Refresher course: 10 tips for attracting more Twitter followers

Sure, followers aren’t everything—but they sure help. Here are some easy-breezy tips for increasing your reach on Twitter. Good advice for beginners; useful for the more experienced users, too.

1. Find your niche. Choose what you want to be known for on Twitter, and stick to it where possible. For example, I tweet about public relations and social media, so most of my tweets are about these subjects and share some kind of value to others who are interested.

2. Use hashtags where possible. There are hundreds of hashtags. One useful one for my industry is simply #PR. Play around and see what ones are suitable for your industry.

3. Find your peers and follow them. Search for people who work in your field. If you find them interesting, follow them, retweet their posts, and reply to them (try and engage them in conversation). They will probably remember you and eventually follow you back.

4. Add your Twitter handle to e-mails, business cards, LinkedIn profile, blogs, etc.
For instance, in your e-mail signature, include your Twitter handle (in my case @brooke_nolan).

5. Create your own content and link to it.
Whether you have a company blog or a personal one, tweet your news posts so what you’re sharing is fresh. That way, you’re not always relying on third party content.

6. Try using a Twitter dashboard like HootSuite.
This allows you to shorten links (so you’re not eating up your 14-characters with long URLs) and track the statistics (so you can see which posts are generating click-throughs).

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