

Using the automated method, my account grew by 3,891 followers in just 75 days, doubling a following thathad taken me the previous year to build:

That’s a growth rate of 51 followers per day, or 18,615 per year.

The average number of Twitter followers per user is 208.

But follower growth is just a vanity metric. What really matters is traffic (displayed earlier) and engagement.3/20

Since both methods allow you to build a targeted following, my reach and engagement rates increased as well:

Before starting the manual Twitter growth method.

After both the manual and automated methods.

My reach grew by 208%. And those followers are targeted to my niche:

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Both methods were highly effective for building an engaged following quickly, and I only used two main methodsto drive people back to my blog (both automated).

Let’s break down the manual method:

How To Get Followers On Twitter Free

Here’s the theory behind both methods:

When you follow a number of people, a percentage of them will follow you back. These are typically the mostactive users.

If you follow people who are in your industry — AKA people who follow brands and leaders in your niche— the most active of those users will follow you back.

These people are engaged, active, and likely to be interested in what you offer.

This is one of the most scalable ways to build a targeted following on Twitter.

The manual method involves using a tool to follow and unfollow accounts as fast as possible, without tripping upTwitter’s spam sensors.

Let’s get started:

(Hat tip to Robbie Richards for showing me this technique.)

The tool we’re going to use is Tweepi.

First, head over to Tweepi and sign in with your Twitter account (it’s free).

Your dashboard will immediately show you some key data about your account:

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First, click “Follow Tools” at the top and “By @user’s followers”:

Then choose a popular account in your niche whose followers would be interested in your content and what youhave to offer.

Choose carefully, because this determines how targeted your followers will be and how well they will convert.

If you’re unsure whether someone has the type of followers you’re looking for, go ahead and sign up for a freeFollowerwonk account.

Then click the “Analyze” tab, plug in their Twitter handle, and choose “analyze their followers”:

After it’s done analyzing, scroll down to “Bio word cloud.”

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This will give you a good idea of what niche/topics their followers are into.

You can also look at how many followers their followers have, how active they are, what languages they speak,how recent their latest tweets are — a bunch of cool data.

Once you’ve found an account whose followers you’re interested in, paste their handle into Tweepi.

(BOOM!

Nailed that target audience.)

This will pull up their followers, filtered by most recent. Click the “Followers Count” heading to filter it by most toleast followers.

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To follow someone, simply click the “Follow” button on the left under their handle:

Here’s the nifty thing about this:

When you click “Follow” on someone, the page automaticallyscrolls down so your cursor is over the next person’s “Follow”button.

All you have to do is click click click multiple times to followeveryone on the page and move on to the next one.

Here are some guidelines to make sure you don’t trip upTwitter’s spam radar and get your account suspended:

1. Don’t follow more than 100 people per day.

I usually stick to 80—100 to stay under the radar.

2. Don’t follow a lot of people with WAY more followers than you.

Most of the people you follow should have follow numbers similar to your account. Give or take a couplethousand is fine.

This isn’t to say you shouldn’t follow people with massive followings. Just don’t only follow these people.

3. Pay attention to the “Follow Ratio.”

If this is high, it means they’re following a lot less people than are following them, so they’re less likely to followyou back.

Look for follow ratios between 70% and 150%, to maximize your returns.

That’s it! Just follow about 100 people per day, which usually takes no more than 5 minutes, and a percentage ofthem will follow you back.

However, there is a second part to this:

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Unfollowing people who don’t follow you back.

To keep your Follow Ratio normal, it’s smart to unfollow these people. Odds are, if they haven’t followed youback after a week they’re inactive anyway.

Tweepi used to have this capability, but it was removed at Twitter’s request.

I suggest signing up for a free account at ManageFlitter and using their Unfollow tool:

This entire process takes less than 10 minutes a day, it’s 100% free, and it’s an effective method for growingyour Twitter following.

Using this method, I gained 2,790 followers in just 4 months.

And it scales up as your reach increases and more people retweet and share your content.

So if you don’t mind some mindless clicking every day, you can grow your following pretty quickly.

However, time is my most valuable asset, so if I can automate something and it fits my budget I usually do it.

Small adjustments to your routine can lead to BIG changes over time.

The next method is the automated method. It costs $25 per month, but it saves you time and it’s more effectivethan the manual method.

Let’s get to it:

The Automated Method to Increase Your Twitter Followers

I love automation.

And I love it even more when automating something actually yields better results than doing it manually.

That’s what happened when I discovered Social Quant in this post by Tim Felmingham.

Social Quant is a service that automatically follows and unfollows people for you, exactly like the manual9/20

method.

Except they use an algorithm to do it 24/7, and you can control how effective the algorithm is through thekeywords you tell it to search for.

Based on the keywords you input, Social Quant will scan Twitter conversations and analyze the accounts thatused those keywords. Then it will decide whether they’re valuable accounts to follow.

“Using the power of Big Data, our hard-working algorithms listen to all conversations throughoutTwitter and if one of the keywords you’ve selected when you set up your Social Quant account ismentioned, we will analyze the Twitter account that used that keyword to determine if it seems tobe a valuable account to follow.” — Social Quant Team

It also tells you which keywords are most effective and which aren’t, so you can make strategic decisions aboutthe keywords you input.

Let’s break down the signup and keyword selection process:

First, head over to Social Quant and sign up for their 14-day free trial.

(You’ll probably gain at least a couple hundred new followers with the trial.)

Then authorize the app to access your account.

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It will ask you who you’re trying to connect with andwhether you only want to follow people who followyou. Here’s what I select:

Next, scroll down to the section where you input your keywords.

They suggest including 20-30, but I’ve had success with 35+ as well.

Don’t worry too much about your specific keywords just yet, because you can change them anytime you want tolater on based on how they’re performing.

Just know that your account’s growth is dependent on the keywords you choose, so make sure they’re related toyour target audience.

Here are a few I might input:

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You want to base your keywords on four things:

1. Topics your target audience is interested in

2. Their profession (or how they identifythemselves)

3. Accounts and people they follow

4. Hashtags they might be using

If your audience is interested in cats, electronics,sports, personal development, or anything else —choose keywords related to those interests.

If they call themselves bankers, or marketers, orstay-at-home dads, again, put those keywords inthere.

Then identify a few accounts whose followers youwould like to have and the hashtags your idealfollowers use, and input them.

After 20-30 of these keywords, you’ll be off to agood start. After a couple days you’ll be able tocheck the data and make adjustments.

When you’re done, click “Update” and SocialQuant will email you a link to your dashboard.

(Note: Mike Kawula, their CEO, is a super niceguy and always gave me quick answers to myquestions.)

Here is what your dashboard will look like:

You’ll be able to see how long you’ve been with them, how many followers you have, your account’s percentagegrowth, the number of keywords you’re using, and a graph of your follower growth.

Below that you will see the most important data — how your keywords are performing:

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You will see your best/worst converting keywords in the last week and all time. This is based on the percentageof people who followed you back using that keyword.

Social Quant suggests that you remove any keywords that convert at less than 10%. This is a pretty good rule ofthumb, but you will also find anomalies.

Like my best converting keyword of all time converts at 8.8%:

So base your decisions mostly on the number of people each keyword is converting rather than the conversionrate.

Next, open up the keywords page in a new tab (so you can refer back to your conversion data).

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Here, you can choose which keywords you want todelete and which you want to add in.

After you have gathered enough data (let the algorithm run for a few days before making adjustments) delete thekeywords that aren’t converting enough followers for you and add more in.

If you’re stuck on new keywords to add, Social Quant suggests keywords for you:

After this, your Twitter account’s growth will be 99% automated. All you have to do is head into your dashboardevery few weeks to a month and spend 10 minutes adjusting your keywords.

This tool helped me gain 3,891 followers in 75 days. That comes out to 1.6 cents per follower ($0.016/follower).

That’s insane.

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No matter which route you take (the manual method or Social Quant) you’ll gain a ton of followers in a shortamount of time.

But the trick is to funnel those followers over to your website where they can convert into leads and sales.

So let’s break down two automated (my favorite) ways to drive traffic from Twitter.

Two Automated Methods to Drive Twitter Traffic

These methods to drive traffic to your website pair perfectly with the Twitter growth strategies described above.

They involve automating content delivery to both new and existing followers.

As your followers continue to increase, they’ll get exposed to more and more of the content you’re sharing out.

Let’s break these methods down:

1. Set Up An Automated Direct Message

Everyone knows how annoying automated Twitter DMs can be. They usually start with “Hey! Thanks forfollowing me!!” and end with “Go like my Facebook page.”

The key to an auto DM that gets responses like these:

Is to provide value in the message and minimize the personal nature of it.

Too many DMs ask for something in return immediately, like signing up for an email list or liking another account.

They also include the person’s name or Twitter handle. Usually this would be a smart idea, but since SO manyautomated DMs include the person’s name, it has become the standard.

(It actually turns people off.)

But if the right people start following you and you deliver something that might be valuable to them, there’s astrong chance they’ll actually check it out, join your email list, or buy your products.

Here’s how to do this:

First, sign up for a free Crowdfire account. Then click “Automate” in the left sidebar:

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Here, you can create automatic messages that go out to each newsubscriber. You can create a single message that goes out to each one, oryou can create multiple messages that get sent out randomly.

I’ve created multiple:

Each one follows a similar pattern:

“Thought you might like to check out [Insert Valuable Content Here].”

I’m slightly trying to fool them the with the “Thought you might like…” part that it’s a personal message, but youreally can’t fool anyone with “-via @crowdfire” appended to the end of it.

However, when they see it in their messages they’ll only see the first couple words. This will entice them to checkit out more than a fake “thank you for following” message.

And once they see you’re delivering value rather than asking for it, and it’s on a topic that interests them, theywill click through.

So take your best piece or pieces of content and create messages like these to send out.

Now each new follower will have the opportunity to visit your website — on autopilot.

2. Automate Sharing Your Content

Finally, you want to stuff your Twitter feed with valuable content. The more content you share, the further yourreach and traffic potential.

Twitter is inherently crowded so you need to do everything you can to stand out. Part of this is sharing a load ofcontent.

Here’s how:

First, sign up for a Buffer account if you don’t have one already. Then take your best pieces of content and start17/20

scheduling tweets for each one:

If you run out of content to share, simply re-share the content you already scheduled but create a unique tweetfor each one, like so:

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Schedule as many tweets as you can, and that’s it! You could even use Matt’s TweetAttacksPro tutorial for somemore unique angles.

The more followers you build, the greater your reach will be. So take as much advantage of that as possible byscheduling out your content multiple times.

To strike a balance, you should also share out content from other people, and create tweets with the solepurpose of building relationships and showcasing your personality:

(Native posts like these also tend to get greater reach.)

ALERT: Increase Social Media Traffic & Engagement Instantly With My Case Studys!

Wrapping It Up

I actually didn’t like Twitter at first, but now I know how to get followers on Twitter easily – I love it.

Mainly because I found simple ways to scale my follower growth, but also because it’s an excellent place to buildrelationships with people.

The relationships I’ve built there have led directly to social shares, subscribers, book sales, and clients.

There’s a lot of opportunity to be harnessed on Twitter, and now you have some dead simple and scalable waysto take advantage of it.

Have fun

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