Most social media experts will say that the core to Twitter greatness is:

Providing real value and engaging with others
Acting the way you would act in a real life situation
Never spamming
Building meaningful relationships

These foundational concepts are hugely helpful in making Twitter really work for you. And when you’re ready to build on these foundations and scale your Twitter engagement and reach, there are some useful next-level tactics that work great, too. I’ve had a chance to test out some of the advanced tips and tricks to more followers and increased engagement on Twitter, and I’d love to share them with you and hear what you think!

1. The strategic way to follow people on Twitter

If you’re trying to promote a business or a startup using Twitter, you typically need three things to make it work:

A story (or a message)
Reach
Engagement

Let’s focus on reach.

If you go to followerwonk.com and search for “content marketing,” sort it by “social authority” and pick the first five individual (not company) Twitter accounts, you’ll notice an interesting pattern:

John Luke – Following: 2175 / Followers: 15.2K
Michel J.D. warner – Following: 32.4K / Followers: 38.8K
Steven Farnsworth – Following: 40.7K / Followers: 116K
Gerry Moran – Following: 60.3K / Followers: 75.1K
Steve Cartwright – Following: 62.6K / Followers: 67.8K

Except for John Luke, do you recognize a pattern here? Most of these Twitter masters follow an amazing amount of people.

If you’ll look for the next 5 Top social authority twitter users ranking high for content marketing you’d get the same ratios (with a few exceptions of course).

This means that these people followed a large amount of other Twitter users to get to those big numbers of followers they have today.

Here’s where strategy comes in: It’d be great to get tons of followers but also make sure you have a qualified and engaged following.

This is where Twitter tools like Tweepi come in handy. Tweepi has two important features that will come in handy

“Follow Followers”—a feature that enables you to see who’s following a specific Twitter account
“Flush”—shows you who you’re following that isn’t following you back

One of the most strategic ways to get new followers who are relevant to your content and niche is to follow people who are already following a Twitter account that you share the same target audience with.

On Tweepi, you can find this information in the “Follow Followers” section. Enter the username of a Twitter user you admire and you can see all the users who are following that account. Choose a large handful to follow, and you are likely to see many of these users follow you back. I usually get a follow back rate of about 20-25%.

Now for part two: Flushing.

Every so often, you can check into the Tweepi tool to see all the people you are following but are not following you back. If you want to keep your following/follower ratio balanced, you can use this information to clean up the list of people you follow (tools like Tweepi also can show you which accounts are no longer active, too).

Using this method of finding targeted, relevant people to follow on Twitter and regularly checking in with my follow/follower ratio, I was able to see some great results.

I went from 10-12 people following me per week to about a 100 per week.

Also, my engagement improved by over 32%.

More people are clicking on my content (raised my average by about 3x) and sharing it.

Occasionally, you may have the opportunity to engage with individuals and share with your community about some awesome things going on at your site—new products, new announcements, new ways to connect and share with one another. You don’t have to be shy with promoting (more on this below). It also feels great to do so in the right way.

Here are five tips that I’ve found to work really well when promoting your content on Twitter.

1. Remember to sound human and authentic – People enjoy being spoken to in a sincere way. When composing your tweets, feel free to speak casually and comfortably with your audience.

2. Focus on the benefits – You don’t necessarily need to ask people to buy from you; instead, talk about what’s in it for him or her.

3. Be very specific – Don’t ask them to check your blog. Offer them to read more about the type of content your provide.

For example, if you were sharing with a new follower about the other places to find you online, you might say this: ‘Welcome aboard! Now that you’re following us on Twitter, you should also check out our blog!”

This will work better: “Welcome aboard! If you’re interested in content marketing and growth hacking you should check out our blog”.

If your content is right for me, I will recognize it right away and will click on your link.

4. Make it the beginning of your funnel – Don’t just send someone to your site, but create a landing page welcoming them. That’s where you make the experience more personal.

5. If possible, use a branded link – By using a branded shortener you’ll make your new followers feel safer.

3. The new rule for following others back

I’ve often heard the Twitter advice to follow back all those who follow you. I’ve found a slight alternative that seems to work well for me:

Follow back the accounts that interest you.

If you’re not interested in a specific Twitter user’s content, you don’t need to feel the pressure to follow back. If they’re interested in your content, they will keep following you and become an engaged reader. When they start engaging with you – that’s when you follow back.

This is the right way to build the following/followers ratio—by posting great content that gets people to follow you and by not following people who aren’t engaging with you.

4. Influencer outreach can wait

One of the most important insights Kristoffer Tjalve shares on his post “The story behind #BeTech” is how to relate to influencers on Twitter.

Do not worry too much about the influencers. The influencers are already super busy doing their own stuff. Rather, you should focus all your energy in making the life better for those who are (connecting with you).

While most social media experts will tell you to try and engage with influencers so you’ll get more credibility and followers, it’s quite hard to do.

Influencers are extremely busy most of the time and are probably responding to tens if not hundreds of mentions on Twitter daily. They will usually have their own content to promote and their own very clear agenda to follow.

The content world is divided into roughly two major groups:

Content creators
Content curators

Content creators are the ones people seek their attention. Content curators and just-beginning content creators are usually the attention seekers.

If you’re just starting out and want to build your following, start by attracting the content curators, they are the ones who will actually share your content and be the foundation of your increasing reader-base.

After a while, when enough content curators notice you and start following and retweeting you, you will understand that for a small niche, you have become an influencer. Then, it will be the time to reach out to other influencers by email. Not as a newbie looking for attention, but as an equal.

5. Tweet the same content multiple times

Remember this tip? “If you share the same link more than once, your followers will take you for a spammer”.

Up until recently there was a strong belief that your audience doesn’t want you to share the same content more than once. That it is recycled content and you need to put more emphasis on creating higher value and share new stuff all the time.

In reality, most of your audience wouldn’t see your next blog post if you share it just once. As the good guys here are Buffer mention on ’The everything guide for Twitter success’ e-book, posting the same (valuable) content more than once won’t annoy your followers.

What it will do is get you more traffic, you’ll hit different timezones and reach new followers. Belle Beth Cooper explains it better than me in her post: ‘Why You Should Share Your Blog Post More Than Once on Social Media: The Case for Reposting Content‘.

Some of the main takeaways:

If you tweet something only once, a lot of people will miss it because their Twitter feeds are crowded with content. If you’ll tweet it multiple times there’s a bigger chance more people will catch it than people seeing it for the second time and thinking it’s spam.
If your audience lives in different timezones, one’s morning is another’s nighttime. Posting the same content at least once per time zone is recommended.
There are new followers on board – If you’re implementing the technique I showed you on the first section, then you’re getting about 100-120 new followers every week. This means that there are over 100 new followers who haven’t seen the content you shared last week. If you have interesting posts they might enjoy or find helpful, re-sharing them will increase the chances they’ll actually see it.

Read Belle’s post for a more in-depth analysis.

6. Forgo your timeline

If you’re using Twitter as a personal social media outlet, you’d want to keep your timeline clean and clutter free. If you want to get hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers, you’ll need to start following a lot of people and your timeline will soon be unbearable for the naked eye. Try following the feed of over 23K users. You’ll go crazy.

Most social media gurus will tell you to take advantage of Twitter lists in your marketing efforts, but keep your Twitter feed clean so you can interact with your followers. That’s nice advice, but not scalable.

What you really need to do is to come to peace with the idea that the timeline is not for you anymore. From now on, lists are your new home.

5 Lists I Think Every Marketer Should Create:

1. The timeline you wished you had – This is basically the following mix you used to enjoy before becoming a Twitter master.

2. Journalists and bloggers – Keep a tidy and up to date list of every journalist that covers your area of business. You’d want to engage with them so they’ll keep you in mind, see what they’re writing about so you can offer more information or guest posts. Remember, a good relationship with journalists means more PR (if you play your cards right).

3. Influencers – A great way to keep up to date with all current trends is by following other influencers. See what they are posting, share the best content they put out, plan your own content by seeing what works for them and see who they are engaging with, so you could get into the conversation as well.

4. Customer/ Clients – You want to build a strong relationship with your clients, so follow them on Twitter, help them when they are in need and spontaneously engage with them on daily events, just so they will see how much attention and effort you are willing to spend on them. They are worth it.

5. Competitors – Yes, you should have a list (probably private) dedicated only to your competitors. You want to know what they are up to and how you can learn from them.

Content marketing is about providing value for your followers and engaging through interesting and engaging content. If your product / blog post / Ebook has real value (and I hope it has!) feel free to drop in a clear call to action along with the content you post regularly.

Take Retweeting for example: Do you know what are the best methods to getting more retweets? It’s asking people to retweet your content. You get a 12% more chance of getting retweets if you simply ask for it.

Same goes for downloading an Ebook, reading a new blog post of buying your product. If you provide the right context a direct call to action will significantly improve your chances of getting people to take the desirable action.

Which counterintuitive tips might you use?

With the evolution of social media and inbound marketing over the past 5 years a lot of what was considered as rude or ill-advice on Twitter has become obsolete.

You are no longer struggling on creating the best content out there, but to get noticed and acknowledged by as many relevant readers as possible. Like every meaningful growth, you will never achieve it by doing what everybody else is doing, only by finding the right combination that works for you.

What are your biggest Twitter tips that were counterintuitive to social media expert advice?

Image sources: The Noun Project, Blurgrounds, Startup Stock Photos

Roy Povarchik

Get More Followers And Increase Engagement With These 7 Counterintuitive Twitter Tips