If you follow us on Twitter you’ll know that we have just reached the lofty heights of 100,000 followers. It’s been an epic and tiring journey of 5:30am starts for over 2 years.

As a small token of our appreciation to our followers, and to answer the question we get asked the most, we have decided to share the secrets of our success.

If you came here looking for a quick fix don’t bother reading on, just go and buy some followers instead.

Growth History

As you’ll see from the graph below our number of followers has grown pretty steadily over the course of the last year at a rate of approximately 1000 new followers per week.

When we first started out our growth was nowhere near that high (unfortunately we cant find those figures anywhere) and we have noticed this figure increasing recently so it’s fair to assume that the more followers you have the faster you’ll grow.

GrowthGraph

For those wondering where we’ve got this graph from it is available from a company called ManageFlitter, without whom we wouldn’t be here writing this article for you today. More about them in a sec.

So here we go – here are our “secret” techniques:

1 – Follow Relevant Twitter Accounts

The simple act of following people on Twitter will result in some of them following you back. Twitter users receive a notification when somebody follows them and more often than not they will take a look at your Bio and recent tweets and decide whether they want to follow you back.

There’s no point just following any old accounts though, or you could end up with an inbox full of spam. You want to build relevant followers who are going to listen and engage with you and help your business grow.

Here are the types of people we follow:

  • Local companies
  • Our competitors
  • Our competitor’s followers
  • People who tweet using the same keywords (SEO, Web Design etc)
  • People who tweet using the same hashtags (#Bizitalk, #PurpleBiz etc)

To grow to 100,000 followers you do need to automate this process and this is where ManageFlitter comes in.

ManageFlitter enables us to find users based on all the categories above and makes following them extremely quick and easy. It’s just a case of clicking your mouse A LOT.

Search by Tweets  – Ideal for searching keywords and hashtags.

Tweet Search

Search by Account – Ideal for finding local companies and competitors.

Account Search

Power mode – ideal for finding your competitors followers:

Power Mode

Process – Follow users quickly and easily:

Process

Twitter Limits

You’ll need to take into account that Twitter limits the number of people you can follow to 1,000 per day and once you follow 2,000 accounts you can’t follow anymore until your number of followers is within a 10% ratio of the number of people you follow. This is one reason why your growth is slower at the beginning.

This means you will need to unfollow people in order to follow more and continue to grow. ManageFlitter can help with this too. Just select the unfollow option within the control panel and it will bring up a list of accounts that don’t follow you back and you can unfollow them just as easily.

There is even a setting to unfollow accounts you followed within a certain timescale. This is great as it means you can give people the longest time possible to follow you back. For example, you can unfollow everyone that doesn’t follow you that you followed more than 5 days ago.

UnfollowPowerMode

To give ManageFlitter a go click here – http://manageflitter.com/try/Ibt1RPNG/plans

They do offer a free version but if you sign up to one of their paid plans you’ll earn us a free month!

2 – Give People Content They Will Want to Share

If you’ve followed us for a while you’ll know that we share internet marketing tips from our blog throughout the day. On an average day we receive approx. 500 Twitter shares and / or retweets. Our followers and blog readers are promoting our Twitter account for us, all because they love the content we share.

We have a structured routine with posts going out every half an hour. We share 7 educational posts followed by 1 promo message then repeat.

Obviously we don’t sit at our desks and post tweets every half an hour, we use a tool called Hootsuite to schedule the posts for us. We also use this tool to post to our Google Plus, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts.

HootsuitePublisher

Does this make us a robot? In some peoples eyes it probably does. Do we care? Not in the slightest. IT WORKS!

Our followers are from all walks of life and come from all over the world. We don’t have an optimum time to post so we just post all day every day. The more we post the more web traffic we receive, the more web traffic we receive the more potential web design leads we generate and the more links we earn which helps solidify our page one rankings for “Cheap Web Designer” and such like.

That’s why we’re here after all. As satisfying as it is to read hundreds of thank you messages every day we get paid to design websites.

3 – Use Hashtags

If you follow more than a few hundred accounts you’ll probably agree that keeping up with your timeline is near impossible. We find it easier to monitor hashtags instead and no doubt others do the same.

By including hashtags you make it easier for relevant people to see your tweets making it an easy way to naturally gain followers. 

For a list of hashtags to include in your tweets take a look at this article – A Complete List of UK Twitter Hashtags to Help Market your Business

Summary

So that’s it! There’s no magic potion, we haven’t bought followers (as some of you have asked), we just have a structured regime that requires absolute commitment in order to be successful.

Mark Walker-Ford

Director, Red Website Design