by Jo Linsdell

Created on: May 28, 2010

As social media sites go, Twitter is turning out to be one of the best. This micro-blogging site, that allows you to update your status in 140 characters or less, has well and truly left it's mark in the world of networking and on-line marketing.

Obviously the more followers you have the better your chances of reaching more people with your message. So how do you get followers on Twitter?

People will follow you on twitter for a number of reasons:
because...

1) they know you and want to keep in touch

2) they like the look of your page/ find your bio interesting

3) they are interested in your products

4) they are interested in your career

5) you post about topics of interest to them. I post about Italy as I live here and my books are related to Italy. This gets me followers interested in Italy, Italian, Rome etc... I also post lots about social media and marketing techniques. This is of interest to many. I post about writing and the writing industry including blogging and other avenues. This attracts a lot of writers.

6) Following on from the last point. You keep things varied but stay close to topic. No one wants to read the same things over and over again but you don't want to go too off topic. I have a few main topics I tweet about; writing related, marketing related and Italy related. Within this I will post about contests, events, tips, interesting articles, book reviews, you-tube videos, etc... (you get the idea)

7) You offer tips and advice. People love to learn things the easy way. Having to give advice in a nut shell (140 characters) means you get straight to the point.

8) You interact with other people on twitter. By having twitter conversations, you promote each other to a certain extent as each post has the others @username in it. People also like to get to know others with similar interests and this is a good way to do that.

9) You retweet. If they see that you often share others tweets, and therefore offer a good selection of tweets, they might follow you instead of following several (twitter traffic can get a bit much at times).

10) Other people have listed you. The thought behind this being that if people find your tweets good enough to add you to a special list you must be worth following.

11) You use Hashtags. The use of hashtags makes it easier for you to show up in searches and therefore more people see your tweets.

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