by Ruth Belena

Created on: January 28, 2010

The first thing you should know for increasing your Twitter followers and retweets is that you will not benefit by joining any program promising many thousands of instant Twitter followers. Automatic followers have no real interest your Twitter activities, they are only interested in getting followers of their own. What you do need are genuine followers who will use Twitter to read your tweets (updates) and give you plenty of retweets by sharing your updates with their own followers.

1 - Before you can expect anyone to follow you at Twitter you should create a good Twitter profile. Identifying your location will help you to gain local followers. Adding a link to your blog or your website will help Twitter users to decide if they want to follow you after visiting that link.

2 - It is very important to have a mini-bio on your Twitter profile. You can write a funny self-deprecating description of who you are or portray yourself to be a serious business person, depending on the type of followers you want to attract.

3 - People will identify you from your profile image, so do try to upload a memorable picture rather than using the default graphic, or featuring a cute pet.

4 - Follow a few new people every day. Use the search box at Twitter to find topics that match your own interests and to find people with plenty of retweets on their profiles. Note how often and how recently those people have posted retweets. See who they are following, who is featured on their lists and who they talk to in their tweets.

5 - Use Twitter lists for attracting new followers and for retweets. Create your own lists under different keywords. You might start a list, for example, of "green-tweets" and add people who are interested in the environment, then you could have another list for "moms-at-home". Your lists will be found and followed by others with the same interests.

6 - Use third party applications, such as SocialOomph, HootSuite and TweetAdder, to schedule new tweets at regular intervals night and day. This allows your tweets and retweets to be seen in different time zones around the world, and will help you to get more international followers at Twitter.

7 - Do not follow everyone back, or you will get people constantly trying to persuade you to join money making schemes. If someone is clearly using Twitter only to get others to join something, you will see them heavily promoting the same program in every tweet. You

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>