building a following on twitter

[Merguez]

Hi - can anyone advise me about how I can build up a following for my new business on twitter (offering consultancy services)?

I have set up my account and am following about 70 people/organisations in my space but how do I get them to follow me back?

It seems weird to tweet if you have no followers to read your tweets!

Any advice gratefully received!

You have to start Tweeting to a small audience, there isn't really any other way.

I'd focus on getting the content of your Tweets "right". So ideally a mixture of

• personal thoughts/opinions (can be business focused)

• your own content eg blog articles, case studies etc

• sharing content from others, could be news that impacts your sector or blogs from others etc

Continue to follow relevant people. People will start to follow you back esp when you have an interesting feed.

There are packages (Followr is one I think, am on phone so cannot leave the MN message page) that can automatically follow people for you, but I personally feel thay quality is better than quantity.

Hope that helps.

Good luck. I love Twitter!

Definitely agree that the best thing to do is start tweeting and "find your voice" - it does get easier over time and people only follow people with regular tweets. Try to reply to people who are in your industry with interesting comments - they might retweet you to all their followers.

Don't just follow people, tweet to them. Comment on what they say, ask them questions etc.

The key word in Social Media is Social.

It is a bit embarrassing at first, tweeting to yourself! Provided you are clear what you do, you will soon get followers though as Twitter e-mail you daily with other people to follow, so you will appear on there. Make sure your profile links through to your website too.

if you search my previous posts you will see one about finding people to help with digital marketing and there are several people on here who do.

Just be "normal", I see people out there with 20000 posts to their names. Nobody cares what you had for breakfast, or that tesco was busy, or your opinion on eastenders or all the other minutiae you could be saving for AIBU.

Don't buy followers and don't auto-dm people when they follow. So lame.

Thanks all some great advice here.

Dolomites, is there a way of stopping the auto-dm when someone follows you? i've had a few messages like that and it felt like a default option on twitter - but maybe you have to set it up?

No, you actually have to go out of your way to annoy the shit out of them and deliver an extremely non-personal, personal message!

If you share someone else's content, make sure you tag them in so it would look like 'loved this article on blah blah blah from @dolomitesdonkey' then that would show in dolomites interactions and she might retweet it to her followers getting you in front of people who arent already following.

Look out for regular Twitter parties relevant to your field.

Make a Twitter list of people to engage with - relevant, with a good following - then look for opportunities to interact.

If there are publications or websites or big companies you'd like to engage with, you might have more success if you first engage with the Twitter accounts of individuals from the company.

Dolomites - I hate those DMs. Anyway to block them?

As the others have said - start tweeting and don't be shy.

If someone tweets something that interests you, reply to them.

If you RT, add a comment. Don't just straight RT it, give an opinion.

Set up a search that relates to your field or business so that you see when someone tweets about it.

Agree with the DM thing (don't think there is a way to block them, that I ahve found anyway).

Make sure your profile is really good, and reflects what you do. Don't forget to add a link to your website.

Don't ask people to follow you, or you will sound desperate. It will come but you can't force it.

I don't know if any way to block the auto DM's, I just use the manual unfollow after the event.