How to get more followers on twitter

Twitter is an extremely useful broadcast medium, which is free. Knowing how to get more followers on twitter will enable you to build an audience.  So that when you have important news to share with your clients or potential customers, you will have a ready-made following to receive your news.

Many small businesses will emerge from a period of business disruption, with a new or adapted product/service to share. Now is a useful time to consider how to get more followers on twitter to ensure that you’ll have an audience to address when your announcement is ready. With that in mind, here are my 7 ant-inspired tips on How to Get followers on twitter.

I’ve chosen the analogy of an ant colony to illustrate this topic. Ants send scout ants from the nest to seek food for the queen and pupae. Once food has been found, the scout will return to the nest to tell its fellow workers.

The scout leaves a trail of scent, pheromones in its wake this scent is followed by its nestmates, the whole colony which might include 100k in a single colony. The process triggers the familiar sight of a seemingly endless trail of ants.

Here are my 7 ant-inspired tips for how to get more followers on twitter:

1. Clear objective: you must approach your use of twitter with a clear objective, the scout ants seek food for its colony to thrive. What do you seek, and why? Are you clear about how twitter can help you to implement your Marketing Communications Strategy?

2. Find influencers to be your scouts: Ants use a scout ant that finds the prize for the colony. Consider how you might enlist support from  thought-leaders in your field. It is likely that you’ll know individuals in your field who can help you to find others who will be interested in your message. I’ve named these seed-influencers. You can find out more about how to find influencers here.

3. Get the balance right: ants are positive contributors to nature’s eco-system, they enrich the soil by recycling dead insects and aerate it with their tunnels. You must remember to be mindful about offering a benefit to the Twittersphere, the ratio of your followers to those you’re following is the most important metric for you to monitor, not how many followers you have. If you follow many accounts and have fewer followers, it is an indicator that you’re a taker not a giver in the Twittersphere. It will discourage new followers from joining your colony.

4. Leave a clear trail to help others to find you: ants leave a scent for its nestmates to follow.  You must use the hashtag as an indicator to others of the relevance of your content for them, careful selection of hashtags from the outset will enable relevant followers to find your account.  This is particularly relevant if your business focuses on a specific geographical area or activity.

5. Seek those who will enjoy your content: ants use their antennae to smell the scent trail towards their prize. You must search using hashtags as your antennae to locate valuable accounts to follow. You can sniff out like-minded accounts using hashtags.

6. Shareable content: ants will find objects to eat which are much larger than them in order to share it with their community. Deliver valuable content that will be shared to increase your reach and to get more followers on twitter.

7. A social activity: ant colonies are social communities, like twitter both rely upon interaction and two-way communication you must participate in conversations on twitter for your account to thrive. The twitter algorithm prioritises tweets from accounts with good engagement.

Make a note of your current metrics, how many you’re following and your followers.  And build your relevant audience, prior to your next big announcement.