Can you provide advice for gaining good/quality followers (as oppose to mass following like many)? #AskPh

Question asked by @Innov8Safety

Good question to start us off here, how do you gain quality followers? I think the emphasis should be on the quality so what I’d first say is you need to define what a quality follower looks like. What type of audience are you trying to build and if you do your research and find the communities of ideal prospects or audiences that you’re looking to engage with, that’s the first thing. As soon as you identify them, what you can do that as you can see what language they’re using in terms of what hashtags, what topics are interest and also what channels are they hanging out because I think this this question is based around Twitter but in terms of health and safety in construction and that kind of thing, you might have more value on LinkedIn, might be Facebook, I don’t know, you need to do the research but defining the audience is absolutely fundamentally key.

The next thing is devise a content strategy so when you put content out there they’re going to be highly relevant and really interested in engaging with that content and if you built up a reputation for producing content the is highly valuable and relevant to your audience base, you will build quality followers no doubt.

Finally, just one quick tip: you might want to use a tool called Followerwonk to get some real good insight into who those communities are and also the influencers in your community and by that I mean all the people that are already doing and what I’ve just suggested, putting great content out there and building a great follower we call them influencers online and if you can engage directly with these influencers then you’re going to get a lot more visibility and a lot more traction quicker. The interesting thing about this is sometimes the influencers are actually the prospects, the future customers that you’re also trying to attract, so by engaging with those, you can accelerate the whole ball game in terms of what you trying to achieve.