Whether you are a blogger, a business, an entrepreneur, a politician or the homeless man that scares me outside of 7-11, I can almost guarantee you are trying to leverage yourself via social media. More specifically, Twitter. Twitter’s success is an enigma to all. However, it’s catchy, fun and more importantly has a massive following. I’ve read my fair share of “How to get a larger Twitter following” articles and while some of them offer some redeemable advice, the majority of the articles do not. This is due to people using their own success stories as a means to guarantee success to others. This obviously can’t be true, every business is different, and thus should be treated differently.

I feel I have a fairly firm grasp on social media as I’ve been successful in some of the larger networks. So, allow me, someone who has yet to accumulate a large following on Twitter, offer my advice on how to leverage your personal brand, or business on this anomaly of a social network.

Market via other social networks

To begin just like every other social network, if you are successful on one you are successful on all of them. Start by promoting your Twitter account on the networks you already contribute to. Even if I were to attract 1% of my entire following on MySpace that would mean roughly 130 Twitter followers – and I don’t even use MySpace anymore.

Invite your friends

Twitter is very new and has yet to really hit the mainstream (unless you live in San Francisco). One hundred percent of my friends already belong to social networks. Although, they may be just the mainstream network giants, Twitter was made not just to connect people globally but locally as well.

Make friends

Don’t shamelessly self promote. Give people a reason to follow you and actually offer something redeemable to them. Use Twitter Search to find conversations on topics of expertise to you and contribute to those discussions. For example a lot of people became successful on Twitter as a result of offering customer service help on products.

SEO your posts

Look at Google Search Trends and Twitter Search Trends and write about topics that are popular. This will increase outside network exposure.

Find friends with similar interests & Twitter ratio

I find a lot of the Twitter celebrities don’t even respond to my replies, regardless of how constructive they were. I have found that making friends that have a similar following:follower ratio greatly increases your chance of receiving an @reply. Replies are very key for promoting your name on Twitter.

Update regularly & constructively

Pretty straight forward, don’t spam, reply with information that contributes to the topic of discussion etc. etc.

Use 3^rd party apps and mobile updates

Utilize everything to make your Twitter experience more efficient. Twitter has about two hundred and forty million applications. Here is a really huge list of them: REALLY HUGE LIST OF TWITTER APPLICATIONS. Also, use the mobile features that Twitter offers to update from anywhere. This ensures a consistent stream of updates.

PUT IN THE HOURS!

In actuality, people should treat their Twitter like business. They should act as though there is no easy road to success and they should put in the hours needed to achieve success – and that’s a lot more than you think.

BTW @bensir me!

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