by Gail Seymour

Created on: January 05, 2010

Whether you just want to have a huge twitter following to brag to your friends about, or you're using twitter to promote a business, blog or website, there are some simple steps you can take to boost your profile. Here are just a few to get you started:

1. Tweet regularly, even when you have a small following

Even if you only have a single follower, tweet regularly. Your tweets are how people will find and follow you, so if you only send a single tweet in a month, you're going to be hard to find. Some people tweet once a day, others every five minutes. For most, every hour or every half hour through the day is sufficient to build a following. A word of warning, though, don't tweet just for the sake of it. Set some time aside each day to plan your tweets, and make them interesting, newsworthy, useful or funny. A mix of different types of tweets is best for most, though only use humor if it's suitable. If you're building a niche list, keep your tweets relevant to your main subject by developing a keyword list you think people will look for you with and making sure 75%+ of your tweets contain at least one of those keywords. Twitter considers sending the same tweet multiple times as spam, so understand that you have to try different ways of getting your point across, rather than repeating the same thing over and over.

2. Look for people to follow by using keywords

Use your keyword list to find people to follow. Type your keyword into the search box, and read the posts that come up. Follow some of the links and follow those who interest you. Many will return the follow. Also, consider visiting the profile pages of those you are following and look for other users with similar posts to follow. It's a byproduct of the way twitter is set up that one of the best ways to build a following is by following others. You can unfollow anyone at any time and you don't have to give a reason, so you needn't be worried about spam. You will probably want to turn off the email notification for new followers and direct messages, though, under the notices tab of the settings page on twitter.

3. Retweet those you are following

Building a large list of followers is all well and good, but if you want to see any benefit from it, you want to know your followers are reading your posts. One good indication of this is if your tweets are being retweeted (RT'd). Again, being proactive is the best approach. Read the posts you receive, and RT any you think might be of interest to your followers.

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>