How to get 50,000 Twitter Followers

I recently celebrated my 50,000^th follower on Twitter, and thought I’d share the various techniques I used to accomplish it, to help others who might still be struggling to grow their own social network.

Engage with not only the followers you have, but also the ones you don’t. A great way to build a loyal following is to actively seek out users who have questions that fall into your area of expertise. By helping others with questions, or problems that may seem inconsequential to you, might just have saved the other party hours of searching for and implementing a solution that you yourself know off by heart!

“It is by helping others, that we help ourselves”

Set goals for yourself in all areas of life and business, including those that surround your social media targets. If it’s important to have 10,000, 50,000 or 100,000 followers, it most likely isn’t going to happen by accident. (Unless you also star on a daytime television show) By setting goals and tracking them on a regular basis you’ll be monitoring and adjusting your progress, as well as seeking out new methods to try in case you aren’t achieving the numbers you’d like to be.

Leverage your existing web properties to maximize the number of people who actually see that you in fact have a Twitter account. Many of us include a small “Follow Me” graphic somewhere on our blogs. Instead make a larger sized banner telling people what you tweet, why they should follow you, and of course where to find you! If you have Squidoo Lenses, or Blogger blogs, make sure you’ve remembered to include an invitation there.

Make sure you are taking advantage of the signature file’s that can be included with any email. A signature file is simply a short bit of text or graphics that automatically gets appended to each and every email you send out. Include an invitation to follow you on Twitter, as well as the URL to your website.

Take advantage of social introductory sites like Twiends where you can grow your community by following others and being rewarded in the way of points that are called “seeds”. You then use those same seeds to offer a reward to others for following you. There are even setting which will allow you to only attract people who are in your own geographic location should that be something that is important to you.

Actively follow users who are interested in the same topics as you are. Many times, these same people will in turn follow you back. It is important to note that Twitter frowns upon following mass amounts of people only to unfollow those who don’t follow you back, so be careful and stick to the rules they’ve laid out for us.

Often times the best way to keep and attract new followers is by providing great content for them. If I notice someone retweeting my content, and I’m not yet following them, I’ll quickly rectify that. After all I enjoy getting my content shared as much as the next guy.

Make sure you are reaching all your existing followers by tweeting for maximum effect. Now I’ve personally tested what tweet frequency results in the most clicks for my particular type of follower and have found 20 to 43 minutes works best. And since many of my followers aren’t located strictly in my time zone, I have to tweet during hours I might not be in front of the computer.

There are plenty of website, or software solutions that will allow you to pre-write the messages you want to go out, and then schedule the times you’d like them sent at. This way those over in China or India also get a chance to see, and possibly share your content.

And last but not least, this is probably the most powerful method I’ve used to grow my twitter followers, and I use it to this day! What I do is choose someone who happens to be in my niche or market and has more followers than I do. I generally try to keep it within 2000 followers, but have on occasion gone after someone with more. (It’s usually easier with smaller jumps; you could just as easily go after someone with 200 more followers than yourself.)

I then take one of my post-it notes, and write out the user, as well as their current follower count. Then add my own details in with a highlight showing the difference. I then make it a point to overtake that user, and devote a small portion of time each day toward Twitter, and growth and engagement. Once I overtake that user, I simply find another with slightly more followers.

The most recent motivator in my quest for more followers is none other than Pat Flynn who until 8:00 am this morning had more followers than I at 50,127. Pat is an unassuming, yet great internet marketer who shares not only his information over at Smart Passive Income, but also his income statements as well. I know I for one, find his site hugely motivating, and plan to read every single post he writes!