Aug 11, 2016

How To Grow Your Twitter Following

Friday, August 12 7:52am

Location: Sitting on my couch with the doors open listening to the rain fall into the pool at my villa in Bali

Twitter….ahhh good ole Twitter.

I’ve been on Twitter since April 27, 2008 (you can find out how long you’ve been on it here)

(You can also follow me here → Chris Hughes )

What have I learned over the last few years about Twitter?

Twitter is a Terrific Networking Tool

I’ve been lucky enough to have met quite a few of my favorite authors on Twitter, have gotten business deals from Twitter and even met new friends from Twitter.

Yes, it is impressive.

But how can you use Twitter to grow your network?

Here’s a few tips to help you grow your Twitter following.

5) Start a conversation with someone.

Yes, this one is pretty obvious. In order to get more people to follow you, you need to start conversations with people.

Instead of just treating Twitter as a social network to blast out links to your website or affiliate offers, actually communicating with people works wonders.

Everyone is on Twitter to feel heard. That’s why we all tweet. Sometimes it’s something as simple as someone sharing what they had for lunch. Other times people are complaining about something that happened at work, or something that they just want to vent to someone about.

One thing you can (and should) do, is take the time to listen to people. This quote comes to mind…

4) Follow People Who Like Similar Things As You

Does this seem pretty obvious to you?

You are in control of what you see on your Twitter time line (for the most part).

That means that you should follow people who are interesting to you.

The easiest way to do that is get on google and type in something like this within your niche or industry.

“top twitter accounts for UFC”

of course you’ll want to replace that search with something different if you aren’t interested in UFC..

3) Answer Questions

This is one of my favorite things to do, because you can become a helpful person so quickly and easily to someone!

Honestly, you’re going to be like “whoa Chris, thanks for this. I didn’t realize how simple it was to help someone”

…and I mean you can EASILY help almost anyone, in any niche, no matter what you know right now.

How is that possible?

The Internet…. this site by the name of Google can help you find solutions to millions of problems simply by typing in the question… genius right?

Let’s see an example of this…

I’m going to head to https://search.twitter.com right now and type in “how can I lose 10 pounds”

and after clicking “Search” this pops up…

(I clicked on the “Live” tab under where it says “how can I lose 10 pounds” to see who recently tweeted this)

Let’s say that you are in the Fitness niche…is your brain starting to run a little faster with some ideas for this yet?

If not, here’s a simple idea… You can write a blog post (or shoot a video) that explains exactly what someone needs to do (using your product/service/etc) to lose their goal weight within their time frame.

Then, all you have to do is approach the person and share with them a helpful recommendation.

In this particular instance, you could do something like this:

For this example, I simply responded to her request and provided a recommendation. In this case, I recommended that she check out the Fat Diminisher course because I’ve heard a lot of positive reviews on the product, and by using Clickbank.com I will be able to earn an affiliate commission if she choses to buy.

Yes, you can just as easily do this and instead of recommending an affiliate product like I did, you simply send the blog post or video you created to the person.

One way to get an unbelievable response is if you shoot someone a 5–10 second video saying something such as “hey NAME, I wanted to shoot you this quick message to share with you how you can lose 10 pounds in 2 weeks, here’s the link → LINK”

When people get personalized videos, it helps them to Know, Like and Trust you even more…thus getting them to follow you and they are likely to share your stuff with their community as well (getting you more Twitter followers)

2) Follow Those Who Follow Influencers In Your Niche

This has been one of my favorite ways to gain more followers fast.

You see, Twitter has done a great job of compiling lists of people who are proven to be interested in certain things (or people)

I’m going to use Tim Ferriss in this example because he’s been the reason behind me building up my dream lifestyle business.

Tim tweets about a lot of the things I’m super interested in. Business, Health, Life Hacks, etc.

What does this mean?

Duh! His followers are likely to be interested in those things as well, otherwise they wouldn’t have followed him.

That means you have access to a proven list of 1.34 MILLION people who are interested in these things.

HINT: you can do the same thing with people in your niche by finding the influential people in your niche who have large Twitter followings.

Now what? Simple! You follow some of these people and you actually interact with them like we mentioned before…

1) Use Tools To Make It Easier

If you know me, you know that I like to find ways to get things done without my direct involvement.

Freeing up my time so that I can do more stuff I love has been the reason for building my business and every time I find a way that I can either hire someone to handle something, or use a tool that can handle something that I used to manually have to do, I’m all over it.

(The free time can be used for traveling and surfing)

Here’s a few of my favorite tools for leveraging Twitter.

Rewst — this tool is honestly just bad-ass. It’s a tool that allows you to follow and unfollow large amounts of people by doing some of the stuff I mentioned before (like following followers of accounts you’re interested in, but it makes it super easy)

Click Here to Try Out Rewst — You can use the code: 7DAYVA for 10% off your account subscription for life

2. Bit.ly — this works great for shortening links when posting tweets so that you can track things. Bit.ly is just a URL shortening service right? Wrong! Used by @marismith,@techcrunch, and @problogger, a free Bit.ly account will give you access to a dashboard where you can shorten and share links to multiple Twitter accounts. You can also see the stats for any Bit.ly links you share through your dashboard and plug your Bit.ly API key into Tweetdeck, Twitterfeed, or Seesmic to get stats for links you share through those applications as well.

3. Buffer — Buffer is deemed the smarter way to tweet, and is used by @tweetsmarter,@jaybaer, and @askaaronlee. It allows you to simply schedule your tweets to be spread throughout the day so you don’t go through a reading spree and inundate your followers with 20 tweets within an hour. You can also get great analytics on your tweets which will help determine what your audience loves, or doesn’t, out of the content you share as well as the times of day you get the most action on your tweets.